For India and Japan, the next security challenge is not simply how to deter a crisis, but how to remain operational when a crisis disrupts the systems that sustain national power. Warships, missiles and defense budgets matter, but their effectiveness ultimately depends on fuel, critical components, repair facilities, ports and supply chains. A prolonged disruption to these systems can constrain strategic choices without a single shot being fired.

This is why India–Japan security cooperation needs a broader concept: strategic endurance. It is the capacity to sustain economic and military power when essential supplies, infrastructure and production networks come under pressure. Recent cooperation between New Delhi and Tokyo on energy resilience, economic security, critical technologies, maritime security and naval repair is already moving in this direction. The next task is to connect these initiatives into a coherent security strategy.

The vulnerability is particularly clear in energy. India imported about 88% of its crude-oil requirements in 2023–24, according to the Petroleum Planning & Analysis Cell. During 2024–25, the country imported around 300 million tonnes of crude and petroleum products, while oil and gas accounted for nearly 28% of India’s total trade by volume handled by ports. 

Japan faces a different but equally significant structural exposure: its energy self-sufficiency rate was only 16.4% in fiscal 2024, according to Japan’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

Why Energy Resilience Matters

These figures explain why energy resilience has become part of the India–Japan security agenda. In July 2026, the two governments agreed to cooperate on strategic stockpiling of crude oil and petroleum products, reserve mechanisms, emergency response, diversification of supplies and resilient maritime transportation. Strategic reserves can provide time during an immediate disruption, while diversified suppliers and upstream investments can reduce medium-term exposure. Over the longer term, alternative fuels, nuclear energy, batteries and renewable capacity can reduce structural dependence.

India’s energy transition itself illustrates why resilience must be treated as a long-term capability. India had 168.04 GW of installed solar capacity by August 2026, according to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. The transition is reducing some fossil-fuel vulnerabilities, but it is also creating new requirements for technologies, minerals, manufacturing capacity and resilient supply chains. Energy security is therefore no longer only about securing oil and gas; it increasingly involves securing the industrial systems behind the next energy economy.

The same principle applies to defense. India and Japan’s August 2026 defense engagement placed greater emphasis on maritime security, defense technology and cooperation under the Make-in-India framework. Their wider defense cooperation is increasingly concerned with maintenance, repair, logistics and industrial capability rather than only the acquisition of new platforms. India is also expanding its own repair infrastructure: in July, the government approved in-principle assistance of ₹1,570 crore for a ship-repair facility at Vadinar, explicitly linking the project to reducing overseas dependence.

This matters because military capability is partly a function of operational persistence. A sophisticated naval vessel has limited strategic value if it cannot be repaired, refuelled or resupplied during a prolonged disruption. Reciprocal access to trusted repair facilities can extend operational reach, while cooperation in design and production can create domestic knowledge, supplier networks and the capacity to maintain and modify systems over time.

Critical technologies create another layer of vulnerability. The India–Japan Joint Declaration on Economic Security identifies semiconductors, critical minerals, ICT including artificial intelligence, clean energy and pharmaceuticals as areas for project-based cooperation aimed at strengthening joint resilience. 

Neither country can realistically eliminate its dependence on international production networks. The more practical objective is selective redundancy: alternative suppliers for genuinely critical inputs, reserves where substitution takes time, and domestic or trusted-partner capabilities where concentrated dependence could become strategic leverage.

The economic relationship itself makes this interdependence significant. India–Japan bilateral trade reached about US$25.15 billion in FY2024–25, while cumulative Japanese FDI in India since 2000 stood at US$44.4 billion, according to the Ministry of External Affairs. 

Japanese investment is concentrated in sectors including automobiles, electronics, telecommunications, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The relationship is therefore not simply diplomatic. Production networks, capital and technology already connect the two economies.

That interdependence should not be mistaken for a case for economic autarky. Attempting to produce every critical input domestically would be expensive and, in many sectors, impractical. Resilience instead requires identifying where dependence is genuinely dangerous and building alternatives where the costs of disruption would be highest. Diversification is therefore more useful than indiscriminate self-sufficiency.

Need to Regular Stress Tests

This requires India and Japan to move beyond separate ministerial initiatives. Energy, defense, technology and industrial policy increasingly affect one another. A disruption to maritime transport can become an energy shock; an energy shock can disrupt industrial production; and a shortage of critical components can reduce defense readiness. 

Cross-Sector Dependencies

The two countries should therefore map their most consequential cross-sector dependencies and identify where stockpiles, alternative suppliers, joint investment, co-production or shared infrastructure are most justified.

The partnership should also be judged by operational outcomes rather than the number of agreements announced. India and Japan should conduct regular stress tests involving scenarios such as disruption to an energy route, a cyberattack on logistics infrastructure, loss of an undersea cable or the unavailability of a specialized defense component. Such exercises can expose weaknesses in communication, procurement, repair and supply arrangements before a real crisis does.

Strategic Endurance is the Key

The underlying argument is simple. Deterrence depends not only on the ability to impose costs on an adversary, but also on the ability to absorb pressure without losing freedom of action. Resilience therefore does not replace deterrence; it gives deterrence staying power.

India and Japan have already assembled many of the components required for such endurance: energy reserves, diversified supply chains, critical-technology cooperation, maritime infrastructure, industrial partnerships and defense-production capabilities. What remains missing is a framework that treats these not as separate policy initiatives but as interconnected sources of strategic power.

The next phase of India–Japan security cooperation should therefore focus less on adding another layer of dialogue and more on ensuring that existing systems can withstand disruption. 

The real measure of the partnership will not be how much power the two countries can display when a crisis begins, but how much power they can preserve after it does. Strategic endurance is ultimately the capacity to ensure that disruption creates pressure, not paralysis.

(Dr Simran Keshwani is Founder and Research Lead at IndiaForth, a Sydney-based geoeconomic intelligence firm. She is also a Sessional Lecturer at Macquarie University. Janvi Singhi is a Research Fellow at IndiaForth and Research Associate in Asia-Pacific Bureau at Organization for Threat Assessment and Peacebuilding (OTAP). She holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and is a Gold Medalist in International Relations. The views expressed are personal. They can be contacted at simran.k@indiaforth.com.au, janvi.singhi@indiaforth.com.au )