This is John Batchel, a conversation with my good colleague Lance Gatley in Tokyo about the

Ardium in the Financial Times saying that Ubridge Colby, Deputy Under Secretary for Policy

at the Pentagon has asked Japan and Australia to state, what will you do in the event of an attack by the People's Republic of China

on Taiwan and the whole region?

What will you do specifically?

And here, Lance explains why that's an important question, to have an answer.

Here's Lance Gatling on an item in the newspaper that turned into a thing,

and here's the analysis of it.

Very positive, very helpful.

More of this later.

When the press secretary at the Pentagon was asked, they referred the world's press to

an ex-tweet that Eldridge Colby had written in response to the F.T. article.

So we're in Brave New World territory here.

It's quite novel to me and pretty astonishing.

But the question itself is not one that really surprises me.

This is an all-important question to military planners.

If we have this contingency that we're talking about, what, in fact, are you going to be able to do?

What do you plan to try to do?

Because, of course, if you try to do 10 of something, you may get eight of it done before

the shooting starts. So that question is always foremost in the minds of American-style military

planners. What can you do? So you have the military attachés and the exchange officers who

spend a lot of time understanding the nuts and bolts.

...