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Defense analyst Evan Montgomery, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the world is now in the midst of a “second nuclear age,” one that is arguably more complex and potentially more volatile than the bipolar U.S.–Soviet struggle of the Cold War.

Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, has crunched the numbers, and says the U.S. now accounts for 73 percent of all NATO defense spending. But part of that, Blakely says, has to do with America's superpower status and its unmatched military might. "The United States also has a very broad set of core global national interests that many of the European NATO countries don't necessarily share."

While U.S. and NATO forces were free to launch attacks on al-Qaida, Islamic State and several other terrorist groups, they could only attack Taliban forces if they were directly attacking coalition forces, especially Afghan army troops, or could be directly tied to previous attacks on friendly forces. These stringent rules of engagement were meant to avoid "unintentional casualties and unwanted damage," said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Such attacks could "frankly, hurt your overall objective," he added, meaning to maintain open channels of communication with the Afghan government and push for diplomatic resolutions. "This is not a major air campaign," Gunzinger, a former advisor to the Air Force, told Air Force Times in late May. "It is an air support operation."..

The ministry presentation didn’t give any estimated price tag but Bryan Clark, who formerly served as special assistant to the chief of U.S. naval operations, said the cost could be daunting and its vulnerability to detection would make it less attractive militarily than using a submarine or an unmanned vehicle.

Conversely, Japan already produces variants of some US systems under license or joint production agreements: Fuji’s UH-1J Huey helicopter, for example, or the F-16 derivative F-2 fighter. Overall, said Bryan Clark, a former aide to the Chief of Naval Operations now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, “Japan imports US technology in key areas such as undersea warfare, electronic warfare, stealth, and strike weapons, rather than the other way around.” Instead, the practical impact of the agreement — at least in the near term — is that it eases the sale of high-tech Japanese components for US weapons systems. “We don’t normally buy whole platforms from other countries, but some foreign components and mission systems such as weapons, sensors, jammer pods, etc. are more effective than current US capabilities,” said Clark. “In the past, RDPs have mostly increased the purchases of component parts from foreign suppliers for larger systems that are built by US companies.”..

That's a message to China, which lays claim to almost all of the resource rich waters as its territory, said Bryan Clark, retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Its clearly a show of force," Clark said. "The U.S. is trying to push back on this notion that it's not involved in an area of the world where another major power has moved in to set up shop."