By VADM (ret.) Yoji Koda, JMSDF

Preface

It is my estimate that, even around 2030, the alliance between Japan and the United States will remain a core enabler of the security of the Asia-Western Pacific region. The division of labor between Japan and the United States with respect to fundamental roles and missions – i.e., the defensive power of Japan and the offensive power of the United States, US nuclear deterrence, and Japan’s responsibility of providing military bases to the United States – will be maintained over the next two decades. However, if the future world includes new challenges of precision strike and nuclear weapons proliferation, there will be several issues for Japan to consider that have not been recognized as problems in the current alliance posture.

Precision strike

In Japan, the requirement for defense against precision strike was for a long time overshadowed by the Cold War nuclear competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, the capacity for longer-range precision strike was considered a monopoly of the United States during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union, which had some relevant capabilities, was well deterred by the strategic balance.

Contrast that with the situation today. China will gain longer-range precision strike capabilities before 2030. If other regional nations also join the precision strike club by that time, this will greatly complicate Japan’s defense planning. It is especially the precision strike capability provided by long-range cruise missiles (CM) that will pose a security problem for Japan. North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and China all may develop or further develop precision weapons utilizing cruise missile delivery systems in the next two decades. For Japan, relative to Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), which has been an example of successful Japan-US cooperation, building an effective defense network against precision strike will be more difficult.

In this situation, some may wonder if more than before aggressive voices within Japan will argue that Japan should obtain its own strategic CM striking capability. It is certain that an increasing number of Japanese will support this opinion; however, if the Japanese and US governments make a strong case for the continued credibility of the alliance, this hard-line trend of opinion will not become a significant political factor.

Nuclear weapons proliferation

It is just a matter of time before Japan will be targeted by North Korean nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Japan was targeted by Soviet nuclear weapons in the Cold War and, possibly, faces a similar threat from Russia and China today. So nuclear weapons proliferation is best online casino far from a new issue for Japan; however, if such proliferation expands to other regional nations, this will be serious problem.

A key question for Japan will be whether to remain a non-nuclear nation in the face of the spread of nuclear weapons in the Asia-Pacific region. In such an environment, the following points would have to be considered.

First, what are the costs and benefits of becoming nuclear-armed? It is clear that Japan would lose much more than it would gain in such a situation. Remaining a non-nuclear nation under the current alliance with the United States would be a much wiser and more practical decision for Japan.

Second, a key issue for Japan and the United States in this environment will be how to continue to convince the Japanese people of the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent. Some in Japan have expressed growing concern about the status of the US deterrent, and, unfortunately, neither government has made sufficient effort to convince people about the deterrent’s reliability. In particular, since Prime Minister Koizumi’s tenure, the government of Japan (GOJ) has not adopted any productive reassurance measures, and if this situation continues, a majority of the Japanese people might have a strong appetite for an independent nuclear weapons capability. Both Japan and the United States should take this risk into account, and should resume bilateral nuclear dialogues as soon as possible.

Concluding thoughts

Japan will have several options for meeting the challenges of the emerging security environment. New measures should be taken to keep highly trained and operationally capable US forces in the region to counter emerging anti-access/area denial (AA/AD) strategies. These would include an at-sea BMD to protect the US Navy’s Carrier Strike Groups. Also, a more robust anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability against the latest submarines should be developed. In addition, protective measures to secure and maintain the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities of allied forces against an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack in the region should be established. EMP is not widely discussed yet but will be a good tool to neutralize allied C4ISR nerve centers and networks. Finally, construction of a defense network against precision strike will also be critical for future Japan-US cooperation. Efforts along all of the above lines will enable the future operational and strike capabilities of US forces deployed in the region.

One last idea is to develop Japan’s own AA/AD capabilities. For example, Japan could develop long-range anti-ship cruise missiles to counter an adversary’s naval and carrier strike forces, and also deny their freedom of movement. Conventional submarines and vast numbers of modern sea-bed mines would be Japan’s other AA/AD assets. These are just some parts of a potential suite of Japanese AA/AD tools in the 2030s. In this context, without taking “eye for eye” measures, there are several flexible options to meet future security challenges, while maintaining Japan’s long-established defense-only posture under the alliance. This could be the Japanese version of Asymmetric Warfare.

Yoji Koda is Vice Admiral (ret.), Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force.

