Naval power increasing in Northeast Asia

By Edward Neilan

Incremental nature of build-up blunts world attention. Can nations of region find naval cooperation?

TOKYO (JP): Chief Petty Officer Eddie Johnson's story that he was the first American sailor ever assigned to duty in a Japanese brothel, may be apocryphal.

The year was about 1939 and Johnson was a language specialist in the Naval Attache's office at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

He had spent a weekend in a Japanese inn of dubious reputation, the legend goes, which was located in Kanagawa Prefecture, on a secluded cove facing Sagami Bay.

Opening the windows in the morning, Johnson was confronted with the scene of two aircraft carriers being constructed in a shipyard near the inn, at water's edge.

Although a language specialist, Johnson knew that Japan was disallowed under the Portsmouth Treaty from building additional of modern aircraft carriers. He reported the incident to his superiors at the embassy whereupon he was ordered to spend the next five nights in the brothel, at navy expense, getting as much information as he could about the construction.

And this time he was authorized to take along binoculars.

That is a long-winded introduction to the fact that Japan held a very impressive naval review. on Sagami Bay on Oct. 26.

Officially it was a Maritime Self-Defense Force review watched over by Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto aboard the 5,200-ton destroyer Shirane.

The Shirane and the missile-heavy 3,500-ton Umigiri, which led the 46-ship flotilla, would be called "light cruisers" in anybody else's navy.

You might ask "Since when does a Maritime Self-Defense Force need sophisticated missiles?"

Tongue-in-cheek, the answer might be presumably to fire at the boats which smuggle in Chinese illegal immigrants, a rising tide which constitutes Japan's greatest threat from the seas these days.

Hashimoto praised the MSDF and the 46 naval vessels and 47 aircraft in the review, saying they were part of the crisis management capability which Japan could use in accordance with the new guidelines for Japan-U.S. defense cooperation.

Paul Bracken, professor of political science at Yale University, writes in the summer 1997 issue of The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis that "The size and reach of naval powers in Northeast Asia is increasing. It is not doing so dramatically, as in an arms race. Nor is it doing so because of any major technological breakthroughs, such as the one took place in the past with the fusion of air and sea power.

"Rather it is taking pace incrementally, year by year."

The problem this poses is interesting. Bracken says it means that at any given time it is probably safe to ignore the buildup, because the change in any time period is low.

He says that if an argument could be made that would exaggerate the pace of naval development, then it could probably be used to focus attention on defusing this development.

"But in fact, the opposite is the case; it is the very incremental character of the naval expansion in the region that distracts attention from its long-term significance."

A "security dilemma" occurs when each country builds forces meant for defense, without any intent of offensive action, but they soon begin to crowd the geography and in fact "threaten others."

Japan's naval buildup to a force of 60 combatants, second only to the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Asia, through expenditure of part of the world's third-highest defense budget at US$50 billion, is relatively transparent.

China's naval buildup, on the other hand is murky and ominous. Anyone interested in understanding China's great leap forward in military, and particularly naval, power should read China's Strategic Seapower: The Politics of Force Modernization in the Nuclear Age by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai (Stanford University Press, 1994).

One of their conclusions: "Unquestionably, the Chinese navy of the 1990s has built the forces needed to determine Taiwan's fate, if called on to do so. ...They have given precedence to the development of submarines... If another Taiwan Strait crisis should occur, these submarines would represent the front-line force."

Analysts estimate that China has 300-650 nuclear warheads, of which all but 20 are targeted at cities in Asia, including Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Niigata and Taipei, Kaohsiung, but not Seoul or Pusan. The 20 are aimed at U.S. cities.

Richard Fisher, of the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington DC, quoted by the Far Eastern Economic Review, says China's missile exercises of 1995 and 1996" were tests to target Taipei."

The U.S. has some 13,000 warheads so Washington requests that China reduce its missiles go unheeded. The U.S. has de-targeted Chinese cities with its missiles but Beijing refuses to reciprocate unless the U.S. renounces first-strike which the U.S. declines to do as part of its deterrence strategy.

It sounds like the old Cold War all over again.

As Prof. Bracken wrote, the development of navies is a slow process: "Navies are complex institutions requiring many years to build and perfect. In short, navies change much more slowly than do strategies."

He argues that expanded naval cooperation among the U.S., Japan and South Korea is a subject of immediate importance.