Japan Defence agency seeks missile defence cash
Tokto, Aug 31: Japan's Defence Agency is seeking to raise spending on missile defence by more than 50 per cent, officials said, two months after North Korea unnerved East Asia with a volley of missile tests.
The agency will request 219 billion yen for missile defence in the year starting next April, up from 140 billion yen for the current financial year, although spending proposals are generally whittled back before the budget is passed.
About 23 billion yen of the budget is earmarked for new projects, such as speeding up the introduction of ground-based PAC-3 interceptors, designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles in the final phase of flight, by ordering them from the United States.
Earlier plans had called for the PAC-3s to be produced under licence in Japan. The United States has offered Japan up to 80 PAC-3 missiles, Kyodo news agency said earlier this week.
Missile defence spending has risen to nearly 10 billion dollars a year in the United States, despite criticism that successful tests have been stage-managed, so they offer little evidence that the system would be effective in the event of a real attack.
The Japanese Defence Agency's budget request includes plans to test-fire an SM-3 ship-to-air interceptor, which is designed to shoot down an incoming ballistic missile in mid-course, when it is outside the earth's atmosphere.
North Korea test-fired seven missiles in July, including for the first time a long-range multistage Taepodong missile.
The USS Shiloh, the first missile defence-capable ship to be deployed in Japan, arrived at the US naval base in Yokosuka, near Tokyo, on Tuesday. Japan plans to fit its own destroyers with SM-3s over the next few years.
The Defence Agency plans to request a total budget of 4,863.6 billion yen, the officials said yesterday, up 1.5 per cent on spending of 4,490.6 billion yen the previous year, when defence spending accounted for 0.93 percent of GDP.
Reuters