As the Bard noted, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. So it is with “anti-access.” While the catchy title is new, the methods are as old as naval warfare itself. Nor is anti-access peculiarly Chinese, even though the People’s Liberation Army is today’s foremost practitioner. Imperial Japan’s strategy against the U.S. Pacific Fleet warranted the name. Like the contemporary PLA, the interwar Imperial Japanese Navy envisioned scattering assets like submarines and tactical aircraft along the Pacific Fleet’s path from Hawaii and the West Coast to the Far East. Repeated aerial and subsurface attack would thin out the fleetwhile wearying American crews as a prelude to decisive battle. That’s anti-access by another name—“interceptive operations” being the moniker Japanese officers often affixed to their war plans.

But even the Japanese didn’t pioneer the concept. Heck, Alfred Thayer Mahan reproached ancient Syracuse for its neglect of anti-access measures. During the Peloponnesian War, classical Athens dispatched its expeditionary fleet and army to Sicily, hoping to wrest away a breadbasket for that decades-long struggle while outflanking rival Sparta. The invasion pitted the Athenian armada against that of Syracuse, a naval power on the rise. Mahan praised Syracusan strategist Hermocrates, whom he deemed a natural genius of strategy, for urging the Syracusan assembly to forward-deploy the city’s capable but inferior fleet to Tarentum—a city in the heel of the Italian boot—to harry the superior Athenian fleet along its journey from Greece to Sicily.

Distant defense would have opened up a wealth of operational and tactical options while imposing strategic dilemmas on the Athenians. Syracusan commanders could have threatened to cut the Athenians off from their source of supplies back home. They could have compelled Athenian commanders to leave behind slow-moving transports and supply vessels that would have made easy pickings for the Syracusan navy in combat. And so forth. Mahan upbraided the assembly for rebuffing Hermocrates’ counsel—and thus missing a major opportunity to avert invasion. The campaign ultimately had a happy ending for Syracuse, costing Athens its entire expeditionary force. For Mahan, though, the journey to that destination was needlessly hazardous and costly.

So anti-access is a time-tested strategy for using an inferior navy supplemented by shore-based weaponry to oppose a superior fleet that ventures onto your home ground. Next we’ll look at the Islamic Republic of Iran, another regional power striving to convert the sea and sky into a bulwark against U.S. military access—rather than a medium by which Washington projects power onto remote shores.

What options does Japan have?  Robert Dujarric gives us three in our China Power section here.

A few weeks back I likened China’s anti-access strategy vis-à-vis the United States to the “rope-a-dope” strategy Muhammad Ali pursued during his famous Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman. In wartime, that is, China would let an initially stronger U.S. Pacific Fleet overextend and exhaust itself getting into the theater before risking a fleet-on-fleet battle. It would overcome the Pacific Fleet in the same manner the lighter, more agile Ali beat the burlier Foreman—with a flurry of punches against a tired adversary.

Such a strategy conforms to Mao Zedong’s counsel to let the other boxer waste his energy foolishly while conserving one’s own energy for the decisive counterpunch. But what about a match in which China played the part of Foreman, the bigger, stronger contestant?

There’s a boxing metaphor for China’s peacetime strategy as well. Retired Japanese vice admiral Yoji Koda says Beijing is “shadowboxing” with fellow Asian powers in the East China Sea. Sparring with them individually makes China the stronger competitor. Because numbers are on its side, for instance, China’s leadership can keep law-enforcement ships on station near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, send PLA Navy task forces through the Miyako Strait and other waterways as a matter of routine, and otherwise overtax finite Japanese military and law-enforcement resources.

It can dance around the ring constantly—compelling its opponent to follow. So long as Tokyo feels the need to monitor Chinese maritime movements, it may wear out its coast guard and navy. In short, Beijing can impose a hyperactive operating tempo on the Japanese sea services—dispersing and enfeebling them while disheartening the Japanese leadership and electorate over time. Ultimately Tokyo may throw in the towel, acknowledging it can no longer keep pace.

