TOKYO – The United States and Japan announced a major agreement Monday to deploy a second, advanced missile-defense radar on Japanese territory – an effort specifically designed to counter the North Korean threat but likely to anger China.
The expanded missile defense cooperation capped the first full day of an Asian mission by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who unveiled the radar initiative alongside his Japanese counterpart, Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto.
Japan already hosts one American X-band radar – officially known as the AN/TPY-2 – a tracking system that is a central element in a complex technical architecture for identifying ballistic missiles and coordinating a defense by interceptors. That first radar is at Shariki; no location for the second has been decided, although an American working group had arrived in Japan to work out details of the site, officials disclosed.
Mr. Panetta described the radar system as essential to enhancing how the American-Japanese alliance can defend their people and territory from attack by North Korea.
"The purpose of this is to enhance our ability to defend Japan," Mr. Panetta said at a news conference. "It's also designed to help forward-deployed U.S. forces, and it also will be effective in protecting the U.S. homeland from the North Korean ballistic missile threat."
Anticipating criticism from Beijing, where Mr. Panetta is to travel later this week, Defense Department officials said the radar was not aimed at China and was only about the North Korean threat. "It's not about China," one Pentagon official said.
The effort to knit together a regional missile defense system across northeast Asia parallels a similar effort under way in the Persian Gulf, where the effort is about deterring Iran. In the Pacific, the effort is meant to send a signal to North Korea – although the Chinese, with a relatively limited ballistic-missile arsenal, are likely to see any increased American-led missile-defense effort as a threat to their nuclear deterrence.
The same X-band radar technology is carried aboard American Navy cruisers and destroyers assigned to the missile-defense mission in the Pacific, but having a second, permanent radar on Japanese territory would allow those warships to move with some flexibility around the region and expand radar coverage even more, officials said.
Similarly, while the American Navy deploys the radar aboard ships in the Persian Gulf region, officials disclosed earlier this year that a similar high-resolution, X-band missile defense radar would be located in Qatar as well. That logic apparently drove negotiations to base a second radar on Japanese territory to watch for potential North Korean missile launches.
The objective in northeast Asia, as in the Persian Gulf, was preceded by a more widely publicized missile defense shield being installed in Europe to deter any Iranian attack and, if required, to blunt the effect of missiles launched against allied territory and American forces.
But the similarities end there. The European initiatives were adopted officially by NATO and are being put in place after formal negotiations with countries that will host early warning radars, ground-based interceptors and Navy warships equipped to track ballistic missiles and shoot them down. No multinational alliance similar to NATO exists in Asia or in the Persian Gulf region, so the United States has been building up the capability on a country-by-country basis in both regions.
By THOM SHANKER 17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/world/asia/u-s-and-japan-agree-on-missile-defense-system.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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