By Dima Adamsky

How is the Russian military likely to evolve in the context of the continuing diffusion of the precision strike, information technology (IT) “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in various forms, and the likelihood of further nuclear proliferation by 2030? The current Russian approach to dealing with strategic challenges emanating from advanced conventional militaries may inform our thinking about this question. For the last two decades Russian doctrinal publications, official statements, and military theoreticians have mentioned the non-strategic nuclear arsenal as a counter to the conventional military threat from IT RMA-type NATO militaries. In the theater of military operations, the Russian nuclear arsenal’s mission is to deter, and if deterrence were to fail, to terminate large-scale conventional aggression through limited nuclear use. Among other scenarios, this nuclear countermeasure is imagined as a credible option against US Prompt Global Strike. Given the very slow procurement of Russian long-range precision guided munitions, and due to the significant backwardness of Russian command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities, a non-nuclear alternative against precision strike is a very distant and improbable prospect for the Russian military.

What if, toward 2030, more states on Russia’s borders become nuclear, and what if the diffusion of precision strike capabilities gathers momentum among Russia’s neighbors? Russia will be forced to deal not only with NATO and the US Prompt Global Strike, but also with the advanced conventional capabilities of the small and big non-NATO neighboring militaries. Russia’s arsenal of non-strategic nuclear weapons is unsatisfactory for missions demanding precision, cleanness, and low collateral damage. If, by 2030, Russia is unable to transform its armed forces into a sophisticated reconnaissance-strike complex and to bridge the gap with other IT RMA-type militaries, it is possible that it will opt for a solution in the area of a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Futuristic works by several Russian military theorists and nuclear scientists already call for the development of a new generation of usable nuclear weapons. These fourth generation nuclear weapons (FGNW) can be realistically used on the battlefield due to their tailored effects that ensure low ecological and political consequences. Theoretically, FGNW rely on non-fission means to trigger a low-yield fusion reaction. Hypothetically, they can be developed without a test, thus without violating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Lower yields and lower radiation fallout levels will minimize collateral damage, and will offer potential solutions against big and small powers that are superior in the field of precision strike capabilities. Also, FGNW may provide effective deterrence and military options vis-à-vis unstable and rogue nuclear-armed state and non-state actors.

What if ideas about a new generation of nuclear munitions and accompanying doctrinal concepts materialize into an actual military posture?  What happens if these doctrinal and scientific ideas proliferate to other nuclear powers, or the latter emulate them? This imagined second nuclear RMA might have major implications for international politics. Presumably, the current nuclear taboo norm would erode, significantly transforming the nature of future warfare. A shift in perception would make nuclear weapons usable, legitimate, and a strategically desired battlefield tool, and thus would lower the nuclear threshold level. This, in turn, may stimulate a new era of nuclear competition and arms racing.

It is unclear how expensive and complicated the adoption of this class of munitions would be for current and prospective owners of military and civilian nuclear programs. Although developing FGNW would be a significant scientific-technological challenge demanding political will and financial investment, it may be more feasible than one would expect. In principle, one may realistically imagine technology transfers, doctrinal diffusion, and adoption capacity pertaining to such capabilities among and the old and new members of the nuclear club. Deterrence models and campaign designs based on FGNW may be immediately useful for China and Pakistan, along with other states in East Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, as a countermeasure against adversaries possessing various forms of conventional precision or nuclear capabilities.

Dr. Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky is Assistant Professor, School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, IDC Herzliya.

The draft Global Trends 2030 report states that “the risks of interstate conflict are increasing,” partly because “the next 15-20 years will see a wider spectrum of more accessible instruments of war.”  How will this broadening of the spectrum affect how different states approach military competition and conflict?  What will be the impact on the global balance of military power?  The draft report outlines several ongoing competitions – including “anti-access vs. access” and “nuclear disfavor vs. nuclear renaissance” – relevant to the ability of the United States to project force and protect its friends and allies.  This week the blog’s attention turns to the trends underlying these competitions and their implications over the next two decades.

We will hear from a variety of subject matter experts based in the United States and other countries.  All of the contributors will respond to the question of how the diffusion of conventional precision strike capabilities and potential further nuclear proliferation are likely to affect the security environment of 2030.    Some posts will focus on the conventional dimension, and others on the nuclear side; still others will attempt a synthesis, analyzing how conventional and nuclear trends may interact.  Contributors will offer their perspectives as experts on a particular country, military service branch, or domain of conflict.

