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Why Japan Is Facing Pressure To Return To Military Research (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's growing nation status has Japan reconsidering its 70-year old ban on military research projects, as Japanese defense circles actively seek to take advantage of the country's vanguard position in robotic technology. Pressure from the government is also mounting, as authorities try to find means to bring university researchers into the defense fold — particularly to meet the challenge of a more aggressive Chinese military. Funding cuts in Japanese higher education, combined with a weakened economy and governmental austerity measures, may make the allure of military funding irresistible to researchers and academic institutions.
Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with our (USA) penchant for starting fights with the entire fucking planet
The revanchist Chinese are at their doorstep and making territorial claims. Russia still occupies Japanese territory. And last but not least, they have Obama at their back. What do you think he'll do if war breaks out? Go on Japan! Develop weapons.
I really hope Japan resists becoming more militarised and aggressive. The current pacifist constitution is a model other countries should look too, not one that should be abandoned. Abe wants Japan to become a "normal" country, but look at what "normal" gets us. The weaponry we export in no way makes up for what we waste on wars, and much of it goes to dubious places and killing the families of people who them try to kill us.
More than that, being pacifist has kept Japan safe for decades. The threat is always there, they have rockets and could build nuclear weapons in months, but the fact that they don't have any of it prevents escalation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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An extremely innovative industrial powerhouse turns to military R&D, what could possibly go wrong.
The reason is that the Japs, Chinks, and all the other Slant Eyes in the region can't get along with each other. The result is an arms race that threatens the security of the civilized nations that make up the West. The EU should conduct a few preemptive nuclear strikes against the Japs, the Chinks, and their buddies to put an end to the threat.
It is unfortunate that Japan has to consider rearming itself, but with North Korea's ability to launch (possibly nuclear) missiles at Japan, and China's increasingly belligerent tone in the south china sea, Japans current pacifist constitution cannot stand. It cannot rely on the US to wholly protect her. If we could all take a step back and realize the silliness of it all, the world would be a much nicer place, but we are all jerks to someone else, whether you want to be or not and you do need to protect yourself, lest you get shot bringing words to a gun fight.
No doubt there is a clique of policy wonks telling the gov how great the 'stimulus' will be for their moribund economy.
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Oh dear god, please build Mechs! You'll need them when giant creatures emerge from a rift in space-time in the Pacific...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Is it more of a nation than it was ten years ago, or is this just more incompetent writing funnelled through a dipshit editor?
At the bottom of the
The only reason that Japan is doing this is because China is coming. The USA currently guarantees Japan's safety, but seeing as the Japanese hate the US military being on their soil, it's only a matter of time until they get kicked out, to thunderous applause. Then, it's back to the good old days of Japan/China relations.
Why are the Chinese doing what they're doing? Two reasons, the first being that they require external resources to power their economy. Without military control, they're under the domination of the international bankers, and we all know how well that turns out.
China's view is, "we were out of commission for 150 years, but now we're back, and it's time return to the old system where everyone acknowledges China as the center of the world (a far better translation of 'zhongguo' than the pathetic 'middle kingdom' literal translation). Oh, and we're bringing back the kowtow so be ready to knock your head on the floor when you visit us." They were wronged in the past, and now it is time for others to be wronged. Social justice in action. The second reason is to distract their population from the horrid job the Communist Party is doing. Growth is slowing, people are getting restless, and some of them are getting crazy ideas like they could do a better job running the government themselves rather than allowing the smart people to do it. The smart people have been ruthlessly fucking over the ordinary people and laughing about it. You can turn on Chinese TV any hour of the day or night and see at least 2-3 wartime dramas, all reminding the people about WWII. Sheesh, we Americans got sucker-punched by the Japanese but we paid them back in spades. China never got to do this...the Japanese surrendered and suffered few defeats in the mainland. So they do it on TV every day...the joke is that more Japanese soldiers die every month at TV studios than died during the whole war. And it is always the Communist Party doing the fighting, when the truth is that they wisely stayed out of the war and let the right-wingers do all the dying. You gotta hand it to them, they have a good plan and they're executing it well. Japan doesn't really have a choice but to re-arm, they want the Americans out and without defense, it will be Japan who will become a client of China.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Well, just to mention the elephant in the room: Racism, or something like it.
