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Domestic problems constrain military build-up
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Domestic problems constrain military build-upGreen & Hornung 18 (Michael, Senior Vice President for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Jeffrey, political scientist at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, War on the Rocks, “IS JAPAN’S NEW DEFENSE PLAN AMBITIOUS ENOUGH?” published December 6th, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/12/is-japans-new-defense-plan-ambitious-enough/, accessed 7/17/19, JME.) Domestic Challenges Japan is beset by a number of domestic challenges that constrain its ability to address its external challenges. One of the most publicized is its struggle with demographic decline. Statistics from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications show that Japan’s population in 2016 stood at 126.9 million. Due to low birthrates, over the coming decades, this is set to plummet. In 2025, it will drop to 122.5 million. By 2045, it will drop to 106.4 million. By 2055, it will drop below 100 million to 97.4 million. This declining birth rate directly affects the Self-Defense Forces. For many years, the overarching trend has been one of a steady decline in recruitment. Despite defense budgets increasing for the past several years, recruitment has struggled. The Self-Defense Forces have not been able to hit recruitment targets since 2014. In 2017, for example, recruiters only achieved 79.9 percent of their target. Alongside declining recruitment, Japan also faces resource constraints that are expected to grow. Japan’s defense budget for the current fiscal year stands at $44 billion (4.9 trillion yen). Despite Japan’s relatively large defense budget, its defense spending is artificially capped at 1 percent of its gross domestic product. This is a product of a political decision made by the Miki Takeo administration in 1976 to show restraint in Japan’s defense policy. With the exception of a few years during the late 1980s, Japan’s defense spending has hovered below this artificial cap. When Japan’s economy was growing rapidly, this did not matter much because a budget capped at 1 percent still grew annually. This is no longer the case, and has not been the case for some time. As long as this artificial political cap remains in place, it constrains the amount of resources Japan can dedicate to the types of capabilities it seeks to meet its external security challenges. On top of declining recruitment and constrained resources, the Self-Defense Forces continue to struggle to operate in a unified manner. Take the creation of the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade as an example. Success in an amphibious operation will require all three services to work jointly. Yet, a recent study by the RAND Corporation argues that some of the more challenging aspects of bringing Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to the point of mastering amphibious operations have to do with overcoming deeply entrenched service cultures, identities, and mission prioritizations to ensure sufficient attention to joint training, developing strategy and doctrine, and ensuring the software connectivity to enable all three services to work together seamlessly as one integrated force. These challenges intensify as Japan looks to new domains and increasingly technologically savvy competitors. At the opening session of deliberations on the National Defense Program Guidelines, Abe indicated that Japan would no longer be able to fully defend itself if it sticks to old paradigms of relying on traditional land, sea, and air forces. Yet, when looking at Japan’s current efforts on cyber and outer space, these areas are not only mired by the lack of jointness with which the three traditional services continue to struggle, they also remain complicated by interagency coordination processes and a lack of resources. While Japan has made strides in recent years to address these new domains, cyber in particular remains an area of vulnerability for not only Japan, but for bilateral cooperation with the United States. There are only a few hundred people total, for example, in the Self-Defense Forces who are dedicated to protecting the computer networks of the force. And in the Ministry of Defense’s Cyber Defense Group, there are only 150 people. Cognizant that Japan must meet these security challenges, Abe has stated: “While maintaining (Japan’s) exclusive defense-orientation as a given…rather than extending what we are currently doing, I think we should identify the defense capabilities we truly need to protect the people.” Understanding the external and internal challenges facing Japan, there are a number of possible enhancements that decision-makers deliberating the next National Defense Program Guidelines and Mid-Term Defense Plan could pursue that could benefit Japan’s defense and address these challenges. Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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