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.
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.
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.)
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
As I studied Midway, the conclusion I came to was that the Japanese made a big mistake: They had two attacks for two quite different goals going at once, and the two conflicted and were one too many.
The two attacks were (1) attacking the ground installations on Midway island and (2) defending against the US aircraft carriers.
For (1), the main goal of the whole operation was to take Midway island, but early in that operation the goal was to destroy the ability of US planes on Midway to attack the Japanese ships. The Japanese kept worrying about attacks on their ships from US planes on Midway.
For (2) the Japanese had tried to determine where the US carriers were but the effort failed, and, net, the Japanese didn't know where the US carriers were. The Japanese considered the possibility that the US carriers really were about ready to find and attack the Japanese ships.
Then, net, handling both (1) and (2) was too much and led to (A) having the Japanese airplanes busy with (1) and unable to respond to (2) and (B) giving too little attention to (2) until too late. In particular, the Japanese had to wait, wait too long, wait on their airplanes returning from their attack on Midway and have their decks full of those returning airplanes. Also they had to wait, wait too long, wait to rearm their planes with torpedoes for attacking US ships instead of bombs for attacking Midway ground targets.
Basically, either (1) for the island or (2) for the US ships was a long term effort, from getting ready, launching the planes, managing their fighter cover for their ships, recovering the planes, getting the planes below decks, refueled, rearmed, and ready for launching again. The Japanese were able to do well at all that for either (1) or (2) but not for both in the time available. The Japanese underestimated the challenge and threat of trying to do both at essentially the same time.
Great post. And one of the things that sometimes is overlooked and might be a bit overshadowed in your post was the adherence to doctrine that Japanese commanders had - that’s why the planes were sitting on the carriers in the first place.
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.
> ... with the dive bombers avoiding running into fighters, ...
The conventional narrative of the battle is that the torpedo bombers (coming in low as part of their standard attack pattern), drew off the IJN figher cover, using up their fuel and ammo. When the dive bombers attacked the IJN fleet, the figher cover wasn't in a position to stop them effectively.
The price paid for this "distraction" (which wasn't planned as such) was steep, the losses among the torpedo bomber squadrons was severe.
Absolutely. Also the torpedo squadrons arriving piecemeal due to mishaps in navigation and the USN lack of capability to quickly launch a coordinated strike, meant that the IJN carriers were occupied with launching/recovering/refueling/rearming fighters, and weren't able to launch their own strikes. So when the dive bombers attacked, the IJN strike aircraft were waiting fully loaded and fueled in the hangars, with devastating results.
What's missing from this analysis is that the US industrial base wasn't under attack while it was producing those ships.
If you play "what if" and imagine the Japanese had won Midway, and the US had no carriers at all, that gives the Japanese total control of the Pacific. The Japanese can take Hawaii if they want to, because how could the US possibly reinforce and resupply it? The Japanese can attack shipyards and ports on the West Coast at their leisure - and those would be defended obviously, but the attacks would greatly slow the progress of shipbuilding.
Fortunately for the US, they have other ports in the Atlantic. So okay, the US builds carriers there. Now the problem is, you can't just build one carrier and send it to the Pacific. If you have just the one carrier, the Japanese will be very eager to sink it. They'll have spies and recon subs so they'll know when it sorties. If you try to take it through the Panama Canal they'll ambush it.
The bottom line is, you have to build several carriers before you even think about challenging the Japanese again. That means you're looking at years - YEARS - during which, the Japanese do whatever they like. And when you finally put a carrier task force together, at best it's a fair fight ...you might lose again.
And don't forget, while all this is going on you're also fighting Germany.
> If you play "what if" and imagine the Japanese had won Midway, and the US had no carriers at all, that gives the Japanese total control of the Pacific. The Japanese can take Hawaii if they want to, because how could the US possibly reinforce and resupply it? The Japanese can attack shipyards and ports on the West Coast at their leisure - and those would be defended obviously, but the attacks would greatly slow the progress of shipbuilding.
So here's the big problem with that thesis: the attacks at Pearl Harbor and Midway stretched the IJN's supply and logistical capabilities to their utmost limits. It's very likely that in any actual attempt to take Pearl Harbor, the US would have sabotaged the port facilities to the point that it would have required months, if not years [1], to bring it back up to an operational status capable of being used as a forward operating base for striking the US West Coast. Oh, and this is Hawaii--everything has to be brought in from the mainland, which means you're diverting a lot of shipping to maintain a supply line while you're repairing the harbor at the same time. Which is going to be vulnerable to submarine activity the entire time, and Japanese anti-submarine practices were terrible.
Yes, Hawaii is the strategic linchpin of the Pacific Ocean. However, it is so remote that actually acquiring strategic control is extremely challenging. At the same time, Japan is basically running against the clock: the Essex carriers start commissioning at the beginning of 1943, and that's the countdown Japan is running against. Japan just doesn't have the time to consolidate Pearl Harbor into an advance operating base, even if it could theoretically capture it.
[1] Keep in mind that the US was still in the middle of upgrading Pearl Harbor to serve as Pacific Fleet anchorage, which was I believe a decade-long process.
From what I've read, Japan never had anywhere near the industrial capability to pull any of that off. Even landing troops and maintaining a garrison at all on Midway and the Hawaiian islands would stretch them to the limit - they arguably already didn't have the troops to spare to do that along with their other commitments in their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere plan.
Taking Hawaii at all is already outlandish, no chance that if they found a way to pull that off, they'd be able to supply it heavily enough to make it an active seaport, patrol the waters to the east aggressively, or carry out attacks against the US West Coast and their land-based defenses at a high enough tempo to impede shipbuilding there. Similarly, maintaining enough spies and subs to track ship sorties and ambushing them at the Panama Canal isn't in the cards for them.
WWII is ultimately a logistics war. Individual battles don't really matter that much, whoever makes the most stuff will win eventually somehow, and whoever is on the other side from them will lose. Japan was way too far behind on industrial capacity to have a chance. Maybe if they managed to pull off their Co-Prosperity Sphere plan without any interference and make the most of it, they'd have the capacity in 40 years. But that's doubtful too, since everyone else in their so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere hated their guts due to horrible occupation practices on the part of the IJA.
Yes Japan has almost no natural resources which is why they invaded Asian countries in the first place.
But allied submarines and seaplanes were hammering their supply lines constantly to the point they could barely get anything shipped to Japan.
The war was a Japanese gamble and quite a few intelligent Japanese predicted it would fail.
That's the reason behind why Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Japan's invasion of the rest of China though was an act of militaristic hubris that caused a net loss in resources over 4 years and led them to invade the rest of southeast asia to patch this hemorrhage which then drew the US into the conflict with its oil embargo.
Japanese military planners in 1937 knew an invasion of China would be a waste of precious resources for little potential gain. But they were sidelined by younger military officers that wanted a shot at battlefield glory and ignored orders from above for a ceasefire after the Marco Polo bridge incident. And after the first battlefield victories started rolling in it became politically impossible to halt the momentum for continued war.
I don't understand how you could question American ability to resupply Hawaii but not Japan's, given the fact that the core point is that the IJN could not afford the losses which they were suffering throughout Pacific War while the US could. The supply lines that the IJN would need to reach out so far would have given American forces the overwhelming home field advantage while greatly diminishing the capabilities of the IJN. Conversely it was no accident that the US still endured terrible losses in spite of it's overwhelming numeric advantages. The amount of manpower and material required for such long distant campaigns is enormous, and it's no accident that Super Powers are defined by their ability to wage war far away from home.
> I don't understand how you could question American ability to resupply Hawaii but not Japan's
I'm claiming that if one side has a carrier and the other side doesn't, that will determine who can reliably move convoys across the pacific.
The carriers have such an enormous capacity for reconnaissance, it's hard for me to imagine a convoy sneaking past them. So if Japan has a carrier dedicated to the blockade of Hawaii, it seems to me that Hawaii is effectively cut off.
By contrast, the US would attempt to interdict Japanese supply convoys by using the only tool they'd have left: submarines. Better than nothing, to be sure. But it's much more difficult for a sub to find a convoy, than it is for multiple airplanes.
You're proposing using capital ships--ships of which even the largest numbers had single digit numbers--to escort convoys. This takes them out of the action for any other offensive or defensive naval operation you might want to use. Instead, you'd use destroyers (of which you have hundreds) and cruisers (merely dozens). This also lets you have several escort vessels per convoy, which is superior because two ships can be in two places at once which a single ship cannot.
