Japan and JASSM

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Yeah, which brings me to the second reason that I think I'm right. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East.

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It is cold out here on the East Coast and it's windy and there are like trash cans being blown around in my neighborhood.

Jeffrey 1:26

Oh, that's too bad. It's warm and sunny here. Although, you know, at least and not, well, it's warm and sunny here. And unlike some of our neighbors to the south, it's not on fire.

Aaron 1:40

Yeah. You know, is it a real fire or a dumpster fire like some of the recent events we're going to talk about right now?

Jeffrey 1:47

Oh, boy. Yeah. So I think today we're going to talk about Japan's interest in long-range cruise missiles. But I would be remiss if I didn't recapitulate the tempest in a teapot that we had this morning when we recorded it, which is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaking at your shop. Is that right?

Aaron 2:10

That is true. He spoke at the Atlantic Council. And He made news for about 16 hours.

Jeffrey 2:17

Yeah, he said there were no preconditions to the United States talking with North Korea. We could talk about anything they wanted. We could talk about the weather, he said, which, by the way, you and I are good at.

Aaron 2:27

We are good at it. They could expand it to wine, maybe plum wine. They could start their own podcast.

Jeffrey 2:33

Yeah, he was open to pretty much anything, just as long as the North Koreans wanted to talk. And then the White House weighed in.

Aaron 2:42

The White House waited. You'd think that they would get a draft of his speech and that there would be some interagency sign-off so somebody in the White House didn't have to leak to Reuters. And I first saw it on Julian Borger's Twitter feed, walking back the Talk Anywhere tweet.

Jeffrey 2:59

Now is not the time to start talks with North Korea, given its recent missile test. White House official.

Aaron 3:05

I think a separate official or maybe the same official in the same statement even used the word behavior.

Jeffrey 3:11

At some point, we have to have a conversation about behavior. Rex Tillerson and whether Rex Tillerson is a positive or negative force in this role. I think of it as the paradox of Rex Tillerson, which is that actually on policy, he's not bad and probably the best we're going to get out of a Trump appointee, but he is an incompetent boob.

And so you have to decide whether like, you know, like is the incompetence Does that outweigh the fact that actually on policy, he's not that bad? You know, should he go? But I think for now, it doesn't matter because this administration is not engaging with the North Koreans. And the North Koreans are not giving up their nuclear weapons, which means we're getting our arms race on.

Aaron 4:05

Yeah, I was about to say... It gives us a chance to talk about precision and targeting because of the missile race that's going on in Asia at the moment that nobody's talking about. Instead, they're just focused on North Korea.

Jeffrey 4:18

Well, not nobody's talking about it. We have done lots of podcasts on Taiwan and South Korea's missile programs, including the very fancy pants cruise missiles in both countries. That's right. And China has its own cruise missile program, which is chucking along. So we've got large numbers of cruise missiles in every country. The North Koreans even are fooling around with the shorter range KH-35, a sort of copy of the Russian KH-35.

The only country until now that has stayed out of this crazy cruise missile race has been the Japanese.

Aaron 4:57

Yeah, and then we've seen reports this week, or I guess it was last week, that they want to change all that and they want to at least buy two different types of cruise missiles for aircraft.

Jeffrey 5:09

Right, so these would be long-range cruise missiles that could strike targets anywhere between 500 kilometers and eventually 1,000 kilometers away. Two systems, a Norwegian system for the F-35 called the Joint Strike Missile, and then the much longer-range JASM-ER. Which goes all the way up to about 1,000 kilometers with a pretty heavy conventional payload. So that would be a change.

Aaron 5:45

It would be a change. I think what's interesting about the news is that it's couched within this broader debate about the Japanese constitution and what its armed forces, I mean, I guess are ultimately going to be used for as we enter this new age in Northeast Asia. Yeah.

Jeffrey 6:01

So I think we should talk about why the Japanese, you know, a big broad sweeping term that always indicates some inaccuracy, but why the Japanese want increasingly long-range cruise missiles. Because, you know, one of the interesting things about the announcement Is that it really wasn't presented by the defense minister in terms of North Korea. And I think North Korea enables the Abe government To get its way on some of these issues.

But I actually think that the motivation for the Abe government is a much deeper thing that doesn't really ultimately have anything to do with North Korea.

Aaron 6:59

Yeah, I mean, just looking at the announcement to summarize in Defense News, which has a nice piece about it, which is that They go out of their way in the announcement to suggest that Japan's stance towards attacking land-based targets on foreign soil hasn't changed. That's the role of the U.S. in the bilateral defense treaty. But then they use this word that is Ford's self-defense.

