JAMES J. LEE, AFJ STAFF Nobu Kanehara is political counselor at the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C.

Trust, flexibility and a willingness to share information are key factors to building and retaining effective coalition relationships, political counselors at the Embassies of Australia and Japan said May 31 at a conference to discuss joint and coalition operations.

Andrew Shearer, political counselor at the Embassy of Australia, and Nobu Kanehara, political counselor at the Embassy of Japan, shared a panel at the Armed Forces Journal conference, the Power & Limits of Jointness, in Washington, D.C.

Both speakers stressed the importance of their alliances with the United States and of emerging alliances with like-minded nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Building and sustaining a winning coalition has to have a whole-government approach,” Shearer said. He listed a number of key elements to making alliances work. They include regular communication at a strategic level, providing access to coalition partners to the planning process ahead of an operation, mutual trust, the ability to stay flexible, and equipment interoperability.

“But above all, it’s the flow of information that is critical. The bottom line is that without that information, we [Australia] are much less valuable to you [the United States] as a coalition partner,” Shearer said.

Kanehara said Japan was the oldest democracy in Asia and had a lot of experiences and common interests to share with the United States. He said Japan welcomes the transformation of its alliance with the United States and wants it to be widened so that the new challenges that both countries face in the 21st Century, including terrorism, the increase in weapons of mass destruction, natural disasters and issues of sea lane security, oil, poverty and global warming could be worked together.

Kanehara said Japan also wants to build alliances with other Asian nations that shares its interests and responsibilities, such as Australia, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

Shearer added that Australia is actively involved a wide variety of coalition operations around the world, some as leader and some as a participant. “As I speak, Australia is deploying 1,300 troops to East Timor to restore order there,” he said. “We also have a presence in the Solomon Islands that we are ramping up as violence increases there, and in southern Afghanistan our Special Operations forces there will be augmented later this year, which will mean for the first time we will be working direct with NATO there.”

In fact, Shearer stressed, “Most of our operations since Vietnam have been coalition operations.”

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