21 ms·

We only ever talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor

427 points by stanrivers 5y ago

travisjungroth 5y ago
This story is amazing. The story of US war games seems to commonly be "Yeah the Read Team won but..." and no changes are made. Maybe those are just the stories I hear. It's also interesting to consider if the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened if it weren't for our own dress rehearsals we carried out in front of the Japanese. Maybe war games are a bad idea when they're too big to keep secret and you're too politicized to integrate the lessons. Admiral Yamamoto didn't have to worry about upsetting US Navy top brass. He was able to benefit from our lessons, even if we weren't.
- rjsw 5y ago
  Japan also learned plenty of things from Taranto [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
- jabl 5y ago
  In the recent(ish) movie Midway there is a scene where the IJN is wargaming the upcoming attack, and they get their asses kicked since some cheeky junior officer playing the Americans doesn't keep the carriers waiting in Pearl Harbor but rather NE of Midway (which is what later happened in reality). So they reprimand that officer and restart the game with the clause that the US carriers must stay at Pearl until the attack on Midway island starts. Don't know whether such a wargaming episode happened in reality.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Yes, it did. See Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. (One additional feature often seen in the story is the part where the umpire "resurrects" the two Japanese carriers which were "sunk" in the attack---that part is usually overplayed, since it would be a waste of time to continue the game without the two carriers and there were still questions to be answered.)
    - jabl 5y ago
      I keep hearing good things about that book. Alas, my interest in Midway only seems to go so far and I'm finding myself unwilling to commit to actually reading that book. Oh well, maybe one day..
      - credit_guy 5y ago
        I don't have much time lately to actually read books, so I listen to them on my bike ride to and from work. I have had "Shattered Sword" as a paperback book for more than 10 years, and never read more than 2 pages in it. Once I started listening to the audiobook, I pretty much had to finish it. It's about 24 hours of audio. Longer than it would take to read it, but if you don't find time to read it, it's quite a good substitute.
        dotancohen 5y ago
        I cannot recommend audio books highly enough. I've been promising my daughter to read Harry Potter for years, but only with the audiobook have I been able to fit it into my schedule. I also finished The Martian on audiobook, which was probably the most riveting book that I've read since childhood.
  - enkid 5y ago
    I mean, if you know the adversaries plan, it's pretty easy to come up with something that wrecks it, which is what it sounds like that officer did. What the Japanese didn't know was that the Americans also knew the plan.
    - TwoNineA 5y ago
      Americans also got lucky that George Best and Wade McClusky were able to hit the carriers knowning that most attempts in the battle so far have utterly failed.
      - jabl 5y ago
        It seems that the Americans were very lucky at Midway indeed, with the dive bombers avoiding running into fighters, and the hangar decks filled with loaded and fuelled bombers waiting to be spotted once the attacks were over. Which made them extremely vulnerable to anything hitting the hangar decks, and even a few hits were enough to doom the ships. Not entirely unsurprising that upon entering the jet age the USN demanded their own expensive but less flammable brew JP-5 instead of "standard" jet fuel (which itself is much less dangerous than the aviation gasoline that was the cause of many WWII carriers burning).
        SkyMarshal 5y ago
        The amount of luck involved in the US victory at Midway is astonishing. About the only part of it not due to luck was the codebreaking that tipped off the US about the coming Midway attack, the heroic efforts of the dock workers in getting the damaged Yorktown fixed and back to sea in 72hrs, and persistence of the aviators who finally broke through the Japanese defenses and hit the carriers. This video series from the Japanese perspective is pretty good and shows all the luck involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo&list=PLLeOB_bZlkeZUj_gD_ACWGK6geCl-LMZx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo&list=PLLeOB_bZlk...
        ghaff 5y ago
        You can probably argue that the Americans' singular lack of essentially any success early on was a bit unlucky. But the ultimate decisiveness of Midway was very much a case of everything going right at a couple points for the US. Probably wouldn't have altered the course of the war given US manufacturing power (and the upcoming atomic bomb). But keeping Midway saved an airfield much closer to Japan than Hawaii was.
  - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    The "World War 2 in Real Time" series follows the events of the war 79 years after they happened. Midway happened 79 years ago this week, so this week's episode should be good.. https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo/videos
  - anamax 5y ago
    The big problem for the Japanese at Midway was that they only had 4 carriers. With 6 carriers, all of the the Japanese wouldn't have had to decide between protecting their carriers vs attacking US carriers vs attacking Midway. They could have done it all. Heck, even one more carrier, for a total of 5, would have significantly reduced the task-overload. That's why the original Japanese plan for Midway had 6 carriers. So, why didn't they follow the plan? The answer is the Battle of Coral Sea, a month earlier. While the US lost one carrier (Lexington) and almost lost Yorktown, one Japanese carrier was significantly damaged while another lost most of its aircrew. Japanese doctrine at the time didn't transfer pilots between carriers, so Coral Sea took two carriers from Midway. If the Japanese had transferred pilots from the damaged carrier to the carrier without an aircrew, the Japanese could have had 5 carriers. Five carriers would have likely resulted in a Japanese win at Midway. That said, the US would win the war in the Pacific as long as it sank a Japanese carrier for every 2-3 it lost.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > The story of US war games seems to commonly be "Yeah the Read Team won but..." and no changes are made. Maybe those are just the stories I hear. War games are not fair really. For either side. No-one know what the actual outcome of a manouver would be. Also, if Red's commander is way better, Blue's paper strategy might still be preferable. My feeling is that big military exercises is a exercise in logistics foremost.