Which I think is where people are looking at is what exactly does self-defense mean and how are they defining it? At least this government is defining it and how they justify this interest in cruise missiles.

Jeffrey 7:37

You know, Japan's constitution is a gift from the United States. It's the gift that keeps on giving, as my dad likes to say. And, you know, we fought a war.

Aaron 7:52

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 7:54

And maybe we were a little bit sore about that. And so we gave the Japanese a constitution, which includes Article 9, under which the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. And, you know, I think that while... Conservatives in Japan have always been annoyed by that.

A pretty healthy chunk of the Japanese populace looks at the utter devastation of World War II and thinks, yeah, you guys should not get us in that shit again. And so it's surprisingly durable. And so, you know, over the last, I don't know, 70 years that this constitution has existed, there's been this interesting tension because, you know, it also, you know, says land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential will never be maintained.

Well, Japan has a military and they just call it a self-defense force. And so, you know, there's this really interesting tension between a Japanese public that I think is fairly pacifistic. Is that a word, Scott? Sure, why not? Yeah. There's a tension between the Japanese public, where pacifism is quite popular, and I think among elites, particularly conservative elites, who have tried to not eliminate Article 9, but continually reinterpret it to allow Japan to engage in more defense activity like a normal country.

And so, you know, the conversation we're having right now is, The Japanese government has interpreted this rather you know, straightforward, you know, no war potential to allow Self-Defense Forces, and, and, and at least for missiles you know, anti-ship and anti-air missiles, the, the general rule, I believe, has been the kind of MTCR guidelines, so you know, nothing more than say 300 kilometers.

Aaron 10:01

Yeah, and it looks like in the announcement, because they made that they're interested in two missiles. One is this joint strike missile, which is for F-35, and it's made with Lockheed Raytheon and a Norwegian company. And then that one seems to have a shorter range, and when we were looking at it, built around the MTCR limits more or less.

Jeffrey 10:26

Yeah, although interestingly, you know, what I've read is they generally say nothing more than 300 kilometers, which I guess you could imagine that as kind of a defensive, you know, like a proxy for what's defensive. You know, not far enough to go fight a road game. Although I'm not actually sure in principle that works, right? But whatever.

I mean, these are kind of arbitrary things, and my point about interpretation is precisely that... You know, there's just a push and a pull. And there's not any, I think, inherent logic to whatever number gets settled on. It's just that's the, like, political balance of the moment. But even the JSM would go up over 300 kilometers. It's just that it wouldn't do it with a 500-kilogram payload.

Aaron 11:12

Indeed.

Jeffrey 11:13

Indeed. But JASM-ER, that's a long-range cruise missile.

Aaron 11:22

Right. And yeah, and they'd like to put those out on their self-defense interceptors, which just happens with the F-15J or the Japanese version of the U.S. F-15. And so that's some strike power that they want to get on there and at least develop. But I think when we were talking off pod, and it's interesting, is that you just think that this is a reflection of trends within conservative, maybe Japanese politics.

And that the North Korean activities more recently is the excuse to reinterpret Article 9.

Jeffrey 11:57

Yeah, I do. I mean, I think that for two reasons. I mean, one is I think we have seen pretty consistently a push by – Hawks is not exactly the right word. But conservatives who want to see Japan as a more normal country with a regular military, they have pretty consistently pressed these boundaries. So in the 1980s, the kind of famous instance was Japan limits its defense spending to 1% of its GDP.

And they breached that one year by like a tiny fraction, you know, just a little bit, just to demonstrate that they could. And, you know, I think you've seen conservatives and other people who want to reinterpret the Constitution, you know, they want to do this for a long time. You know, the Abe government has a very large endeavor about reinterpreting the Constitution that has nothing to do with.

With particular capabilities. It's just a general desire. And in 2009, right, there was an LDP position paper that suggested that an Abe government would seek this kind of capability. It's just that they lost that election.

Aaron 13:17

Yeah, and then when they return to power, it just happens to be that there's this confluence of events with North Korea and then stuff we've talked about in the pod about preemption and wanting more accuracy to do that. Well, maybe this – It's not an either-or situation here. This is a longstanding policy position, and now the tools to do so are becoming available, and they're pushing forward with purchases.

Jeffrey 13:42

Yeah, which brings me to the second reason that I think I'm right, which is somebody told me so. Right. I took a trip to Japan with some colleagues right before. Actually, I took a couple of trips to Japan, but had one in the kind of 2008 timeframe. And it was a really interesting trip because I was there with some people who were way more important than I was.

