Been listening to Dan Carlin's podcast series on the Imperial Japanese military in WWII. (It's six parts, and about 20 hours long at this point.) Coincidentally, I just listened to the part about the attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday.
He didn't mention any of these failed wargames in the podcast. Reading about it now gives a lot more context on why the commander in chief of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor knew his head was going to roll following the Japanese attack.
Supernova in the East was a great series. I read one of his major sources, Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy, immediately after finishing the series, which gave a great strategic and political view to complement Carlin's emotional view
What an epic podcast. And rather than being a straightforward recitation of events, it cleverly focuses on everything else: politics, the brutality of combat, personalities, why soldiers and commanders act as they do, and so on. It really drives home the feeling of the war as a slow-motion car accident, long in the making, impossible to stop, and horrific in its human impact. I’ve read a lot of military history, and this still felt so fresh, original, and dramatic.
Just keep in mind to take everything he says with a big grain of salt.
Quite a few times I've been mesmerized by his podcasts only to find out later its either mostly made up or a "classic" but totally discredited version of the story.
He really doesn't bother reading up on the latest and most accurate material for his topics.
It's the main reason why I stopped listening to him (the smaller one is that I will never get used to his grating accent).
Oh - interesting, I never knew that was a claimed levied against him - that his history wasn't necessarily accurate. That is a bummer. Still like what he is doing for getting the concept out there that history is worth studying and should be "cool," and you can't blame a generalist for not being 100% up-to-date on the latest findings / understandings by experts... so if its just that, I get it - if its more storytelling and embellishment - that is unfortunate.
To be fair, he always states: "I am not a historian".
So if you listen to him as a storyteller, you will have a great time, and you might learn something along the way.
Absolutely, he's the kind of guy that should fire up your interest and make you buy a real book to learn more.
However, never take the book he's actually using...most of the time it's plain outdated.
As you say, you can't really blame a guy who says 5 times per episode that he's "not a historian", but plenty of times I just can't help and wonder why didn't he spend 30 minutes extra researching a topic and choosing better material and sources. The only answer I got is that bad material makes for better stories.
And yet the US went from not being on a war footing to rolling up the Japanese forces across a huge war zone in 4 years. And this was the side hustle to the main job. But go ahead and misunderstand what happened while throwing racist comments around.
One has to wonder whether the Japanese would have thought up this strategy (or considered it feasible) had the Americans not practiced it and proved it for them.
It seems worryingly common for this kind of simulation to ironically lead to disaster. Chernobyl would be another example (the explosion happened during a safety test). And it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).
I'm not sure you can assign blame to the safety test in precipitating the disaster (perhaps this wasn't even your intention). The overarching theme in the examples you mention is that the weakness was always there, safety test or not. I'd posit that Chernobyl would've happened eventually for example. It was a design with unstable boundary conditions operated in an environment of secrecy and disregard for safety. That's basically a situation where disasters are guarantee to happen. Nobody knows anything, the default operating procedure is to withhold crucial information and everyone is working under a "don't question your orders" mindset.
It could have happened but they did blatantly disregard a lot of safety procedures in the name of the test. I should hope that would but be done during normal operation.
Ps I read the book from Adam Higginbotham, I didn't just watch the show :)
He also said it would have happened eventually but I doubt it would have in normal operation. In a power loss situation similar to what they were testing perhaps...
No, Chernobyl was only possible because so many design features specifically meant to prevent exactly this scenario were deliberately disabled, and then on top of this many more failures both technological and human had to coincide. Seriously, if you did not know it really happened, the reports would read like bad fiction given the huge numbers of obviously bad decisions and ridiculously improbable coincidences.
Again I'd posit that those steps were a consequence of a much deeper rooted issue. Yes the people doing the test were directly responsible by virtue of being in the control room at the time and making these decisions but in a culture of secrecy and bootlicking, what else do you expect?
We can argue about technicalities all day long, but in my mind Chernobyl had the following critical issues:
- The crew was kept deliberately in the dark about the weaknesses of the design.