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > My feeling is that big military exercises is a exercise in logistics foremost. Varies. Getting people familiar with command and control procedures is a key theme. In the UK, 'Army HQ' manages the process of ensuring that forces are ready for operations - which is where the training happens. When the country deploys troops on an operation, various units and sub-units are assembled into a mission-specific force which is ultimately under the control of a Joint Task Force HQ, not the Army's peacetime HQ. Exercises are a key part of the peacetime 'readiness cycle' through which the various force elements are prepared for ops. An exercise might test the staff of a battlegroup HQ to receive orders from a Brigade HQ ('Higher Control' in exercise-speak) and in turn generate orders that are given to its constituent sub-unit HQs. Such an exercise might last for a week and have separate phases for Planning and Execution activities. The different HQ elements need this type of training because the precise mission-specific C2 arrangements simply don't exist when the forces are in their peace-time barracks. Logistics are entirely simulated in such an exercise so that you don't need half the army around to train 50-100 staff. In fact there is such a thing as a Tactical Exercise Without Troops that totally focusses on HQ processes so as to avoid wasting the troops' time while the staff in the exercising HQ get their act together. Field exercises using laser-simulated weapons might involve 'last mile' logistics activities but there is no way they will involve the complex logistics supply chains of a real deployed force.
- micropresident 5y ago
  It's very likely that Pearl Harbor was intentional to get popular support for entering World War 2. There's evidence that the president had been briefed on the attack and they intentionally did not move the fleet.
jvanderbot 5y ago
This sounds very familiar. You should look up the millennium challenge to see this play out again in modern times. https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/ https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-r... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
- Marazan 5y ago
  The Millennium Challenge was a farce but _the Millennium Challenge was completely right_. The point of the millenium challenge was to see if modern advances in C3 could allow a numerically inferior force to the one used in Desert Storm could invade Iraq successfully. What they discovered was against a tenacious and unconventional enemy willing to use elite troops in daring and near suicidal ways then America would take unacceptable losses. But..... That's not the enemy they were going to face. They were going to face the Iraqi army. So whislt on the face of it the "reset" was ludicrous it was also appropriate. And, I was a critic of the US military's strategy for the Invasion of Iraq, I thought the force ratios were insufficient and I was wrong. The Millennium Challenge did indeed show that C3 advances were sufficient to allow the lower force ratios to succeed. (Of course the Millennium Challenge did have other failures in the limits of what it was testing. The occupation of Iraq was botched from the opening days as whilst the force numbers were sufficient to beat the Iraq army they were not sufficient to occupy the country in a way that stopped it descending into chaos)
  - mcguire 5y ago
    That's a well-known failure mode of modern professional wargames: they analyze the heck out of the first three days and then hand-wave the rest of the campaign.
  - bluejekyll 5y ago
    Saying this up front, as an American, I believe we were lied to and misled in lead up to the invasion of Iraq, and someone should have gone to jail for that. That said, this statement isn’t quite this simple, “ they were not sufficient to occupy the country in a way that stopped it descending into chaos.” The US administration made a decision to disband the Iraqi military and it’s other paramilitary forces. That meant that all existing structure for maintaining order in the country was lost. By doing this, it necessitated a large occupation force, that never was created, and only made the US more hated there. Look at the occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII and it’s a very different outcome and one where existing systems were left in place to help maintain an orderly transition.
duckfang 5y ago
Lets remind us our dates. July 4, 1898, the Newlands Resolution was a joint resolution by the United States Congress to annex the independent Republic of Hawaii. In 1900, Congress occupied the Territory of Hawaii, despite the opposition of most native Hawaiians. Dec 7, 1941 is when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawai'i, an occupied territory. August 21, 1959 is when they were forcibly turned into a state, after 60 years of occupation. Note that Japan did not bomb native settlements and cities where civilians and natives lived - only the occupying force. Edit: both posts are at -4. And indeed it's sad to see close minded nationalism take and keep hold. The world is bigger than from Hawai'i to Maine, and the USA is often the aggressor. I liken to consider myself a citizen of the earth, and not any one nation.
- monoideism 5y ago
  > Dec 7, 1941 is when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawai'i, an occupied territory. With the end objective of occupying themselves, like they occupied so many countries during WWII. > Note that Japan did not bomb native settlements and cities where civilians and natives lived - only the occupying force. Yes, because those settlements had no military value, so they focused on targets of military importance. When able, the Japanese had no hesitation about killing or raping local inhabitants of the places they occupied during and before WWII - see Nanking and Korean "Comfort Women". I'm OK with someone criticizing US conduct in Hawaii in the years leading up to WWII, but let's not pretend that imperial Japan was some kind of benign force for good in the world during the same time period.
  - duckfang 5y ago
    I suggest you look up some reading on the subject, and try to shy away from the US propaganda. No Choice but War: The United States Embargo Against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqmp3br https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqmp3br Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History And you'll find out that there was continual and worsening relations with Japan due to US imperialism. Hawai'i was only one such territory colonized and conquered. And there were economic sanctions from 1931 to 1941 for various products. But this is also out of the US playbook to surround an enemy or proposed enemy, pull out economic sanctions, and then pull out the single bad thing. For example, here's the AFB's around Iran https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d67205db3b8a9d820ca77d77364f94a https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d67205db3b8a9d820ca77... , but we're supposed to only look at Natanz nuclear refining. Now, I'm not saying that Japan was honorable in combat. They death-marched Chinese. The "comfort women" were rape and murder victims. But really, all nations have similar horrific stories. Japan, alike the US, was no different in that regard.
jacksonkmarley 5y ago
This is a good article, and the story is certainly emotionally appealing, with the maverick who goes against the prevailing wisdom being proven correct in the end. I wonder how this sort of story would look when put into the context of a large scale investigation into military strategy and dissenting voices. When these contrarians pop up are they usually right? Maybe there are heaps of them and 9 out of 10 times conventional military strategy is the better option? Modern military history seems to have so many examples of leaders being wrong, including 'successful' ones, it's hard to extract a clear narrative in many cases.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Taken from the universe of all ideas, a random contrarian idea is usually wrong. Taken from the universe of contrarian ideas pushed by domain experts and backed up by successful experiments, they're usually right. Paul Graham recently wrote an essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html Ernest King (the red team commander in the second wargame) wasn't a random newbie: he eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations in WW2. And a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get. Amazingly, real-world experience is still often discounted by people in charge, which shows the power that existing paradigms and status-quo bias have on people.
