Sharpening the samurai’s sword

Press, 25 August 1986, Page 20

Sharpening the samurai’s sword

From “The Economist,” London

One of the first ways Mr Yasuhiro Nakasone made his mark on foreign public opinion was with the over-enthusiastic remark in 1983 that Japan could serve the Western alliance as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” in East Asia. The words were a cliche: but Mr Nakasone’s commitment to a bigger role for his country in the defence of the West was never in doubt.

Even this financial, year’s defence budget of Y 3.3 trillion ($2l billion) is, by the tortured official estimate, expected to amount to 0.9937 per cent of GNP. But that projection assumes 5.1 per cent GNP growth for 1986. Assuming a more realistic 2 per cent GNP growth, defence spending will inch over 1 per cent of GNP. Bogus’ it may be, but the 1 per cent ceiling has great symbolic value in Japan. Breaking it is likely to cause a hullabaloo, both inside Parliament, when the defence review is considered, and outside. Mr Nakasone’s defenders can argue, however, that more spending is justified because the regional balance of power has changed so markedly since the 1976 outline. Then the Soviet Union’s Asian strength was 31 divisions, 2030 combat aircraft, a 755-ship navy, and no medium-range nuclear missiles. Now, according to the Japanese (who count these things more broadly than our chart does), Russia has deployed in its Asian region 41 divisions, at least 162 SS-20 missiles, 85 Backfire bombers, 2390 combat aircraft and an 840-ship fleet including two aircraft carriers. What is to be done about this build-up? More men and equipment, answers the defence review, thereby breaking the second, and more interesting, of the decade-old taboos.

The new defence review says that Japan’s self-defence forces, as the country’s army, navy and air force are called, would be incapable of repulsing even a “limited and small-scale” invasion. (The United States, which keeps 16,600 airmen and more than 100 combat aircraft in Japan, provides Japan’s broader defence.) Defence experts say that at worst Japan would be able to hold up an invader for only two days. Even the targets set in the modest 1976 review have not

been achieved. For example, the navy still has only 145 of the 220 combat aircraft it should by now be using.

Last year Japan started tc mend some of the more obvious holes in its defences. It proposed then to spend Y 18.4 trillion over five years (a figure worth nearly $l2O billion at today’s exchange rate) to bring the defence forces up to the level proposed in 1976. Spending Y 18.4 trillion (in 1985 yen) over five years would imply a 5.4 per cent annual real increase in defence spending. If that happened, admits the new defence review, spending would eventually “slightly exceed” 1 per cent of GNP. In fact, it will probably be far in excess of 1 per cent. Japan measures defence spending narrowly. If it included items like soldiers’ pensions, as North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries do in their calculations, Japan would have broken through the 1 per cent ceiling years ago.

Japan’s acts have limped behind its Prime Minister’s will (and, indeed, behind the defence plans that more cautious Japanese administrations had made as long ago as 1976). But the unremitting build-up of the Soviet Union’s forces in the Far East (see map), the landslide victory of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party in last month’s election, and the consequent strengthening of Mr Nakasone’s personal position, may all be stiffening Japan’s readiness to act.

The defence review the Japanese Government published on August 8 makes it clear that the country is proposing to spend a lot more on defence to counter the Russian military build-up. The review does not put things quite so starkly. In its Japanese way, it signals a shift in policy by insisting simply that existing policy is to be fully carried out. But it is the most important Japanese defence review since 1976, because it breaks the two main taboos that have governed defence policy for a decade: the beliefs that Japan’s defence spending cannot exceed 1 per cent of the country’s gross national product, and that the desirable strengths of 'the country’s armed forces are numbers chiselled in stone.

That 1 per cent ceiling has become a kind of magic symbol

in Japanese politics, and a headache for Mr Nakasone, who has been trying to find ways of evading it. The new review confirms what many analysts have known for a long time: 1 per cent of GNP is not nearly enough to pay for Japan’s main, and modest, defence commitments — to repel an invader and keep open the sea lanes supplying the country. At present, the self-defence forces are limited to 180,000 soldiers, 60 anti-submarine warships and 430 combat aircraft. These numbers are likely to be increased, if not immediately. The self-defence forces are now at only 86 per cent of their permitted manpower. Defence experts say that the first priority for extra defence spending should be better - training and

improved logistics rather than military hardware. Japan’s main role in defence, outside itself, is naval: it is supposed to be the West’s gatekeeper for the northern Pacific. A Russian fleet sailing from Vladivostok, barely 480 kilometres across the Sea of Japan from Hokkaido, would have to pass through the straits at both ends of the Japanese archipelago, or through the Tsugaru Strait between Japan’s Hokkaido and Honshu islands (see map). Japan hopes to operate in the waters around its shores to a range of several hundred miles, and to keep open the sea-lanes up to 1600 kilometres away, which would take it south of the Philippines. It is increasing its fleet of 14 submarines to 16, and of anti-

submarine surface vessels from 58 to 62; and it is equipping its new ships with Seahawk antisubmarine helicopters. It is raising its fleet of anti-submarine aircraft from 76 to 100, and replacing its older P-2Js with P--3 Cs.

For all the boldness of the defence review’s thinking, and all the furore it is likely to cause in Japan, the increases actually proposed are extremely modest. Even if the numerical targets called for by the review are all met, Japan will still be unable by 1990 to fulfil the strategic goals the review has set: it would not be able to defend the sea-lanes, or even to provide air defence of its own territory. Such are the small steps of Japanese revolutions.

Copyright, “The Economist.”