> By contrast, the US would attempt to interdict Japanese supply convoys by using the only tool they'd have left: submarines. Better than nothing, to be sure. But it's much more difficult for a sub to find a convoy, than it is for multiple airplanes.
... Merchant and convoy raiding by WW2 existed almost exclusively of submarines attacking convoys. The Germans did attempt using surface ships to raid convoys, but their record was absolutely abysmal, and it's pretty universally agreed among naval historians that not building those ships would have been better for Germany.
Now, in 1942, the US submarine fleet was greatly hampered by the fact that the Mark 14 torpedo was a piece of shit that didn't work, and the Bureau of Ordinance refused to countenance those claims. However, the US was historically targeting Japanese shipping with submarines the entire time, and once the Mark 14 torpedo was finally fixed, the US submarine fleet would go on to be the most successful of WW2, having sunk virtually the entire Japanese shipping fleet.
There's even more considerations that I'm not including here, but hopefully this should be enough to convince you that figuring fleet carrier numbers are not going to determine the victor of a battle for merchant shipping.
> You're proposing using capital ships--ships of which even the largest numbers had single digit numbers--to escort convoys. This takes them out of the action for any other offensive or defensive naval operation you might want to use. Instead, you'd use destroyers (of which you have hundreds) and cruisers (merely dozens). This also lets you have several escort vessels per convoy, which is superior because two ships can be in two places at once which a single ship cannot.
The Allies (mostly the US) built lots of escort carriers, precisely for escorting convoys (be it "normal" convoys or invasion fleets in the Pacific), and AFAIK they were considered pretty successful and took some of the glory of winning the battle of the Atlantic. But yeah, you can, with some justification, argue that escort carriers aren't capital ships.
> The Germans did attempt using surface ships to raid convoys, but their record was absolutely abysmal
IIRC the German auxiliary cruisers (HilfsKreuzer) were considered pretty successful, as they were cheap and since they were just converted merchant ships with guns etc. hidden they could often get quite close to a target before revealing themselves. But these were used for picking off lone merchantmen, not convoys.
> it's pretty universally agreed among naval historians that not building those ships would have been better for Germany.
Yes, the German capital ships were an almost complete waste of resources. Those resources would have been much better spent on, say, u-boats and land-based aircraft. I guess the only positive return Germany got from them was as a sort of 'fleet in being', in that their mere existence forced the allies to commit their own capital ships to the area in case they turned up to attack some convoy.
Of course, had the Germans not built their own capital ships, the Allies would have also reacted, e.g. by not building or stationing their own capital ships in the area, and spending more resources on, say, anti-submarine efforts. So I'm not certain the battle of the Atlantic would have turned out any different in this case either, just even more bloody.
Hawaii is an unsinkable carrier itself. If the US lost its carriers at Midway, Oahu would have been host to a massive force of fighters and long distance bombers.
Any Japanese fleet unlucky enough to come within five hundred miles of Oahu would be subject to an unending stream of heavy US bombers like the B17 escorted by long range fighters such as the P-38.
There would be little chance of any surprise either with radar installations far improved and a vigilant picket line of US subs.
Landing troops without air superiority would have been impossible, and it’s unclear whether a Japanese carrier fleet could even hold off US battle ships if they sailed with US air cover.
To win that parley, land troops and push a large US Army force off Oahu is almost impossible. But even then, to raid the US coast with your remaining fleet, against an even more formidable air and sea defense many thousands of miles from any resupply would be a disaster for the Japanese Navy.
Yes. By the end of the war, the USA had more carriers than then entire IJN surface fleet. Never mind all the cruisers, destroyers and such. And the fuel to run them.
The Japanese had absolutely no chance to win the war.
I don’t think it was ever their goal to straight up fight the US. They just wanted the US standing navy ruined so that they could go about their business in the Pacific.
I don’t think they counted on a few early problematic outcomes, and the US will to enter a fight over the loss of a few soldiers at Pearl Harbor.
Their naval plans specifically aimed for effectively a second Battle of Tsushima. Basically, harass the American strike force from afar to whittle them down as they steam towards the Home Islands in a decisive, epic showdown, and once the Americans lose that engagement and see their entire fleet sunk, they give up and go home. (The Kantai Kessen plan).
The entire war, the Japanese were still waiting for the big decisive battle, no matter if they were winning or losing the various engagements, but they never got the big battle they wanted. Eventually, they did try to force it at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, although that attempt did not turn out well for them.
I sometimes get the impression that the last time "decisive" battles worked was during the Napoleonic Wars. And even then the Russian campaign played as much a role as did Waterloo. After that everybody trying to force decisive battles got wars of attrition wich were ultimately lost.
The person you're replying to literally gave you an example of a decisive battle, the Battle of Tsushima.
And there are many others, depending on how decisive you mean.
The battle of Sedan in the Franco-prussian war resulted in the loss of most of the French army, their emperor and government. A siege and a few more battles had to be fought before France surrendered, but it was a foregone conclusion.
The battles of Tannenberg and Masurian lakes in WWI were decisive and stopped Russia for up to years, and they never recovered in the north, their only successes coming against the Austria-Hungarians.
In WWII, the Bagration and Manchurian strategic operations were pretty decisive on land. Midway was on water. The invasions of the low countries and France, Denmark and Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece, (present day) Malaysia and Indonesia were decisive and swift as well ( even if they indeed resulted in a war of attrition ultimately lost to allies of the decisively defeated countries in question).
Except Sedan, none of these battles were as decisive, or at least not in tye same sense, as the battles won and lost by Napoleon. The Pacific war just really started after Midway, After Bangration the Nazis didn't surrender. The Low Lands and Denmark fell early in the war. And as you said, despite being turning points, these battles were part of modern industrial wars. They didn't end the war, nor did they force parties to the negotiation table. Aiming for that, as part of a strategy, against a peer adversary stopped working in the mid 19th century. One could even argue that the British defeated Napoleon by forcing him into a decisive battle, Waterloo, they could afford to loose but he couldn't. It does work so against adversaries that cannot hope to win, or afford to loose. E.g. Denmark. If Denmark would have been the only country to be conquered that is.
> They didn't end the war, nor did they force parties to the negotiation table
But they did. France, the low countries, Denmark, Norway all surrendered following said battles. The fight was kept on by allies of theirs, but the battles themselves were decisive with regards to the fate of the country that lost.
But neither battle was decisive for the second world war. And deciding a war is what decisive battles are about.
France fought on, the Free French forces were active on each front. Including the Eastern Front. Norway formed a government in exile, and continued the fight. Including the sabotage of the Nazis heavy water production. So no, these countries didn't surrender, as defeated countries did in the Napoleonic Wars.
the Japanese leaders who were US-educated (including Konoe and Yamamoto) absolutely knew that attacking the US would steel the Americans' resolve against Japan:
> In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
I wonder why the US doesn’t produce a bunch of WW2 style carriers with light aircraft or helicopters. I’m aware the US has several helicopter carriers, but I would imagine we could build dozens of the things for the price of a nuclear carrier. Obviously they wouldn’t stand up to a near peer competitor but they could be useful for small scale conflicts with far less advanced militaries, which seems to be the pattern lately.
It's an idea that gets resurrected every so often too, and I want to say that it's been revisited lately as some articles on DefenceOne and TheWarZone have suggested.
For small-scale conflicts however, it's somewhat paradoxical that a large carrier is what you need. Putting airpower over land from a carrier requires throwing a lot of weight into the air to put an aircraft with both an effective warload and a useful loiter time. This is coupled with a large sortie rate, as the time it takes to get a warplane on station is long and needs to be replaced often. That adds up to a lot of launches.
All of that is to say then that you need a larger carrier, ideally with a catapult and the powerplant to fire it often. Skijumps and STOVL don't get you that kind of range except to the beach.
So for any kind of land strike mission, you really need a big fleet carrier. But for sea operations, smaller carriers are looking more feasable, so the idea is coming around again. The America class as you mentioned is likely going down this path, and Japan's Izumo-class is likely going to go down this route as well.
INJ didn't have a chance to e.g. invade California, but they had a plausible chance to redraw some of the map of the South Pacific, if the US had proved to not have the appetite for prolonged war.