  - marvin 5y ago
    If leaders and strategists around the world could take one single lesson from the Covid pandemic, it should be that you must never, never underestimate the power of mental inertia and the status quo. It leaves all but an elite few in the dust when reality suddenly changes in what's perceived to be an instant. Most normally competent people will behave as complete morons for the 6-12 months it takes them to understand the new reality. Of course, reality has been changing for a long time, but in principle there's still time to react when it becomes obvious to well-placed observers. I'm sure that an organization that's able to internalize that lesson will have an immense strategic advantage in a conflict against a peer force. Whether that be a virus, a military adversary or a competing industrial entity.
pmontra 5y ago
In other wargames: You might remember that the Ronald Reagan was sunk by a Swedish stealth submarine in 2005 [1] and that there is little hope to save the Baltic and Taiwan if Russia and China decide to occupy them [2]. [1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-stealth-submarine-sank-us-aircraft-carrier-116216 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-ste... [2] https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/ https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-t...
- tpmx 5y ago
  [1]: > Key Point: Why are we still building aircraft carriers when even Sweden can sink them? Oi. Still a fair question, though.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    One complication is that sinking a US carrier would likely trigger nuclear retaliation. Even if the enemy is in a good position to do so, that will make them think twice.
    - senko 5y ago
      Would it, tho? Answering a conventional strike in international waters with a nuclear one (and at different target instead of the original attacker, since you can't really nuke a sub) is crossing the Rubicon, there's no going back from that.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        Yes. Sinking an aircraft carrier would likely kill several thousand personnel at once. If that doesn't lead to the use of tactical nukes, nothing will.
        warkdarrior 5y ago
        Bringing down the Twin Towers in NYC killed several thousand people at once. US did not use nukes against Taliban/Al-Qaeda in response.
richliss 5y ago
This is one of the best things I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Thank you.
Giorgi 5y ago
This was really interesting, it's tragic that so many people died because of the ignorance.
GuardianCaveman 5y ago
My uncle flew Cobra helicopters in Vietnam and the us developed a new anti air system and he was supposed to fly against it to demo its effectiveness. I don’t recall the story well but he flew nap of the earth and in a certain manner he knew would counter the aa system and embarrassed the hell out of the bluefor test team and engineers who said he cheated. A friend in the army did an excercise at Bragg where Special forces made him and the other guys attached into opposing force to hunt them down. My friend and his team circled back from the trucks and climbed in the bed and when the sf got tired of looking for them and came back to the truck my friend popped out from under a tarp and simulated kill with miles gear and they said he cheated as well. I guess there are a lot of egos and sore losers in the military throughout history.
- kevmo 5y ago
  Check out the most expensive War Games in history -- the USA got annihilated, and there were a lot of hurt feelings. The Lt. Gen. quit in the middle of the games, because he kept winning and they kept changing the rules to force a USA victory. Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
  - 5y ago
jabl 5y ago
Well, in retrospect it's easy to say that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete. But with the information available at the time, I don't think it really was that clear back in 1932. Back then, no capital ship had been sunk let alone been severely damaged(?) by aircraft. Aircraft, and in particular naval aircraft, at the time were flimsy biplanes, with monoplanes slowly entering the scene. Sinking a battleship with those? Pfft, entirely reasonably people said. I mean, put yourself into the hypothetical supreme naval planner of, say, the US or Japan at the time. Are you really going to gamble your entire nations (or empires, if you will) capability to project force overseas on the notion that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete? If you're wrong, the enemy battleship fleet will just shrug off your feeble aerial attacks and proceed to crush your navy and conquer your overseas assets. So in that sense it's no surprise that both USN and IJN built both battleships and carriers. And at least the US kept building them long after Pearl Harbor (though the Iowas were all ordered before Pearl Harbor, but they weren't cancelled in favor of carriers or converted into such either).
- aqme28 5y ago
  Totally agreed, politically, but wasn't Billy Mitchell demonstrating air power vs naval as far back as 1921? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Project_B:_Anti-ship_bombing_demonstration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Project_B:_Anti... It seems mostly like the powers that be weren't ready to accept it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jabl 5y ago
    Indeed, Mitchell's experiments were one of the first to suggest that air power might have a role beyond scouting in naval combat. And no doubt, history proved him to be right. But again, it would still have been a very risky gamble that air power is the future when all your potential adversaries are building ever bigger battleships.
- greggyb 5y ago
  > I mean, put yourself into the hypothetical supreme naval planner of, say, the US or Japan at the time. Are you really going to gamble your entire nations (or empires, if you will) capability to project force overseas on the notion that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete? Per the fine article, Japan did devote their preparations to air superiority and carried out exactly the attack forewarned by the 1932 war games. So, yes, that seems to have been a good strategy.
i56asg5h 5y ago
Colonel Billy Mitchell, the "father of the US Air Force," was famously court marshalled in 1925. He had predicted that in the future Japan would attack Pearl Harbor with aircraft. He predicted 'aircraft traveling 1000 miles per hour would fight each other in the stratosphere'. He predicted troopers would one day parachute behind enemy lines. He predicted long range heavy bombers. He aggressively argued for stronger investment in air power, against a resistent brass, who, irritated with him, had him court martialed. A great 1955 Gary Cooper film tells his tale, "The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell." This is the climactic court martial scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecMYH3dPIUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecMYH3dPIUI
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Not to be pedantic, but he was court martialled for calling his superiors criminally negligent to the media. The video you linked makes that clear.