And so we got like way more important meetings than I normally get. And we had a really interesting meeting with an individual who shall remain unnamed, but who I think can fairly be described as the former Prime Minister Koizumi's fixer. And he was really blunt. I mean, he said, look. You know, the goal here is to be treated like a normal country with a normal military.

And the threat that everybody's worried about is China. And to the extent that the North Koreans are difficult, then that creates a political argument that allows the Japanese government to do things that are, you know, to some extent about China and I think more fundamentally just about the vision that they have of Japan. And so he was, you know, pretty straightforward about the cynicism involved in this.

Aaron 15:03

Yeah, and there must be a push and pull tension with the U.S., particularly if the concern is about China. I mean, and JASM is a U.S. product. It's a hell of a missile.

Jeffrey 15:15

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think – one thing I would say is that – Once the progressive coalition that won that election, that killed off that 2009 position paper, once that coalition was out of office and Abe was back in government, if you look, you can see press reports of the Japanese re-engaged almost immediately on long-range strike capabilities.

And so then it just becomes a question of like, whoa, what would they want to buy and what would make sense for them? And my guess is that Whether it's, you know, a sea based conventional tomahawk or the outcome just politically would be too fraught for the Japanese because it's a right. Anything is kind of a nuclear capable system.

But these are systems in the United States that have had nuclear weapons.

Aaron 16:10

Yeah, and TLM has particular salience over there.

Jeffrey 16:14

Right, so even if it's a conventional variant of that, you're going to have this conversation about whether this is a stalking horse for nuclear rearmament. So I'm guessing if you're the Japanese, you're like, meh, I don't really want to have that argument. Well, lucky for you, there's a conventional. Exactly. JASM-ER is a purely conventional cruise missile. It has the same, I shouldn't say the same, it has virtually the same range as the Alchem, something that gets a little bit obscured.

Which Alchem? Tell the listeners. Well, either. It has the same. It's a 500-kilogram payload to like 1,000 kilometers. But if you put on a nuclear weapon, which weighs a lot less, you're going to get a range extension. It's probably not exactly the same. It's probably a little bit shorter. But JASM-ER is fairly capable. And Lockheed has won the contract for the LRSO.

Aaron 17:10

Yeah, that can cause some problems.

Jeffrey 17:12

Which is a nuclear-armed, which will be a nuclear-armed cruise missile, and which I think will be one of these old Lockheed concepts for taking the Jasmine R and making it a little bit bigger. Maybe a slightly more powerful engine, but probably just adding a lot more fuel. But whatever, LRSO is a nuclear system. JASM-ER is not and has never had a nuclear payload.

And so I think if you're the Japanese, just saying like, oh, well, we're just buying this capability because we have to arm our new aircraft and it's never had a nuclear capability. I think for them, politically, that's just going to be like an easier lift.

Aaron 17:54

Yeah, and then I think the big enabler of this is North Korean actions. Even though it may be a long-standing policy position, the North Korean actions have perhaps made this more politically tenable back in Japan. And you see this in statements from the United States. There are efforts to try and reassure allies through the provision of more capable weapons.

Jeffrey 18:16

Yeah, I actually wonder who the harder party would have been to convince, say, A year ago. You know, would it have been harder to get JASM-ER past the Japanese public or to get JASM-ER out of the Obama administration? And of course, you know, There were people in the Obama administration who I'm sure would have been delighted to sell JASM-ER to the Japanese.

I think there would have been people who would have been more cautious about it. How that fight would have played out, I don't know. But the combination, I think, of having the Trump administration in place, which is both sort of, I think, willing to sell stuff, but also seen in Japan as an unreliable, vaguely frightening ally. No.

Yeah. No. That doesn't happen. You know, and then you've got this scary North Korea situation. Like, I think that's probably... It's probably as favorable terrain as Abe is ever going to have to do this thing that he has clearly wanted to do for a long time. And in fact, that his whole family has wanted to do. You know, I mean, I think...

I never see this talked about in U.S. press reports, but... You know, Abe's father was a foreign minister. And Abe's grandfather on his mother's side was the prime minister. And Abe's great uncle, right, his grandfather on his mother's side's brother, was also the prime minister. Like, this is a very old political family in Japan, two political families, right, that represent, I think, a fairly consistent right of center agenda for Japan that predates the 1946 Constitution.

You know, Grandpa was a muckety-muck in Manchuria during the occupation.

Aaron 20:11

See, I didn't know any of this, so I actually just learned something on my own podcast, which was nice because I don't focus on Japanese politics. But I'm curious, I mean, if you zoom out, right, and then we start to look at the broader trends. I was joking at the top of the podcast when I said nobody's paying attention to the missiles.

