Russia deploys missiles to Pacific against U.S. military’s moves against China’s moves against U.S. moves against North Korea’s moves against U.S. moves.
(Originally published March 23 in “What in the World“) Russia followed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Kyiv by deploying a missile defense system to an island north of Japan.
Moscow said it was moving a K300-P Bastion coastal missile-defense battery to Paramushir in the Kuril Islands to counter what it said was a growing effort by the United States to contain China and Russia in the Pacific by increasing its military presence and bolstering alliances there. Xi’s own concern about U.S. containment appears to have overshadowed his plans to urge peace in Ukraine on Russian President Xi Jinping.
The U.S. has been beefing up its military posture in the Pacific, ostensibly to counter perceived threats from China and North Korea. Case in point: the U.S. last week flew two F-22 fighter jets from Alaska to its former Clark air base in the Philippines to take part in joint exercises there. It was the first time the advanced U.S. fighters have flown to the Philippines, where it closed its bases in 1991. There’s no shortage of paranoia, though. Pyongyang on Wednesday launched several cruise missiles into the Sea of Japan, capping its latest fusillade that included an ICBM and firing missiles from submarines it says are a response to the threat from the U.S. and South Korea.
Russia’s decision to publicly express common cause with China in the Pacific doesn’t change the fact that Russia has a Pacific coast that has long put its forces in close contact with U.S. forces in Alaska (as Sarah Palin was wont to remind us). But its decision to announce common cause with China in Asia is troubling. It could be part of a regional arms buildup and a new nuclear arms race. On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov reiterated the obvious when he told a conference on nuclear arms that Russia and the U.S. are in a “de facto” conflict over Ukraine and that the risk of nuclear war is at its highest in decades.
Russia’s Bastion battery is small potatoes, though, next to what the U.S. is building. The U.S. Space Force has asked Congress to give it $16 billion over five years to build a network of satellites that can track ICBMs and hypersonic missiles from space. The Resilient Missile Warning Missile Tracking, or RMWMT, will put a fleet of small satellites built by L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and SpaceX into orbit about 2,000km above the planet. It will replace the Space-Based Infrared System that’s already in orbit today and the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared satellites being launched to provide coverage until the RMWMT is in place. The satellites presumably feed into Earth-based missile defense systems like the Aegis Ashore system being built on Guam.