elihu 5y ago
The article makes a good case that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to surprise attacks and the Navy had good reasons to be aware of that at the time. However, that being the case, what should they have done differently to be less vulnerable? Clearly they needed some kind of early warning system, and they actually installed a radar installation which was brand new technology at the time. (Unfortunately, they didn't heed the warning when it came.) What else should they have done?
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Well, it doesn’t get any simpler than taking threats seriously. Beyond that a night shift and early morning patrol into the blind spots couldn’t have hurt.
sthnblllII 5y ago
FDR goaded Japan into that attack by cutting off their oil and suppressed intelligence about the impending attack to ensure a decisive entry into WWII over the opposition of 90% of the American public. Having political leadership so opposed to the will of the people is a state US 'democracy' seems perpetually unable to end, re Iraq, Vietnam, WWI, WWII etc. Hearing US lecture governments that fight on behalf of their people instead of manipulating them into war would be a national embarrassment if Americans weren't firmly ensconced in their pro-US empire media bubble. PS: FDR began sending supplies to the USSR before pear harbor despite its mass murder and atrocities across Eurasia and extreme unpopularity of the Soviet government with the US public. The embargo with Japan was made for geopolitical reasons and any "humanitarian" argument is post hoc. EDIT: Remarkably, President Herbert Hoover remained politically active in the post-FDR media landscape and his account of the events and of FDRs actions leaves little room for doubt about FDRs aims in his foreign policy with Japan. https://www.hoover.org/research/freedom-betrayed-herbert-hoovers-secret-history-second-world-war-and-its-aftermath https://www.hoover.org/research/freedom-betrayed-herbert-hoo...
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Do you have a cite for the suppression of US intelligence prior to the attack? The mainstream history sources I've read have suggested no such thing and led me to believe the US really was caught with their pants down. The Japanese sent an envoy to alert the US after the attack started, but while trying to maintain plausible deniability that they tried to make contact beforehand. Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time. Continuing to supply oil would be supporting that occupation. It's true though that part of Japan's motive for the attack was that oil was running out.
  - cpleppert 5y ago
    >>Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time. See chapter 8 of The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars. War between Japan and the United States was a certainty to FDR's advisors if an oil embargo was imposed.
jgeada 5y ago
It is as if people keep thinking of the military as this altruistic organization staffed by pure self-sacrificing people willing to put it all on the line for the defense of country. Sure, that is somewhat true of the troops. But the generals and leaders are political beasts that know the true purpose is to call coddle the status quo & divert gargantuan sums of money into private pockets with as few questions as possible. This is why when real wars happen and the stakes actually suddenly matter there tends to be a large upheaval at the top to discard the political animals. When was it the last time you heard of a US general being fired for incompetence when a procurement projects they led goes totally off the rails (as they almost always do), blowing any notion of budget, time & preparedness ?
Lammy 5y ago
IMO the use of aircraft isn't even the most interesting part of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Having an aircraft carrier isn't very useful if you can't load it with enough fuel to get to a target and back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underway_replenishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underway_replenishment
- shakezula 5y ago
  To add to this: One of the reasons they originally targeted Pearl Harbor was to take out our oil and fuel reserves there, but at the last minute they changed targets and went for our ships instead. From what I've read, if they had taken out our reserves there, our entire foothold in the pacific would have been lost for a year plus while we rebuilt, and we would've had to move our carrier forces back to the pacific coast, which would've been devastating at the time. The entire pacific theatre effort from the U.S. would've been crippled before it could've started. War is really just a game of logistics.
mjlee 5y ago
First Sea Lord (Head of the Royal Navy) Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson described submarines as "Underhanded, unfair and damned un-English". He also suggest that enemy submariners be tried as pirates and hanged if caught. Thankfully (for the RN...) reason prevailed and submarines were in service for the First World War. The pirates association lives on today though - RN submarines returning from deployment still fly the Jolly Roger.
NotSammyHagar 5y ago
I'm surprised to see no mention of the interesting recent book, 2034 by a recently retired us admiral, about how in about 10 years China, through tech superiority, could beat the us, and badly. "A Novel of the Next World War, 2034", by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis. It has a lot of things that resonate with these war games thoughts. I loved it.
- ericmay 5y ago
  If you like reading about this stuff, Rand Corporation has a fascinating analysis that I recommend reading. Long story short is the US wins in almost all cases except a short violent war with severe losses up-front, but that is very unlikely and it may actually result in the US engaging in a long-term violent war. China knows this too. The longer it takes for this war to happen the better China will do, but the U.S. geographic situation is too good. The U.S. east coast is permanently protected which means supplies come in, planes can be built, etc. and the U.S. can indefinitely attack and harass Chinese forces. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html
darepublic 5y ago
Would it have been possible for the Japanese to parlay the attack into a full scale invasion of Hawaii?
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Training enemy has a price. Those j admiral from USA West Point ... observing is just one. It has gone before. As the training of Ag. And ... It is going now. Good luck USA.
dng88 5y ago
Training enemy has a price. Those j admiral from USA West Point ... observing is just one. It has gone before. As the training of Ag. And ... It is going now. Good luck USA.
srb24 5y ago
It is very odd that the attack is often taught as something just out of the blue - e.g. there was the Japan War Scare of 1906-1907 https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/japan1906.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/japan1906.htm and Japanese citizens in the US were bascially treated like 2nd class citizens stoking up a lot of resentment (not that I'm defending the attack or the Japanese military/fascist leadership!)
AdrianB1 5y ago
This is not a story about a war as much as a story about organizations that know better. You can see these cases in various circumstances, from the military to governments to private companies where incompetent decision makers dismiss anything they don't like.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