China’s navy and police services can sustain such a tempo indefinitely without breaking equipment or tiring out crews. That’s the luxury of being the stronger party to peacetime competition. Shadowboxing, then, is a more offensive variety of the rope-a-dope strategy in which the boxer has no desire to knock out his opponent. He’s determined to win on points—even if it takes the full fifteen rounds, or another bout, or another one after that.

Moving around the ring constantly while feinting or jabbing against an opponent from a lighter weight class lets the shadowboxer score points without cutting loose with a haymaker. In so doing he preserves his strength. He avoids exposing himself to a lucky counterpunch. And he avoids making himself look like a bully in the crowd’s eyesfor decking an outclassed antagonist.

The main challenge is self-discipline. The shadowboxer has to content himself with a victory on points. That means foregoing the glory of a knockout. That’s a tough thing for any pugilist to swallow—especially a pugilist like China that’s attempting a comeback to reverse a long history of defeat.

But, why win by a knockout when you can win without fighting?

The Naval Diplomat went on NPR’s All Things Considered on Monday to discuss the size and configuration of the U.S. Navy. Among the people interviewed for the story was Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former Reagan administration defense official. He reproached the Mitt Romney campaign for advocating a buildup of the navy’s amphibious fleet.

The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that it needs 38 amphibious assault ships to meet the requirements entrusted to it, whereas current shipbuilding plans project a 33-ship “gator” fleet. Because the Republican candidate is pushing to make up that deficit, Korb opined that a Cold War mindset holds Romney and his advisers captive. Why? Because the United States has not landed forces under fire since 1950, when General Douglas MacArthur masterminded the opposed landing at Inchon.

There’s plenty of room for debate about the makeup of the navy, but there are three problems with this particular bit of reasoning. First, amphibious landings were hardly unique to the Cold War. The Marines developed amphibious doctrine during the interwar years, publishing a Tentative Manual for Landing Operations as early as 1934. And check out the excellent HBO series The Pacific to get a grunt’s-eye view of what amphibious operations were like during World War II, when U.S. forces landed under murderous fire at places like Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.

Second, by Korb’s logic there is little reason to prepare for major fleet actions. After all, it’s been longer since the U.S. Navy fought for command of the sea than it has since the Inchon landings. The navy’s last fleet engagement was precisely 68 years ago, at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Should the American leadership assume the sea service will never again confront a fight to the finish, simply because it’s been a long time since the last one? That would be quite a wager.

And finally, there’s a lot more to the amphibious fleet’s portfolio—and thus to its reason for being—than opposed landings. When I worked at the State Department in 1997, we joked that the amphibious helicopter dock USS Kearsarge was the United States’ floating embassy. Evacuating noncombatants from civil-war-ravaged Sierra Leone was only one mission assigned the Kearsarge during that busy year. Nor has the amphibious fleet been idle during the decade-plus of combat operations since September 11.

Korb’s bottom line may be right. There may be good reasons for accepting a 5-ship shortfall between the Marines’ stated requirements and the actual inventory. Navy officials evidently think so. But reductio ad Cold War isn’t among them.

Because no survey of newcomers to the second nuclear age would be complete without North Korea, it seems fitting to close out this series with a glance at Pyongyang’s emerging nuclear strategy and doctrine. Professor Terry Roehrig, grand wizard of the Naval War College’s Asia-Pacific Study Group, authors a chapter on the subject in Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age. He splashes cold water on the idea that the six-party talks or other negotiations will bring about disarmament on the Korean Peninsula. So, let’s zero in on the operational dimension of North Korean strategy.

Pyongyang has tested nuclear weapons. It must now miniaturize its warheads sufficiently to fit on missiles. Then, having produced a battle worthy arsenal, how will the North Korean military arrange its precious weapons on the map to safeguard them against preemptive attack? What kind of doctrine will the leadership adopt to deter South Korea and the United States?

