By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
At Camp Higashi Chitose on Hokkaido's northern edge, an Australian brigadier and a colonel from the 1st Australian Division huddled over maps with American counterparts this week, working through the same question militaries have asked since the Cold War: can three different armies fight as one?
The occasion was Exercise Yama Sakura 91, a trilateral command post exercise that opened September 2 and runs across Japan Ground Self-Defense Force camps at Higashi Chitose and Asaka, with a supporting contingent based in Hawaii. By the numbers alone it is a serious undertaking — roughly 4,000 JGSDF personnel, 1,400 U.S. Army soldiers, 350 U.S. Marines and 340 Australian Defence Force troops, according to U.S. Central Command's public affairs office. At a briefing in Asaka, Australia's Major General Ash Collingburn stood alongside Lieutenant General Matthew McFarlane of the U.S. Army's I Corps and Lieutenant General Makoto Endo of Japan's Ground Component Command — a tableau meant to signal that this is planning, not just posturing, for large-scale combat operations under a coalition banner.
The drill is not standing alone. U.S. officials say the same 11th Airborne Division units training in Japan are, in the same stretch of weeks, also present at Yudh Abhyas in India and Super Garuda Shield in Indonesia — an effort, the Army says, to show that skills honed in Alaska's cold translate to jungles and mountains across the Pacific. Separately, Naval Medical Forces Pacific hosted Japanese health officials and researchers in late August to work through the unglamorous but essential business of military medicine across a vast ocean theater.
None of this guarantees deterrence works. But interoperability — the unsexy word for whether radios, supply chains and chains of command actually mesh under pressure — is the thing militaries can control before a crisis, not during one. That is the quiet bet Washington, Tokyo and Canberra are making in Hokkaido this month.
Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from U.S. Central Command (DVIDS) reporting and imagery.
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