But, you know, you have, you know, and this is the obligatory reference to Dennis Gormley. Drivers of cruise missile proliferation in Northeast Asia. These trends are continuing. And on top of that, you do have the very real North Korean crisis and then the concerns that we've talked about before about preemption. So how does this fit into the bigger picture within the region, even if it's a fairly consistent right of center conservative position amongst Japanese politicians?

Jeffrey 21:02

I think, you know, I mean, we've talked about it. There is a really aggressive arms race, missile arms race underway in Northeast Asia. And for whatever reason, we don't ever talk about it. We talk about North Korea's capabilities. And occasionally we talk about China's capabilities. But even Chinese capabilities rarely get mentioned. So you have seen, it's the last week of my class on the evolution of China's rocket forces.

You know, the Chinese, when I got into this business in the mid-1990s, the Chinese had... You know, a very small number of missiles. They were virtually all liquid-fueled, and they all had nuclear weapons on them. And today, the rocket force has much larger numbers of short-range, solid-fueled ballistic missiles with conventional warheads, and is introducing cruise missiles with conventional warheads.

And so, you know, the nuclear forces, it's grown a little, but it's, you know, kind of basically the same size. But there has been an explosion In the number of conventionally armed Chinese missiles. And then we've seen the response in Taiwan is to develop a long range conventionally armed cruise missile that like nobody talks about. Except for the Taiwanese, occasionally.

I mean, right, this is the one they hid in delivery trucks. I was about to say, the fake delivery company that they were driving them around in town in. Redbird Express.

Aaron 22:27

Which is really important. The fact that they were driving them around, we make fun of it, is that they were looking for survivability.

Jeffrey 22:34

Yeah.

Aaron 22:34

In ways that are moving forward, then they're not the only ones. But it's really important is that it's for survivability and to prevent from persistent strike. Prevent being killed in precision strike.

Jeffrey 22:45

And you see this, I think, really clearly in South Korea, where you've got the Hyunmoo-2 ballistic missile and the Hyunmoo-3 cruise missile. And the purpose of those missiles is not to go hunt North Korean missiles. It's to kill Kim Jong-un. So the point here is that these are precision capabilities of increasing range. And what they are really good for Is decapitation strikes.

And so if you're not going to have a nuclear weapon on them, what you're really going to use these things for is to try to kill the leadership and knock down the communication structures in your adversary, which, by the way, is a posture that requires you to go first.

Aaron 23:32

Yeah, we usually call it in Pentagon speak, hitting command and control notes.

Jeffrey 23:37

Yeah, so the thing that I worry about, and to be honest, you know, if I were a defense official and the Japanese showed up and said, hi, we'd like to buy Jasmine R, I would sell it to them. I mean, I understand why they want that. But the analyst in me steps back and says, well, you know, the universe we're getting into is a universe where as Japan's capabilities grow in the same way that South Korea's have grown, The prospect of defending Japan by either shooting down North Korean nuclear-armed missiles or, you know, hunting them in North Korea and killing them all seems pretty unrealistic.

It's, you know, ten times more true for... China and so if you're the Japanese and you're facing a nuclear-armed North Korea or a nuclear-armed China, I think the tendency is you're going to just be dragged by the logic of the systems that you have and the vulnerabilities that the other side has to these kinds of preemptive doctrines, and I, I don't, I don't think that Shinzo Abe is thinking about that. Like, I don't think he's sitting here thinking, yes, I want to get in the preemption business.

But I think the inertia of the decisions that he's making for this other reason, you know, this desire to transgress these post-war norms that Japanese conservatives find constraining, the inertia of those systems, I fear, will push them in this direction.

Aaron 25:17

And there's another wild card that is that even when they describe the purchase, you know, as I read through secondary sources, you know, it's largely interpreted over the Senkaku Islands, which I've always found to just be another wild card that goes on around here about, you know, a territorial dispute over rocks in the ocean.

Jeffrey 25:36

You know, that was my my job the summer that I worked at the Department of Defense. I was on the Japan desk in the waning days of the Clinton administration as an intern. This strange little Pentagon internship program that I don't know still exists. And Frank Kramer was the assistant secretary. And I did two things that summer.

I worked on a paper for Frank Kramer on the Senkakus, and I tried to get Walt Slocum and Jack Gansler to sign the same letter on missile defense cooperation with Japan. I actually know Walt now, and it's, like, funny, because, like, I see it, but, like, now I could probably get him to sign the letter, but... Back then, he probably wanted you to get his coffee.

