|
|
The House has approved a $643 billion defense-spending bill for 2013 that’s $3.7 billion more than the Obama Administration, and its Pentagon, is seeking. That’s just about the same amount the Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill’s push for an East Coast missile shield will cost over the next five years. It’s amazing that [...]
TOKYO – A shooting war with China may not be inevitable, but a dangerous arms escalation seems a dead certainty. That’s the take from a rare public discussion here this week among naval experts from Japan, the U.S. and China. “Eighty percent of the population wants us to use the military,” says Yang Yi, former director [...]
…the world goes crazy when North Korea says it is going to launch a missile into space, and there’s hardly a peep worldwide when Iran says the same thing? Especially strange given the fact that the two nations often share weapons technology, the fact that Iranian experts were on hand for last month’s failed NoKo [...]
The South Koreans believe their friendly neighbors to the north have jammed the Global Positioning Systems on hundreds of airliners flying in and out of South Korea’s major airports in recent days. It could be a typical North Korean tactic: come up with a low-cost way to cause trouble, especially one that’s difficult to trace. Luckily, [...]
The prospect of U.S. and Japanese troops fighting side by side in the next land war in Asia — and heaven forbid the need for either — comes a step closer with a little-noted provision in U.S. realignment plans announced last week. The agreement to shift 9,000 Marines from Okinawa to other locations in the Pacific [...]
Seoul has lost its bid to have the world’s mapmakers allow the Sea of Japan, the body of water between Japan and the Korean peninsula, also to be known as the East Sea. Japan is pleased, according to Stars and Stripes. The International Hydrographic Organization met this week in Monaco and elected to keep Sea [...]
Now that we have West Coast missile defenses to protect us from ICBMs North Korea doesn’t have, the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee wants the Pentagon to consider building an East Coast shield to protect us from ICBMs Iran doesn’t have. Here’s the language from its slice of the proposed 2013 defense authorization [...]
TOKYO – You could almost hear the collective “Aw, damn,” from Japan’s Ministry of Defense Friday as a North Korean missile broke up soon after takeoff and plopped into the sea. Japan spends about $5 billion a year on missile defense and had mobilized forces throughout the country to shoot the missile down if it strayed [...]
After weeks of hype and warnings that the North Korean launch could send rocket debris raining down on U.S. allies including Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, Pyongyang’s Unha-3 rocket failed shortly after takeoff and turned into a multi-million-dollar kimchi candle. Up next: a likely NoKo nuclear test. Failure there is easier to hide, but [...]
That was headline Tuesday in the Japan Times on the prospect that the Japanese military will be able to do anything to protect Japanese citizens if the North Korean rocket launch slated for later this week goes astray. The article notes it was comments from a Pentagon official that debris could fall on Japan or [...]