427 points by stanrivers 5y ago

This story is amazing. The story of US war games seems to commonly be "Yeah the Read Team won but..." and no changes are made. Maybe those are just the stories I hear. It's also interesting to consider if the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened if it weren't for our own dress rehearsals we carried out in front of the Japanese. Maybe war games are a bad idea when they're too big to keep secret and you're too politicized to integrate the lessons. Admiral Yamamoto didn't have to worry about upsetting US Navy top brass. He was able to benefit from our lessons, even if we weren't.

rjsw 5y ago
Japan also learned plenty of things from Taranto [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
jabl 5y ago
In the recent(ish) movie Midway there is a scene where the IJN is wargaming the upcoming attack, and they get their asses kicked since some cheeky junior officer playing the Americans doesn't keep the carriers waiting in Pearl Harbor but rather NE of Midway (which is what later happened in reality). So they reprimand that officer and restart the game with the clause that the US carriers must stay at Pearl until the attack on Midway island starts. Don't know whether such a wargaming episode happened in reality.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Yes, it did. See Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. (One additional feature often seen in the story is the part where the umpire "resurrects" the two Japanese carriers which were "sunk" in the attack---that part is usually overplayed, since it would be a waste of time to continue the game without the two carriers and there were still questions to be answered.)
  - jabl 5y ago
    I keep hearing good things about that book. Alas, my interest in Midway only seems to go so far and I'm finding myself unwilling to commit to actually reading that book. Oh well, maybe one day..
    - credit_guy 5y ago
      I don't have much time lately to actually read books, so I listen to them on my bike ride to and from work. I have had "Shattered Sword" as a paperback book for more than 10 years, and never read more than 2 pages in it. Once I started listening to the audiobook, I pretty much had to finish it. It's about 24 hours of audio. Longer than it would take to read it, but if you don't find time to read it, it's quite a good substitute.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        I cannot recommend audio books highly enough. I've been promising my daughter to read Harry Potter for years, but only with the audiobook have I been able to fit it into my schedule. I also finished The Martian on audiobook, which was probably the most riveting book that I've read since childhood.
- enkid 5y ago
  I mean, if you know the adversaries plan, it's pretty easy to come up with something that wrecks it, which is what it sounds like that officer did. What the Japanese didn't know was that the Americans also knew the plan.
  - TwoNineA 5y ago
    Americans also got lucky that George Best and Wade McClusky were able to hit the carriers knowning that most attempts in the battle so far have utterly failed.
    - jabl 5y ago
      It seems that the Americans were very lucky at Midway indeed, with the dive bombers avoiding running into fighters, and the hangar decks filled with loaded and fuelled bombers waiting to be spotted once the attacks were over. Which made them extremely vulnerable to anything hitting the hangar decks, and even a few hits were enough to doom the ships. Not entirely unsurprising that upon entering the jet age the USN demanded their own expensive but less flammable brew JP-5 instead of "standard" jet fuel (which itself is much less dangerous than the aviation gasoline that was the cause of many WWII carriers burning).
      - SkyMarshal 5y ago
        The amount of luck involved in the US victory at Midway is astonishing. About the only part of it not due to luck was the codebreaking that tipped off the US about the coming Midway attack, the heroic efforts of the dock workers in getting the damaged Yorktown fixed and back to sea in 72hrs, and persistence of the aviators who finally broke through the Japanese defenses and hit the carriers. This video series from the Japanese perspective is pretty good and shows all the luck involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo&list=PLLeOB_bZlkeZUj_gD_ACWGK6geCl-LMZx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo&list=PLLeOB_bZlk...
        ghaff 5y ago
        You can probably argue that the Americans' singular lack of essentially any success early on was a bit unlucky. But the ultimate decisiveness of Midway was very much a case of everything going right at a couple points for the US. Probably wouldn't have altered the course of the war given US manufacturing power (and the upcoming atomic bomb). But keeping Midway saved an airfield much closer to Japan than Hawaii was.
- cbm-vic-20 5y ago
  The "World War 2 in Real Time" series follows the events of the war 79 years after they happened. Midway happened 79 years ago this week, so this week's episode should be good.. https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo/videos
- anamax 5y ago
  The big problem for the Japanese at Midway was that they only had 4 carriers. With 6 carriers, all of the the Japanese wouldn't have had to decide between protecting their carriers vs attacking US carriers vs attacking Midway. They could have done it all. Heck, even one more carrier, for a total of 5, would have significantly reduced the task-overload. That's why the original Japanese plan for Midway had 6 carriers. So, why didn't they follow the plan? The answer is the Battle of Coral Sea, a month earlier. While the US lost one carrier (Lexington) and almost lost Yorktown, one Japanese carrier was significantly damaged while another lost most of its aircrew. Japanese doctrine at the time didn't transfer pilots between carriers, so Coral Sea took two carriers from Midway. If the Japanese had transferred pilots from the damaged carrier to the carrier without an aircrew, the Japanese could have had 5 carriers. Five carriers would have likely resulted in a Japanese win at Midway. That said, the US would win the war in the Pacific as long as it sank a Japanese carrier for every 2-3 it lost.
rightbyte 5y ago
> The story of US war games seems to commonly be "Yeah the Read Team won but..." and no changes are made. Maybe those are just the stories I hear. War games are not fair really. For either side. No-one know what the actual outcome of a manouver would be. Also, if Red's commander is way better, Blue's paper strategy might still be preferable. My feeling is that big military exercises is a exercise in logistics foremost.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > My feeling is that big military exercises is a exercise in logistics foremost. Varies. Getting people familiar with command and control procedures is a key theme. In the UK, 'Army HQ' manages the process of ensuring that forces are ready for operations - which is where the training happens. When the country deploys troops on an operation, various units and sub-units are assembled into a mission-specific force which is ultimately under the control of a Joint Task Force HQ, not the Army's peacetime HQ. Exercises are a key part of the peacetime 'readiness cycle' through which the various force elements are prepared for ops. An exercise might test the staff of a battlegroup HQ to receive orders from a Brigade HQ ('Higher Control' in exercise-speak) and in turn generate orders that are given to its constituent sub-unit HQs. Such an exercise might last for a week and have separate phases for Planning and Execution activities. The different HQ elements need this type of training because the precise mission-specific C2 arrangements simply don't exist when the forces are in their peace-time barracks. Logistics are entirely simulated in such an exercise so that you don't need half the army around to train 50-100 staff. In fact there is such a thing as a Tactical Exercise Without Troops that totally focusses on HQ processes so as to avoid wasting the troops' time while the staff in the exercising HQ get their act together. Field exercises using laser-simulated weapons might involve 'last mile' logistics activities but there is no way they will involve the complex logistics supply chains of a real deployed force.
micropresident 5y ago
It's very likely that Pearl Harbor was intentional to get popular support for entering World War 2. There's evidence that the president had been briefed on the attack and they intentionally did not move the fleet.