Japan was certainly aware that in a long drawn-out war they had no chance against the industrial might of the USA. The attack on Pearl Harbor was essentially a gamble that by crippling the US Pacific fleet they could sue for peace on terms favorable to them. That is, the USA would leave them alone to continue their imperial ambitions in the Pacific region, and crucially, stop the trade embargo that had quite effectively stopped their oil supply. Well, as it turns out that gamble didn't work out in their favor.
I’ve heard that USA appeared quite weak in 1940, and Axis strategists laughed with disbelief when they heard the accurate industrial capacity reported. I’m not disagreeing with you —- Japanese military strategists were immense gamblers. I wonder if only a minority of their analysts judged it this way.
I've also read that while the IJN was quite good at carrier aviation, their lack of long-term experience fighting naval battles and focus on the offensive led to a severe deficit in damage control and efforts to reduce e.g. the risk and severity of fires from being hit, both in operation and at the design stage.
That's roughly my understanding, with the exception that AFAIK several of the IJN carriers and crew had been involved in operations in China during the invasion there, so they had combat experience (though AFAIK no attacks against the carriers occurred there).
As for fuel fires, yes, several IJN carriers were essentially lost due to fuel fires or explosions after suffering damage that otherwise would have been perfectly survivable. Perhaps most spectacularly in the case of Taiho, were inept damage control essentially turned the entire ship into a giant fuel air bomb, resulting in a spark somewhere setting of a massive explosion with catastrophic loss of life (and the end of the ship).
The USN lost Lexington that way, but crucially, they learned from this incident and instituted a system where they purged the aviation fuel lines with CO2 (cooled exhaust gases, presumably?).
Also IJN carriers had dedicated damage control teams, and a very strict command hierarchy. If you weren't on such a team, you were supposed to do your assigned duty and not do anything about the ship burning or flooding. In the USN apparently everybody nearby was supposed to help with damage control efforts.
IJN had also saved on money and used iron piping for the fire suppression system, as steel was expensive or in limited supply in Japan. This turned out to not be such a good idea when the shock from a nearby bomb blast shattered the pipes. Also said piping was not zoned to nearly the same extent as on US carriers. Not a good combination, as you can imagine.
I read a suggestion recently that there was a higher probability of sinking IJN carriers during the Indian Ocean raid [1] than at Midway. Any attacks on them would have been done by radar equipped aircraft at night with no Zeros flying.
This was a very good read. So many communication problems. Ships or aircraft were spotted or encrypted messages were deciphered - but information was not relayed for various reasons.
It wasn't as lucky as it seems. The dive bombers were able to dive straight down, almost vertically, with no risk of being shot down by the enemy Zero fighters (since they were drawn away by a previous attack).
It's more lucky that they didn't attack the same targets, than that they hit their targets.
you seem to be confusing luck with experience and skill.
what was luck was that the scouting plane flying above tf-16 didn't spot them, and even there it's debatable since the task forces where there intentionally due to an overcast weather forecast and that overcast weather was what allowed them to remain hidden.
I may concede that yorktown being bombed twice was luck, or at least unlucky for the Japanese, but even then damage party skill played an important factor in the event.
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
They didn't completely rely on that though, as they, for instance, ordered the Yamato class battleships in 1937, at great expense and years after the wargames mentioned.
The IJN seems to have been quite obsessed with their Kantai Kessen doctrine, where battleship fleets would slug it out in one decisive battle.
To be fair, some American Admirals believe in battleships fleets slugging it out. I cannot remember which battle, but it was basically caused by an American Admiral moving his BBs for just such a battle.
One can equally say that those who assumed airplanes did not present an existential threat to battleships were taking a massive gamble - it just did not seem like it to them.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that Japan’s early enthusiasm for aircraft carriers was partly driven by the terms of the Washington and London naval treaties, which limited its battleship fleet.
As for having evidence that a successful attack on Pearl Harbor could be made, its planners looked at not only the exercises described here, but also the British attack on the Italian fleet in Taranto harbor in 1940.
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.
Your hunch is correct. There is a quote from a british naval officer that roughly says that -if they were right [on aircraft carriers being the next best thing and battleships being obsolete] they'd win the war. If they were wrong, they'd lose the empire.-
The exact quote escapes my google-fu sadly. I'm quite postive I've seen it in either one of Indy Neidell and his team's WW2 week-by-week episode[0] or one of the many excellent Drachinifel's videos about all things naval history[1].
Just to play devils advocate isn't this happening right now with the US army's dependence on aircraft carriers vs the Chinese and Russian supersonic missiles?
No because Aircraft carriers are mobile and thus significantly harder to hit. Supersonic and Hypersonic's are most effective against fixed assets like airfields and bases who's locations are known ahead of time. China for example likely has missile right now aimed at Okinawa and Guam, just waiting for the order to launch.
Compare that to trying to hit say the USS Ronald Reagan. It is capable of moving 700 miles a day. They need to track its location, have a firing solution, and continuously update the tracking to ensure they actually hit it as opposed to a near miss. All of these stages could be disrupted by US assets.
Well it would be the U.S. Navy, but not quite. First, how do you even locate the carrier groups? Let’s say you do get lucky and find them. Ok. Now let’s say you launch missiles - ok the carrier group can move and also shoot down missiles. Oh and once you do launch those missiles you’ve committed to a big time war, and you’re open to counter-attack by American forces - not just the carriers but also land-based strike forces.
It’s not like the United States is sitting around saying well jeez I guess China built these missiles and we can’t do anything.
Ok let’s say you have a satellite and you somehow find US ships. Then what?
And how far is the radar range? Can you truly detect ship signatures with radar without the CSG being out of your range? Maybe a war started and the USAF bombed the Chinese radar stations? Idk.
Anyway, let’s say you launch missiles. Ok? Ships move. Ship missile defense shoots down some missiles, etc.
Now what do you do?
Idk why people think that the U.S. Navy hasn’t considered these things. As if China is going to just build some missiles and launch them and that’s that. Whenever you think things are that easy, you should wonder if you have a grasp on the scenario.
I'm sure all the US carriers are accounted by China 24x7 already! :D
+ if I had to bet, then I'd bet that modern submarines, smart mines & rockets can take out any carrier, ship or whatever, it's just that no one has done it yet for obvious reason of not starting a new WW. It's stealth & speed that gives an edge these days, instead of displaying big, slow chunks of metal in a middle of big swaths of water + even 1 "missed" rocket can make the any ship incapacitated or sunk.. & now imagine 100 hypersonic missiles launched as a swarm.
Imo carriers and ships in general are the "battleships of WW2" (considered supreme, failed miserably). Yes, still works against small countries, with limited capabilities and as a "display of power", yet practically I'd assume they'd be sunk during the first days of a REAL full scale conflict. One should never forget the level of technology during WW2 compared to these days.
ps. it's interesting that China is always considered agreesor, though it's the US that's been involved (directly & indirectly) in most of the wars of the 19th, 20th & 21st century + is the TOP1 seller of the weaponry in the world as of today.
> And how far is the radar range? Can you truly detect ship signatures with radar without the CSG being out of your range?
yes.
> Anyway, let’s say you launch missiles. Ok? Ships move. Ship missile defense shoots down some missiles, etc.
ships move means nothing at all, the missiles are tracking the ships with radar. missile defence shoots down some missiles yes, but usually the idea with these types of attacks is overwhealimg air defence systems with volume of fire, so you fire on the order of 30 missiles at once, and use a probabalistic attack to ensure one or two make it through
Overall, you seem to be the one that isn't very up-to-date. Missiles have been around for almost 80 years, but people are saying things are different now - maybe have a look into why. Hypersonic boost glide missiles can manouver sharply, travel at speeds of up to mach 5, have next to no radar signature, and can time their attacks and manouver such that they come at a carrier group from all angles at once. Many people in the pentagon are sounding the alarm - the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering recently said that such weapons hold carrier groups at risk, and ordered a review into how to defend against the threat. The department of defence has said several times that hypersonics are their "top priority". Just because you don't hear them besides themselves in the media doesn't mean they aren't seriously concerned, but this kind of thing naturally tends to be kept muted in order to not make it obvious if they are defenceless.
The biggest saving grace is that the current systems of this technology have on the order of 1000kms range. terrifying, but can be worked around. However, that range will inevitably increase with time.
