Japan’s Counterstrike Planning and Lessons From the Third Gulf War
What are planners in Tokyo taking away from the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran? What are the limits of comparisons?
Today’s Nukesletter is a dispatch from Japan as I wait at the airport to head home after a week of great meetings. I was here for a very interesting workshop (that I may say more on later), various catch-ups, and spoke at a roundtable at the Japan Institute of International Affairs. Alas, I was a few days too early to catch the peak sakura bloom.
As the Third Gulf War grinds on, I naturally had a number of conversations here in Tokyo about what the ongoing conflict means for a country that is, right now, operationally standing up a “counterstrike” capability pursuant to the watershed 2022 National Security Strategy. Japan is buying up Tomahawk Block IVs from the United States and fielding its upgraded Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles—extended to roughly 1,000 km range—from bases on Kyushu this year, with more deployments to Shizuoka (some reporting says later this year, but it may get pushed to 2027). The Hyper Velocity Gliding Projectile is in the pipeline too. I’ve been tracking this for a while—from back in the days when the debate in Tokyo was about whether to have a counter-strike capability. We’re way past that now. What’s interesting about this particular moment is that the Takaichi government, with its historic supermajority, is now in the process of revising the so-called three security documents. This gives a politically dominant, popular, and hawkish PM the opportunity for more defense policy entrepreneurship than might have been possible in the past (including during Kishida’s tenure where the sea-change that we saw in 2022 happened, post-Ukraine).
Given the timing of all this, it’s natural that events in the Middle East are sparking debate here in ways I think are worth paying attention to.
Let me start with the obvious: the US-Israeli campaign against Iran’s missile infrastructure has been, by any measure, remarkably effective at suppressing the other side’s ability to shoot back. (I spoke to CNN recently about the limitations in Iranian missile operations. The coalition reportedly eliminated something like close to three-quarters of Iranian missile launchers by day ten, and Iranian launch activity fell by over 90 percent in the same period. As I wrote in my earlier Nukesletter shortly after the war started on Iran’s deterrence failures, the missile arsenal was supposed to be Tehran’s insurance policy, but its post-2024 use has revealed significant limitations. The lesson, as seen from Tokyo, is that there is much wisdom there days in trying to hit the archer (what Japan is doing now), not the arrow (the pre-2022 missile defense approach, back in the Aegis Ashore debate days).
Japanese defense planners will look at this and feel validated. Given the missile volumes Japan could face—from China’s PLA Rocket Force and from North Korea, both of which dwarf anything Iran has thrown at Israel—a strategy that thins the inbound salvos at the source has obvious attractions. I get it.
But I’ve been sharing a few points across conversations in Tokyo that I think are worth repeating here, because I think there are at least three ways this analogy breaks down that deserve more attention than they’re getting in the conversation here. More broadly, I think the lesson-learning from this war will need to be seriously tempered by regional realities and, when it comes to China and North Korea, differences in geography, CONOPs, tactics, and other factors.
First, the intelligence gap. The US-Israeli campaign rests on substantial intelligence penetration inside Iran (including truly impressive HUMINT in the case of Israel). As we learned after the 12 Day War last year, Mossad assets had pre-positioned capabilities on Iranian soil before the first shots were fired. This is the kind of deep operational preparation that has paid dividends and allowed for the launcher-suppression campaign we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks. Japan has nothing remotely like this against China or North Korea, and honestly, it’s not close. Without exquisite targeting intelligence, long-range strike weapons are expensive signaling instruments. North Korea and China will excel at manifesting these. (There’s also the matter that Iran’s missile operations CONOPs rested on taking the initiative, which was fully ceded as Israel and the United States initiated the war; this isn’t an option yet for Japan, which views “counterstrike” as compatible with its constitutional requirements for self-defense—though this could change.)
Second, the escalation problem—and this one really matters in Asia. Israel struck Iranian launchers as part of a campaign that had already killed the supreme leader and was openly pursuing regime change (or collapse). Escalation, in a sense, was the point. Japan’s situation is fundamentally different. Its counterstrike capability is framed, constitutionally and politically, around defense and a fundamentally reactive posture. But the operational logic of counter-launcher campaigns pulls hard toward preemption (which is permissible and has longstanding precedent1 in Japan that I’ve written on) and sustained offensive initiative, because launchers that have already fired are empty launchers. That tension between political constraints, which have deeply permeated strategic culture, and operational logic is unresolved.