How should we knit together these contributions into an understanding of the net impact on the security environment?  Integration is more an art than a science.  It is difficult enough to forecast how trends based purely on material factors may interact or be disrupted, but in the case of the future security environment, we are dealing with factors of organizational and strategic culture that, together with technological capacity, will shape how military force is conceived and employed from country to country, in peacetime, during a crisis, or in war.  Unfortunately, there is no simple formula or established methodology for anticipating the outcome of the interaction of the various capabilities and concepts of operation that different states will adopt.  We must also acknowledge that the diffusion of conventional precision strike and nuclear proliferation are not the only trends relevant to the future security environment.  Still, they are at least among the dominant factors that will shape the outcome of military competition and conflict in the coming decades. Even if we can’t give a definitive answer to questions such as how the United States will project power or extend deterrence to friends and allies in 2030, the importance of the subject compels us to do our best to begin to outline the dominant alternative possibilities.

By Brendan Cooley

The United States soundly defeated the ideological challenges of communism and fascism in the 20^th century. The U.S.-led liberal order has streamlined global ideology and provided distributed security and economic growth. But a new, more nuanced challenge now operates within that liberal global order: state capitalism.

State capitalist societies, namely China, skirt global norms in many ways, but can plausibly claim to adhere to the general principles promulgated by the UN, WTO, IMF, and World Bank. But in leveraging the full power of their economies to advance the interests of the state, China and others subtly undermine those institutions, whose longevity is essential if the 2030 world is to be prosperous and secure. These states “cheat” in the liberal system, but remain dependent on the integration and stability it provides.

This paradox is at the center of the emerging global institutional architecture. Global Trends 2030 spends a lot of time talking about global order, but it really only poses the possibility of (sometimes dramatic) changes to the liberal order, rather than a total usurpation of that order. And because the challenge of state capitalism is acute and the liberal international system is strong, GT 2030 wisely ignores the potential for a drastically different system. So the question becomes: will China and other state capitalist states gradually alter some tenets best online casino of the liberal order, or will the system alter them?

If the world does become multipolar, as GT 2030 predicts, regional powers like China will have the opportunity to shape their local casino environment independent of large-scale U.S. influence. But as their economic interests spread and U.S. influence wanes, these states need become providers of public goods and order rather horoscope aquarius sign may suffer from pains in legs because of bad blood circulation, varicose veins, and trombophlebitis. than free riders on U.S.-led order.

China has already begun to entangle mobile casino itself in online casino a multitude of regional institutions, but very few of these present overt challenges to the liberal order. China has been at the forefront of the proliferation of free trade agreements in East and Southeast Asia and has pushed for regional economic integration over protectionism (although this may change with the composition of China’s economy). In this casino online area, China is ironically better at being “liberal” than the United States.

China’s foreign aid and investment policies do not adhere to the same standards as equivalent Western aid policies and China’s support of rogue regimes continues to frustrate the West. But these deviations from Western standards are relatively minor when one considers the degree of integration between China, its neighbors, and the West.

So while U.S. academics and strategists fret about the potential for a hegemonic challenge from China, Chinese ascendency might not severely alter global norms. The world will become more regionalized and will struggle to come to agreements on emerging challenges like intellectual property rights, climate change, and resource sharing. But the fundamental openness and agreed-upon rules of the liberal system will not change. China and other emerging powers will derive more benefit from playing by the system’s rules and enforcing them in their sphere of influence than overturning them. And the U.S., as the architect of this remarkable system, will continue to play a disproportionate role in the shaping of its future trajectory across regions.

Brendan Cooley is a rising junior majoring in Peace, War & Defense and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

One other area where the draft GT 2030 could go into greater depth is in analyzing the effect of ideas — the isms that can be motivators of collective action and accelerants to global change.  America’s global role is inextricably linked to the influence of ideas.  America’s global influence turns on its soft power as well as its hard power.

The United States does not confront an ideological enemy with the resources and global appeal that Communism enjoyed at the height of the Cold War, but there are contending isms ranging from militant islamism to authoritarian crony-capitalism (or whatever label one would assign to the middle way approach China and Russia appear to be trying to forge).

The past decade of kinetic war has been directed at the threat from militant islamism, and it is striking how optimistic GT 2030 is about how that contest will unfold in the coming decades. В I think GT 2030 may be too optimistic, perhaps reflecting the difficulty the casino online Intelligence Community has grappling with religious-based movements.

But I agree that the U.S. has the ideological advantage in the long run. Many aspects of American/Western ideology seem destined to subvert the appeal of militant islamism, such as feminism or respect for individual liberty.