> ships move means nothing at all, the missiles are tracking the ships with radar. missile defence shoots down some missiles yes, but usually the idea with these types of attacks is overwhealimg air defence systems with volume of fire, so you fire on the order of 30 missiles at once, and use a probabalistic attack to ensure one or two make it through
I think you're misunderstanding how these missile systems work and overestimating their ability to "lock on" - it's not a video game where they have near-perfect accuracy.
> Hypersonic boost glide missiles can manouver sharply, travel at speeds of up to mach 5, have next to no radar signature, and can time their attacks and manouver such that they come at a carrier group from all angles at once.
Launch of these missiles can be detected by U.S. space-based assets via their thermal signatures, so the CSG would probably know they are coming (obviously anything can happen in war and maybe this doesn't happen, but it's likely to be detected).
Once detected the CSG can begin evasive maneuvers - spreading out for example. These ships are pretty quick and even small course adjustments may render the missiles ineffective. While the hypersonic missiles can adjust in-flight somewhat, it's much more difficult to be accurate with them. Think about it - they're launching missiles from hundreds of miles away to hit tiny ships in a gigantic ocean at a high rate of speed and those ships can shoot some of the missiles down (or at least the research is being done) and move around. It's difficult for the missile to adjust.
Think about it like this: China launches these missiles, and they're very fast but they're detected. USN ships start immediate evasive maneuvers. They don't have much time, but the missile is so fast it also doesn't have much time to adjust. It's never "locked on" in any sense you may be thinking. So can the ships get out of the way? A near miss might as well be a miss by a million miles. It remains to be seen.
There's also something to consider that they aren't cheap, and there aren't very many of them. These aren't simple cruise missiles, and a Chinese launch of such hypersonic missiles is likely to not be a repeatable attack - even so you open the launch sites up to response from the CSG or air assets from other locations. In many war game scenarios I've read, China essentially launches all of the missiles and damages USN assets in the region, but the U.S. just brings more while also retaliating and destroying Chinese assets. A quick and violent war is the best hope that China has (maybe the U.S. will back down) - but long term it loses a war of attrition based on the chess pieces and what's on the board.
So even if China launched missiles and they were wildly successful, it's not going to end the war but at best buy China some time and a moral victory.
Overall, I highly question the ability of Chinese capabilities to effectively track and put missiles on targets. These capabilities will probably improve over time (unless the Chinese nation collapses due to economic factors) which will basically mean that the U.S. will think twice before attacking China due to a serious concern about damage to naval assets.
> The department of defence has said several times that hypersonics are their "top priority". Just because you don't hear them besides themselves in the media doesn't mean they aren't seriously concerned, but this kind of thing naturally tends to be kept muted in order to not make it obvious if they are defenceless
When you read articles about the U.S. military "sounding the alarm" I would not take that at face value.
As an aside - if you're interested in further reading the Rand Corporation and others put out some pretty fascinating in-depth discussions about topics like these.
Missiles are not targeted at a location. They absolubtely do "lock on" and can track a moving target. They would simply not be able to function if that were not that case. Why even use a missile at all if it worked like that, just fire a big gun. Sure there are countermeasures, but manouvering a ship won't do anything on its own. The only way things like that help is when combined with chaff or heat signature dummies.
What makes you think that tracking a ship the size of a skyscraper would be difficult but that tracking a missile would be easy? Yes, the US satelite network will soon be able to detect this type of missile launches, they are working on that capability right now - I never said ships wouldn't know that they are coming, just that there is little they can do with that information if more than one or two missiles are launched.
You seem to be vastly underestimating how well these missiles can manouver. They can't adjust "slightly", they can make sharp turns, with many times more g-forces than a regular plane - a ship has no chance to outmanouver them, any manouvers would only be to present a lower profile to a single missile or to try to confuse the missile's tracking system using some other countermeasures
Finally cost. Yes these missiles are expensive but that is several orders of magnitude lower than an aircraft carrier. Heck, its orders of magnitude lower than a single plane on that carrier
> Missiles are not targeted at a location. They absolubtely do "lock on" and can track a moving target. They would simply not be able to function if that were not that case. Why even use a missile at all if it worked like that, just fire a big gun. Sure there are countermeasures, but manouvering a ship won't do anything on its own. The only way things like that help is when combined with chaff or heat signature dummies.
I don't think this is correct with ballistic missiles or these hypersonic missiles - please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that it's not like a fighter jet locking on to a target and firing a missile. When these missiles are fired they are launched into a general area - in this case where the Chinese think the U.S. Navy ships are, and then after that the missiles will lock on to a target as they re-enter the atmosphere - they have a few seconds to adjust course and do so. They can miss.
> You seem to be vastly underestimating how well these missiles can manouver. They can't adjust "slightly", they can make sharp turns, with many times more g-forces than a regular plane - a ship has no chance to outmanouver them, any manouvers would only be to present a lower profile to a single missile or to try to confuse the missile's tracking system using some other countermeasures
What I'm not saying is the U.S. Navy can just run away or something from the missiles once they are in range, but the ships can move and the missiles can miss.
> as for reading articles about the millitary "sounding the alarm" how does the dod itself sound
It doesn't sound like anything - it's no different. These are just reports that come out form the bureaucracy. The DoD sounds the alarm on all sorts of things.
> Finally cost. Yes these missiles are expensive but that is several orders of magnitude lower than an aircraft carrier. Heck, its orders of magnitude lower than a single plane on that carrier
Cheaper than a carrier but dunno about planes. Maybe the cost can come down over time if they aren't already cheaper.
Also in the grand scheme of things the US Navy can just stay out of their range and harass supply lines, and then U.S. forces in the region can attack these missile systems and destroy them, then the US Navy can move in.
The main concern really isn't these missiles. They present a problem, of course, because they make it difficult for the U.S. Navy to effectively operate in the region (and by effectively operate we mean unimpeded), but they aren't an ace in the hole or some sort of trump card that the Chinese have.
Ballistic missiles are things like ICBMs, there it doesn't matter if you miss by a couple of miles. Hypersonic missiles are fast enough to make ship movement a negligible factor, ship are slow.
All other anti-ship missiles are guided. How bad that can end was shown in the Falkland war, the Royal Navy suffered quite a lot from Argentinian Exocets. Bought from France.
A F-35 is what, 35 million dollar plus, excluding the pilot and training cost? Missiles are cheaper, by order of magnitude.
> Ballistic missiles are things like ICBMs, there it doesn't matter if you miss by a couple of miles. Hypersonic missiles are fast enough to make ship movement a negligible factor, ship are slow.
The hypersonic missiles are like ICBMs though. They operate similarly and enter the atmosphere before coming back down. They’re not nuclear weapons where you can be close enough, they have to be accurate. A miss by 3 feet jug as well be a miss by a mile.
As the missile enters the atmosphere it only has a few seconds to course correct to hit a moving ship. The ship can potentially move just out of harms way. Not the most likely scenario but definitely plausible.
> All other anti-ship missiles are guided. How bad that can end was shown in the Falkland war, the Royal Navy suffered quite a lot from Argentinian Exocets. Bought from France.
Different kinds of missiles. Can’t really compare them.
> A F-35 is what, 35 million dollar plus, excluding the pilot and training cost? Missiles are cheaper, by order of magnitude.
Not sure that these particular missiles are. I think it’s likely they’re closer to $20mm-$30mm in cost. Plus all of the ones China has are basically R&D missiles and not proven.
Having talked to former and active Navy guys, especially working on this stuff, I can tell you that ship don't dodge shit in a modern environment. They are simply to big and slow. If you can't get rid of the attack by counter-measures or shooting the missile down, the ship will be hit.
Which makes sense, but the hypersonic missiles are not like regular missiles and are more like ICBMs. There's a small chance that if a ship takes evasive maneuvers the missile will miss because it also has to adjust targeting at the last second.
I think everybody's clear this isn't WWII style evasive maneuvers with ships trying to evade torpedoes or bombers.
I guess what you're arguing for is that if friendly satellites or whatever reconnaissance assets detect a ballistic or hypersonic missile launch, the targeted ship (or realistically, all friendly ships in the area that could potentially be targets?) can change course, and in the 10 mins(?) it takes the missile to arrive the ship can be in quite another location than that estimated at missile launch time.
I would guess such missile systems would incorporate mid course guidance updates, but then again such comms could potentially be jammed.
