PRESS

STRATEGY—RESOURCE MISMATCH?
Beyond budgetary constraints, Japan’s long-standing
ambitions to fulfill wider international responsibilities
befitting a major power—captured by Abe’s
concept of “proactive contribution to peace”—could
spread the SDF too thin. Since Japan’s dispatch of
minesweepers to the Persian Gulf after the First Gulf
War in 1991, successive Japanese administrations have
deployed ground, air, and naval forces far beyond Japan’s
own neighborhood to conduct “international
peace cooperation operations.”
The 2013 MTDP defines such operations as:
activities cooperatively carried out by the international
society to improve the international security
environment such as UN Peace Keeping Operations,
Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR),
and others in the fields of non-traditional security. 34
Since Japan’s first peacekeeping mission in Cambodia
in 1992, Japan has sent peacekeepers around the
world, including to the Golan Heights in the Levant,
to South Sudan, to East Timor, and to Haiti. Japanese
forces distinguished themselves in rendering assistance
to stricken nations following the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami and to the Philippines in the aftermath
of the 2013 Haiyan typhoon.
In a post-September 11, 2001, show of solidarity
with the United States, Tokyo committed MSDF
vessels to the coalition naval contingent supporting
combat operations in Afghanistan. MSDF tankers
resupplied coalition warships, and Aegis destroyers
guarded against air and surface threats in the Arabian
Sea. MSDF vessels supplied fuel oil and water to cus-
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