​Japan’s new national-security and defence strategies

Japan’s release in December 2022 of three transformational strategy documents signalled its intent to adopt a new approach in the coming years to national-security and defence issues. The National Security Strategy pledges to increase defence spending from roughly 1.0% of GDP to 2.0% by the fiscal year beginning in 2027. The documents also call for Japan’s armed forces to acquire counterstrike missile capabilities and launch new efforts to overcome the civil–military divide that has long undermined Japan’s defence sector by hindering the development and adoption of new capabilities.

On 16 December 2022, Japan published three important strategic documents – the National Security Strategy (NSS), the National Defense Strategy (NDS) and the Defense Buildup Program – signalling a decisive shift away from its approach to these issues since the end of the Second World War. The proximate trigger for this break is Tokyo’s bleak assessment of the rising security challenges from China, North Korea and, most recently, Russia on its western flank.

In Tokyo’s view, the threat from this increasingly interactive trio is intense – especially due to, for example, the evolving Sino-Russian strategic relationship, which is being operationalised in Japan’s immediate vicinity through joint naval and air patrols and is evident across multiple domains (from military to economic); China’s rising belligerence regarding Taiwan and the likelihood that any Chinese aggression towards Taiwan would spill over into nearby Japanese territory and the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which Japan controls and China claims; and North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programmes.

Tokyo’s concerns are reflected in the new NSS’s assessment of Japan’s strategic environment as more ‘severe and complex’ than at any other time in the post-Second World War period. This was the first revision to the NSS since its release in December 2013, and Tokyo will probably seek to revise it more frequently in the future, given the rapidly changing Indo-Pacific security environment. Meanwhile, the NDS is the first defence-strategy document released by Japan since the end of the Second World War and is modelled after national-defence strategies developed in Washington DC, signalling Japan’s intent to deepen its alignment with its most important security ally, the United States.

It replaces the National Defense Program Guidelines, which were first published in 1976, and provides the doctrinal framework for the Defense Buildup Program, which sets spending priorities over the coming decade. These priorities had previously been set by the Medium-Term Defence Program, which had been in place since 1986 and was updated every five years. But under the new process, with the Defence Buildup Program having been drafted alongside the NSS and NDS, Tokyo is seeking to coordinate national-security and defence planning to a greater extent, which will facilitate a long-term transformation of Japanese security policy that will have a profound impact both in the Indo-Pacific and within Japan.