Typically the way these kinds of missile emplacements work is that first the ships are spotted with a command/radar unit, which then tries to categorise the ships based on their radar "signature" - in this case signature is literal, in the sense that each class of ship and sometimes even within classes has a unique radar reflaction that can be detected. Most major millitaries over the years of shadowing each other have built up databases of each other's craft including radar signatures from every angle. This is then used to prioritise targets and decide on an attack profile - so it's unlikely it would accidentally be launched at say a destroyer. They then send this plan to their missiles which all start their attack independantly, using their onboard radars to follow the target. The usual countermeasures to this like I mentioned involve using chaff, which is little bits of metal foil that are launched into a cloud in the sky, which presents as a big cloud on the enemies radar behind which the missiles cannot see. This is where manouvering may be used, if the missile momentarily cannot see then you may be able to avoid it. However with swarm attacks, which is how these missiles will almost certainly be deployed at least against a target as valuble as a carrier, they come from several directions which makes deploying chaff and/or manouvering very difficult.
I don't claim it's some secret that only china has or anything like that - the US and several other countries have deployed them as well. Its just that the vulnerability of carrier groups to them necessitates a shift in naval strategy closer to "fleet in being" - essentially that capital ships are too valuble to risk losing so are restricted in where they can operate because they are more valuble as a deterrrent than they would be actually fighting - which reduces power projection ability of carriers, similar to what the early 20th century did to battleships
The issue here is China has no capability to swarm attack with these missiles. They don’t have enough, and they aren’t proven. And once you launch them that’s it. You won’t produce any others to get a second strike. So if you launch them all (China has what, 30?) and sink a CSG, the US just sends 2-4 more and now what? Oh and the US also has aircraft in places like Japan and Korea and Guam that can retaliate.
The Chinese also don’t have a multi-direction launch capability.
The carriers are definitely vulnerable to them in general, but the notion that the carriers are now all of a sudden the same as battleships is an easy and lazy mindset to adopt. “X must be like Y” is a failure in thinking - “oh our startup will just be the Uber for X”. “We’ll be the Amazon of Y industry” etc.
Instead of saying battleships did this thing and then I think these other things will be like them, you should start with the opposite assumption and deduce from that. Assume you’re completely wrong and figure out why carriers aren’t like battleships. It will be an interesting exercise. A good question to ask would be like what’s the point of carriers if there is nothing for the planes to bomb? That makes them actually useless. Even in a scenario where the Chinese are completely capable with these missiles the U.S. fleet can just take over the oceans anyway and then what?
The U.S. has power projection independent of the carrier fleet.
If your views are strongly aligning with what you would hear on Fox News or Reddit you should be very cautious in the certainty in which you hold those views.
> First, how do you even locate the carrier groups?
Perhaps by these SAR satellites China has been launching? SAR satellites have AFAIU been fairly effectively miniaturized recently, enabling a wannabe-superpower like China to send up hundreds or even thousands of them if they want to, making it infeasible to destroy them all cost-effectively at least with today's technology.
I'm not sure what the current level of coverage these things have, but it seems that today the technology exists to track surface naval assets day and night, and through clouds, at a somewhat affordable cost (for a superpower wannabe). So the trick of hiding a carrier battle group in the vast ocean might no longer work.
> the carrier group can move and also shoot down missiles.
Considerably more difficult for ballistic missiles. I would also imagine that missiles in principle could be relatively affordable if they were mass-produced; today they are expensive because they are expensive to develop and there's no demand for a huge number of them. So you could saturate the defenses with enough missiles that even if many were shot down, at some point a sufficient number of them are going to get through.
> Oh and once you do launch those missiles you’ve committed to a big time war, and you’re open to counter-attack by American forces - not just the carriers but also land-based strike forces.
Of course, but that goes the other way as well; if those carriers launch strikes against a big modern opponent you're also in for a big time war. I just hope neither side commits such a folly.
> It’s not like the United States is sitting around saying well jeez I guess China built these missiles and we can’t do anything.
Of course not. Then again, China probably doesn't build those missiles because they think US carrier groups will easily shoot them down. Both sides certainly have smart people, as well as ossified bureaucracies gunning for the last war.
Note I'm not saying the time of carriers is gone. But it's been 80 years since carriers became the kingmakers of naval force projection, and technology has developed quite a bit since, and there (luckily!) has been no major conflict testing out these new developments. I just think it's foolish to be very certain one way or another.
> Perhaps by these SAR satellites China has been launching? SAR satellites have AFAIU been fairly effectively miniaturized recently, enabling a wannabe-superpower like China to send up hundreds or even thousands of them if they want to, making it infeasible to destroy them all cost-effectively at least with today's technology.
Sure it's possible. I think it's challenging overall but it seems neither of us are completely sure.
> Considerably more difficult for ballistic missiles.
Kind of. Ballistic missiles follow a predictable trajectory - the difference is these hypersonic missiles while mostly following predictable trajectories they can adjust a little bit more at the last second to hit a target.
> I would also imagine that missiles in principle could be relatively affordable if they were mass-produced; today they are expensive because they are expensive to develop and there's no demand for a huge number of them. So you could saturate the defenses with enough missiles that even if many were shot down, at some point a sufficient number of them are going to get through.
Potentially, but then the U.S. may have its own counter-measures. As I think about the costs, the cheapest the cruise missile got to was around $1,000,000. So I wonder how cheap you can make hypersonic missiles in order to create enough of them? They'd have to be hypersonic too b/c the U.S. is likely shooting down others that get too close to the CSG.
But also, what if China goes and builds all these missiles for a war that never comes? Or rather, what if the U.S. just keeps the fleet out of range and just chokes off Chinese supply lines from the sea?
> Of course not. Then again, China probably doesn't build those missiles because they think US carrier groups will easily shoot them down. Both sides certainly have smart people, as well as ossified bureaucracies gunning for the last war.
I agree.
> Note I'm not saying the time of carriers is gone. But it's been 80 years since carriers became the kingmakers of naval force projection, and technology has developed quite a bit since, and there (luckily!) has been no major conflict testing out these new developments. I just think it's foolish to be very certain one way or another.
My bias here is not so much with carriers or the U.S. Navy but by overestimating these missiles and their effectiveness. Whenever I hear all of the armchair generals talking about something (myself included) I immediately have to wonder how we're wrong and why we're wrong. It's like everyone predicting the next market bubble - they latch on to a relatable idea (China has so many missiles they can blow up all of our ships) and stick to it and then barely question that assumption.
> Sure it's possible. I think it's challenging overall but it seems neither of us are completely sure.
I have no idea about the exact capabilities of the Chinese military SAR satellites. But considering that a dinky little startup with a few tens of millions in funding like Iceeye is able to launch half a dozen smallsats with SAR's that have been used for, among others, tracking fishing vessels that have gone dark (shut down their AIS transponders), it seems almost obvious that a high-tech wannabe-superpower would be able to launch boatloads of similar things in order to track foreign naval surface vessels.
> Kind of. Ballistic missiles follow a predictable trajectory - the difference is these hypersonic missiles while mostly following predictable trajectories they can adjust a little bit more at the last second to hit a target.
I was thinking of this supposed Chinese anti-shipping ballistic missile (DF-21D) that has some mid/late course correction ability. The hypersonics everybody is excited about these days are of course a further step ahead of these kinds of things. But yes.
> They'd have to be hypersonic too b/c the U.S. is likely shooting down others that get too close to the CSG.
I think a stealthy subsonic (subsonic for fuel economy enabling long range without having to boost (almost) out of the atmosphere like a ballistic or hypersonic) missile could be an interesting design point - with a supersonic terminal stage. Not sure if such things are on the drawing board anywhere.
> But also, what if China goes and builds all these missiles for a war that never comes?
The same accusation can be leveled at all military spending. What if the US builds a dozen carriers and accompanying battle groups and a war never comes (not counting bombing some 3rd world tinpot dictator)? Oops, the US already did that. You can of course say they provide deterrence or whatever, but so can the Chinese.
> My bias here is not so much with carriers or the U.S. Navy but by overestimating these missiles and their effectiveness. Whenever I hear all of the armchair generals talking about something (myself included) I immediately have to wonder how we're wrong and why we're wrong. It's like everyone predicting the next market bubble - they latch on to a relatable idea (China has so many missiles they can blow up all of our ships) and stick to it and then barely question that assumption.
Fair enough. It's easy enough to get carried away speculating on the capabilities of weapons systems which are closely guarded state secrets.
