U.S. Launches Military Command in Tokyo to Counter China
TOKYO—The U.S. will establish a new military command in Japan to bolster security ties here as Washington moves to strengthen its Asia allies in the face of China’s military buildup, top American and Japanese officials will announce on Sunday.
The new American command, which will be led by a three-star general, will coordinate military operations with the Japanese, plan joint exercises and participate in the defense of the country if hostilities erupt.
In so doing, it will put America’s warfighting capabilities under the command of a headquarters on Japanese territory for the first time and dispense with the need for U.S. forces in the country to wait for instructions from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which is located in Hawaii 3,500 miles away.
The move is intended to keep pace with Japan’s efforts to build up its military capabilities, including a new joint military command that Japanese authorities are planning to stand up early next year.
The push to establish the command is also part of a broader effort to buttress military relations between the two allies and will include Japanese efforts to shore up the West’s industrial base, which is expected to include providing Patriot antimissile systems to the U.S. that are produced in Japan.
While much of Washington’s attention in recent months has been focused on trying to end the conflict in Gaza and efforts to help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression, China remains the principal long-term threat to the U.S. and its allies in the Pacific region, according to the Pentagon’s formal defense strategy.
The U.S. and Japan also have to contend with increased military cooperation between Russia and China, which sent a joint bomber patrol toward Alaska this past week for the first time. North Korea’s growing nuclear and conventional arsenal is another danger.
The new initiatives will be announced during a meeting here Sunday of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and their Japanese counterparts, Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yoko and Defense Minister Kihara Minoru.
They are part of a comprehensive effort by the U.S. to strengthen the military capabilities of its Asia allies. On Tuesday, Blinken and Austin plan to announce $500 million in U.S. financing during a meeting with their counterparts in the Philippines, among other steps.
The U.S. is already involved in an ambitious effort to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The U.S. has also removed the restrictions on the range of ballistic missiles South Korea can develop with American technology. And Japan has opted to buy hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles from the U.S. that can attack targets on land.
“What this means is the U.S. is prepared to take steps to support allied capabilities in ways that we haven’t before,” said Christopher Johnstone, a former senior U.S. official on Asia policy who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
A joint military exercise in the Philippines in 2019. Photo: rolex dela pena/Shutterstock
The push to restructure command and control relations between Japan and the U.S. was foreshadowed during Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Washington in April.
Still, the effort to launch the new U.S. Joint Force Command, as it is dubbed by U.S. officials, remains a work in progress. To establish it, the U.S. military plans to overhaul an existing administrative headquarters at a base near Tokyo named U.S. Forces Japan to enable it to command the approximately 50,000 U.S. troops in the country.
American officials have yet to spell out what the geographic scope of the new command’s responsibilities will be, the schedule for standing up its capabilities and how large a staff it will have.
“This is actually a new type of cooperation for the U.S .and Japan, and so it’s going to take a lot of effort and we’re going to have to build some new muscles to be able to do that,” said Zack Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute and a former Defense Department official.
U.S. officials haven’t detailed how the new American command will interact with Japan’s parallel command.
Japan’s new command is expected to be located in the basement of its defense ministry, Cooper said. And U.S. officials haven’t said if they plan to establish a joint cell of American and Japanese officers from the two commands who can work side-by-side during a military crisis or to plan exercises, and where such a cell might be located.
The question is important because the American and Japanese commands will separately control their nation’s forces unlike the U.S. command in South Korea, which would control both American and South Korea forces in wartime.
Discussions will also be held on how to deepen the role that Japan could play in strengthening the West’s defense industrial base.
Japanese law precludes the country from exporting weapons to nations involved in conflicts. But its allows for selling weapons to the U.S., whose inventory of some critical weapon, including Patriot antimissile systems, has been diminished by Washington’s efforts to support Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion.
“The war in Ukraine has driven home the need for added industrial capability among like-minded states and allies,” said Johnstone. “The amount of material consumed in that conflict has been sort of mind-boggling.”
The meetings here are intended to hasten military cooperation in other ways as well. South Korea’s defense minister is making his first trip to Japan in 15 years to meet with Austin and his Japanese counterpart.
Austin, Blinken and Japan’s defense and foreign ministers will hold the first discussions at their level of “extended deterrence”—the issue of reassuring nonnuclear Japan that the U.S. would be prepared to use nuclear weapons if need be to defend Japan against external threats.
Following their discussions here, Blinken and Austin will fly to Manila for similar set of meetings with the foreign secretary and defense ministers of the Philippines.
Soon after returning to the U.S., Blinken and Austin will also meet with the Australian foreign and defense ministers at a meeting to be held early next months in Annapolis, Md.
