by JAMES SIMPSON

The executions of Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa by Islamic State militants has left Japan looking for solutions to an impossible problem.

While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attempted to link the crisis to his broader project of constitutional reform, he has also posited the creation of an hostage rescue force and the legal framework to support its deployment abroad.

The idea is flawed—Tokyo has no use for a military hostage rescue capability. What’s more, Japan couldn’t have saved Goto and Yukawa from Islamic State even if Abe had already had his military reforms in place.

In a Foreign Policy article this month, a former U.S. Joint Special Operations Command officer placed the likelihood of a successful extraction of American hostage Kayla Mueller at “less than 50 percent.”

A Japanese mission would have had much lower odds of success—the U.S. has the best intelligence and special operations assets in the world. Tokyo has excellent special forces, but its foreign intelligence collection is inadequate to support a rescue operation.

Accurate and timely intelligence is critical to rescue ops. You can’t raid an enemy that you can’t pin down. The U.S. government deployed a task force into Ar Raqqa, Syria, to attempt rescuing journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff in the summer of 2014. They came back empty-handed—the militants had moved the hostages mere days before.

Given the difficulties in negotiating with Islamic State, Japan clearly lacked intelligence on the ground. With no dedicated foreign human intelligence collection capability, Tokyo’s independent secret intel consists of imagery from the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center plus diplomatic and military intelligence collected by Japan’s embassies and attaches.

The recent crisis has spurred an attempt by Japan to close the intelligence gap. The Ministry of Defense has increased the number of uniformed liaisons to the Middle East. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is also considering policies that might create a civilian central intelligence agency along the lines of the American CIA or British Secret Intelligence Service.

Such an agency could take a long time to establish and could face significant public resistance.

If anything, the deaths of Goto and Yukawa underline that non-state actors threaten the safety of Japan’s civilians abroad. Understanding the threat—and how to avoid it—is far more important to Japan’s paternalistic style of public safety governance than any military action would be.

Currently, Japan’s only hope for actionable intelligence in an international crisis is through its alliance with the United States. With more than 12,000 Japanese working in the Middle East and North Africa, Tokyo needs to be able to independently identify and track threats against its citizens. It also needs the human capital to contact and negotiate with groups that have taken Japanese captives.

What it doesn’t need is an independent military capability to extract hostages from militant groups.