Richard Fernandez wrote 15 years ago in his essay “The Ten Ships”:
Admiral Nagumo launched his infamous attack on Pearl Harbor from a nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu. But Admiral King had the sense to understand that the location itself had little significance. It was the Kido Butai, the ten carriers which made up the Japanese Fast Carrier force which momentarily occupied that ocean waste that he had to destroy. While the Kido Butai existed it could move across the vast spaces and attack at a point of its choosing. While it survived every patch of ocean was dangerous. Once it had been neutralized all the oceans of the world were potentially safe. As John Adams in his book If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War wrote: “sink ten ships and win the naval war”. Both the Nihon Kaigun and the CINCPAC understood this. The entire purpose of subsequent American naval operations was to find and sink these ten ships; and the Nihon Kaigun’s subsequent efforts revolved around their attempt to preserve them.
Keeping that in mind, we can see that Midway Island itself was merely a plot device that existed to bring about the desired battle.
Fernandez’s larger point is that a correct strategy in a competitive environment must take into account the opponent’s center of gravity. In order to perform this exercise, one must engage in empathy in order to understand the opponent. To Fernandez, that center of gravity was the Japanese carrier fleet which would allow the Japanese to project power throughout the Pacific.
Keeping in mind that Fernandez’s primary object in the essay is not to critique the Great Pacific War, I will add two modifications. The first is that the true center of gravity turned out not to be the Japanese carriers themselves but rather the pilots who flew the planes off of them.
While by June 1944 the balance of forces had turned decisively against the Imperial Japanese Navy, it was still able to deploy carriers in force as seen in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. It was also able to use the carriers themselves as bait during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. However, by that time it no longer had the trained pilots to make those ships effective weapons of war; the pre-war Japanese navy understood the operations of carrier warfare quite well, but completely failed to understand what a prolonged campaign would mean in terms of the true center of gravity, provision of pilots.
The second modification is that the Kido Butai not only served as a striking arm for Japan in the Pacific but provided the strategic depth necessary for Japan’s defense perimeter. As such it provides a parallel for another important anniversary.
Today is the anniversary of the D-Day landings, and while we celebrate “The Longest Day” and the beginning of what Eisenhower termed the “Great Crusade,” Allied planners saw their area of operations not in terms of just Normandy on one day, but as all of France for weeks to come in the form of the inevitable German response. Both the Allies and Germans understood that the success of the Allied invasion would depend not just on the events of June 6th, but also on the ability of both sides to build up combat power in the area of operations.
The Allies would not only have to bring all of their forces literally across the Normandy beaches, they would have to build that combat power in a very restrictive geographic space. The Germans, on the other hand, had access to very large forces in theater, especially the various Panzer divisions located near Paris and Calais, which could (theoretically) arrive faster in order to contain the beachhead and crush it. Time was the key.
The Allied solution to the problem was two-fold. The first was deception: Operation Fortitude, in order to convince the Germans the real invasion would be in Calais, and therefore delay the German commitment to Normandy. The second was to isolate Normandy from the rest of France through air power by destroying rail communications. By the time the Germans were able to deploy their forces in theater, it was too late.
In retrospect, Guadalcanal was an anomaly where the Japanese could fight an American invasion force while having some access to sea communications. Even then the Japanese made the mistake of committing their forces piecemeal. The First Marine Division showed what an island garrison could do with a modicum of outside support.
In the future, with the enemy carrier fleet matched and then neutralized, any American invasion would have total control in any place it desired along the Japanese defensive perimeter. Any Japanese island garrison, seeing such a fleet appear offshore, knew it was doomed, since it was cut off from the rest of the Empire. As opposed to Guadalcanal, where American planners knew they could not keep the invasion fleet offshore for more than a few days given the state of Japanese forces, the Americans could stay now in force until the enemy on any particular island was destroyed.
The real purpose of Fernandez’s essay from 15 years ago is to contrast the strategic foresight of the American planners in WW II, with the ineptitude of the Obama crew in 2009-10 and its “war of necessity.” Obama’s machinations show that a core precept of strategy is management of politics. In Obama’s case the national conduct of war was subordinated to the need to protect Obama’s domestic political flank.
Fernandez’s essay also brings back the vivid memories of the post-9/11 period, stretching across not only the Obama but also the Bush administrations, showing the inability of the American leadership class to correctly identify the center of gravity of the post-9/11 world — not so much from ignorance as from an inability to manage the politics of it all.
Rather than identify radical Islam, or rather the radical natures within Islam, as the “Ten Ships,” US leaders chose euphemisms that they thought would be more politically acceptable. They then pursued an insane campaign of expeditionary counter-insurgency warfare to enforce their euphemisms, as opposed to isolating radical Islam like a Japanese garrison of old.
“the insane campaign of expeditionary counter-insurgent warfare”
I thought it turned utterly insane when they abandoned the idea of a punitive expedition and decided on a war of occupation, featuring “nation-building” and all the other garbage.
