Japan to reinforce Top End defence with ADF and US

Eighty-two years after the bombing of Darwin, the announcement that Japanese troops will join US marines on annual deployments to the Northern Territory, training with Australian Defence Force personnel, is testament to the strong, mature relationship forged by Australia and Japan since World War II. The foundations of that bond were set by the Menzies government in the 1950s. It established an Australian embassy in Tokyo in 1952, and its 1957 Australia-Japan Commerce Agreement was a vital trading pact that paved the way for one of the nation’s most important economic relationships. Over recent decades, in the face of China’s growing aggression and military might in the Asia-Pacific, Australian and Japanese strategic interests have increasingly coalesced, both as founding members of the Quad, along with the US and India, and in joint military exercises. In April, Australia, the US and Britain welcomed Japan to the AUKUS pact’s “Pillar II’’ focus on hi-tech weapons, including hypersonics, AI and autonomous systems, quantum computing, advanced cyber capabilities and electronic warfare.

On Sunday, Defence Minister Richard Marles met US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani in Darwin to announce that Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade will join the US Marine Corp’s annual Top End rotations. The move to build greater interoperability between the three militaries in the NT dry season is a logical extension of established ties, driven by concerns about Chinese activity across the region, Ben Packham reports.

Mr Marles is confident that security concerns in the Indo-Pacific are well understood by the Trump administration.

Three weeks ago, the 2024 Marine Rotational Force – Darwin left Australia for home after the 13th annual rotation. During the deployment, 2500 US military personnel conducted training with the ADF and regional partners involving humanitarian assistance, security operations and live-fire exercises. A fresh deployment will arrive in the new year. The arrangement has potential for expansion.

In August, a report by former Defence official Peter Jennings for the Institute of Public Affairs urged the Albanese government to open talks with the US about increasing the annual deployment to 16,000 personnel. “A larger USMC presence in northern Australia offers the cheapest boost to deterrence Australia could possibly buy,” the report said. It would complement the US military strategy of dispersal through the Indo-­Pacific and would add to US and Australian capacity to engage with the armed forces of neighbouring countries. From next year, the US and Japan will participate in the previously bilateral Australia-Papua New Guinea military exercise, Puk Puk. The three countries were working to provide collective security of the region and to assert the global rules-based order, Mr Marles said. And Australia would now participate in US-Japan exercises Yama Sakura and Orient Shield.

Japan has become increasingly concerned about Chinese aggression on its doorstep. In August, Japan’s chief government spokesman, Yoshimasa Hayashi, condemned an incursion by a Chinese military aircraft into its airspace as a “serious violation” of its sovereignty and warned Beijing was becoming “increasingly active”. The incursion, near Nagasaki, by a Chinese Y-9 intelligence-gathering aircraft was the first such violation since records began in 1958. Chinese warships also regularly sail provocatively close to Japan’s Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which Beijing calls Diaoyu and claims belong to China. In the face of Chinese aggression in the South Pacific, around The Philippines and in the Indian Ocean, the inclusion of Japan in NT rotations with the US serves Australia’s strategic interests.