jvanderbot 5y ago

This sounds very familiar. You should look up the millennium challenge to see this play out again in modern times. https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/ https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-r... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Marazan 5y ago
The Millennium Challenge was a farce but _the Millennium Challenge was completely right_. The point of the millenium challenge was to see if modern advances in C3 could allow a numerically inferior force to the one used in Desert Storm could invade Iraq successfully. What they discovered was against a tenacious and unconventional enemy willing to use elite troops in daring and near suicidal ways then America would take unacceptable losses. But..... That's not the enemy they were going to face. They were going to face the Iraqi army. So whislt on the face of it the "reset" was ludicrous it was also appropriate. And, I was a critic of the US military's strategy for the Invasion of Iraq, I thought the force ratios were insufficient and I was wrong. The Millennium Challenge did indeed show that C3 advances were sufficient to allow the lower force ratios to succeed. (Of course the Millennium Challenge did have other failures in the limits of what it was testing. The occupation of Iraq was botched from the opening days as whilst the force numbers were sufficient to beat the Iraq army they were not sufficient to occupy the country in a way that stopped it descending into chaos)
- mcguire 5y ago
  That's a well-known failure mode of modern professional wargames: they analyze the heck out of the first three days and then hand-wave the rest of the campaign.
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  Saying this up front, as an American, I believe we were lied to and misled in lead up to the invasion of Iraq, and someone should have gone to jail for that. That said, this statement isn’t quite this simple, “ they were not sufficient to occupy the country in a way that stopped it descending into chaos.” The US administration made a decision to disband the Iraqi military and it’s other paramilitary forces. That meant that all existing structure for maintaining order in the country was lost. By doing this, it necessitated a large occupation force, that never was created, and only made the US more hated there. Look at the occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII and it’s a very different outcome and one where existing systems were left in place to help maintain an orderly transition.

duckfang 5y ago

Lets remind us our dates. July 4, 1898, the Newlands Resolution was a joint resolution by the United States Congress to annex the independent Republic of Hawaii. In 1900, Congress occupied the Territory of Hawaii, despite the opposition of most native Hawaiians. Dec 7, 1941 is when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawai'i, an occupied territory. August 21, 1959 is when they were forcibly turned into a state, after 60 years of occupation. Note that Japan did not bomb native settlements and cities where civilians and natives lived - only the occupying force. Edit: both posts are at -4. And indeed it's sad to see close minded nationalism take and keep hold. The world is bigger than from Hawai'i to Maine, and the USA is often the aggressor. I liken to consider myself a citizen of the earth, and not any one nation.

monoideism 5y ago
> Dec 7, 1941 is when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawai'i, an occupied territory. With the end objective of occupying themselves, like they occupied so many countries during WWII. > Note that Japan did not bomb native settlements and cities where civilians and natives lived - only the occupying force. Yes, because those settlements had no military value, so they focused on targets of military importance. When able, the Japanese had no hesitation about killing or raping local inhabitants of the places they occupied during and before WWII - see Nanking and Korean "Comfort Women". I'm OK with someone criticizing US conduct in Hawaii in the years leading up to WWII, but let's not pretend that imperial Japan was some kind of benign force for good in the world during the same time period.
- duckfang 5y ago
  I suggest you look up some reading on the subject, and try to shy away from the US propaganda. No Choice but War: The United States Embargo Against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqmp3br https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqmp3br Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History And you'll find out that there was continual and worsening relations with Japan due to US imperialism. Hawai'i was only one such territory colonized and conquered. And there were economic sanctions from 1931 to 1941 for various products. But this is also out of the US playbook to surround an enemy or proposed enemy, pull out economic sanctions, and then pull out the single bad thing. For example, here's the AFB's around Iran https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d67205db3b8a9d820ca77d77364f94a https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d67205db3b8a9d820ca77... , but we're supposed to only look at Natanz nuclear refining. Now, I'm not saying that Japan was honorable in combat. They death-marched Chinese. The "comfort women" were rape and murder victims. But really, all nations have similar horrific stories. Japan, alike the US, was no different in that regard.

jacksonkmarley 5y ago

This is a good article, and the story is certainly emotionally appealing, with the maverick who goes against the prevailing wisdom being proven correct in the end. I wonder how this sort of story would look when put into the context of a large scale investigation into military strategy and dissenting voices. When these contrarians pop up are they usually right? Maybe there are heaps of them and 9 out of 10 times conventional military strategy is the better option? Modern military history seems to have so many examples of leaders being wrong, including 'successful' ones, it's hard to extract a clear narrative in many cases.

