Japan to beef up its defense with drones, AI and missiles, defense budget plans show

Ah, marvellous. Japan's Defense Ministry has looked at the battlefield in Ukraine, seen the humble drone rewriting the rules of modern war, and responded with an 8.9 trillion yen ($55.6 billion) budget request to "drastically strengthen its deterrence and response capability." That is a great deal of yen for a doctrine that essentially consists of hoping the software doesn't have a bad day. One can almost hear the procurement officers muttering "this time it's different" as they sign off on yet another AI-enabled missile programme.

The Ministry's enthusiasm for adapting "new methods of warfare" is touching, particularly given that their American counterparts have spent the last two years discovering that AI targeting systems sometimes decide the best way to defend a position is to shoot at everything and let the algorithm sort it out. Still, there is something almost noble about Japan's determination to catch the drone wave just as everyone else is realising the wave is actually a tsunami full of shrapnel. At $55.6 billion, they could buy a truly magnificent number of quadcopters, or one really, really confident PowerPoint presentation about synergy.

And who are we to mock the aspiration? Ukraine has demonstrated that drones can turn the battlefield upside down, and Japan is simply taking notes while writing a cheque the size of a small nation's GDP. The question nobody in the Ministry appears to have asked is what happens when the AI that's supposed to distinguish a T-72 from a school bus has an off day, or when the enemy's drones are slightly better than ours are. But let's not be churlish: with "deterrence and response capability" this drastically strengthened, the only thing left to deter is the accountants asking why the budget request had no line item for "AI ethics review."