Terry raises a couple of intriguing possibilities. Take the second question first. Knowing that a small force is vulnerable to preemption, the North Korean leadership might embrace a launch-on-warning doctrine. Once the military detects signs of an attack, that is, commanders will cut loose against designated targets. Threatening to go nuts at the slightest affront has been a staple of North Korean diplomacy ever since...well, ever since there has been a North Korea. Adopting such a posture—and putting prospective adversaries on notice that Pyongyang has adopted such a posture—thus would make Seoul and Washington think twice before essaying forcible counterproliferation.

With regard to force dispositions, Roehrig postulates that Pyongyang could deploy its weapons at hardened sites. It would dig in, taking advantage of the peninsula’s mountainous terrain. Deep shelters are notoriously hard to penetrate. Another option would be a road-mobile system by which nuclear-tipped missiles shifted locations randomly to complicate enemy targeting. An undersea nuclear deterrent would be yet another possibility. The former raises security concerns. The latter would depend on North Korea’s ability to master advanced submarine and missile technology. Both look like distant prospects. I’m placing my bets on the low-tech option, underground bunkers.

And where missile sites are located matters. Think about it. Emplacing nukes near the Sino-Korean frontier—as Roehrig suggests Pyongyang might—would deliberately entangle North Korean with Chinese deterrence. U.S. forces might strike at these sites with nuclear weapons or conventional bunker busters. Nuclear preemption could well create nuclear effects spilling across the border.Even conventional strikes would take place too close to the frontier for comfort. Either contingency could set loose the cross-border refugee exodus China’s leadership so fears. Beijing could not stay aloof from a conflict. Embroiling China, consequently, looks like savvy strategy for Pyongyang.

Last week I pronounced apartheid South Africa nutty to try to coerce a great power into siding with it in times of crisis. But never say never. Such a ploy just might work in this case, when the great power adjoins the theater of action and could suffer direct harm from a clash.If so, Seoul and Washington must factor in the likelihood of third-party intervention in any encounter with Pyongyang.

Such are the joys of making strategy in the second nuclear age.

Conventional wisdom holds that Japan is what nonproliferation specialists call a "threshold" nuclear weapon state -- a country that could stage a nuclear breakout virtually overnight should its electorate and leadership resolve to do so. Estimates commonly bandied about run from six months to a year. Toshi Yoshihara and I take aim at such assumptions in Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age. Japanese bombmakers might manage a crude device within that timeframe, but that's a far cry from a weapon ready for battlefield use.

Despite Japan's renown for high-tech wizardry and long experience operating nuclear power plants, it would take Tokyo far longer than a year to deploy a working nuclear arsenal. We're talking many years. As J. C. Wylie defines it, strategy is a plan for using available resources and assets to accomplish some goal. Strategy goes no farther than those implements can carry it -- and strategists cannot simply conjure them into being.

Toshi and I see a variety of impediments to a Japanese breakout. Let's catalogue just a few. Consider the politics. It is certainly true that nuclear weapons are no longer the third rail of Japanese politics -- a topic officials and pundits dare not touch lest it strike them (politically) dead. But Japan's painful past experience as a target of atomic warfare, its ardent sponsorship of nonproliferation accords, and the fury with which pacifist-leaning citizens and Japan's Asian neighbors would greet evidence of a bombmaking program add up to a forbidding political barrier.

That barrier is hardly unbreachable, but it would demand quite a feat of political persuasion on Tokyo's part. As the learned strategist Mike Tyson points out, "everyone has a strategy 'til they get punched in the mouth." Memo to nuclear-weapons advocates: duck!

Nor are the strategic, operational, and technical challenges less daunting. A nuclear triad -- land- and sea-based missiles combined with weapons delivered by manned bombers -- holds little promise in light of Japan's lack of geographic depth and the vulnerability of surface ships and aircraft to enemy action. That means fielding an undersea deterrent would be Tokyo's best nuclear option. But doing so would be far from easy. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operates an impressive fleet of diesel submarines but has no experience with naval nuclear propulsion. And that leaves aside the difficulty of developing sea-launched ballistic missiles and their nuclear payloads.