Yet I would single out for special consideration religious toleration. В It took the West a long time, too long, to figure best architecture schools Games As for language practice, each children”s camp in America, provides for a mandatory training online casino program. this out but after centuries of bloody warfare the West (and especially the United States) has online casino done it. В We have figured out how to be both casino online religiously fervent casino online AND You can find dozens of celebrities with the Sun in Virgo Ascendant in best-horoscope.com combination on Astrotheme, listed in casino online popularity order and based on our visitors” clicks. tolerant of other religiously fervent people (provided they are not using coercive means against others). Tolerance does not require abandoning religious, even exclusive religious convictions. В Religious toleration implies believing your religious position to be superior to others — you are right, they are wrong — but it does so in a way that lets them be “wrong.” В It preserves space for proselytizing — there cannot be true toleration if you deny faiths the opportunity to “compete” by trying to persuade/convert others. В But it is proselytizing through the marketplace of ideas, not through the barrel of a gun.

This form of religious toleration is anathema to militant islamists and yet should have a wide appeal for most everyone else. В It is thus quite subversive to others and props up U.S. power.

Perhaps that topic is too delicate for the IC to touch, but with religious revivals spreading across much of sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and East Asia, it seems too important to ignore.

The authors of GT2030 note that “the current transition is analogous to other historical inflection points – 1815, 1919, 1945 – in fundamentally shifting the trajectory of the international system” (79).  In 1815, the Congress of Vienna ushered in Europe’s “long peace,” and of course the two world wars resulted in a fundamental rebalancing of power throughout the international system.

Others have pointed to different inflection points in history.  In “The Post-American World,” Fareed Zakaria points to “three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years.”  The first was the rise of the West (which began in the fifteenth century and accelerated in the eighteenth), the second was the rise of the United States (end of the nineteenth century), and the third is what we are experiencing now: “The Rise of the Rest.”

Niall Ferguson has written about imperial falls.  To think of the collapse of the British empire as a protracted process, he argues, is wrong.  “The zenith of British territorial power was in fact in the 1930′s.  To Churchill, sitting as an equal at Yalta (Feb 1945) with Roosevelt and Stalin, it didn’t seem as if the sun would set on the British empire under his watch.”   As for US power today, he believes it is danger of a dramatic fall, not a slow decline.

The most interesting discussion of inflection points I’ve come across recently was in a lecture by Frank Gavin, a historian at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT-Austin.  Gavin asks whether the United States today is more like the United States in the 1970′s or Great Britain in the 1870′s.

Recall the global position of the US in 1975.  We had just lost Vietnam; Nixon had resigned in disgrace; the economy was bad; there was a sense of cultural malaise.  Who would have thought that the nation was on the verge of an economic and technological explosion that would last for decades?

Or think of Britain in the 1870′s, halfway through its imperial century.  In that decade, Britain was on top militarily and economically, had the world’s best education system, and presided over enormous swaths of land.  Yet that decade, many scholars believe (Ferguson excluded), marked the beginning of Britain’s decline.

So where are we?  Are we undergoing a third tectonic shift as Zakaria believes – a transition as monumental for the international system as the rise of the West?  Or is the current transition more akin to the reordering of the international system after one of the world wars?  Are we back in the 1970′s?  Might we be on the verge of the next technological revolution, one that will leave the United States atop its global perch?  Can any of these scenarios be ruled out?

In his lecture, Gavin quipped that “Any time you hear someone in 2010 tell you something about where America’s power is going, it should make you laugh.  There is no one in 1976 who thought that America’s power was not in decline.”  Is this true (and is this true)?  Is the direction of American power unknowable?  Did everyone in 1976 believe America was in decline? . Eenlifatatel .

Joseph Nye has said security is like oxygen: everyone enjoys it when it is present and few fully appreciate it until it is absent, at which point regaining it becomes an all-consuming obsession.

At a recent workshop on grand strategy, one of my colleagues observed that American power may be like gravity: it is hard to evaluate its reach and impact until it is gone, at which point we are likely to miss it acutely.

He is on to something that policymakers have recognized but have struggled to articulate in a way that won’t get mocked by academics (cf. “indispensable power”).  Certainly the dgfev online casino online casino United States has not always wielded its power perfectly, and Simply put, if your casino online cap was $2,000,000 you no longer had health medical insurance the moment your insurer online casino spent casino online dollar number two million on you. there are casino online doubtless instances when some (perhaps casino online many) online casino other international actors would have online casino preferred “less United States involvement.” But the United States has been a critical provider of global casino public goods, casino online especially global public online casino nbso goods in the security sphere and a world where the United States is both unwilling and incapable of providing those public goods is likely to be a world far less congenial for many global actors — including, ironically, many who have made a cottage industry of blaming America first for the world’s problems.

Perhaps the question is best put this way: what global problem will be easier to solve if the United States is weaker relative to other countries and, feeling that weakness, is less-willing to engage globally?