143 Anno XVIII - 2008 - Marina Militare

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and in Normandy (1944), sea-borne assaults
contributed in no small measure to the success in
the conflict creating new fronts, supporting main
operations on land and favouring the enemy’s
forces displacement. 14 Amphibious operations,
attacks on sea lanes of communication (SLOCs)
by means of commercial blockade or guerre
de course, and throughout the Cold War, seabased
strategic missile attacks ashore have
been regarded as the principal means to deliver
maritime power projection in conventional
wars.
Expeditionary warfare is different from
maritime power projection. It concerns
operational campaigns generally set outside the
context of conventional conflicts in which naval
forces primarily provide the lifting capability
and air and naval tactical support to deliver
ground and air forces ashore. 15 Expeditionary
operations are a derivation of the colonial
campaigns of past centuries, which were waged
to suppress ‘insurrections and lawlessness,
or for the settlement of conquered or annexed
territory, (…) to wipe out an insult, to avenge
wrong, or to overthrow a dangerous enemy’. 16
In that context, the global reach of naval forces
was used to deploy the army in ‘protracted
and hazardous operations in all quarters of
the world’ in which the armed services had to
conform their methods of fighting ‘to those of
adversaries infinitely inferior in intelligence and
armament’. 17 Modern expeditionary operations
feature an element of continuity with the ‘small
wars’ of colonial memory in that they are
campaigns of choice, usually conducted against
irregular forces and aiming primarily at the
prevention of disorders, the maintenance, or reestablishment
of security in distressed areas. 18
In the aftermath of the Cold War, increased
social and political tensions on a global scale,
coupled with the more interconnected nature of
security brought this form of interventions back
into fashion, with some of the most notable
examples including Somalia (1991-1992), Haiti
(1994), Albania (1997), East Timor (1999).
In line with the new trends, major navies of
industrialised countries endeavoured to include
in their doctrinal grammar formulas to perform
expeditionary warfare to various degrees. 19
Indeed, for the United States, the ability to
intervene in both high and low intensity warfare
scenarios worldwide made maritime power
projection and expeditionary capabilities
attributes equally vital to national strategy,
eventually leading to the adoption of the hybrid
formula ‘expeditionary power projection’. 20
On the basis of this brief conceptual sketch out,
it is possible to conclude that the application
of these notions to Japan’s case presents some
fundamental difficulties. Maritime power
projection implies a political willingness to
procure and use naval forces for coercive
military operations overseas, a course of
action currently forbidden by the Japanese
constitution. By contrast, expeditionary warfare
is the result of a nation’s political choice to
commit to international stability emphasising,
from a military point of view, the procurement
of assets capable of performing various degrees
of logistical and tactical support to air and land
operations. Sustainability and scale of a country’s
expeditionary capability are key in determining
its operational flexibility, which can range from
amphibious incursions of special forces to the
deployment of military or medical personnel
for disaster relief or humanitarian assistance. In
order to better understand to what extent each
of these notions can be applied to Japan, the
next two sections will review from an historical
perspective the development of the JMSDF’s
power projection and lifting capabilities in the
Cold War and beyond.
jaPan’s cold-war naval Power:
asw and suPPort to ground
forces
At the time of its establishment in 1954, the
Japanese navy was only a pale shadow of
the awesome force which had projected the
country’s military power in the most remote
corners of Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Drafts of the force planning produced from
1955 to 1956, attributed to naval defence very
modest tonnage allocations, ranging from
81,000 to 143,000 tons. 21 Financial constraints
due to Japan’s fragile economy as well as
political considerations dictated a secondary
attention to the naval build-up. In the mid-
1950s government’s priority list, the relative
expansion of the ground forces was in fact
one of higher importance for two reasons.
Domestically, it showed to the Japanese people
the government’s commitment in accelerating
the withdrawal of US troops stationed in Japan
from the days of the Occupation (which had
ended in 1952). Diplomatically, it represented
a tangible sign of Japan’s commitment to the
newly established security partnership with the
United States with no real strategic role beyond
the country’s borders. 22
In 1956, these considerations informed the final
decision to attribute the JMSDF a relatively
modest force goal in the first Defence Build-up
Plan, 23 set at about 124,000 tons and 180 aircraft
of various types to be achieved during the period
1958-1960. 24 The plan endorsed a minimalist
approach to naval matters, with the JMSDF’s
primary mission consisting of a strict ‘defence
from direct aggression of the mainland’, with
the Soviet Union as primary national threat. 25
Naval operations included the prevention of