Japan’s Most Dangerous Military Constraint Is Time

During a 2022 wargame I ran, bilateral planners reached a familiar barrier. U.S. forces needed to disperse from concentrated bases before the adversary’s first missile salvo. Participants believed Japan could grant emergency access to private land only after an attack, which would be too late — the authority’s trigger was also its deadline.This appeared to be a hard political constraint: the kind alliance planners record in after-action reports, script into next year’s exercise, and then carry, untested, into contingency plans, where assumptions harden into fact. But in