I was just in Okinawa, relaxing at a beach cafe, when my peace was suddenly disturbed. A couple of F-15s – these belonging not to the US Air Force, but rather to the Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces – flew overhead. They were thundering off to go slay dragons, presumably a visitor from the People’s Republic of China.
It’s standard practice in peacetime military operations to push the limits of spying on potential adversaries. Spy planes fly well-within nations’ stated Air Defense Zones, skirting just outside the internationally recognized maritime sea borders (about a dozen miles from land), collecting intelligence. It’s also standard practice for the target of the intelligence gathering to dispatch air intercept assets to put the gatherer on notice, and keep them honest. This doesn’t always go well, for example when China forced a US Navy spy plane to land in 2001.
It would seem that this sort of phenomenon would highlight the importance of military “self-defense” assets. Even for a “pacifist” nation, such as Japan.
Why not have planes and missiles whose sole purpose is to shoot down aggressive planes and missiles? Isn’t that consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle?
The pitfalls lie with the nature of conflict. It’s completely possible for China to send routine flights near Okinawa to accomplish two purposes other than gathering electronic intelligence. First, they could be testing Japan’s defensive response procedures and times. Second, they could be establishing a pattern of behavior, which they can then modify during an attack to throw Japan off-guard.
If you have defensive missiles as your nation’s defense, you might believe that you’ve achieved conditions where “it’s too costly to attack.” However, this doesn’t consider the mind of the military planner. Your missiles exist in discrete locations, have operational limits, time constraints, systemic weakness, and so forth. The goal of the adversarial military planner is to exploit those weaknesses, to defeat the missiles. By having a defensive system, you’ve given an adversary a purpose, and something to target.
In other words, military conflict is escalatory. As your defensive measures improve, the enemy’s need for a better funded and larger aggressive force increases. This in turn creates the need for a system of exploitation – an Empire – to fund the military. This makes an enemy even more desperate to conquer you and convert your society to their system of exploitation – at any cost.
The “fine-edged sword” of the tactically brilliant military professional died during the Napoleonic age, when the entire nation of France was conscripted to go make an Empire in Europe. France created a system where the prerogatives of the state were united with those of the people – nationalism. This led to the human carnage seen in WWI and WWII. The post-war efforts by the United States to prevent another such conflict through maintenance of near-world hegemony have led to perhaps 20 million dead.
And yet, by leaning on a system of perpetual hegemony, the US has forced China to respond by exercising its own hegemonic prerogatives, and preparing for regional conflict.
I could imagine, in a Libertarian society, that tall urban buildings would field anti-air defenses against small-scale criminal or terrorist drone attacks. But large-scale defenses meant to defend against attacks by a large state represent a political act, one which can’t possibly succeed without succumbing to the pitfalls of statism.
I contend that military means of defense are simply ineffective. Unless you’re in a privileged class in the victorious power. But let’s see how long that can last.
And in Japan’s case, their pacifism is entirely fake. They host and rely on numerous US assets as part of their geopolitical posture in the region.