Such engineering challenges are far from insoluble for Japan's scientific-technical complex but cannot be conquered overnight. A force of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile subs, or SSBNs, thus looks like a remote prospect for Japan. As an interim solution, the JMSDF might construct cruise missiles resembling the U.S. Navy's old TLAM-Ns, or nuclear-tipped Tomahawks. JMSDF boats could fire such missiles through torpedo tubes, the easiest method. Or, shipyards could backfit Japanese subs with vertical launchers -- much as the U.S. Navy installed Tomahawk launchers in its fast attack boats starting in the late Cold War.

The problem of constructing nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile would remain -- but nuclear-armed diesel boats would represent a viable course of action should Japan decide to join the nuclear-weapons club. Years down the road, then -- not overnight -- a modest Japanese nuclear deterrent might put out to sea. Will Tokyo proceed down that road? I doubt it. But the prospect no longer appears unthinkable.

Different types of regime—republics, democracies, autocracies—“do” strategy differently. Right? Not if you ask Thucydides. The chronicler of the Peloponnesian War opines that “fear, honor, and interest” comprise “three of the strongest motives” that propel states’ actions. The Greek historian disregards the nature of the regime as a variable in his fear-honor-interest calculus. Freewheeling democratic Athens obeyed his logic of statecraft. So did oligarchic Sparta.

The Islamic Republic of Iran may as well. In Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age, my pal Scott Jones and I argue that the nature of the regime influences nuclear strategy and force structure less than common sense says it should. Tehran pursued a policy of nuclear ambiguity under the Shah, only to press ahead with nuclear-weapons R&D under the Islamic regime following the 1979 revolution. The Iranian nuclear program, then, has endured for some four decades across diametrically opposed regimes.

In other words, the link between how a country is governed, its leadership’s decision to go nuclear, and the kind of strategy it drafts to govern the use of nuclear weapons appears tenuous. Consider these motives in turn. Thucydides’ third driver, interest, is reasonably quantifiable. By applying raw intellect, representatives of different societies and cultures will probably come up with the same list of interests and options for a given state in given geopolitical surroundings.

How to uphold these interests, though? Most aspirants to nuclear-weapons status are developing countries. Pressing economic interests limit the funding they can devote to armaments. Having resolved to breach the nuclear barrier, they construct the fewest weapons they believe will deter potential adversaries. In the second nuclear age, consequently, the universal logic of interest prods resource-constrained governments toward “minimal deterrence,” with little surplus capability. Hence the apparent continuity in Iranian nuclear strategy since the days of the shah.

What about honor? The desire for honor and prestige pervades everything else nations and individuals do, including the weight they place on their interests and the methods they select to further those interests. Whatever their political leanings, Iranians see nuclear weapons as a token of national greatness and a way to restore lost grandeur. Regime change in Tehran would not dissipate these passions—and thus, in all likelihood, would not bring about disarmament.

In Thucydidean terms, then, fear promises to act as the arbiter of Iranian strategy following a nuclear breakout. How Tehran sizes up the external threat environment when ruled by different regimes could result in different nuclear postures. The more fearful Iranian leaders are, the more drastic measures they will be prepared to take.

A secular regime, that is, would presumably carry on routine power politics and would be less prone to hype regional and global rivals’ predatory intent or overbearing capabilities. A minimal nuclear posture would provide an adequate buffer against rivals not seen as bent on Iran’s destruction. More or less secular rulers would probably content themselves with a few nuclear weapons kept at fairly low readiness levels.

By contrast, a clerical regime that defines itself in opposition to the secular West would discern hostile designs lurking everywhere. All-consuming fear could goad Tehran into a mania for security of the arsenal.

Nuclear forces able to ride out a preemptive assault and strike back represent the gold standard for nuclear deterrence. Fielding a large arsenal rather than just a few score weapons would bolster deterrence accordingly. Concealment would be an obvious measure, as would dispersing the arsenal among hardened sites. Cultivating ambiguity about the conditions under which Tehran was prepared to use nuclear weapons would be yet another.