- The crew had the ability to disable all the safety measures and bring the reactor into a very unstable condition.
Are you seriously going to place the main blame on the crew? They were pawns who made bad decisions in an environment where they were missing crucial information. In my mind, the buck stops with the people in power who discouraged the questioning of superiors, encouraged checkbox ticking exercises and withheld information by default.
It wasn't a culture of secrecy and bootlicking though. These weren't pawns following flawed orders at gunpoint, these were knowledgeable engineers acting on their own volition. I am unequivocally putting 100% of the blame on the controllers who were well aware of how their reactor worked, who disregarded the test plan, who knowingly ignored countless warning signals going off as they repeatedly disabled more and more safety systems. Chernobyl was not the result of some arcane and unforeseen design flaw which surprised the operators, it took hours of manual labor to shut off the cooling lines and raise the control rods, putting the reactor into a state it was clearly never designed to be in. The controllers weren't under immense pressure to conduct this test, in fact the test was never approved, and was delayed because of its low priority. Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have said "hey all the people who were supposed to be doing this test aren't here, the reactor is acting so weird that we're struggling to even get the right starting conditions, the grid operator doesn't want us to run the test right now, we've tested this before and it didn't work, countless warnings are going off, this test was never approved to begin with, and there isn't actually any reason to do the test right now, let's postpone it."
It's easy to say "of well they never should have been able to do this in the first place" but what does that actually look like? Reactor controllers need to be able to control the reactor. There are many reasonable scenarios where any given valve or control rod would need to be manipulated, and a long list of scenarios where you don't want to limit the options of engineers to avert a disaster. Having trained engineers be free to access what they need to but putting warning indicators in place to alert them about potentially hazardous actions is the right option. You could shift authority to other people, but at some point you have to trust that whoever it is you have placed in control of this thing will make reasonable choices.
The secrecy and the bootlicking came after the reactor blew up. Yes, had the soviet government been transparent people could have been evacuated faster and workers trying to tame the reactor could have been better equipped. The number of casualties could have been reduced, but the disaster still would have happened.
Everything is ultimately rooted in deeper issues. But none of those deeper issues made this disaster inevitable. The world is full of secretive bootlickers who have never pulled 94% of a reactor's control rods out. Secretive bootlicking does not necessitate nor encourage control rod removal. At the very worst, secretive bootlicking might prevent someone who was already going to remove a bunch of control rods from reconsidering that decision, but something else had to cause that decision to be made in the first place. That's not to say that addressing these issues can't be beneficial, and many changes were indeed implemented after the disaster, but the fact remains that this disaster didn't have to occur.
Alternatively, the weakness was obvious to anyone with a brain, noone fixed it, so the enemy exploited it.
UK government issued a pandemic readyness report. Report said the country has no protective equipment and will get rekt. This is exactly what happened. Blaming the messenger is very misguided. Negligence is endemic and always comes back to haunt you
If our military thought of it during practice then you can pretty much guarantee that some military would have come up with the plan eventually. The Japanese military wasn't inept.
> One has to wonder whether the Japanese would have thought up this strategy (or considered it feasible) had the Americans not practiced it and proved it for them.
I don't think one does. The imperial Japanese planning staff had strongly favored the doctrine of decisive battle since at least the Tsushima Strait, when it worked splendidly for them against the Russian imperial navy - a much weaker adversary than the US, true, but this was well understood and only made more pointed the need to immediately disable the US navy's ability to conduct significant operations in the intended sphere of Japanese imperial influence.
Too, it's not as if the Imperial Japanese general staff was anything less than world-class. The British made the mistake of assuming otherwise, even ignoring reports from their own observers that Japan needed to be taken seriously as an opponent. That mistake cost them Singapore and Malaya at the outset of the war, and depending on whose arguments you buy, eventually India as well. In light of that and other related history, it verges upon the absurd to repeat the mistake now.
(Really, it was entirely the other way around from what you're positing here; rather than the IJN taking a cue from US war games, we followed the Pearl Harbor attack with our entirely symbolic "Doolittle Raid" on Tokyo a year later.)
