April 18, 2025

The government dispatches high-ranking officers of the Self-Defense Forces to a U.S. military educational institution to learn how to calculate the scope of civilian damage caused by Japan’s use of the capability to attack enemy bases.

This was revealed by Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Yamazoe Taku in his Diet questioning on April 17 based on a Sunday Akahata-obtained document.

That is an internal document of the Defense Ministry regarding its project to send high-ranking SDF officers to the United States to enroll in classes at the U.S. forces’ educational facility, Joint Targeting School (JTS), which provides training to improve students’ skills, such as selecting targets, at operational levels. According to the document, the dispatch of SDF officers to the JTS began in 2023.

At a House of Councilors Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting, asked by Yamazoe about “Collateral Damage Estimation (CDE)”, one of the JTS training courses, Defense Ministry Defense Policy Bureau Chief Yamato Taro explained, “The CDE is a process to predict civilian casualties and damage to non-military infrastructure during military operations.” Yamazoe stated that the U.S. military, in preparation for a military operation, calculates the number of civilians projected to be killed and injured based on the population of areas where homes, schools, and stores are located prior to selecting a target. He asked if the JTS training programs which SDF officers receive include the CDE. Defense Ministry official Aoki Takeshi who heads the Personnel and Education Bureau said, “Yes.”

Yamazoe said that the U.S. military will determine the target of the attack without the permission of the President and the Secretary of Defense if the number of people obtained by the CDE process is below the predetermined upper limit. Pointing out that this limit is said to be a de facto “license to kill”, Yamazoe claimed that taking the CDE course means that the SDF seeks to establish an upper limit to civilian casualties in an attack similar to that supposedly imposed on the U.S. forces. Defense Minister Nakatani Gen in response said that the government will restrict the SDF’s use of attack capability only to military targets. The JCP lawmaker stressed, “The Defense Ministry’s project will turn the SDF into an armed force willing to harm civilians, which is unacceptable under the war-renouncing Constitution.”