Nuclear weapons, then, serve dual purposes. They burnish Iranian prestige while providing top cover under which the regime can pursue its goals through diplomacy, economics, and conventional military force. Yet despite the constants in Iranian foreign policy, Iranian strategic behavior could look quite different from regime to regime—even under doctrines formally classified as minimal deterrence.

Pariah states are not irrational, but subjective factors like fear and honor shape their rational actions. Acknowledging this—and affording prospective antagonists the respect they merit—is the sine qua non for thinking about strategy in the second nuclear age.

Rationality is one of the central themes of Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age. People gravitate toward an either/or view of this trait, to wit: you’re either rational or you’re irrational. It’s not that simple.

We apply linear logic derived from economics and other fields to our daily lives. When considering some course of action, we estimate the costs, benefits, and pitfalls. We render a decision after judging whether the payoff we expect is worth the effort and risk.

That works reasonably well in everyday life, although it exaggerates how straightforward it is to assign numbers to the variables. What are the units of measurement for “benefits” when we debate whether to purchase a BMW instead of a Kia, or a mansion instead of a cottage? There’s no objective answer, only subjective ones. So much for unadulterated rationality.

Injecting a competitive element into rational decision-making compounds these ambiguities. Nations (and competitors in other fields of endeavor) interact constantly, vying to outdo one another in their quest for power, interest, and prestige. Indeed, interaction is the second core theme of Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age.

Strategist Edward Luttwak contends that linear logic gives way to a “paradoxical logic” of strategy once nations step into the arena of international competition. “Ironic reversals” of momentum are commonplace as thinking antagonists react to—and oftentimes outwit—each other’s designs.

And as economist Thomas Schelling points out, groups of people—societies, big institutions—depart from rationality in a variety of ways, such as inefficient communication, “faulty calculation,” “random or haphazard influences” on the decision-making process, or the sheer complexity of making decisions within groups where the members advocate for perspectives and courses of action sharply at variance with one another.

In short, the motives that drive human beings, the pitfalls of collective decision-making, and the nature of competition conspire to impair rational choice.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to today’s topic: apartheid South Africa. We begin a book about Asia with a non-Asian case precisely because it dramatizes how nuclear newcomers can do things that outsiders find wacky. Helen Purkitt and Steve Burgess show that paranoia gripped the apartheid regime in its waning days. Its bunker mentality distorted the rational calculus of foreign policy and strategy.

Pretoria built a small arsenal of tactical nukes, then retrofitted a strategy to the weapons. Apartheid rulers rightly saw their regime as being on “death ground,” to borrow Sun Tzu’s evocative term. Survival concentrates minds—impelling cost/benefit calculations toward expending every resource available for as long as it takes. Strategy can take some bizarre turns when a belligerent considers itself cornered.

For instance, Pretoria ran a variant of the good-cop/bad-cop routine vis-à-vis a hoped-for ally, the United States. The difference: there was no good cop to restrain the bad cop from his worst predilections, and the bad cop was not only bad but slightly unhinged. Should a conflict with the Soviet bloc loom, South African officials planned to gradually disclose that they had a working mass-destruction arsenal at their disposal.

The prospect of nuclear-armed government’s running amok, believed regime officials, would compel Washington to take Pretoria’s side against Moscow and its African surrogates. Why U.S. leaders would back them under such circumstances, apartheid leaders never explained. Staring political death in the face, Pretoria fashioned a strategy of desperation.

Thomas Schelling observes that in hard bargaining, being seen as less-than-fully rational confers significant advantages. In other words, your interlocutors may appease you for fear of what you may do if pushed. Schelling could have been writing about apartheid South Africa—or about recent nuclear newcomers such as North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan.

My trusty sidekick Toshi Yoshihara and I have a book coming out this December titled Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age. The premise behind this collection of essays is simple. Efforts at nonproliferation and counterproliferation are worthwhile and must continue, but nuclear proliferation has occurred. Averting our eyes from that unpleasant reality does no good. Accordingly, contributors to Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age try to get their minds around the strategic dynamics at work in this brave new world.

