Saturday’s Asahi led with a report on its finding that the Ministry of Defense compiled at the end of last year a report predicting that the estimated cost for purchasing and maintaining two Aegis destroyers for 30 years will total about 700 billion yen ($6.68 billion), about 1.5 times more than purchasing two Aegis Ashore batteries at the cost of about 450 billion yen ($4.3 billion). The paper wrote that ministry officials involved in studying an alternative to the Aegis Ashore deployment said that several hundred billion yen will be needed to install land-based equipment on Aegis ships in addition to the 700 billion yen it will cost to purchase the Aegis destroyers.