Japan and Australia, with the United States and other partners, should build an air bridge between them in peacetime. This would be a set of regular air corridors with settled overflight and landing rights, refuelling routes and dispersed supply and maintenance sites.
In a crisis, it would carry supplies to dispersed forces, especially those along the second island chain, which runs from Japan’s home islands to its outlying Pacific islands and through Guam to Palau and New Guinea.
This is where Japan is beginning to plan to build up defences, because of China’s lengthening naval reach. The air bridge might help reinforce these defences if war looked imminent, and it would support them with necessary supplies if fighting began, such as precision-guided munitions, spare parts and components, maintenance tools, critical medical supplies, including blood products, and portable desalination units.
To prepare for this, what’s needed now is a strong and steady peacetime flow of aircraft between Japan and Australia that solidifies the capability. Britain’s experience in improvising an air bridge using an airfield on Ascension Island in the Falklands War of 1982 shows why this must be done. Ascension’s Wideawake airfield, staffed for just three aircraft movements a week, had to be turned within three weeks into a base for more than 800 personnel and up to 32 aircraft.
In peacetime, Japanese and Australian aircraft using the air bridge would carry supplies and essential support equipment to be stored along the route, including on islands. Japan, Australia and the US already have logistics agreements with storage provisions, so each could keep stocks in the others’ territory, including islands.
Japan’s 2026 defence white paper devoted a section to Chinese aircraft carrier operations in the Pacific. China has a well-established ability to deny an enemy use of surface ships on the waters inside the first island chain, which runs from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is based mainly on anti-ship missiles that would be launched from land or by land-based bombers. Submarines, with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, would contribute.
Japan is looking at setting up defences on the second chain because this Chinese sea-denial capability is now extending beyond the first chain. In April, the defence ministry set up an office to plan Pacific defences. The ministry plans surveys for installing a radar on Chichi Jima, an island on the second chain. The defence ministry’s 2027 budget request includes a surveillance site on Kita-Daito Jima, an island east of Okinawa, between the two chains, and a study of cargo-handling facilities on Iwo Jima, also on the second chain.
The second chain lies within the range at which, according to the Pentagon, Chinese strikes would probably be effective against US intervention; once inside the reach of the Chinese denial capability, US ships and aircraft would have to fight for access, supported by friendly forces.
For Japan’s trade, the second chain becomes a lifeline in a Taiwan crisis, when ships would struggle to use the waters along the first chain and between the two chains. If the Malacca Strait were also closed, most traffic between the Indian Ocean and Northeast Asia would divert through Indonesia’s Lombok and Sunda straits, or far to Australia’s south and east, then out to the second chain.
Six Japanese Lockheed Martin F-35As and two air-surveillance radar aircraft flew to Australia for Exercise Southern Cross in July, refuelled in the air by Japanese and Australian tankers. The biggest step forward was on the ground, where maintainers from Japan, Australia and the United States inspected, refuelled and rearmed the F-35As. The three countries’ air forces formalised that work in July through a new trilateral air logistics body.
In mid-August, the Japanese and Australian defence ministers said that they looked forward to more exercises with an eye to further rotational deployments. While these may be preparations for protective dispersal of combat aircraft in a crisis, they can also contribute to the beginnings of an air bridge, ideally by using varied routes and thereby making it broad as well as long.
Specifically, frequent movements of aircraft between Japan and Australia would settle overflight permissions, airspace clearances, refuelling patterns and compliance with host-nation procedures. Equipment and supplies needed to keep aircraft moving would build up at the landing points. All this would then amount to standing infrastructure, even if much of it were not physical.
The air bridge might be sustained in part with uncrewed aircraft. Australia’s Project Camel Train is trialling autonomous cargo aircraft under a concept that ranges from short-range precision delivery to longer-range transportation of heavier loads along dedicated corridors. Extended over water, such systems could resupply dispersed sites from northern Australia through Southeast Asia, Pacific island states, US territories and Japan’s remote islands without risking crews.
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