... effective in task forces formed under the main battle task: anti-aircraft and ballistic missile defence; anti-submarine and surface ships warfare; supporting the amphibious operation or suppressing enemy’s military and economic infrastructure. In the Asia Pacific Aegis-equipped ships are deployed by the USA, Japan and Republic of Korea. There are plans in Australia, Canada, Taiwan to build such destroyers. Moreover China and Russia have Aegis analogs of indigenous design. It’s notable that Aegis-equipped ships are the backbone of the Japanese ...
The rivalry between the US and China for primacy in the Asia-Pacific, and then possibly on a global scale, is becoming the main story of world politics in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
But how, in the first place, did China grow so strong as to be able to challenge the world’s only (as yet) super-power? The answer is well known: the colossal growth of China’s economy. From 1980 to 2012, the PRC’s GDP increased 50 times.[1] As one might have expected, Beijing is...
At noon on the 1st of October 2012, the first Osprey V-22 aircraft landed at Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Japan’s Okinawa Island. The controversial deployment of this ungainly looking aircraft (a hybrid between a helicopter and fixed-wing plane) has exposed tensions between centre and periphery in Japanese politics, revealed major fault-lines in the U.S.-Japan military alliance, and demonstrated far-wider strategic shifts and geopolitical miscalculations by key states in East Asia.
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