South China Sea is getting more dangerous for everyone.

Harry J. Kazianis

It seems that Japan is developing plans to craft its own Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) strategy—or what one former Japanese official describes as “maritime supremacy and air superiority”—against the Chinese Navy.

The plan itself, detailed by Reuters, makes a tremendous amount of good sense:

“Tokyo is responding by stringing a line of anti-ship, anti-aircraft missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea stretching 1,400 km (870 miles) from the country’s mainland toward Taiwan. . .

“While the installations are not secret, it is the first time such officials have spelled out that the deployment will help keep China at bay in the Western Pacific and amounts to a Japanese version of the “anti-access/area denial” doctrine, known as “A2/AD” in military jargon, that China is using to try to push the United States and its allies out of the region.

“Chinese ships sailing from their eastern seaboard must pass through this seamless barrier of Japanese missile batteries to reach the Western Pacific, access to which is vital to Beijing both as a supply line to the rest of the world’s oceans and for the projection of its naval power.”

The piece also spells out an overall larger Japanese military presence in the East China Sea, which will certainly not please China:

“Over the next five years, Japan will increase its Self-Defense Forces on islands in the East China Sea by about a fifth to almost 10,000 personnel.

“Those troops, manning missile batteries and radar stations, will be backed up by marine units on the mainland, stealthy submarines, F-35 warplanes, amphibious fighting vehicles, aircraft carriers as big as World War Two flat-tops and ultimately the U.S. Seventh Fleet headquartered at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.”