Vice Admiral Jonathan Greenert, commander of the Seventh Fleet, said the new destroyers would provide long-range search and tracking of missile activity. Data from the ships will be transmitted to Ft. Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Interceptor missiles could then be launched from those bases.

Comprised of the radar and satellite network, sea-based missiles, and land-based Patriots, such a shield would advance the goal of Washington and its allies to be able to launch strikes without fear of retaliatory attacks from states such as north Korea, China, or Russia.

The Bush administration laid the foundation for this system two years ago by withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which banned ship-based “missile defenses.”

“I can’t specify adversaries, but you’re looking at rogue nations,” said Greenert, according to a September 24 Associated Press article. The news agency said the country “best fitting” this description is north Korea.

“This week,” the AP article said, “Japanese naval ships were dispatched to the waters off North Korea amid reports that Pyongyang was preparing to test launch a ‘Nodong’ missile, which can reach much of Japan—and the more than 50,000 U.S. troops stationed there—in just minutes. North Korea is believed to have at least 100 of the missiles.”

The Japanese Diet, the country’s national parliament, voted in late March to spend $10 billion over the next decade on building such a “missile shield” around Japan. Tokyo plans to add U.S. Patriot and other missiles to its four Aegis destroyers. Guidance information will be provided by U.S. satellites as well as a Japanese land-based radar network and command-and-control center. The step is part of the accelerating course by Tokyo to rebuild its military and deploy its forces abroad—as the dispatch of Japanese soldiers to Iraq as part of the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” has shown.

Washington has also gained agreement from the governments of Australia and Taiwan to be part of the radar and missile ring in Southeast Asia. The shield is supposed to be fully operational by 2007. Meanwhile, talks are under way with the government of India, which has committed scientists to the research effort.

The governments of China and north Korea have condemned these moves, rejecting claims by U.S. and Japanese officials that the missile system is “purely defensive.” Moscow announced in February that it was developing a missile capable of evading the radar and other detection and interception devices.

Government representatives of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or north Korea, have called Washington’s deployment of the Aegis destroyers “the most outright hostile act against the DPRK and a part of its unchallenged attempt to dominate the Asia-Pacific region.”  
 
 
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