WASHINGTON -- The U.S. needs to ensure that it will be able to obtain permission from Japan to use U.S. bases in the country for combat purposes "within hours" after a Taiwan conflict breaks out, an influential scholar and Pentagon adviser says.
Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Oriana Skylar Mastro, an expert on the Chinese military, said that if the U.S. were to intervene in a cross-strait contingency, the northern Philippines and southwest Japan will be the only areas that the U.S. military has access to that are in combat radius of the self-governing island.
