The U.S.-Japan alliance is entering a new phase in its effort to deter China, one that increasingly relies on dispersed, land-based missiles positioned along the “first island chain” — the string of islands stretching from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines toward Borneo.
The planned longer-term presence of a U.S. Typhon midrange missile system in Japan, combined with the fielding of the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) anti-ship missile and Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) air-defense systems by Okinawa-based units, is creating a distributed network of strike, air-defense and targeting capabilities that complicates Chinese military operations around Taiwan and across the western Pacific.
More importantly, these assets are forcing Beijing to contend with many of the same operational dilemmas that China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy — designed to keep rival militaries at bay — was originally intended to impose on U.S. and allied forces. In doing so, Tokyo and Washington are beginning to narrow a longstanding asymmetry in land-based conventional missile forces — one that has gradually favored Beijing since the end of the Cold War.
