Japan scraps plan to deploy two Aegis Ashore missile systems

TOKYO, Japan (Xinhua) — Japanese Defense Minister Taro Kono said on Thursday that the government has decided to scrap a plan to deploy landbased missile defense systems at two sites in Japan.

The decision was made at a National Security Council meeting convened Wednesday at which Kono officially told a meeting of Japan’s main governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) about retracting the plan to deploy the Aegis Ashore missile systems.

“After deliberations at the National Security Council, we have come to the decision to cancel the deployment in Yamaguchi and Akita prefectures,” Kono told LDP lawmakers. He also said the ministry had struggled to find alternate sites for the two missile batteries.

Kono had already indicated last week that the deployment of the Aegis Ashore missile systems in Yamaguchi and Akita prefectures would be halted owing to major technical issues and mounting costs.

Japan first decided to deploy the two missile defense systems, made by the United States, in 2017. Kono said on June 16, one day after he unexpectedly announced the plan was unfeasible, that the initial decision to deploy the two missile batteries was “correct at the time.”

But in a U-turn on the matter, Kono told a House of Representatives Security Committee that while the decision may have been the right one at the time, it can no longer “be deemed rational given the cost and time required to prepare for its operation.”

The 180-billion-yen (1.7billion-US dollar) missile defense system, of which 12 billion yen (112 million US dollars) has already been paid to the United States, was supposed to be online in fiscal 2025 and aimed to operate in support of the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s (MSDF) Aegis-equipped destroyers.

Kono, however, said that guaranteeing the rocket booster of the system’s interceptor missile would, after a launch, land in a designated Self-Defense Force training area or the sea, was no longer a promise the defense ministry could keep, without the hardware being further reconfigured.

The costs involved in further modifying the Aegis Ashore’s Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor to address its technical issues, would equal the 200 billion yen (1.86 billion US dollars) and more than 10 years already spent in enhancing the technology, Kono said.

The plan has, since its conception, been met with a myriad of problems aside from mounting costs, including but not limited to a staunch public backlash from residents in candidate sites for the Aegis Ashore system.

The defense ministry, in addition, has also come under fire for initially using flawed data to select sites for hosting the controversial land-based missile launcher systems.