US, Japan reaffirm plans to strengthen military alliance as global conflicts flare up

ICHIGAYA, Japan — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed several high-stakes, ongoing pursuits to contemporize and integrate the U.S. and Japan’s militaries’ operations and assets — against the backdrop of escalating international conflicts — with his top Japanese government and military counterparts Tuesday night.

Those bilateral engagements followed stops earlier that day at both U.S. Forces Japan headquarters at Yokota Air Base, and separately the Yokohama North Docks, where Austin heard directly from military personnel about maturing efforts to modernize the alliance’s command-and-control capabilities.

They also came as the two allies work on refining requirements to reconstitute USFJ into a joint force headquarters.

“As the security situation in the region is increasingly severe, I would like to continue to move forward with important initiatives of the alliance and cooperating our efforts to strengthen alliance capabilities to deter and respond, as well as to mitigate the impacts on local communities,” Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani told Austin and his team during the open-press portion of their bilateral meeting.

Austin also emphasized how the two nations are operating in a clear-eyed manner regarding the challenges to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and other areas of the world.

“That includes coercive behavior by the People’s Republic of China in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and elsewhere in a region. It includes Russia’s reckless war of choice in Ukraine, and it includes [North Korea’s] support for Moscow’s war, as well as its other destabilizing and provocative activities,” he said. “But we’re meeting these challenges with confidence and resolve, and we remain committed to advancing our historic trilateral cooperation with [the] Republic of Korea.”

As the defense leaders alluded to, their meetings this week unfolded as Syria continues to erupt in political chaos, South Korea confronts backlash and works to recuperate from its president’s recent, temporary declaration of martial law, and conflicts continue to play out both in Ukraine and around Israel.

While the main portions of the Pentagon chief’s engagements were closed to the press on Tuesday, senior U.S. defense officials briefed a small group of journalists traveling in Austin’s delegation on the progress and implications of the deepening U.S.-Japan military partnership.

“The department has been working to realize the vision that Secretary Austin outlined in July” at a 2+2 dialogue in Tokyo, one senior official said.

There, American and Japanese national security officials solidified a plan to revamp their alliance’s command and control — or C2 — capabilities, including by enabling more collaboration on next-generation technologies within their defense industries and by expanding joint, cross-domain missions.

“The United States and Japan are on track to deliver that vision, as [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] continues to convene working groups with Japanese counterparts to build out alliance coordination procedures and other operational measures for enhanced bilateral cooperation. There have been several such working groups so far,” the senior defense official said.

They added that, at the same time, America is also moving to reshape USFJ into a joint force headquarters by revamping its resources and facilities to expand and enable more cooperative missions and responsibilities.

“We are in a good position to implement these requirements in the months ahead, ensuring that the JFHQ is in a strong position to operate effectively with Japan and that the alliance can respond in peacetime and contingencies,” according to the senior defense official.

In their view, “Japan has been investing more than ever in its own capabilities.”

They pointed to how, in particular, the island nation has been moving to take on more roles and missions in the alliance and the broader region — including by standing up its own joint operations and command center that should open up sometime early next spring.

“And in the context of that, we made an alliance decision to upgrade U.S. Forces Japan, which has largely been in the business of managing the alliance itself, but not an operational command,” the senior U.S. defense official said.

They committed to sharing more information on the technical aspects of this pivot in the near future.

“But currently, the U.S. Forces Japan commander is dual-hatted as the 5th Air Force commander — and the decision that Secretary Austin made this summer as an alliance decision is to split those and to have a standalone [USFJ] commander that would be in command of this upgraded command, and one of the principal responsibilities of that will to be linking up with Japan’s new joint operational command in a way that we have not done before in the U.S.-Japan alliance,” the official said.

Additionally, they pointed out that the original language lawmakers proposed for the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (the House-Senate negotiated version of the NDAA was released Saturday) incorporates a reporting requirement that if passed would mandate Defense Department personnel to inform Congress members about the progress that’s been made since the nations first agreed to boost their military partnerships.

“That’s just another sign and symbol of the bipartisan congressional interest and support that we see on this issue,” the senior defense official said.

During the official bilateral dialogues with Nakatani and Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Tuesday, Austin repeatedly emphasized that — despite intensifying warfare in multiple regions around the world — he believes that the U.S.-Japan alliance is presently stronger than ever.

“We share a vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, and I’m proud of how much we’ve accomplished over the past four years. We’ve announced major improvements to our force posture, advanced groundbreaking defense industrial agreements and taken steps to upgrade our command and control, and we’ve worked more closely than ever with our partners across this region in support of stability, deterrence and peace,” the Pentagon chief said.

In his opening remarks with Austin, which reporters were permitted to observe ahead of the closed-door meeting, Ishiba said the global conflict landscape is changing “very quickly, on a weekly basis” — and that current events now playing out in Syria and South Korea were difficult to imagine or predict not that long ago.

“A century from now, we will consider what’s happening in 2024 as something historic. So, we need to be accountable for today’s world, as well as the world of tomorrow’s generations,” he said.