U.S. confirms new Pentagon No. 3 as Japan defense budget in crosshairs

Japan Times

09-04-2025

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Elbridge Colby to be the Defense Department's policy chief, bringing to the Pentagon's No. 3 post a known China hawk and advocate for Asian allies — including Japan — to spend more on defense.
The Senate voted 54-45 in favor of Colby to be the new undersecretary of defense for policy, a vote that was largely along party lines.
Colby, who served as U.S. President Donald Trump's deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development during the president's first term, has also been a strong advocate for the U.S. military to shift its focus from Europe and the Middle East to China — especially in terms of preventing conflict with Beijing over self-ruled Taiwan.
These views will likely align with those of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, according to a top secret memo, is reportedly looking to shift the Pentagon's focus to deterring a Chinese invasion of the democratic island it claims as its own.
The memo also says the Pentagon will 'assume risk in other theaters' given personnel and resource constraints, and pressure allies in East Asia, Europe and the Middle East to hike their defense budgets in order to take on the bulk of the deterrence roles against Russian, North Korean and Iranian threats, The Washington Post reported late last month.
During confirmation hearings last month, Colby said that Japan and Taiwan must dramatically ramp up defense spending in order to deter war with China.
Japan, which is in the process of aiming to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense by fiscal 2027, must boost its defense spending even further, he said, hiking this to 'at least 3% of GDP ... as soon as possible.'
Colby called Japan's push to revamp its security and defense policies, including its five-year, ¥43 trillion (roughly $315 billion when it was announced in 2022) spending plan, 'critical and most welcome,' but said it remained 'manifestly inadequate.'
Noting Trump's push for NATO and others to also spend more, Colby said that "it makes little sense for Japan, which is directly threatened by China and North Korea, to spend only 2%.'
'As the president has rightly said, allies need to spend far more on their own defense, especially those that are most acutely threatened,' he added. "The best way for the United States to support this shift is to make these priorities and urgency clear to Tokyo in a constructive but pressing fashion.'
While the Japanese government has emphasized that Tokyo's 'initiative to fundamentally strengthen its defense capabilities' has been a big step for the ostensibly pacifist nation, Heseth hinted during a visit to the U.S. ally last month that Japan would be asked to do even more, saying he hoped it would "make the correct determination of what capabilities are needed."
Colby has taken an even more strident view of Taiwan, saying that it must more than quadruple its defense budget from the 2.45% of GDP this year.
'They should be more like 10%, or at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense,' Colby told a hearing last month. 'So we need to properly incentivize them.'
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has pledged to hike the island's defense budget to 3% of GDP in the near future, in a move intended to show Trump that it is committed to defending itself.
Beijing views democratic Taiwan as a renegade province that must be united with the mainland, by force if necessary. The United States, meanwhile, switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but has maintained unofficial relations with Taiwan and is bound by law to supply the island with weapons to help it defend itself.
Fears of a U.S. conflict with China over Taiwan — one that would almost certainly drag in Tokyo — have prompted some in Japan to refer to such a crisis as an existential one.
Colby, however, told the same hearing that while "Taiwan's fall would be a disaster for American interests," the island's status was not an "existential interest" for the United States.