It should be noted that Pearl Harbor has nothing to do with the decisive battle doctrine. Indeed, from a strategic perspective, Pearl Harbor actually ruined the ability of the IJN to achieve a decisive battle, since the USN would be highly unlikely to risk any remaining fleet forces to seek the decisive battle that Japanese wanted, much less the Japanese model scenario of steaming en masse to somewhere near Japan.
That illustrates the strategic incompetence of the IJN. They had, without a decisive battle, won control of the seas--which is why you want the decisive battle. But they didn't exploit their control of the seas (to some degree, they couldn't--the core interests of Britain and the US were outside of the range of Japan to plausibly threaten). And by the Guadalcanal campaign, the USN wrested control of the seas (at least around Guadalcanal) away from Japan--without a decisive battle, still--and used that to devastating effect: the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal was unable to be receive sufficient supplies because of it. And still, the Japanese fretted about not having their decisive battle.
It's not for nothing that Pearl Harbor is often considered an example of simultaneous spectacular tactical success and ruinous strategic failure.
Not that you're wrong, but I don't believe I described Pearl Harbor as a strategic success; I was discussing the intent, rather than the outcome.
I do think it's fair to describe Pearl as an attempt to reconcile the doctrine of decisive battle with the increasingly evident primacy of naval air power and the numerical and resource superiority of the US. I'll grant that a surprise strike on ships in port doesn't exactly qualify as battle per se, but it was certainly intended to be decisive, and in that circumstance waiting to receive an attack in the classic style doesn't work.
As planned, the attack very well could have worked; after all, if the US fleet carriers had been at Pearl when the Japanese strike force arrived, the IJN could have counted on superiority in the Pacific until at least 1943. While in the long run that might still not have been enough, it would certainly have at least enabled them to consolidate gains and better prepare to receive US attacks in the Pacific, and in any case it's well documented that that was what they were going for.
There are at least three reasons other than the oil tanks and carries at sea why attack was a failure: 1) the ships attacked were in shallow water. Most were salvaged or repaired. 2) Timing the attack for early Sunday maximized the advantage of surprise, but minimized the number of officers and sailors on the ships when attacked, so that loss of know-how was less than it might have been. 3) The US sent ships out to counter-attack the Japanese fleet based on radio direction finding, but the signals were mis-interpreted, and the counter-attack went in the exact opposite direction of the true direction of the Japanese fleet.
There has been a suggestion that Japan should have been more decisive at Pearl Harbor and invaded and occupied Hawaii. A recent blog post [1] analysed this idea.
In advance of reading the post, but what an intriguing idea! I doubt they could have sustained an occupation force, though, not with their resource problems, not in advance of expansion across much of the Pacific. You'd have a general on the end of a hell of a long and skinny string, but you'd potentially pin down the entire US Pacific Fleet trying to deal with it and protect the response force...honestly, it's not impossible you could lose the entire invasion force and still achieve the strategic objective, if they held out long enough. And if any army in human history could do it, it'd be the IJA circa 1941, right? What a thought!
You may find Konpeki no Kantai [0] interesting as a thought experiment.
Its quite a bit more broad-ranging than just a single question, and has a lot of Japanese nationalistic sentiment, but I don't think that detracts from it being an entertaining and thoughtful watch.
>> the USN would be highly unlikely to risk any remaining fleet forces to seek the decisive battle that Japanese wanted
The USN risked their somewhat inferior (naval aviation and carrier) assets at Midway, and despite their intelligence advantage, knowing where the Japanese were going (as opposed to December 1941, when they expected an attack, but had no way of narrowing down the list of potential targets), won with the help of good fortune, which is usually a part of a victory.
If the Japanese fleet had not been so damaged at Midway, the evacuation of civilians from Hawaii had already been planned to commence post haste, ...
FDR had been advised by an expert that an early attack on the home islands would do important damage to Japanese morale by deflating the myth that their military war-cabinet regime was not putting any civilians at risk.