It is high time, that is, for officials and strategists to try to catch sight of how new entrants to the unofficial nuclear club will employ mass-destruction weaponry to protect themselves while advancing national purposes. (The official nuclear weapon states are the five countries recognized by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which also happen to be the permanent members of the UN Security Council.) Foresight will help oldtimers like the United States, the chief guardian of the first nuclear age, adjust their own strategies to shore up deterrence.

While he didn’t coin the phrase second nuclear age, Yale University professor Paul Bracken has done the most to popularize it. What is the second nuclear age? For one thing, it is an Asia-centric phenomenon. The first nuclear age was the age of relatively stable competition between the U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs.(“Relatively” being the operative word—especially this month, when we observe the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Writing in 1999, Bracken prophesied that newfound military strength would empower Asian governments to nullify Western superiority in the region. New technology would invert trendlines that originated during the fifteenth century, when Vasco da Gama first dropped anchor in Calicut. While China’s ascent to economic and military prominence has dominated headlines, this is a development of regionwide dimensions—and world-historical importance.

Today’s nuclear arsenals are a fraction the size of Cold War inventories. Nevertheless, the geometry of deterrence is more intricate than it was during the era of bipolar competition. Adding more competitors to the mix complicates the structure of the international system, for one thing. Each time a new country fields nuclear weapons, outsiders debate whether its leadership will abide by the familiar logic of mutual assured deterrence. In the 1960s, alarmed at Mao’s nonchalant talk about atomic war, both the United States and the Soviet Unioncontemplated striking at the Chinese nuclear complex preventively. North Korea is a wildcard today. So is the Islamic Republic of Iran, an incipient nuclear newcomer.

Trends among established nuclear powers further complicate deterrence. The late Samuel Huntington portrayed post-Cold War competition as a matter not of “buildup versus buildup but rather of buildup versus hold-down.” East and West ran a symmetrical arms race for decades. Today, established Western powers are striving to preserve their edge in unconventional weaponry vis-à-vis rising challengers. For Huntington the outcome of such a race was foreordained: “The hold-down efforts of the West may slow the weapons buildup of other societies, but they will not stop it.”

Huntington had it half right. Western nuclear weapon states do want to hold down proliferation, but at the same time they have undertaken partial disarmament rather than additional arms buildups. It would be more accurate, consequently, to describe the emerging dynamic as “build-down versus hold-down.” How Western governments will navigate the challenges of a world where no military can make the rubble bounce—but where many countries, driven by disparate histories, cultures, and incentives, deploy modest arsenals—remains to be determined.The Naval Nuclear Diplomat will survey some of the newcomers and their strategies over the next few days.

A Chinese friend raises an excellent point about the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s fitness for a one-on-one engagement against China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. To wit: the JMSDF was founded mainly as an appendage of the Cold War U.S. Pacific Fleet. While the sea service has expanded its repertoire since the Cold War—dispatching minesweepers to the Persian Gulf in 1991, refueling coalition naval forces in the Indian Ocean after 9/11, and patrolling the Gulf of Aden for pirates—it remains largely true to its founding missions to this day.

Under the division of labor worked out between the two navies, the U.S. Navy supplied the offensive firepower, manifest in aircraft carriers and other high-end implements of war. The defensive-minded JMSDF acted as a gapfiller, making itself proficient atniche missions like minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, and offensive submarine warfare. Japanese mariners performed these duties with aplomb. The composite U.S.-Japanese fleet kept the Soviet Navy largely in check, complicating Soviet ships’ egress from ports like Vladivostok into the broad Pacific Ocean. Many skippers chose not to bother.Though such endeavors took place mostly out of public view, they constituted one of the success stories of the Cold War.

An unintended consequence of Cold War maritime strategy is that the JMSDF remains a partial navy animated by a partial strategy, doctrine, and force structure. Fighting alone against a balanced peer navy would be tough. Whereas the U.S. Navy allocates warships to “expeditionary strike groups” and “amphibious ready groups,” as befits its offensive character, the Japanese fleet is organized into “escort flotillas” homeported at bases like Yokosuka and Sasebo. Escorts are intrinsically defensive assets. And with only five combat logistics ships in its inventory—ships that refuel and rearm combatant ships on the high seas, letting them remain on station longer—the JMSDF would be hard-pressed to sustain operations far from base without American logistical help.