Aaron 26:26

Yeah, right. Like, who the hell are you?

Jeffrey 26:30

But I spent a summer on the Japan desk working the Senkaku Islands issue. It's a funny case where the treaty that we have with the Japanese, the defense, the security treaty, obliges us to defend areas under the administration of Japan. Yeah. Which is like nice because it means we don't have to go to war with the Soviet Union over the islands in the north that they occupied.

That's convenient. Yeah. But sadly, while we don't while the U.S. government never took a position on the ownership of the Senkaku Islands, they are administered by Japan. And so we are treaty bound to defend those islands. And like, yeah, nobody in the United States wants to have a nuclear war with China over those rocks.

Aaron 27:17

Yeah, and now Jassim's meant to defend them.

Jeffrey 27:19

Yeah. I mean, I do think that it is an interesting question how important that flashpoint is because, you know, that rocks are approximately worthless. You know, people can make the kind of like, well, there might be oil under there, and then they establish an EEZ. But, you know... It's not actually about the material value of the islands.

You know, there are testicles involved. You know, which is precisely why, like, ultra-nationalist Japanese like to, like, you know, put up flags and...

Aaron 28:03

Well, I deal in Turkey and one of the fun part is the Aegean and the flag wars over Greek and Turkish flags over uncertain rocks. So I get it.

Jeffrey 28:13

Yeah, there's a part of me that just wants to like get a very large nuclear weapon and see if we can just like sink those islands. Kim Jong-un may oblige. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, it does get back to this broader point, which is, you know, the islands themselves are not That valuable. I mean, even if there are oil deposits under them, you know, I mean, it's money, right?

Like, like you could, you know, one side could cut the other side of check, but they'll never do that because it's not actually about it's not actually about the material value of the islands. It's about what the islands say about Sovereignty and historical grievances. In the same way, I think that the, you know, the cruise missiles aren't really about the military mission.

They're about a different kind of historical grievance, you know, a sense that the Constitution was imposed on Japan and represents a kind of humiliation that prevents Japan from being a normal country. And I think it's really hard to imagine making good defense policy when you're worried about things like that. Is that a happy note? No, it's a terrible note.

I mean, it's a really depressing note.

Aaron 29:32

That's our specialty recently is that we can't find ways to wrap the podcast up without going down this path.

Jeffrey 29:39

Well, you know what? I've got a shot at a happy note. There you go. I mean, look, I think the happy note is... I don't... I am not worried about... These capabilities representing some resurgence of Japanese militarism you know I think the simplistic op-ed to write is you know this constitution is the only thing that you know stands between us and the beast that was You know, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy before 1945 and, you know, selling the missiles will, you know, puncture that and unleash that beast.

Like, I don't think any of that's true. I mean, I think pacifism in Japan is still pretty strong and that the Abe government has struggled to reinterpret the Constitution. They have long wanted a capability like this, and they have found it hard to get, and they may finally get it because they've got this unique confluence of events, but it doesn't, I think, fundamentally change the constraints that Abe's grandfather and great uncle and father and that he have faced.

And so, like, yeah, I think we're going to sell Chasm Yarn to the Japanese, and it's not the end of the world. My concern is less that than it is this broader question, which is the kinds of capabilities that all of the countries in the region are developing, which are driven by where technology is at the moment, seem to me to be prioritizing offense.

And that creates some instabilities that we're going to need better designed public policies to deal with. So, you know, it's not like good news, but it's not, you know, it's not the downside that you're going to see in all the hot takes.

Aaron 31:31

Yeah, I think that's right. And it's one of the reasons that I focus, I mean, just more and more of my time is just focused on the interagency policy process within the U.S. And my problem with this is not JASM-ER, it's how we started this podcast. It's the disconnect between public statements that are meant to be signals and to reassert what policy is.

And then less than 24 hours just changes. And so we're left as outsiders and probably people on the inside not knowing what exactly it is that the United States is pushing for. And given all these confluence of events, where technology is going, I think that that is the more dangerous thing than JASM-ER is.

Jeffrey 32:23

Yeah, I think, you know, just to be simple about it, I can imagine stable trilateral U.S.-ROK-Japan deterrence against both Chinese and North Korean aggression with JASM-ER and without JASM-ER. You know, it's a much bigger set of questions, and this particular system neither solves our deterrence problem nor makes it impossible to deal with. I think that's a happy enough note.

Yeah, yeah, we found it. All right.

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Hey, Aaron.

Aaron 33:24

Yes?

Jeffrey 33:25

Thanks for joining me.

Aaron 33:27

Always a pleasure. And thank you for listening.