And then Iraq. Oh dear, oh dear.
…the ineptitude of the Obama crew in 2009-10.
Even granting that any sufficiently thorough incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, I still decline to accept that Obama and his pals were merely incompetent.
There was malice then and there is malice now from these people, aimed at America and the American people. That’s how we ended up with a Venezuelan gang taking over apartment complexes in Colorado while the left pretended it wasn’t happening, among a myriad other disasters great and small.
but completely failed to understand what a prolonged campaign would mean in terms of the true center of gravity, provision of pilots.
One reason why Japan had a lacking of trained pilots was because they had a serious lacking of fuel available for them to fly. I think of that when I recall that whomever was ruling the country while Biden was busy pooping his pants emptied the strategic petroleum reserve and of course also worked hard to ensure that domestic production was hamstrung in every way possible.
Again, this wasn’t mere incompetence. It was treason.
The fuel problem with Japanese pilot training became manifest in the latter part of 1944.
The problem by the time of the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” was that the Japanese hadn’t implemented the type of pilot replacement system that the US had. As Hornfischer and others have pointed the Japanese would weed out flight candidates to produce the best of the best, modern-day Samurai and then fly them until they burned out or died. That’s great but hardly the way to fight a prolonged war or to sustain a branch of the service.
The US on the other hand while highly selected made sure to both adequately staff and then to rotate their pilots with the “best of the best” rotating state-wide for instructing new pilots The result was the both development in 1943 and maintenance of a highly competent arm
The Japanese decline, on the other compounded, as it was forced to rush poorly trained pilots into the fleet with disastrous combat results- see the Marianas – which led to lost battles and degraded position so that after the loss of the Philippines and the resultant loss of oil from Indonesia there was no way to recover.
thats an interesting view of the goals of the Navy, but the Army had a harder goal, to drive the Imperial Army all the way back, you get a notion of the close quarter naval engagements that Hornfischer illustrated in the Solomons, in that Ottto Preminger piece ‘in Harms way’
well, what was the goal in the Vietnam war, to hold Saigon to take Hanoi, that didn’t really seem to make sense, MacArthur for all his folly, seem to have a target, aim at the source,
now he didn’t have enough men, to fight the PLA , a similar thing could be said of the goals of the Afghan expedition, take Kabul, but then there was the whole Federated Territories, in Pakistan, but would that have sufficed, because Islamism is as dominant as Shintoism in the IJA
The “ten ships” narrative has something more than a touch of 20/20 hindsight. The navy’s battleship pursuit was far more than a pretense. The last sortie of the Yamato stimulated a major response. The naval Battle of Guadalcanal was notable for the number of surface engagements and the paucity of carrier action. In 1942, the ascendancy of the carrier was not so clearly manifest.
What'[s almost universally overlooked is that, for Japan, China was the quagmire of quagmires. I’ve never heard just what Japan hoped to gain from their mainland expedition; what they got was a near war with the Soviet Union, and a decade slog that makes Vietnam and Afghanistan together look like a weekend pleasure excursion.
The fact that Japan never completed a capital ship started after Pearl Harbor shows the resource constraints. Japan had fairly advanced radar but never managed to deploy it effectively, especially airborne.
Mike and Trent several years ago pointed out that Japan never really recovered the aviators they lost at Pearl Harbor and Midway, on through the rest of the war. Losses of ships and personnel were permanent, all while we were building dozens of carriers and almost countless numbers of other ships. Turning tens of thousands of just average guys into aviators, and all the other roles that mechanized warfare required.
Could we do the same today? Is a future war of ours even going to last long enough for some sort of general mobilization to take place? We see those sorts of wars in Ukraine and Israel. Is something like that plausible for us? I have trouble imagining a scenario, probably why I shouldn’t take up writing thrillers if I want to keep eating regularly.
We were at war with Iran. We never admitted that basic, simple truth.
This allowed domestic enemies to lie about the nature and identity of the enemy we were fighting.
Strangely, this is exactly the same thing that happened with Vietnam. In that war, America’s enemies characterized the war as an uprising of the people against American colonialism when the reality was that it was always an invasion by North Vietnam of the South.
Truth matters. Allowing lies to define you can be the reason you lose.
we have been certainly, one might think the seizing of the Embassy was definitely an act of war, the bombing in Beirut made it unmistakable, there were other skirmishes, the bombing of Torrejon Afb in Spain (although that might have been a join effort with Syrian Salafis) then Khobar towers another joint venture, and of course we have the Afghan and Iraq expeditions, the Iranians were some of the early supporters of the Northern Alliance along with Russia, but they turned and supported the Taliban at some point, they also gave some support at other Salafis like Zarquawi,
Ten ships? I thought it was six: AKAGI, KAGA, SORYU, HIRYU, SHOKAKU, ZUIKAKU. Granted the latter two were damaged and depleted respectively following Coral Sea, but I was sure the Kido Butai was comprised of those big fleet carriers.