Chinese, Japanese and Koreans detest each other, very similar to the ghetto/white urban racism in the USA, or maybe worse.
The power China is showing scares them all.
China is becoming a bully.
So the Japanese will do military research, and USA will share in the results.
It'll either be a very quick little war, or a long-lasting drudge of a war.
China - Hubris.
Korea - Scheming.
Japan - Ninjas.
The American president is going to launch a nuclear war because China invades Japan? Not a chance.
Japan is also getting into the business of arms exports, as well. For instance, they're one of the finalists (and the favored contender) to win a contract to build submarines for the Australian Navy (other competitors being France and Germany).
Overall, this is nothing bad - even were Japan to fully rearm, Japan today is a far cry from the aggressive expansionist of 80 years ago. China is the real threat to international stability and order in East Asia with its aggressive attempts to seize outlying islands on the flimsiest of justifications. (North Korea is a threat as well, but more to South Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan)
The Japanese public is also incredibly wary of full rearmament, and they're undergoing massive protests to the current government's plan to even relax some of the pacifist restrictions to let them do things like help the USA prior to a direct attack. To put another way, as it currently stands, if North Korea attacks South Korea, and starts firing missiles at US ships, Japan wouldn't be able to do a thing until Japan itself is fired on - not even to shoot down missiles targeting US transports.
Japan has had a long history with China, and generally not a good one. Based on that I'd saw the need increased military research needs to and will happen. China has been throwing it's weight around in a number of areas including the South China Sea dispute as well as Taiwan. One should say Japan was in a hard place for most of it's existence. A small group of islands with big neighbours just next door. Kinda of like the UK. They will certainly need something to make people think twice about invading them. The USA for the moments has interests in keeping Japan (and Taiwan) protected from China. But that could change. If it does, what will hold China back if it decides to "liberate" Japan? (They used a similar excuse for Tibet)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
The best-case scenario is that they kill every living thing in China. Then rebuild. [spent 5 years in China ...]
I'm disappointed in the lack of Godzilla jokes.
It's about time Japan started cutting funding to the Agriculture Ministry to increase funding to the Gundam Ministry.
I wouldn't be surprised if the research is really only concentrated in two areas:
1) Missile defense technologies to counter NK
2) Navel defense technologies to counter China
Though realistically the second I don't really see as a "counter" so much as it is to apply pressure and to posture over territorial claims.
I'm dubious - I suspect conventional weapons would be enough to prevent the need for such a step. Given the turkey shot that the Iraq wars were, and the probability that China doesn't have the technology to prevent that sort of experience, there's no need to go there.
Chinese first use of nukes? More plausible, but still, I suspect, unlikely. At least I hope so... Though of course in the context of war, everyone does things that were inconceivable before its start. If a shooting war does happen, it will leave China economically crippled, because its dependence on overseas supplies of oil remains critical.
I like to think that there are many alternatives short of nukes that would render China so damaged that it would have to withdraw; cruise missiles onto all major power stations, water treatment works and oil storage and refineries would render the country chaotic very fast. But you may well be right about the need to demonstrate the viability of deterrence.
Japanese universities are already partners in technology development with Japanese companies, as universities around the world are partners with companies in their country.
Japan will lose a quarter of its population in about a generation from now, so the country must transform from the traditional economic engines of growth (manufacturing, services, etc.) to offset the inevitable decline that will occur in those engines.
Japan, with encouragment from the US, sees defense technology R&D, manufacturing, licensing and export as a growth industry it hasn't been a part of.
The US has encouraged Japan to do this, since the US depends on funding from Japan to maintain the large military presence it has in Japan. The US can't afford the bases in Japan by itself.
The US wants Japan to become a more "normal" nation, as the US calls it, by being proactive in the US-Japan alliance, instead of being only a self defense entity, because the US may be forced to reduce its presence in the future from US political/budget problems.
The executive summary is:
War is big business.
Well, in the next GZ movie, GZ will speak chinese, and have NK shoes...
