On the agenda to be discussed by U.S. and Japanese officials in Washington this week is a U.S. plan to redesign U.S. Marine Corps infantry forces into “Marine Littoral Regiments” (MLR), including one to be based on Okinawa. According to a Jan. 10 “World Alert” item published in the Washington Post, the “repurposing” of the regiment on Okinawa by 2025 will enable it “to rapidly disperse to fight in austere, remote islands, according to several U.S. officials. The Marine Corps plans to equip the regiment with advanced capabilities, such as anti-ship missiles that could be fired at Chinese ships in the event of a Taiwan conflict…. This is one of the most significant advances in U.S. force posture in the region in at least a decade, said the officials. `Japan is substantially improving its capacity, but also providing more capacity for the United States,’ said the administration official.”
“Japan is stepping up big-time and doing so in lockstep with the United States,” the White House officials said… Its decision to build its own long-range missiles and in the meantime to buy U.S. Tomahawks as an interim step is a major advance in counterstrike capability and a signal to China that aggressive moves in the region will not go unanswered, they said.”
The senior administration official stressed the significance of the developments: “This is about Japan essentially aligning with the United States, in many ways like a NATO ally.”
The article is explicit about how this could lead to a direct U.S.-China military confrontation: “Japan and China also have been engaged in a long-running territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea northeast of Taiwan, where an escalation could draw the United States—which has pledged to defend Japan under a security treaty—into a conflict with China.”