nostrademons 5y ago
Taken from the universe of all ideas, a random contrarian idea is usually wrong. Taken from the universe of contrarian ideas pushed by domain experts and backed up by successful experiments, they're usually right. Paul Graham recently wrote an essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html Ernest King (the red team commander in the second wargame) wasn't a random newbie: he eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations in WW2. And a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get. Amazingly, real-world experience is still often discounted by people in charge, which shows the power that existing paradigms and status-quo bias have on people.
- marvin 5y ago
  If leaders and strategists around the world could take one single lesson from the Covid pandemic, it should be that you must never, never underestimate the power of mental inertia and the status quo. It leaves all but an elite few in the dust when reality suddenly changes in what's perceived to be an instant. Most normally competent people will behave as complete morons for the 6-12 months it takes them to understand the new reality. Of course, reality has been changing for a long time, but in principle there's still time to react when it becomes obvious to well-placed observers. I'm sure that an organization that's able to internalize that lesson will have an immense strategic advantage in a conflict against a peer force. Whether that be a virus, a military adversary or a competing industrial entity.

pmontra 5y ago

In other wargames: You might remember that the Ronald Reagan was sunk by a Swedish stealth submarine in 2005 [1] and that there is little hope to save the Baltic and Taiwan if Russia and China decide to occupy them [2]. [1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-stealth-submarine-sank-us-aircraft-carrier-116216 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-ste... [2] https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/ https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-t...

tpmx 5y ago
[1]: > Key Point: Why are we still building aircraft carriers when even Sweden can sink them? Oi. Still a fair question, though.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  One complication is that sinking a US carrier would likely trigger nuclear retaliation. Even if the enemy is in a good position to do so, that will make them think twice.
  - senko 5y ago
    Would it, tho? Answering a conventional strike in international waters with a nuclear one (and at different target instead of the original attacker, since you can't really nuke a sub) is crossing the Rubicon, there's no going back from that.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      Yes. Sinking an aircraft carrier would likely kill several thousand personnel at once. If that doesn't lead to the use of tactical nukes, nothing will.
      - warkdarrior 5y ago
        Bringing down the Twin Towers in NYC killed several thousand people at once. US did not use nukes against Taliban/Al-Qaeda in response.

richliss 5y ago

This is one of the best things I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Thank you.

Giorgi 5y ago

This was really interesting, it's tragic that so many people died because of the ignorance.

GuardianCaveman 5y ago

My uncle flew Cobra helicopters in Vietnam and the us developed a new anti air system and he was supposed to fly against it to demo its effectiveness. I don’t recall the story well but he flew nap of the earth and in a certain manner he knew would counter the aa system and embarrassed the hell out of the bluefor test team and engineers who said he cheated. A friend in the army did an excercise at Bragg where Special forces made him and the other guys attached into opposing force to hunt them down. My friend and his team circled back from the trucks and climbed in the bed and when the sf got tired of looking for them and came back to the truck my friend popped out from under a tarp and simulated kill with miles gear and they said he cheated as well. I guess there are a lot of egos and sore losers in the military throughout history.

kevmo 5y ago
Check out the most expensive War Games in history -- the USA got annihilated, and there were a lot of hurt feelings. The Lt. Gen. quit in the middle of the games, because he kept winning and they kept changing the rules to force a USA victory. Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
- 5y ago

jabl 5y ago

Well, in retrospect it's easy to say that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete. But with the information available at the time, I don't think it really was that clear back in 1932. Back then, no capital ship had been sunk let alone been severely damaged(?) by aircraft. Aircraft, and in particular naval aircraft, at the time were flimsy biplanes, with monoplanes slowly entering the scene. Sinking a battleship with those? Pfft, entirely reasonably people said. I mean, put yourself into the hypothetical supreme naval planner of, say, the US or Japan at the time. Are you really going to gamble your entire nations (or empires, if you will) capability to project force overseas on the notion that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete? If you're wrong, the enemy battleship fleet will just shrug off your feeble aerial attacks and proceed to crush your navy and conquer your overseas assets. So in that sense it's no surprise that both USN and IJN built both battleships and carriers. And at least the US kept building them long after Pearl Harbor (though the Iowas were all ordered before Pearl Harbor, but they weren't cancelled in favor of carriers or converted into such either).

aqme28 5y ago
Totally agreed, politically, but wasn't Billy Mitchell demonstrating air power vs naval as far back as 1921? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Project_B:_Anti-ship_bombing_demonstration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Project_B:_Anti... It seems mostly like the powers that be weren't ready to accept it.
- deleted 5y ago
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- jabl 5y ago
  Indeed, Mitchell's experiments were one of the first to suggest that air power might have a role beyond scouting in naval combat. And no doubt, history proved him to be right. But again, it would still have been a very risky gamble that air power is the future when all your potential adversaries are building ever bigger battleships.
greggyb 5y ago
> I mean, put yourself into the hypothetical supreme naval planner of, say, the US or Japan at the time. Are you really going to gamble your entire nations (or empires, if you will) capability to project force overseas on the notion that air power is the future and battleships are obsolete? Per the fine article, Japan did devote their preparations to air superiority and carried out exactly the attack forewarned by the 1932 war games. So, yes, that seems to have been a good strategy.

i56asg5h 5y ago

Colonel Billy Mitchell, the "father of the US Air Force," was famously court marshalled in 1925. He had predicted that in the future Japan would attack Pearl Harbor with aircraft. He predicted 'aircraft traveling 1000 miles per hour would fight each other in the stratosphere'. He predicted troopers would one day parachute behind enemy lines. He predicted long range heavy bombers. He aggressively argued for stronger investment in air power, against a resistent brass, who, irritated with him, had him court martialed. A great 1955 Gary Cooper film tells his tale, "The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell." This is the climactic court martial scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecMYH3dPIUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecMYH3dPIUI

koheripbal 5y ago
Not to be pedantic, but he was court martialled for calling his superiors criminally negligent to the media. The video you linked makes that clear.

elihu 5y ago

The article makes a good case that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to surprise attacks and the Navy had good reasons to be aware of that at the time. However, that being the case, what should they have done differently to be less vulnerable? Clearly they needed some kind of early warning system, and they actually installed a radar installation which was brand new technology at the time. (Unfortunately, they didn't heed the warning when it came.) What else should they have done?