And Taiwan will produce the next GZ movie....
Sk will provide special effects.
does not compute. They haven't done anything to anyone, in I don't know how many decades. Now, for certain other countries that constantly try to spin China as dangerous, things are very different...
Japan needs an army of giant robots that for some reason don't use ranged attacks at standoff distances while they have the chance.
I absolutely do not support Japan doing military research....
unless it involves building giant sword-wielding mecha. I would absolutely support giant sword-wielding mecha.
China's growing nation status has Japan reconsidering its 70-year old ban on military research projects, as Japanese defense circles actively seek to take advantage of the country's vanguard position in robotic technology.
It is not just China, it is also the lunatics in NK launching missiles over Japanese airspace and making not-so-subtle threats to turn the archipelago into glowing glass. I am sure the US would retaliate and vaporize NK should they carry a devastating attack in Japan, but that is an after-the-fact conclusion. It is one that would not bring comfort to the Japanese who have to face the real threat.
The US position when it comes to a confrontation with China is less clear. Will they help Japan? I doubt it. Then, and this is something typically missing in these discussion, there is the precedent in the Ukraine. Ukraine gave its nuclear arsenal away on the promise that its sovereign would be respected. And we all know what happened. This is not about what is right or wrong, but about how such a serious treaty ended up meaning nothing.
The immediate message from this, as observed from Iran to Pakistan, is that, a nuclear power can invade you and no one will lift a finger.
If we can't start pointless wars with our aggressive neighbors, how can we save face?
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Military Research? You mean like their Whale Research except with bigger guns?
Can't imagine anything going wrong with that idea.
The US doesn't start fights.
That's the spirit, son! We need more folks like you who understand the importance of an official narrative... You keep reading those history books, son; just stat away from the dangerous ones. ;)
Pacifist nations get conquered unless they pay to non-pacifist nations to protect them.
Switzerland's history begs to differ.
Pacifist nations get conquered if they are of strategic importance.
Pacifist nations that are basically a bunch of rocks in the mountain that nobody gives a care about don't get conquered, even more so if they happen to have a big number of banks where potential invader have already stashed a lot money and would have a lot to lose due to economic instability subsequent to a potential invasion.
Now excuse me, I'll get back to cooking my cheese fondue pot.
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One doesn't have to be a 'Putin Bot' to recognize that the Turkey of today is no longer the Turkey of Kemal Mustafa a.k.a. Ataturk.
Kemal Ataturk saw Islam as an ideology that kept Turkey from becoming a modern state, and so after removing the Caliphate, he made Turkey a secular country - even though its population was fully Muslim - and totally redid its culture in far reaching ways - like replacing the Arabic script w/ the Roman. His successors did everything they could to integrate Turkey into Europe. Unfortunately, the Turks were and are Muslims, not Europeans, and culturally, they are closer to their comrades in Turkestan - the stans of Central Asia. So making them 'European' required putting them under military rule for long periods of time, and that was something that the EU frowned upon, since every EU member was supposed to be fully democratic.
So cue to Erdogan, who won an election once the Army decided to appease the Europeans and stand down. Well, Erdogan was never someone who was much interested in Turkey being integrated into Europe: rather, he was more interested in reviving Turkey's former greatness, which meant pre-Kemal greatness. Like the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey, as the Caliphate, was the leader of the Muslim world. In the current Middle East, Turkey sees a resurgent Iran asserting claims of leadership of the Muslim world, but knows that the Sunni world would never accept as its leader a Shia power. But Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors like Qatar are too underpopulated & weak to assert any leadership, so it's a vacuum Turkey is happy to fill. Which also explains why Turkey has been opposed to expanding the definition of all radical Muslim groups as the enemy of NATO, when they were discussing the scope of the alliance. And as is well known, it's Turkey, rather than Iraq or Jordan or Lebanon, that has been the point of entry for ISIS volunteers into Syria. You know, the average Westerner who converts to Islam, takes a flight to Istanbul, goes over to Gaziantep and then crosses the border into Raqqa.
