Aegis Ashore Cancellation: The Snowball Effect on Japan’s Defense Policy

On June 15, Japanese Defense Minister Taro Kono announced that he had decided to “suspend” the deployment plan for Aegis Ashore. His decision was endorsed on June 25 by Japan’s National Security Council, which moved to officially cancel the program. Kono said that Japan’s government will continue discussing alternative ways to defend the country from missile attacks. 

“We couldn’t move forward with this project, but still there are threats from North Korea,” he said.

Kono’s decision on June 15 seems to have triggered a much larger development in Japan’s defense policy. In addition to launching a reassessment of Japan’s ballistic missile defense (BMD) needs – which will take place over the next two months, so that the adjustment can be incorporated into the budget request for FY 2012-2022 by the Japan Ministry of Defense (JMOD) – Japan now seems to be moving forward with the revision of its National Security Strategy (NSS). Given that the acquisition of Aegis Ashore was one of the key elements in the current National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) and Mid-Term Defense Program (MTDP), the revision of these two documents will also be inevitable. 

Each of these moves make sense on its own. If a considerable cost overrun and program delay were to be anticipated in deploying Aegis Ashore after Japan’s technical concerns were addressed, the decision to cancel the program is a sensible one. And since the Aegis Ashore was one of the major acquisition programs under the current NDPG and MTDP, the revision of those documents is not only reasonable but necessary once the program cancellation becomes official. Finally, a revision to the NSS, which had been unchanged since its first adoption in December 2013, has been long overdue. In fact, given the very different geostrategic landscape unfolding when the current NDPG and MTDP were unveiled in 2018, the NSS should have been revisited then. 

The problem is time, or lack thereof, which has resulted in rushing the revision processes of these key planning documents for Japan’s defense policy and force posture. The only piece that remotely makes sense to rush through is the reassessment of Japan’s ballistic missile defense needs, given the timing of the government’s budget request for FY 2021-2022. Even that process — two months or even less — is extremely rushed, raising concerns over how well the Japanese government can really think through other options that are more cost-effective and yet allow Japan to enhance its deterrent capability against ballistic missile threats. 

Concerns for the anticipated revision of other strategy and planning documents — the NSS, NDPG, and MTDP, all of which the government supposedly will try to revise before the end of 2020 — are even greater. The Abe government took roughly a year to finalize the existing NSS, which it released in December 2013. The typical timeframe for the NDPG and MTDP is approximately two years, with JMOD starting an internal discussion around two years in advance. If the schedule that has been floated in media reports is more or less accurate, it leaves only four months for these three planning documents to be revised. Given the central importance that they all have in Japan’s national security policy, four months is simply not enough time for the in-depth discussion required for revisions. This again raises concerns that the revision process could be hijacked by those who are interested in pushing a certain weapon platforms that may or may not make sense for Japan’s national security policy. 

Moreover, these revisions will take place just as Japan is poised to enter Host National Support (HNS) negotiation with the United States. Entering this negotiation after cancelling the Aegis Ashore — a major acquisition program — could build greater pressure against Japan. The U.S. negotiation position will likely to be hardened on what can be considered as Japan’s “fair and equitable” contribution. 

When Kono made an announcement to “suspend” the Aegis Ashore program, his intention was in the right place — cancel an acquisition program that he believed would end up costing Japan more, with its deployment schedule significantly delayed. However, his decision ended up triggering a series of actions the Japanese government will have to take in recalibrating Japan’s national security policy on an extremely truncated timeline. And at this point, no one knows how such recalibration will play out in the end.