> it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).
Sure it's possible. But at least, according to US intelligence, it's highly unlikely. Much more likely is the virus was of natural origin.
This is essentially the same strategy that the Japanese used in the 1904 Russo-Japanese war. They launched a surprise attack on Russian forces at Port Arthur (where the Russian Pacific fleet was based) with the (successful) intention of destroying the Russian forces in the Pacific before the Russians could mobilize and provide a defense.
>> And it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).
Another interesting thing is that a bunch of US agencies did a similar exercise - a pandemic - as recently as 2019:
Agreed on whether or not the Japanese would have come up with their own strategy like this; it seems like the Japanese admiral was focused on air superiority anyway / if anyone studied the island for an extended period of time, the direction of the attack would make sense.
Chernobyl happened during an event of staggering operational malfeasance. The design was 30 years out date when built and know the world over to be dangerous. It was particularly know to be dangerous in low power situations. The brain dead party appointees installed a lever to put the reactor into a know worst case possible state artificially for the “test”. They build a water holding tank under the reactor ensuring a steam explosion in a meltdown and didn’t build a containment building. They were also forbidden by the state from sharing accident information with other plants, which could have prevented the incident. The whole thing was an engineered tragedy. To called the act of depraved hubris a “test” seems incorrect to me.
It's possible, but they were also influenced by the British attack on Taranto [1] the previous year in 1940.
That battle kind of proved out one of the concepts that the Japanese used later at Pearl Harbor: namely using ship-launched torpedo bombers to attack other ships in shallow water.
From some time around that first simulation (early 1930's), the "plan an attack on Pearl Harbor" problem was in the curriculum of the Japanese naval academy. Hawaii was known to be teeming with Japanese intelligence assets at least since the time of WW1, and its strategic importance had been well known at least since the US had made a point of acquiring the place.
There’s a school of thought that Pearl Harbor was intentionally left vulnerable in order to provide public justification for entering a war that it was pretty obvious we were getting drawn into anyway. The Nazis were vehemently anti-communist which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government, and overcoming that required an egregiously offensive violation of our national sovereignty (which Pearl Harbor provided).
The problem (well, many problems) with that particular conspiracy theory (which is what it is) is that going to war with Japan doesn't mean that the US will enter the war against Germany.
It de-facto did; the US had been providing material aid to the British for years and the axis powers had a mutual defense treaty. As soon as the US declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy declared war on the US (meaning they would now be attacking every US ship they saw, civilian or military). This was entirely expected by military leaders at the time and blatantly obvious to even the news media.
Not only was there no obligation to declare war, but it was Hitler's first formal declaration of war in the conflict! So there was no precedent for expecting him too.
There had been a low-grade conflict for a few years with German U-boats attacking American ships carrying goods to England. Given that’s how we got drawn into WWI, it was certainly the most likely outcome at the time given our “special relationship” with England.
Japan's attack prompted the U.S. to declare war on Japan. That declaration prompted the other Axis powers to declare war on the U.S.
It's plausible in terms of cause and effect. The "if-this-then-that"s follow pretty well.
However, counting on something like Pearl Harbor is pants on head moronic. Japan shipped the majority of its fleet across the Pacific to hit a single target. If the U.S. was counting on an attack, they probably weren't counting on an attack of that scale. Which is poor planning.
And what happens if the Japanese never attack?
Over time, the U.S. would have entered the war, just like it did with World War I. Eventually, trade would have been hindered or too many U.S. ships would have been incidental casualties. The U.S. consistently thought that being across an ocean on either side protected it from being affected by European/Asian affairs and was consistently proven wrong.
That's extremely debatable and a very US-centric point of view. The general consensus is that Hitler's single biggest error was the invasion of the Soviet Union.
And yet... Stalin was going to attack Hitler eventually, maybe 1942 or 1943. So the pre-emptive attack has it's virtues. Could he have conquered England in time to get be ready for war with Russia when it came?
