143 Anno XVIII - 2008 - Marina Militare

or how far and to what extent they will allow
Japan to project military power ashore.
Is Japan building-up its military apparatus and
heading towards a path of maritime power
projection? Is a new sun rising on the horizon?
This paper re-assesses the nature and the purpose
of Japan’s national naval strategy. It argues that
the current pre-eminent focus on procurement
programmes to exercise and maintain sea control,
including Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD),
Aegis and helicopter-carrying destroyers or
tank landing ships, led analysts to overemphasise
Japan’s ‘dangerous behaviour’ as a medium
power. By examining the different criteria and
required military capabilities connected to key
notions like maritime power projection and
expeditionary warfare, the paper postulates that
Japan’s contemporary naval power is not radically
changing in its nature. It maintains that in
light of Japan’s growing international commitments
and concrete regional concerns, the current
evolution of the archipelago’s naval force
is primarily aiming at the procurement of basic
expeditionary capabilities whilst retaining an
effective force against regional forms of power
projection. The structural transformation of the
JMSDF is not part of a menacing plan; rather,
it embodies the service’s attempt to balance a
fleet that some experts considered until recently
well-suited for anti-submarine warfare (ASW)
but incapable of international undertakings because
of the lack of assets in the areas of air
defence, strategic lift and amphibious warfare. 7
A new sun is rising on the horizon, but is one
seeking to maintain an adequate military structure
to protect critical maritime interests and to
contribute to international stability rather than
undermining it.
dIfferencIng MarItIMe
Power ProjectIon
froM exPedItIonary
warfare
Maritime power projection is one of
the crucial ways in which navies can
exploit the command of the sea, employing
‘sea-borne military forces directly
to influence events on land’. 8 For
Sir Julian Corbett, the ability to project
military power ashore was indeed one
of the distinctive attributes of naval forces;
it played to their strengths in that
by freely accessing the sea, a nation
was empowered of the strategic flexibility
to decide when, where and in what
measure it wished to commit its armed
force to military action. 9 Sir Basil
Liddell Hart emphasised that for the
British Empire ‘sea-borne expeditions against
the enemy’s vulnerable extremities’ represented
a key ingredient to its success. The navy was
used to ‘safeguard ourselves where we are the
weakest’, whilst exerting ‘our strength where
the enemy was the weakest’. 10 Emphasis on the
core idea of navies as versatile tools capable of
widening a government’s options in responding
to a crisis or a conflict can be found in today’s
operational lexicons, highlighting that power
projection enables the navy to ‘deliver flexible,
scalable, and sustainable offensive capabilities
at a time and place of our choosing’. 11
Maritime power projection serves offensive
strategies implying the political will to employ
the versatility of naval power to secure a set of
primary military objectives against conventional
forces. It encompasses a wide spectrum of
military actions, ranging from invasion,
territorial conquest, naval bombardment or raids,
and their application depends on the extent to
which these actions are vital to the achievement
of victory at the tactical, operational or strategic
levels of a conflict. For instance, between 1942
and 1945, the nature of the theatre of operations
in East Asia made the maritime campaigns in
the Central and Southwest Pacific conducted by
the United States and its allies essential to the
strategy of defeat of Japan, and represent to date
‘a model for conducting joint operations in a
large theatre against a powerful and determined
enemy’. 12 Similarly, in the 1982 Falklands
campaign, victory was primarily assured by the
Royal Navy’s capacity to acquire sufficient sea
and air control to subsequently land and sustain
ground forces. 13 In cases like the Gallipoli
campaign of 1915 led by a joint British Empire
and French forces, or the Allied landings
in the Mediterranean theatre (1942-1944)
LCAC durAnte operAzione di sbArCo
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