The vulnerability of aircraft carriers to cheaper weapons notwithstanding, there is currently no other platform which does what a carrier group does.
So they’re very expensive and much more vulnerable than they were 30 years ago — what else is available to project power 10000 miles from the US in a robust and flexible way? When that thing exists I think we’ll adapt to it quickly.
The other uncomfortable possibility is that there will be no safe way to project force overseas in the face of overwhelming land based systems, and that the US will be limited to projecting force around where it has terrestrial assets and away from rival powers.
Kind of - but that would just eliminate everyone from projecting power except the United States, who has basis in places like Guam, Germany, Japan, etc.
Well yes, but then again no surface navy comes even close to the USN in terms of power projection capability, so it wouldn't upset the status quo in any way.
But absent a major war proving the point (or not, as it may), that's sort of how the "end of the carrier" could play out peacefully over a longer time: Improved tracking of opponent carriers (be it through satellites, drones or whatever) and improved land-based weapons forces carriers to stand away further and further, necessitating longer ranged strike aircraft. Such aircraft need to be bigger to accommodate the required fuel load, requiring either bigger and more expensive carriers, or fewer planes carried and thus reduced strike capability. Rinse and repeat a few iterations, and at some point you start thinking "what's the point of a mobile carrier since the opponent keeps track of its location 24/7, and my strike aircraft have enough range to launch from land bases anyway?"
Yes, but that's my point. You get rid of the carriers and then the U.S. is still the only country projecting power due to air bases and a sophisticated global logistics system.
But either way, even if you know where the CSG is, it can defend itself and the land-based weapons have limited range. So if you're China, the U.S. Navy can go harass your shipping lanes, and protect their own supply lines going to strategic locations.
Yes, absolutely. The US invests heavily in aircraft carriers because they've worked so magnificently at force projection around the world, without any need for regional bases.
...but with the advent of hypersonic missiles, drones, small attack boats, I have serious doubt how long they would last in any modern non-nuclear conflict.
How long will any regional base last? China or Russia knows where they are and would launch against them in the first minutes of a conflict. CSG's are the most survivable force projection assets that the US has.
It is reasonable to say that it was not so clear then as it is in retrospect, but the point being made here is that contemporary attempts to clarify the issue were not just ignored, but actively sabotaged by the naval establishment. Deliberate ignorance is not the same as being justifiably uncertain.
Flimsy planes don't sunk battleships, torpedoes do and this was proven in WW1. By the time of WW2, torpedoes were even better, also the planes carrying it. If you include bombers, it was obvious that planes can sink battleships and destroyers.
The article is about dismissing proven danger as being unrealistic. All you need to do is to have some radar stations (and not to ignore it) and patrol aircrafts and a good alerting system so you can raise your planes in the air. It is that simple.
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:
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].
From what I understand, the US doesn’t realistically intend to defend or recover either of them, let alone with CSGs, let alone with their own CSGs. The umbrella was/is? organized around deterrence, allies, and ultimately retaliation.
Carriers were/are? more for the vast supply lines going towards the areas where e.g. Swedish/Japanese stealth submarines would be bottling up Russian/Chinese assets near their coasts.
China in particular has thousands and thousands of miles of neck extending into and out of the Indian Ocean.
I don't think the USA ever intended to actually fight a war in the South China Sea. The carrier groups stationed there have always just been deterrents/security for USA allies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) to develop and prosper in the region. Which will have much greater long-term security benefits for the world and for USA.
The Reagan seems to be a particularly unlucky carrier, because she also got stalked by a Chinese sub for several days [1] And then there was German U24 "sinking" the USS Enterprise in an exercise in 2001... Maybe carriers are particularly vulnerable to diesel submarines.
diesel subs are quieter than nuclear subs and can often hide in an audio blind spot behind boats. "Blind Man's Bluff" is a great read on submarine warfare after World War 2 and a lot of the things that go with it. Ship stalking is a some what regular thing by all sides.
But it does matter. It takes two to tango and many a wise man have backed down from a winnable fight with a bloody nose. The US isn't forced to go to war with China over Taiwan. IMO it's more that those that want to retaliate are never anywhere near the war. If generals and politicians were in the first wave in an attack to retaliate against China invading Taiwan, retaliation would never happen.
On the other hand if a war breaks out and the US gets in the middle of it because of power projection (like in the South Chinese sea) then the other side didn't start it, they escalated. You don't see PRC warships, army bases, etc. as a mainstay everywhere around US borders and coastal waters. If we did the US would instantly escalate to WW3.
You are the first to mention China going to war with the US. What was written was the US going to war with China because of China attacking Taiwan, not attacking the US. It's not that same thing. If you want to discuss China attacking the US that's fine, but this isn't about that.
> 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].
Please be serious. The only time the USSR did anything like how the US does this was the Cuban missile crisis. There have never been a ring of Russian army bases, nuclear missiles, airfields with nuclear capable bombers, etc. around the US. It has happened once on a tiny scale in modern history by someone else than the US and it almost started WW3.
Yes they’re expensive. Yes they’re more vulnerable than in the past. But they can do things nothing else can.
Is there another cheaper way to set up a complete airbase wherever you want 10000 miles from home?
A naive totaling of the Capex per CSG is roughly 24.3 Billion dollars. This does not include the cost of munitions.
An interesting question is whether you actually need a mobile airbase which necessitates large quantities of costly defensive weapons ( The new Ford carrier sails with 6 1.8 Billion dollar Arleigh-Burke class Destroyers ).
Considering a tomahawk costs roughly 1 million dollars, it may be more efficient for the Navy's power projection goals to use more portable missile platforms instead of a mobile airbase.
> Considering a tomahawk costs roughly 1 million dollars, it may be more efficient for the Navy's power projection goals to use more portable missile platforms instead of a mobile airbase.
That was the idea between both the “arsenal ship” concept that hasn’t (yet) materialized, and the SSGN conversion of a number of Ohio-class ex-SSBNs, which has.
Your numbers are off. A typical carrier strike group contains one cruiser and two destroyers for escort, not six. There aren't enough destroyers to go around.
Because they're the greatest peacetime weapons system ever invented. Until hot war breaks out, which seems increasingly unlikely under the umbrella of nuclear weapons and MAD, they are the premier force projection tool around--in essence, the best bluff a superpower can make, and crucially, it's worked since WW2.
That said, while incidents like Sweden "sinking" a carrier have happened and embarassed the Navy, carriers have been present in multiple wars since WW2 (Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq War) and haven't been sunk. If it's really that easy, one would think it would have happened when enemies actually were motivated to inflict such a loss. This suggests that the wargame conditions aren't very reflective of actual doctrine.
People here keep citing the wargames with retired Gen. Riper, who sank the USN repeatedly from the perspective of a non-peer adversary using non-technological methods to organize, and disposable, low value swarming assets to overwhelm American defenses. Both Iraq and North Vietnam had patrol boat navies and the wherewithal to invest in attacking a carrier, but didn't.
I guess the simplest answer is they didn't launch an attack because they couldn't. Specialized torpedo boats cannot generally penetrate a destroyer or cruiser screen without assistance. There is no viable way to even get into position to threaten a carrier as such a movement will be detected on radar long before a threat materializes. Even when American ships engaged in offensive operations close to the north Vietnamese coast they came out on top in clashes involving patrol boats making a large offensive operation unappealing.
The red force in the millenium challenge had access to significant capabilities that Iraq and Vietnam did not have access to such as incredibly accurate anti-ship cruise missiles.
IIRC, the embarassment of the Swedish incident was that US attack subs didn't catch the Swedish sub, which lay dormant on the seafloor until it could pop up and blast the carrier in the props.
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.
The new paradigm of China, the current naval rival of the US in the Pacific, is more akin to imitating ants than to imitating sharks. The Chinese are expanding their spheres of influence, power, and control (e.g. in the South China Sea) gradually by a plethora of means that each irritate, annoy and distress the Americans. There is no reason for China to want to sink an American carrier. Extrapolating ahead 20 or 30 years, China can foresee a time when the Chinese economy and Chinese technology are number 1 worldwide, and US influence in the Western Pacific is negligible compared to that of China. At that point, it makes no sense for the US to have a fleet way over there, 8,000 miles from home, outgunned, outnumbered, with few or no nearby bases. The number one reason for having a navy at all will be as an employer of last resort. Given the developments so far, with peace working so well for China, expect China to advocate disarmament, not to instigate major conflict. I believe that the majority in the US would prefer naval disarmament to having Chinese ships and planes patrolling 13 miles off US shores the way US Navy ships have operated near China.