The deeper problem is that effective counter-launcher campaigns don’t stay neatly bounded. They bleed into the suppression of enemy command and control—radar, communications nodes, satellite links, launch authority networks—because you can’t reliably find and kill mobile launchers without degrading the adversary’s ability to coordinate them. In the Iran case, that’s exactly what happened: the U.S. and Israel pushed forward launcher strikes alongside a systematic dismantling of Iran’s C2 architecture. Against a non-nuclear state and when your war aims are some mix of capacious (Israel) and inchoate (the United States), that’s aggressive but manageable. Against China or North Korea, it crosses thresholds that don’t exist in the Middle East. China’s nuclear command-and-control infrastructure is not cleanly separable from its conventional C2; degrading one risks degrading the other. North Korea’s is even more tightly fused. Strikes that look, from Tokyo’s perspective, like conventional counter-launcher operations can look, from Beijing’s or Pyongyang’s, like the opening move of a disarming first strike against their nuclear deterrent. This problem is broadly understood among defense specialists in Japan (and has been for a few years), but I’m still unclear on the planning solutions that are taking shape.
And this implicates the United States directly. Any serious Japanese counterstrike campaign would rely on American ISR, targeting data, and likely coordination through shared C2 networks. That means Washington will effectively be wrapped into a strike campaign that Beijing or Pyongyang may read as threatening their nuclear forces—whether or not that was anyone’s intention.
Third, alliance command and control. Despite not being formal allies, the US-Israeli strikes appear to have been impressively integrated, it seems (at least in the initial days of the war). Japan’s alliance with the United States aspires to a higher degree of integration for counterstrike, but the C2 arrangements aren’t there yet. Who decides when to shoot? Under what political authority? Against which target sets? Based on what I keep hearing, there’s a lot of work still ongoing (carried over from the Biden-era alliance progress) around these questions from officials on both sides. I have not heard a lot of answers. The Middle East experience is a useful illustration of what good allied integration looks like under fire; it’s also a reminder of how far Japan and the United States still need to go. And, as I argued in my Carnegie report, the solution to the escalation problem I describe above partly rests in tighter allied operational integration.
I should be clear: I think Japan is right to build these capabilities. The missile proliferation ship has long sailed in Asia (and globally) and passive defense alone doesn’t cut it. But the war in Iran is a reminder that the weapons can be the easy part. The hard part is the intelligence architecture, the doctrinal framework for use, and the alliance plumbing that turns hardware into credible deterrence without courting escalation. Japan has the missiles. What it still needs is a theory of how—and when—it would actually pull the trigger.
We may get answers as the upcoming strategic reviews progress. Much of this post also bears relevance in parts of Europe, which I’ll come back to in the future.
Links.
I have a new article out with Nicole Grajewski in Foreign Affairs that builds on my earlier arguments about why Iran’s approach to deterrence fell apart in the run-up to this war.
The WSJ reports on an Iranian ballistic missile strike toward Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which, by my reckoning, marks the longest-range combat use of a ballistic missile in history (exceeding Russian Oreshnik ranges against Ukraine and anything fired by Iran in previous operations). The 2020s truly are the decade where the lid has fully come off on missile-centric warfare.
If you’ve been following Japan’s ongoing debate about the third of the three non-nuclear principles, my Carnegie colleague Shizuka Kuramitsu has an excellent article on the history of the matter and the wrinkles that Tokyo and Washington will need to think about if any move toward ending or modifying the third principle (on the introduction of nuclear weapons) takes place.
Sharing a brief excerpt from my 2023 Carnegie report Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Escalation Risks on the background to the “counterstrike” debates: “Like in early 2017, the committee returned with a recommendation to seek long-range strike capabilities: “Our country needs to consider ways to strengthen deterrence, including having the capability to halt ballistic missile attacks within the territory of our adversaries,” the proposal document said. The committee was careful in its choice of verb, opting for the considerably neutral “halt” and eschewing terms that could imply offensive intent, such as “attack.” The constitutionality matter was largely treated as settled within the LDP, as long as the intent was to forestall an “imminent” attack. The precedent here was a 1956 statement by former Japanese prime minister Hatoyama Ichiro, who had once said that Japan could take “minimum measures unavoidably necessary,” when no other means were available, to forestall an “imminent illegal invasion.” Speaking before the Diet, Japan’s bicameral legislature, Hatoyama also expressed the view that “I cannot believe that it is the constitution’s intention for us to sit and wait for our own destruction.” Between Hatoyama’s 1956 statements and the 2020 Onodera committee recommendations, several private government-commissioned studies and remarks by public figures, including Abe, hinted at long-running interest in Japan in acquiring such capabilities—even prior to North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006.”
Good commentary from the Land of the RIsing Sun, Ankit. Take a higher-level view and look at Japan and the the Typhon missile system the US Army placed in northern Luzon and you see an anaconda-like denial plan forming.