By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

As China accelerates its military buildup and expands its influence across Asia, its two principal regional rivals — India and Japan — face a common challenge: how to build defense institutions capable of making fast, informed decisions in an era of high-tech warfare.

Yet an intriguing paradox has emerged. Constitutionally pacifist Japan has spent the past decade modernizing its defense decision-making apparatus and empowering military professionals within government. India, despite being a nuclear-armed state confronting an increasingly assertive China along their long, disputed frontier, continues to maintain a cumbersome system that marginalizes military expertise and concentrates authority in a civilian bureaucracy largely staffed by generalist administrators.

The result is that Japan today possesses a more streamlined and operationally agile defense establishment than India.

The roots of this divergence lie in history. Following World War II, Japan feared a return to the militarism that had driven it to catastrophe. To prevent the military from ever again becoming an autonomous political force, career bureaucrats were allowed to govern the defense ministry under a doctrine known as “Bunkan Yuyu,” or civilian bureaucratic superiority.

India’s concerns were different but produced a similar outcome. As military coups swept through newly independent states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, India’s leaders sought to insulate their young democracy by systematically downgrading the institutional role of the armed forces. The defense ministry became the preserve of civilian bureaucrats, many of whom rotated in from unrelated ministries such as agriculture, education or rural development.

Over time, both India and Japan built defense establishments in which uniformed military officers wielded little influence over policymaking. But whereas Japan eventually recognized the costs of this arrangement, India largely has not.

Confronted by China’s aggressive rise and the North Korean threat, Tokyo concluded that its clunky, bifurcated defense structure had become a strategic liability. Beginning under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan embarked on overhauling its civil-military relations.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when Japan enacted sweeping security reforms that ended bureaucratic supremacy within the defense ministry. Uniformed officers and civilian officials were placed on equal footing, operational authority was consolidated under military leadership, and a new National Security Council helped integrate military, intelligence and political decision-making.

Tokyo did not abandon civilian control of the military. Rather, it modernized it by accepting a key distinction: Civilian control does not require bureaucratic domination.

India’s reforms, in contrast, have been partial and hesitant.

For decades, Indian military officers have complained of being largely excluded from higher defense policymaking. Unlike most major democracies, India has never fully integrated military headquarters into the defense ministry, leaving senior officers institutionally separated from the civilian bureaucracy.

In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government created the position of chief of defense staff. The new office was intended to promote jointness among the Army, Navy and Air Force, improve strategic coordination and drive the transition to integrated theater commands.

Yet the government has subsequently weakened the very institution it created.

Following the death of the first chief of defense staff, General Bipin Rawat, in a helicopter crash in 2021, New Delhi changed eligibility rules to allow retired three-star officers to be recalled to active duty and appointed to the country’s highest military post. Subsequent chief of defense staff appointments have reflected this new approach.

No public explanation has been offered for the change. Yet by selecting retired officers rather than serving chiefs, the government erodes the institutional weight and independence of the chief of defense staff position.

The change resembles what political scientists call “coup-proofing” — institutional arrangements designed to limit the emergence of a unified military leadership. Such measures may make sense in states with histories of military intervention in politics. India, however, has maintained an exceptionally strong tradition of civilian supremacy since independence. Its armed forces have consistently remained outside politics and subordinate to elected authority.

Yet India’s defense institutions continue to operate as though the principal threat to democracy comes from its own military rather than from the increasingly complex security challenges emerging beyond its borders.

The consequences extend beyond bureaucratic turf battles.

A future conflict with China will not resemble the 1962 Sino-Indian war. It will unfold simultaneously across land, sea, air, cyber and space domains, with success depending on rapid decision-making, integrated command structures, and the seamless fusion of intelligence, diplomacy and military operations — the very capabilities Japan’s reforms have been designed to strengthen.

Such requirements favor systems that elevate expertise and empower professional military judgment. They do not favor bureaucratic structures designed primarily to constrain military influence.

Here the contrast with Japan becomes especially revealing. Tokyo has concluded that effective civilian control requires informed civilian oversight, not bureaucratic gatekeeping. India, by contrast, still treats civilian bureaucratic control as a democratic safeguard in its own right.

As a result, India’s civilian bureaucracy remains the principal gatekeeper of major defense decisions, strategic planning, procurement and budgetary authority.

The irony is striking: pacifist Japan has built a more nimble and modern defense decision-making system than nuclear power India.

For years, Indian reformers looked to American models such as the Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act for inspiration. Today, however, the most relevant example may lie closer to home. Japan has demonstrated that democratic oversight and military professionalism are not competing objectives. Properly structured, they reinforce one another.

If India hopes to build genuinely integrated theater commands and prepare for the demands of a future conflict, it must finally move beyond the institutional assumptions that shaped its civil-military system in the late 1940s. The country does not need less civilian control. It needs a more sophisticated understanding of what civilian control actually means.

On that question, nuclear India may have something important to learn from pacifist Japan.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“