> I believe that the majority in the US would prefer naval disarmament to having Chinese ships and planes patrolling 13 miles off US shores the way US Navy ships have operated near China.
If they are in international waters than nobody will care. But China doesn’t have the resources to build ships to routinely project power off the US coast. Ask yourself - why are they building empty skyscrapers? Couldn’t they build ships instead?
>If they are in international waters than nobody will care
If the USSR had put nukes everywhere around the US, even in international waters, we would not be here to discuss this today so yes people do care, a lot.
As to why they "build skyscrapers instead of warships", that's already explained in the comment you reply to. In short: because China isn't going the route of massive military to become top dog. It will become top dog without raising the part of its GDP it already spends today. Why spend a lot more on ships now when everything points to you being both richer, more technologically advanced and with better industrial capacity in 30 years than the US? Unless something significant happens China will win "the war" without firing a single shot while on the other hand the US will likely need ICBMs to "win".
Nuclear weapons aren’t ships. It’s a categorical difference that matters a lot.
You can double check if you want but pretty sure U.S./E.U. adversaries like China and Russia already do flybys and have ships sail close via international waters. It’s good for a quick media hit in western countries but nobody who is serious or matters really cares about it. The U.S. does this all the time - called freedom of navigation exercises. The Chinese or Iranians will saber rattle a bit for no good reason other than strengthening their crappy, despotic regimes, but nothing comes of it.
Re China: I think you’re wrong, largely. First, China as a whole should be wealthier. It has 4x the population. It should have 2x-3x the GDP of the U.S. yet it doesn’t. Interesting.
Second, building empty skyscrapers is a hallmark of collapsing nation states of planned economies. It’s motion for the sake of motion. It’s like a broken window fallacy.
The U.S. has some very interesting advantages and certainly doesn’t need nuclear weapons to win “the war”. It’s winning it right now as China faces a population catastrophe and the U.S. continues chugging along like always.
Again, Chyna (Trumps terms) fear is overrated. Not sure what people/Trumpists are so worried about.
> Why spend a lot more on ships now when everything points to you being both richer, more technologically advanced and with better industrial capacity in 30 years than the US?
Not sure any projections are really convincing here. And the U.S. isn’t even trying as a unified country and is spending massive amounts of money wastefully (Iraq/Afghanistan, etc.).
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.
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.
> If that doesn't lead to the use of tactical nukes, nothing will.
And that’s exactly how it should be and has been since ww2. You use nukes when someone else uses nukes. No exception. In a perfect world this keeps the balance
There wasn’t a single country to really nuke. If it was a conventional military power then the U.S. would have went to war and began attacking actual things like ships or air bases. Taliban didn’t really have those. What are you going to do, nuke random places in Afghanistan for no reason?
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.
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:
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.
> a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get
Having direct experience with wargames, I have to disagree with this. Wargames are weak evidence that too often lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions from an n of 1. The adjudication of moves by blue and red teams by the white cell is more arbitrary than not, and white cell adjudicators will often rule in ways that continue to present dilemmas for the players for the purpose of extending the experiential utility of the game. Those adjudication decisions are not strictly (nor could they be) representative of reality.
Doing a well-run wargame is very difficult, and doing a sufficient number of them simultaneously in order to test a hypothesis (with an n greater than even 1-2) is almost never done.
Wargames are more experiential and exploratory, they do not generate anything close to evidence.
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.
The West could have ended the local epidemic in about 1/2 year with the help of mRNA vaccines.
While medical system is patting themselves on the shoulder, they completely missed the opportunity.
The missed actions were
a) human challenge studies to tremendously speed up the validation of efficacy and
b) war time like effort to invest into vaccine production facilities.
Human challenge studies were rejected by ethical committees - like the risk of health of few tens of thousands were greater than the life of millions.
I am not sure what prevented the proper scale up of the production.
The mRNA vaccines were approved back in December and yet six months later they've only made enough doses for a couple hundred million people. What evidence do you have that a "war time like effort" could have ramped up production wildly faster than what they achieved? It isn't like there are any unused vaccine factories or production machines just lying around, and there'd certainly be no shortage of eager investors fund increasing capacity faster if that was possible
Moderna started ramping up back in August [0], two and a half months after they'd dosed the first stage 1 trial participant [1]. I'm just really not convinced that their scaling up was that bad that they could have done it six months faster. There are real bottlenecks involved, and some extremely specialized equipment. Not to mention that even in WW2, the United States' new naval shipyards took something like 9 months of ramping up before they launched their first ship.
These large-scale war games aren't just an opinion or a white paper though. Maybe better to ask something like how often an unconventional win in a war game could actually be replicated by an adversary in real life.
I seem to recall a similar response to massed small boats (simulating) taking out a U.S. carrier in war games a few years ago. Implying that the Persian Gulf is far more dangerous than previously understood. AIUI the Navy did nothing but cry foul. Maybe the strategy has been changed in response since.
General Van Riper used low-tech but effective techniques like using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders in a way that could not be intercepted by US ELINT/COMINT or blocked by jamming.
We are lucky Saddam did not have inventive Marine generals, because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime.
You're missing the part where those motorcycle messengers move at the speed of light, that the speed boats used were tiny commercial ones which could have never loaded let alone fired the heavy cruise missiles used and that blue force's defenses were off because the simulator otherwise would unintentionally target civilian shipping and aviation.
If the Iranians could have they would have done so already. There's a reason why they had resorted to militias and sectarian violence in Iraq instead.
> If the Iranians could have they would have done so already. There's a reason why they had resorted to militias and sectarian violence in Iraq instead.
A successful strike on a US carrier group would inevitably lead to large scale reprisals on both the attacking force and the nation launching the attack. Iran wouldn't kill a carrier just to prove they could, and would instead reserve such an attack for the event of a Carrier group attacking something of existential importance to the Iranian state.
Hitler's problem, IMHO and only militarily, was that he was right more often than not in 39 and 40. He failed to figure out why, so. As a result, he thought working against military expertise was the silver bullet. That, and that there never was a real chance to win a conventional war against the allies.
Another general that comes to mind os Field Marshal Haig. He wanted a break through on the Western Front in WW1. He got a war of attrition, which worked for him and not for the Germans. So he thought going for a break through was the way to go. It worked in the end, but for the wrong reasons.
That being said, a lot of German WW2 generals are over hyped, first on their memoirs and then by anti-communist "propaganda".
I'm not sure about that. His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort. It's because they weren't capable of understanding the dire economic need for oil and were too zoned in on their domain of expertise (military engagement). Hitler for all his faults was one of the few who knew that the only important stratetic objective at that point was oil. He failed to get a number of his generals on that same understanding, and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.
Exactly. Most people think the Eastern front was an act of lunacy. In reality it was an act of utter necessity. Hitler's only chance of potentially winning WW2 (if there ever was a real chance) was to capture more oil in Eastern Europe. They were running on the fumes of synthetic oil created from coal at that point.
Stalin knew Hitler's objectives well because of how hard Hitler was pushing for oil in negotiations before they became foes, and strategically positioned Russia's army in a way to block Hitler's advance specifically to key oil locations, while leaving other locations relatively weaker.
They were foes before they became foes. While it had the non-aggression pact, Germany could have easily persuaded Russia to give it a pass on acquiring oil by aggression in the Middle East. Germany had two reasons to not do this -- a long supply line for oil to Germany from the Middle East would have been impossible to defend if Russia wanted to sever it, and German territorial acquisitions in the Middle East would be of little value as real estate on which German people could be settled to live a prosperous Germanic lifestyle. Dictators planning world domination do not publish their enemy lists.
I think many people fail to understand that during WW2 the Wehrmacht was often forced to rely on horse carts for transporting supplies to the front. They didn't have fuel for trucks.
They didn't largely have trucks either. The 'blitzkrieg' part with tanks and motorized infantry was a small fraction of the entire army. The rest marched on foot or were transported on trains.
> and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.
This sounds interesting, do you have any sources about this?
> His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s.
My limited understanding of the eastern front is that: a, Hitler ordered the initial attack despite the warning of his generals b, forbid any (even tactical) retreat when the tides turned which eventually led to the destruction of multiple army groups.
