WASHINGTON: How can we deter — or, in the last resort, defeat — a more assertive China? Air and naval forces may not be enough. While the US Army is ambivalent, the Japanese army may have some lessons for their ground force counterparts in America.
“They’re not standing around waiting for us to do something,” Andrew Krepinevich, head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told me after his latest trip to Asia. “Japan wanted to do its part in defending the northern sector of the ‘First Island Chain'” — a long arc running from the Japanese home islands down through Taiwan and the Philippinesinto Indonesia. “They are building a series of facilities along the Ryukyu island chain to discourage Chinese acts of aggression and coercion,” he said. “It was very impressive.”
In particular, the effort by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force aligns with a concept Krepinevich laid out in in a February Foreign Affairs article on “archipelagic defense.”