Japan Approves Highest Ever Defense Budget

Japan’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) Japan’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the outline of the FY2022 defense budget on December 24, 2021. According to the MoD, the budget for FY2022 will be designed as a 16-month budget, integrating the supplementary budget for FY2021. The outcome is a record defense budget.

The budget, dubbed the “Accelerated Defense Capability Enhancement Package,” is aimed at accelerating the pace of defense capability enhancement, mainly in response to China’s growing military power. The total budget is 5.8661 trillion yen (about $51 billion), which is the highest it has ever been.

Naval News previously wrote about the MoD’s budget request for FY2022 except for the supplemental budget in August 2021, and all items requested at that time were approved. Therefore, here is an overview of the new items on naval domain added in the supplementary budget:

• Acquisition of three P-1 patrol aircraft (65.8 billion yen: $573 million)
• Refurbishment of P-3C patrol aircraft (1.1 billion yen: 9.57 million dollars)
• Acquisition of Type 12 light torpedoes, Type 18 heavy torpedoes, Type 15 mines and Type 07 ASROCs (21.7 billion yen: 189 million dollars)
• VLS for two Mogami-class FFMs (8.4 billion yen: 7.3 million dollars)

 According to the Japanese naval magazine “Ships of the World”, the Mogami-class FFMs that have been launched or are under construction will be equipped with VLS at a later date, while the two ships for which construction budgets were included in the FY2022 defense budget (9th and 10th FFM) will be equipped with VLS from the start. And the two VLSs included in this supplemental budget are for the seventh and eighth ships of the FFM, which have already been approved for construction in the FY2021 defense budget.

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