Yesterday, Koizumi’s cabinet finalized its proposal (Japanese, English) to give the Self-Defense Force more leeway in defense. Specifically, if there’s a missile headed toward Japan, the proposal would allow the SDF to shoot the damned thing down without getting approval to mobilize from the Prime Minister.



Perhaps since I’m a military strategist the way Madonna is an actress, this sort of news makes me say, “This is a new proposal? What the hell was the idea before?” From the looks of things, the idea before was that a missile attack would come with plenty of warning. The cabinet is now considering that it may not.



There have been cases (as when our forces shot down an Iranian airliner) in which soldiers have misidentified aircraft, but the Prime Minister isn’t exactly in a position to help with that. Preventing those mistakes involves the segment of the command chain a lot closer to those who first sounded the alert. Of course, I assume the expense of anti-missile missiles, which the government can hardly afford to sling around like arrows, was also taken into account. Even in these times of tension in the region…well, it’s always tense, but a certain birthday boy has made things extra-special tense of late…one feels safe in presuming that the SDF is not going to get too trigger happy.



Added at 22:40: I’m not a military strategist or historian, apparently. The Iranian Airbus thing was bothering me–I associated it with high school, which for me ended the year before the Gulf War, so I did what I should have done initially and looked it up. I’ve fixed it above, but, you know, for any persnickety people who noticed….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 11:21 and is filed under J_defense, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.