An Expensive Replacement
In response to North Korea’s nuclear threat, Japan has established a two-layer defense system using Aegis destroyers and ground-based PAC-3 missiles.
However, the constant deployment at sea to monitor the North Korean missile activities has brought considerable fatigue to the Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), a navy that already faces a severe manpower shortage.
To relieve the JMSDF from such heavy burden, the Defense Ministry pushed for introducing the Aegis Ashore, a land-based Aegis system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, and intended to leave the Ground Self-Defense Forces (JGSDF) in charge of operation.
Unfortunately, this idea failed because of safety concerns and other fiascos, compelling the Defense Ministry to come up with an alternative solution – the additional procurement of two Aegis warships.
The new Aegis destroyers, also known as Aegis System-Equipped Vessels (ASEV), will focus on missile defense rather than conventional fleet air-defense, though in reality, it simply adds two more ships to the already stretched JMSDF.
To be clear, the JMSDF requires more vessels to counter the ever-growing Chinese Navy, but there are just not enough sailors to operate a vast arsenal of warships. What the JMSDF needs are more versatile, labor efficient ships that can perform multirole activities instead of large single-purpose ones.
Sure, more Aegis destroyers would boost the JMSDF’s overall capability, especially in air-defense, and increasing the number to ten ships will slightly resolve the rotation issue.
On the other hand, the new ASEVs are to be significantly larger compared to the previous “Maya-class”Aegis destroyers, hosting a vertical launch system (VLS) of 128 cells.
Given the ASEV’s emphasis on missile defense, this 1.5 times increase in the number of missile launchers is understandable, but it has undoubtedly resulted in the substantial size increase to around 10,000 tons.
Although the Defense Ministry aims to cut the crew size by 20% through automation, the addition of two 10,000 ton class destroyers will likely do more harm than good on the JMSDF’s already constrained resources.
Conceptual image of the ASEV (Credit: Ministry of Defense)
What’s more frightening is that the current projected size is actually half of that of original proposal.
Initially, the plan was to construct a 20,000 ton class vessel with a total length of 210 meters or 690 ft. This proposal was immediately criticized with many attributing it to the former Yamato-class Battleship, a naval giant that sank without demonstrating its potential.
Despite such downscale, each ASEV is estimated to cost over 3 billion USD. To put this into perspective, this is twice the cost of the “Maya-class” destroyers and even more expensive than the “Izumo-class” light aircraft carriers.
Specs Not An Issue?
In contrast to the expensive cost and potential risk of exacerbating manpower shortage, there are no significant concerns regarding the ASEV’s capabilities.
The ASEVs will be equipped with the latest SPY-7 radars originally intended for the cancelled Aegis Ashore systems, so the ships are expected to perform just as well.
On the contrary, it is said that while the Aegis Ashore is capable of intercepting North Korean ballistic missiles, they might have struggled against Chinese and Russian hypersonic missiles.
Japan and the United States are currently joint developing a Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI) missile to counter these new threats, but the GPI missile has a shorter range compared to the conventional SM-3 interceptors, making the ASEV more suitable than the static Aegis Ashore.
To sum up, the new ASEVs are technically sound and offer some operational advantages over Aegis Ashore systems regarding future threats. Nonetheless, the negative impact on the JMSDF’s labor shortage is also something to be considered with thought.
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