Alone, then, the JMSDF is an unbalanced force—unlike the larger, increasingly balanced PLA Navy it faces across the Yellow Sea. By no means is this a knock against Japanese ships, weaponry, or crews. But it does suggest that the sea service would find it hard to fight the PLA without U.S. support. That would limit Tokyo’s unilateral options for a conflagration over the uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, to cite the controversy that has dominated headlines of late.

Why? Because such a contingency would have a weaker claim on American interests and sympathies than would an assault on the Ryukyus, the home islands, or Japanese forces.U.S. leaders might balk at a risky, potentially costly conflict remote from U.S. interests—a conflict that could well make a permanent enemy of China, Asia’s foremost power. While they would probably honor their commitments to Japan’s defense, they would do so with no particular enthusiasm. Disagreement, delay, and missed opportunities might ensue in alliance circles.

Consequently, it behooves Tokyo to cultivate a degree of independence from Washington. Filling out the JMSDF force structure, drawing up a maritime strategy that holds open the option of fighting without the U.S. Navy, and readying officers and crews to go it alonewould render the JMSDF a well-rounded fleet. Such a fleet would deter—and counter—aggression better than one dependent on outside support.

Self-help is a time-honored principle of international relations in this hardscrabble world of ours. It’s a principle worth rediscovering for Japan.

Defense News is running an interview between reporter Chris Cavas and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman that’s well worth your time. Now a senior advisor to the Mitt Romney campaign, Lehman presided over the expansion of the U.S. Navy to almost 600 ships during the 1980s. The chief takeaway from the interview is a number: 350. That’s the number of ships that Romney & Co. believe should comprise the future fleet. The campaign has apparently embraced the vision put forward by a blue-ribbon panel that evaluated the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s official view of the strategic environment and the best methods for coping with it. The QDR panel recommended fielding a 346-ship fleet. The navy’s goal stood at 313 ships from 2006 until earlier this year, when naval officials dialed the total back to “about 300.”

Two things to ponder about this. First, the fleet currently stands at 287 ships. A massive nuclear-powered aircraft carrier counts as one of those hulls; so does a dainty minesweeper. One ship is not like another. Which leads to the question: which 63 ships would the Romney team add to reach the target figure? The new administration would step up shipbuilding rates by about two-thirds, from nine to “approximately fifteen” new hulls per year. Some of Lehman’s observations are boilerplate, such as sustaining a fleet of eleven aircraft carriers and pressing ahead with destroyer construction. More intriguingly, he floats the idea of building a new class of guided-missile frigates to replace the workhorse Perry-class FFGs, which are going to their reward after three decades of service. That would reverse the trend toward substituting single-mission-at-a-time Littoral Combat Ships for multi-mission FFGs—and thereby attenuating the fleet’s overall combat strength. The LCS has its uses, as Lehman points out, but it is not a battle-force ship. LCS construction will continue should the White House change hands—but not as a substitute for higher-end combatants.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, how would the politics of a 20-plus-percent buildup of U.S. naval strength play out? Today’s strategic setting differs markedly from the early 1980s, when Secretary Lehman oversaw the Reagan buildup. Then, the United States confronted an overbearing adversary, the Soviet Union, with the “hollow” post-Vietnam military—a chronically overworked, undermanned, underfunded force. Under such duress, it was relatively easy to make the case for restoring U.S. military power. But how would a President Romney make his pitch? Is China, or Iran, a catalyst of Soviet proportions? If not, the electorate might see a reinvigorated, more expensive U.S. Navy as a wasting asset—never a healthy thing in a liberal society. If Romney wants to superintend a naval renaissance, he must convincingly explain America’s larger strategic purposes, and how a more muscular fleet will help the republic match purpose with power. That could be a challenge.

Read the whole thing.