This is CBSI in the world.

I'm with my colleague, Grant Newsham, Colonel Grant Newsham, United States Marine Corps retired, writing at Asia Times, to guide the new ambassador, nominated by the president to be George Glass, former ambassador to Portugal, a man from the western part of the

United States, Oregon, I believe, what the ambassador will enjoy preparing himself for, the

excuses for why Japan is not ready to defend itself. But there are things that can be done now,

because as Grant writes in his letter in the Asia Times, there's a big pile of

money. All right, Grant, it's time to solve what Japan has said, there's an election coming,

it's too difficult, we're pacifists, but when we get past all that, the money's sitting there.

So how do we use it? Well, the first thing that I think the

U.S. side would usefully do is to consider that the Japanese have no idea how to spend all of

this money that they're going to allocate for defense. And just a little background, they have said

they're going to double defense spending within about four or five years now. And this is a welcome

change. The ambassador should

be aware that although it's doubling, that it's not making up for about 50 years of underfunding,

but it's a good sign. So he will be helpful if the ambassador will tell his staff, ask his staff,

look, how do we, you know, how do we let tell the

Japanese what they need to do? The Japanese don't know how to go about getting ready to fight a war.

They don't need the know the hardware, the capabilities they need. And it's no fault of their

own because it's not something that's intuitive. And for decades, the Japanese military was not allowed to really even think about fighting a war in any proper way.

So it would be helpful if the ambassador gets his staff to get some help from probably Indo-Pacom in Hawaii as well,

and send out some good war planners who can explain to the Japanese exactly what they need

and then spend the necessary money.

But as it stands now, what you've got is this big heap.

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