Top Highlights

• Japan’s unprecedented call for “counterstrike capabilities” results from a frank recognition that China and North Korea’s ballistic and cruise missile arsenals could overwhelm Japan’s air and missile defense systems.
• Japan’s new National Defense Strategy (NDS) — the first so-named and the successor to the erstwhile National Defense Program Guidelines (six versions since 1976; last revised in 2018) — is basically a ten-year guideline that is designed to clarify Japan’s defense objectives and the ways and means by which the government intends to achieve them.
• Japan’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) — the first since 2013 and only the second ever — is Tokyo’s “supreme national security policy document.” It “provides strategic guidance for Japan’s national security policy areas, including diplomacy, defense, economic security, technology, cyber, maritime, space, intelligence, official development ass...
• Its companion document, the Defense Buildup Program, provides “program guidelines” for building and maintaining the critical defense capabilities needed to support the NDS.
• these documents are not legally-binding commitments, plans, or legislation that have received the imprimatur of Japan’s National Diet, much less been fully resourced.

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