JAPAN – 23/02/2023: A Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter with the US Navy’s Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM-51, known as the War Lords) flying near Atsugi Naval Air Station.
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The United States will unveil a major overhaul of Japan’s military command structure and other measures to deepen defense ties with its Asian ally at high-level security talks in Tokyo on Sunday, a US official said.
The review comes as Tokyo seeks to establish a new joint headquarters to oversee its armed forces by March to better coordinate with Washington on the growing regional threats it sees coming from China and North Korea.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will hold talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Defense Minister Minoru Kihara later on Sunday.
“Secretary Austin plans to announce that the United States intends to reconstitute US forces in Japan as a Joint Force Headquarters, reporting to the US INDOPACOM commander,” the US official said in a briefing ahead of the talks.
The command will be headed by a three-star general, the official said, not the four-star rank that Japan had requested.
For the first time, the ministerial talks between the US and Japan will also cover “extended deterrence”, a term used to describe the US commitment to use its nuclear forces to prevent attacks on allies.
Japan provides a base for the US to project its military might in Asia, hosting 54,000 US troops, hundreds of US aircraft and Washington’s only aircraft carrier strike group.
Spurred on by China’s growing military power and regular missile tests by nuclear-armed North Korea, Japan is retreating from decades of postwar pacifism. In 2022 he presented a plan to double defense spending to 2% of GDP.
Austin and Kihara also met with their South Korean counterpart, Shin Won-sik, for talks in Tokyo on Sunday, where they signed an agreement to “institutionalize” trilateral cooperation through efforts such as sharing real-time North Korean missile warning data and joint military training.
The Biden administration is pushing for deeper cooperation between Tokyo and Seoul, which have previously been hampered by strained relations dating back to Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation of Korea.
“This memorandum strengthens cooperation between Japan, the United States and South Korea, making our cooperation unshakable no matter how the international situation changes,” Kihara told reporters after the meeting.
Washington also wants to tap Japanese industry to help ease pressure on American defense companies due to demand created by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Last month, Tokyo and Washington began talks on deeper defense industrial cooperation under the US-Japan Forum on Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition and Sustainment established in April by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and President Joe Biden.
After Tokyo, Blinken and Austin will hold security talks with another ally, the Philippines, as the Biden administration tries to counter an increasingly assertive China.
Blinken met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Laos on Saturday and reiterated that Washington and its partners want to maintain a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” according to a US readout of the meeting.