The problem here being that his generals warned against all of his other attacks earlier in the war which were amazingy succesful. I suppose he felt that he knew better by the time of the Eastern front.
Anything about Operation Barbarossa is good. There's a few YouTube videos on the channel TIK discussing the oil objective on the Eastern front that are basic and densely packed.
> His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the attack on Stalingrad was a diversion for a symbolic victory ordered by Hitler. And when German forces were getting beat he ordered them to fight to the last man, and the general in charge was a rule follower and did not disobey orders.
In other words, I think you’re blaming the wrong person here. Germany’s generals were on the way to the Caucasus to do exactly what was needed (from Germany’s perspective) but Hitler stopped them because he was going crazy and wasn’t a good military commander.
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.
You have to take into account that some of these exploits are possible exactly because you are in an exercise and can work around the rules.
Flying nap of the Earth with a Cobra probably works because he knew the location where the AA system was located, there were no other "combatants", no air cover or spotters/infantry along the route to inform the AA that helicopter is flying low.
SF story about circling back is fun, but in a real scenario it would mean you kill a couple of guys but end up surrounded by unknown number of people and infantry.
At least during Vietnam (and according to “The SOG Chronicles”), it seems like the special forces guys were really out there in areas the US didn’t exactly admit to going (Cambodia, Laos). As such, taking them down probably wouldn’t cause much of a counter reaction.
Flying noe was used in several missions in WW2, it was a known tactic so you cannot say "it only works because ...". A fast plane or helicopter flying noe is detectable, but until the people detecting it can inform the people that can intercept, the mission can be over and the aircrafts returning to base.
i think part of the point is - in some circumstances you can not fly low because you open yourself to certain types of engagement, and that for a particular test you could be certain that incoming helicopters wouldn't be that low.
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.
This story is a lot less impressive when you start learning the details.
Such as the fact that the motorcycle messengers traveled at the speed of light to instantaneously transmit orders. The fact that the salvo of cruise missiles came from boats which could not carry them, and the fact that simulator's fleet defenses were turned off to prevent them from targeting commercial air and commercial shipping.
"Van Riper famously used "motorcycle couriers" to get around the destruction of his C2 network. The problem was that this was handled as simple handwaving, with him saying that he would use motorcycle messengers to handle all the message traffic. Despite supposedly doing so, he continued to relay messages as if he doing so with a normal communications network. Essentially, his motorcycle messengers were treated as being just as efficient as an electronic communications network. Clearly, that wouldn't be possible, hence the folks joking about "light speed motorcycles"."
It's really concerning that the Navy had serious accidental collisions years after that attack. It suggests that it's still alarmingly easy to get close to a destroyer without anyone noticing.
Curiously the Japanese Navy War Gamed their attack on Midway in a similar fashion, and the "USA" team placed their carriers exactly where Nimitiz did a few weeks later, and sank the Japanese fleet.
The top brass then "re floated" and announced the US Navy must sail from Pearl and so be ambushed, as per plan.
This story is absolutely bonkers. If the wikipedia page is true, this paints a very ridiculous state of US high brass. I refuse to believe that a major military nation may engage in such petty stupidity. Thus my conclusion is that the whole summary of the events is carefully crafted to misled future enemies of their true capabilities.
Exercises are different. When you don't have to fear death for you or your troops, you don't act the same I guess. I think the blue team would have thought twice about letting their ego run the show if the red team had used life ammo.
Fortunately for everybody, I have no influence on any military nor political force anywhere. Or any relevant responsibility for that matter. The world is safe from my wrong opinions.
There's plenty of cases like this. One that comes to mind is AIM-4 Falcon: afaik they delivered 30 thousands of those missiles, despite the fact that it essentially didn't work.
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)
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.
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.
I was under the impression that the Millennium Challenge's red team was playing as Iran, not Iraq.
A "tenacious and unconventional enemy willing to use elite troops in daring and near suicidal ways" particularly known for their use of speedboats blended with more traditional military material is the Revolutionary Guard's MO.
Yeah, the descriptions I have read of the red team fits Iran much better than Iraq. Simulating an attack against the Iraqi navy seems rather pointless.
Yes, Red team played like peak Iran - but the actual purpose of the Millennium Challenge was to wargame Iraq no matter what might have publicly been said.
They never publicly said either way because that would have been a diplomatic nightmare. But it's clear the game only makes sense if red team was Iran.
> In 2002 the Pentagon ran an expensive wargame designed to simulate what a war with Iran would be like—and the U.S. lost heavily.
Iraq's military was set up completely different than what red team did, as Iraq tried to have a traditional, symmetric military. This is because, as a minority controlled nation, they were attracted to the added legitimacy it gave their regime to not have a focus on assymetric warfare. Tanks in columns make the state look stronger to the populace, even if you get trounced in an actual battle.
But why the amphibious assault then? And why did they give Iraq, a land locked nation, a navy? Red team were assigned equipment like a peak Iran but were forced to play like a demoralized Iraq. It does not make sense unless there was politics involved.
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 ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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!)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
FDR didn't cut off Japan's oil because of their occupation of China. During Japan's occupation starting 1937 American companies were making plenty of war profits supplying oil and metal to Japan's military, with the US government only sending strongly worded letters.
Japan's oil was cut off in 1941 because they started seizing Southeast Asian colonies of European powers that had been occupied by Germany in 1940, and these colonies were significant suppliers of oil and rubber for the conflict in Europe. If Japan had limited its activities to China the US might have continued its war profiteering indefinitely.
>>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.
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.
> 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.
The Japanese had no intention of occupying Hawaii. They simply wanted to incapacitate the US Pacific Fleet. Had the US Pacific Fleet's carriers been in port at Pearl Harbor at the time, they would have succeeded.
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-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.
The US trying to throw spikes against Japan's tires to slow down its destruction of China left Japan "no choice but war"? Only because they were unconditionally committed to their horrifying attack against China.
From Japan's perspective, the US actions may have left them no choice but war. That doesn't make the US actions wrong; it makes the Japanese pre-WWII perspective incredibly skewed and incredibly morally flawed.
Certainly all of the major combatants of WWII have blood on their hands and committed what would certainly today be called atrocities and war crimes. That being said, there's certainly massive differences in motivation and scale.
For that reason, Imperial Japan certainly ranks right up there together with Nazi Germany as the most evil regimes in recent history, and the US of that era does not (saying this as a non-US'ian who is generally pretty critical of the post-WWII foreign policy adventures the US has gotten itself involved in).
The Japanese started planning their revenge on the US since commander perry forced them to open trade. The US has a history of creating cassus belli like mexican war and Vietnam etc but what you link to is propaganda. And WW2 we had a clear cassus belli for Japan. Japan not only did things more evil than any other force on the planet I’ve ever read about in history as listed in the rape of Nanking but never faced any real consequences from paying reparations or apologizing and even today it’s full of the equivalent of Holocaust deniers who continue to spew falsehoods in defense of the poor Japanese who were only trying to liberate Asia from imperialists
And Korea and everyone, right? The us had its racism, blocking of black pilots for most of the war, and rounding up and basically forcing the loss of businesses for Japanese Americans. It's painful to imagine my grandparents supported all those things too, cause I asked them. Imagine the after the war differences too.
Japan didn't bomb native settlements because doing so would have been a waste of resources that offered no strategic advantage. It would be like during the revolutionary war if Britain had focused on destroying the (largely neutral) Native Americans settlements instead of the "occupiers".
Also, Japan brutalised and terrorised every nation it occupied during the war (and before). If Japan brought no harm upon the "occupied" Hawaiians it certainly wasn't out of any ethnic good will towards them. Does anyone seriously thank that, had Japan won the war and occupied Hawaii, it would have treated the natives any better than it treated the Chinese or Vietnamese?
As long as we're bringing up historical facts that are only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand, let's also remind ourselves of the rape of Nanking, the Burma death railway, Unit 731, the tens of thousands of PoWs that Imperial Japan murdered in its camps and the twenty million people who were killed (many of them by chemical and biological warfare) in Japan's genocidal campaign against China.
Thanks for the history lesson, but what was the point of it? Are you arguing that Japan was a liberator here, responding to calls for help from Hawaiian government-in-exile? In any case, they had attacked US military assets in full conscience, did they expect it not to lead to war?
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.