Mad Soprano – The six ships you mentioned were the fleet carriers. The remainder of the ten were either light or escort carriers (Zuiho, Ryujo, Taiyo) or the Hosho which was the IJN’s first carrier and alternated between being used as a training vessel and assigned to the fleet.
Following Miguel’s comment, I would take the ideas Mike expresses in the above two paragraphs further. W didn’t want to confront the Saudis or Pakistanis over their support for jihadists, and nobody wanted to acknowledge that Iran has been at war with us since 1979. The Obama people were also to some degree sympathetic with the mullahs and/or whomever else they perceived as the anti-western side.
The Biden administration destabilized the post-GWOT status quo through weakness, leading in part to the Oct 7 attacks. Those attacks forced Israel to escalate its own running war with Iran, including by attacking Iran directly. And here we are.
The common theme throughout all of these geopolitical events has been some combination, the percentages of involvement by the respective sides fluctuating over time, of Sunni and Shiite jihadist aggression and Persian imperialism. What the West needs to defeat are the specific religious and political movements driving the anti-western jihad. Conquering and holding territory is not the issue. The modern West is very good at conquering territory; not so good at defeating hostile ideologies and religions.
Jonathan: “The modern West is very good at conquering territory; not so good at defeating hostile ideologies and religions.”
Excellent point about the failure of the modern West, i.e. our Political Class.
If we step back, Islam is far from monolithic — suffused with schismatic groups; the Sunni versus Shia split alone is probably more significant that the former European Catholic/Protestant divide. Similarly, the Far Leftist Religion is a tapestry of groups which either hate or ignore each other — homosexuals, greenies, Marxists, etc. Back in the day when the English Ruling Class controlled much of the world, they would have seen immense opportunities for their favorite strategy of “Divide & Conquer” as a way of defeating hostile ideologies and religions.
The difference between then & now? For all their despicable nature, the Olde English Ruling Class probably invested a lot more time trying to understand the people they intended to exploit. Our modern Betters can’t be bothered paying that much attention to anyone except themselves.
thanks, some seem to miss in a variation on klausewitz, how war is being carried out through other means, see the two convoys, one by sea, and one by land converging on gaza,
most of the Mandarin class on either side of the ocean, seem to be intent in misunderstanding our adversaries goals as well as means,
Strategy without consideration of implementation or even just politics is simply an abstraction. For the policy maker it may be the difficulty of mobilizing resources needed to effect a given strategy or simply in choosing the right one. There are many competing considerations that prevented the selection of the “right” choice. As Clark stated in the book “The Sleepwalkers”, the British foreign secretary Grey moved the target of the nations’s foreign policy from Russia to Germany because of trying to deal with the bureaucracy at the foreign office.
As Jonathan states and Fernandez intimates, political considerations prevented both Bush and Obama from implementing a policy that identified and attacked the true center of gravity of the problem. With Bush that was a leadership issue. With Obama, who knows? Maybe a preferred outcome.
In fact it’s just not foreign policy, but any policy. There are plenty of stories about the “right” way to deal with the federal deficit but few take into account how to build a political consensus necessary o to do it. I’ll call it “The National Review” syndrome, the national policy equivalent of the guy at the staff meeting who has a lot of great ideas but no idea of how to implement them.
That in part is what leadership is about, about creating order out of chaos, Not just identifying the right solution, but showing the way in achieving it. If that’s what you are getting paid for just picking out ideas and solutions, you are just like the jerk in the meeting.
While leadership has certain heroic connotation to it of “over the top” and “Horatio at the bridge,” it’s more than that or just fireside chats and involves a lot of the very ugly but necessary side of politics.
Bush shied away from that and a lot of people, a lot of Americans, died of the wars he launched instead to no effect.
To Miguel’s very good point of misunderstanding our adversaries goals and means, I will point to John Boyd’s OODA loop. The popular conception of OODA it is that the goal is to run through it faster than your adversary but in reality Boyd meant it as a targeting mechanism especially the ability of you or your adversary to “orient” yourself to your environment without which there can be no proper decisions. Disrupt your opponent’s ability, or fail to develop your own ability, to correctly orient to the environment – in this case center of gravity – and you lose.
The fuel problem with Japanese pilot training became manifest in the latter part of 1944.
Perhaps, but my main reason for mentioning this to provide a nice segue into my complaints about our present Deep State and its relentless efforts to undermine America in every way possible.
The problem by the time of the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” was that the Japanese hadn’t implemented the type of pilot replacement system that the US had.
It wasn’t just pilots. By this time the US had better aircraft, better combat control over those aircraft, better anti-aircraft fires, and more of everything. Japan was screwed by this point in the war- and since their war plan was to convince the US to accept peace after their initial victories, I’m sure they knew it.