U.S. and Japan tighten missile-defense ties

WASHINGTON-The U.S. and Japanese navies have worked out common rules for their advanced warships designed to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles, the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet said on Friday ahead of a milestone test.
Underscoring growing missile-defense ties, Jon Yoshishige, a spokesman for the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii-based fleet, said areas of cooperation included "operational activities."The cooperation described in the statement fell short of missile-defense integration, a thorny issue for Japanese concerned about their post-World War Two constitution's ban on collective defense.
"Operationally, the dialogue between the two navies extends from the four-star level to the ship-to-ship level as crews share common tactics, techniques and procedures for use while under way with the Aegis" anti-ballistic missile gear, Yoshishige said in an email response to questions from Reuters.Using the Aegis system built by Lockheed Martin, the Japanese destroyer JS Kongo is due to carry out next week what would be the first ballistic missile shootdown at sea by a nation other than the United States.The test could take place as soon as Monday off Kauai, Hawaii. In cooperation with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, and the U.S. Navy, the Kongo will fire a Standard Missile-3 interceptor to detect and track a medium-range ballistic missile target launched from a nearby U.S. range.MDA, in a statement, described the test as a "major milestone" in bilateral missile-defense cooperation, spurred after North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile in August 1998.The missile's third stage flew over Japan before landing in the Pacific and highlighted Japan's vulnerability to missiles that could be tipped with chemical, nuclear or germ warheads.Japan's missile defense has two components. The Raytheon-produced Standard Missile-3 aboard the Aegis-equipped Kongo-class destroyers and the ground-based Patriot PAC-3 missiles that defend Japanese soil.If Japan's shipboard systems were being tied in with U.S. capabilities, "that would raise a serious constitutional question," said Yuki Tatsumi, an expert on Japanese security policy at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a private research group in Washington."I doubt Japanese political leaders are ready to have that kind of discussion."Japan's "Peace" Constitution is widely interpreted to ban "collective self-defense," including combat cooperation with the United States against a third country.It was imposed by the United States during its occupation of Japan following World War Two but now stands as an obstacle to U.S. efforts to deepen military cooperation with Japan.Washington has pushed missile defense "as an alliance-building program designed to integrate military capabilities," said Paul Giarra, a former Pentagon senior country director for Japan who inaugurated a U.S.-Japan missile-defense working group in the early 1990s.Mindy Kotler of Asia Policy Point, a research group that studies Japan and Northeast Asia, described the new Pacific Fleet statement as another apparent step toward "functional" Japanese-U.S. military cooperation.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071215/pl_nm/missile_japan_usa_dc;_ylt=Ao8TNdWvVwMQ7TErfNCLi6xZ.3QA

As in the days of Noah....