That does not compare w/ the overt support of Russia and Iran for the regime in Syria. It's always been the policy of Western powers to support dictatorships in the Middle East like that of Mubarak in Egypt, and given the events of the Arab Spring, even the toppling of formerly anti-Western dictatorships like Gadaffi has had its deleterious effects. Russia's decision to prop up Assad, while mainly from self interest - it doesn't want to lose its last customer of military hardware in the region - is not the same as them supporting Russian separatists in the Donbass. Indeed, there are enough US leaders - Trump, Cruz, Paul - who recognize that the US doesn't have an ally among the Sunni Arabs, and should not get too involved w/ any of the factions seeking to overthrow Assad.
The history of every major galactic civilization has passed through three distinct and recognizable phases: those of survival, inquiry, and sophistication. Otherwise known as the ‘How’, ‘Why’, and ‘Where’ phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question: “How can we eat?” The second by the question: “Why do we eat?” And the third by the question: “Where should we have lunch?”
The history of warfare is similarly subdivided though here the phases are retribution, anticipation, and diplomacy. Thus, retribution: “I’m going to kill you because you killed my brother.” Anticipation: “I’m going to kill you because I killed your brother.” And diplomacy: “I’m going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.
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No idea why you got modded down. The only problem is that it's probably true...
Clinton is a square shooter. Clinton 2016!
Massive increase in defense spending that the Reagan administration implemented gave a tremendous short-term boost to the US economy. Japan could use something similar to get out of their long-term recession.
> Georgia and Ukraine were not NATO members and had no treaties requiring other nations to come to their aid if attacked.
Actually the Ukraine's territorial integrity was guaranteed by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for Kiev giving up their 2500 warhead nuke stockpile. It was modeled on the treaty that made Britain enter WW1 after the Prussian German Empire invaded Belgium. Eventually the Entente Cordiale alliance armies crushed the huns underfoot. Yet, in the Ukraine, the guaranteeing powers of USA, UK, France and China turned a blind eye to Russia invading the Crimea peninsula.
That story is something to teach all: the DPRK and Comrade Kim are totally right! Never give up your nukes for any kind of promise or paper, because paper is only good to wipe derriere. Nukes, even junk-quality nukes are the seals of a nation's safety. Iran is stupid to give up nuclear ambitions, as US / IL can now bomb them back to stone age with impunity. Every nation and race or tribe that intends to survive needs to obtain nukes and make underground test explosions for demonstrative purposes. An atom a day keeps the invaders away!
What we have w/ Islam is far more dangerous. In the Warsaw Pact, the Russians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Bulgarians et al weren't believers in Communism. The threat was well defined, and usually, people from those countries who defected to the West were genuine, and themselves targets of the KGB, rather than Trojan horses or Fifth columnists here in the West.
The situation is flipped w/ Islam. Here, most of the governments are recognized as 'allies' - including countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, et al which have no plans of waging war against the US. However, an indeterminate number of people of these countries are Jihadists, who either want to come here and terrorize us into accepting Shariah law, or want to strike any symbols of our presence there. Since 9/11, there have been thousands of people worldwide killed in Jihadist attacks. The Jihadists come from a wide variety of Muslim countries - not just Iraq or Syria, but as far apart as Indonesia to Nigeria. In short, our enemies come from the Muslim populations of all these countries, and it's impossible to determine how many of them have those intentions. Given that Islam itself endorses - via the Quran and Sunnah - all these acts of the Jihadists, it is nothing less than PC multi-culturalism to pretend that Islam itself is not our enemy.
Whether such an alliance itself is needed or not, one thing is clear: NATO is obsolete. It existed to prevent Europe from being overrun by Communists: today, the only threat that former Soviet republics on Russia's frontiers face is Moscow threatening them - either genuinely, or using a strawman - of persecuted Russians in those countries. Without endorsing Putin, what happens there is a regional conflict, and while it's fine of Europe to back Ukraine, Georgia and Latvia, it's not a global issue. That's not the case w/ Islam, where you have Muslims from anywhere in the world committing acts of terror anywhere in the world - be it their own countries or other. Russian revanchalism is not a global threat: Islam is.