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Well, it doesn’t get any simpler than taking threats seriously. Beyond that a night shift and early morning patrol into the blind spots couldn’t have hurt.

sthnblllII 5y ago

FDR goaded Japan into that attack by cutting off their oil and suppressed intelligence about the impending attack to ensure a decisive entry into WWII over the opposition of 90% of the American public. Having political leadership so opposed to the will of the people is a state US 'democracy' seems perpetually unable to end, re Iraq, Vietnam, WWI, WWII etc. Hearing US lecture governments that fight on behalf of their people instead of manipulating them into war would be a national embarrassment if Americans weren't firmly ensconced in their pro-US empire media bubble. PS: FDR began sending supplies to the USSR before pear harbor despite its mass murder and atrocities across Eurasia and extreme unpopularity of the Soviet government with the US public. The embargo with Japan was made for geopolitical reasons and any "humanitarian" argument is post hoc. EDIT: Remarkably, President Herbert Hoover remained politically active in the post-FDR media landscape and his account of the events and of FDRs actions leaves little room for doubt about FDRs aims in his foreign policy with Japan. https://www.hoover.org/research/freedom-betrayed-herbert-hoovers-secret-history-second-world-war-and-its-aftermath https://www.hoover.org/research/freedom-betrayed-herbert-hoo...

fighterpilot 5y ago
Do you have a cite for the suppression of US intelligence prior to the attack? The mainstream history sources I've read have suggested no such thing and led me to believe the US really was caught with their pants down. The Japanese sent an envoy to alert the US after the attack started, but while trying to maintain plausible deniability that they tried to make contact beforehand. Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time. Continuing to supply oil would be supporting that occupation. It's true though that part of Japan's motive for the attack was that oil was running out.
- cpleppert 5y ago
  >>Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time. See chapter 8 of The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars. War between Japan and the United States was a certainty to FDR's advisors if an oil embargo was imposed.

jgeada 5y ago

It is as if people keep thinking of the military as this altruistic organization staffed by pure self-sacrificing people willing to put it all on the line for the defense of country. Sure, that is somewhat true of the troops. But the generals and leaders are political beasts that know the true purpose is to call coddle the status quo & divert gargantuan sums of money into private pockets with as few questions as possible. This is why when real wars happen and the stakes actually suddenly matter there tends to be a large upheaval at the top to discard the political animals. When was it the last time you heard of a US general being fired for incompetence when a procurement projects they led goes totally off the rails (as they almost always do), blowing any notion of budget, time & preparedness ?

Lammy 5y ago

IMO the use of aircraft isn't even the most interesting part of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Having an aircraft carrier isn't very useful if you can't load it with enough fuel to get to a target and back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underway_replenishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underway_replenishment

shakezula 5y ago
To add to this: One of the reasons they originally targeted Pearl Harbor was to take out our oil and fuel reserves there, but at the last minute they changed targets and went for our ships instead. From what I've read, if they had taken out our reserves there, our entire foothold in the pacific would have been lost for a year plus while we rebuilt, and we would've had to move our carrier forces back to the pacific coast, which would've been devastating at the time. The entire pacific theatre effort from the U.S. would've been crippled before it could've started. War is really just a game of logistics.

mjlee 5y ago

First Sea Lord (Head of the Royal Navy) Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson described submarines as "Underhanded, unfair and damned un-English". He also suggest that enemy submariners be tried as pirates and hanged if caught. Thankfully (for the RN...) reason prevailed and submarines were in service for the First World War. The pirates association lives on today though - RN submarines returning from deployment still fly the Jolly Roger.

NotSammyHagar 5y ago

I'm surprised to see no mention of the interesting recent book, 2034 by a recently retired us admiral, about how in about 10 years China, through tech superiority, could beat the us, and badly. "A Novel of the Next World War, 2034", by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis. It has a lot of things that resonate with these war games thoughts. I loved it.

ericmay 5y ago
If you like reading about this stuff, Rand Corporation has a fascinating analysis that I recommend reading. Long story short is the US wins in almost all cases except a short violent war with severe losses up-front, but that is very unlikely and it may actually result in the US engaging in a long-term violent war. China knows this too. The longer it takes for this war to happen the better China will do, but the U.S. geographic situation is too good. The U.S. east coast is permanently protected which means supplies come in, planes can be built, etc. and the U.S. can indefinitely attack and harass Chinese forces. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html

darepublic 5y ago

Would it have been possible for the Japanese to parlay the attack into a full scale invasion of Hawaii?

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Training enemy has a price. Those j admiral from USA West Point ... observing is just one. It has gone before. As the training of Ag. And ... It is going now. Good luck USA.

dng88 5y ago

Training enemy has a price. Those j admiral from USA West Point ... observing is just one. It has gone before. As the training of Ag. And ... It is going now. Good luck USA.

srb24 5y ago

It is very odd that the attack is often taught as something just out of the blue - e.g. there was the Japan War Scare of 1906-1907 https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/japan1906.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/japan1906.htm and Japanese citizens in the US were bascially treated like 2nd class citizens stoking up a lot of resentment (not that I'm defending the attack or the Japanese military/fascist leadership!)

AdrianB1 5y ago

This is not a story about a war as much as a story about organizations that know better. You can see these cases in various circumstances, from the military to governments to private companies where incompetent decision makers dismiss anything they don't like.

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