And, could Russia have done as well as they did without US materiel? (I freely acknowledge that Russia did most of the bleeding in World War II. I don't want to minimize that at all. But US materiel was also essential to them.)
I agree with what you are saying. But US materiel could have come with or without an actual war declaration. Actually, war was declared by Germany on December 11, 1941, and the USSR was declared eligible for lend-lease aid on November 7, 1941. Declaring war on the US or not, Hitler would have still dealt with (partially) US funded Soviets just because it attacked the USSR in June 22, 1941 so that is not an argument. Of course, it's hard to judge, as aid can (and was) accelerated.
As a primary war aim, I'm not sure you could call the invasion of the Soviet Union a strategic error. The whole war was an error, therefore Hitler's biggest error was the invasion of Poland.
>which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government
That totally explains why the USA never attacked Stalin, and in fact provided lots of logistical material from oil, rubber, and ammo, to tanks and airplanes.
The help started before Germany being an enemy. In other words, to many elements of the Government, the Communists were always friends. I'll let you deduce why.
It's been years since I read Eisenhower's biography, but my recollection is that within the military a lot of the aid to Russia was seen as a terrible idea and many felt that the British tricked the US into giving that aid in a secret three-way meeting in North Africa.
Nope, incorrect. Lend Lease was criticized that it wasn't really lending gear, since there was a high expectation that it wasn't coming back.
I don't know of any large scale thoughts that Britain tricked the US into entering initial aid attempts. The US was heavily into anti Axis attempts early in the war.
People forget the democratic/political constraints on Roosevelt though, including Hitler who thought of it as normalizing relations but Roosevelt wouldn't have had the political capital for declaring war on Germany.
The problem with this school of thought is that it essentially says "let's lose the bulk of our Pacific fleet and have to spend a couple years rebuilding, to get a sufficiently strong cause for war."
This is absurd on its face, especially when you consider that successfully repelling a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would achieve the same thing without the massive loss in men and material, and allow the U.S. to go on the offensive immediately, before Japan consolidated its Pacific holdings.
Besides, at the time of the attack, public sentiment was 2:1 in favour of risking war with Japan to curtail its expansion; German submarines were already sinking U.S. ships in the Atlantic. The U.S. public had already swung towards war with both powers. The PR boost of the attack wasn't needed.
Communism wasn't a threat to the USA in the 1930s. Have you heard of the lend-lease program? Billions of dollars in military hardware sent to the USSR to fight the Nazis.
US anti-communism was a Cold War thing. You're getting your timelines messed up here.
It most certainly was not just a Cold War thing [1]; anti-communism was a coherent and vocal point of view even in the late 1920s. The big industrialists (e.g. Henry Ford, a known nazi sympathizer) at the time saw it was an existential threat and were determined to stop it at all costs.
Yes there was a non-zero number of anti-communists in the United States at any given time. That wasn't what I was saying.
What I'm saying is that anti-communism to the point of orchestrating quasi-false flags to get drawn into another World War was not a focus of FDR's administration. As I pointed out, FDR's admin fully and materially supported foreign communist governments.
There were already theory papers on combat against Japanese carriers — ideas which proved fateful at Midway.
> Browning laid out his tactical logic in a 13-page, single-spaced, typewritten memorandum on carrier warfare prepared at the Naval War College in 1936, the year that Nazi Germany allied with Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Browning's essay briefly noted the vulnerability of carriers during the aircraft re-arming process, which he later successfully exploited during the Battle of Midway.
A good book (very long and highly detailed) is: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945.
You can really see how each side wound up where it did. Neither side wanted war, the Japanese all assumed they would lose, but because of the immediate successes thought maybe they were wrong. Even terrible translations and a lack of understand of different cultures had a large role.
Also, the Japanese didn't really know they were attacking the US soil, so to speak. Hawaii was, ATT, legally similar to the Philippines. Considering Hawaii american soil and the Philippines something else was a retcon.
What. Such weird re-writing of history. The IJN wanted to destroy as many US Carriers and Battleships as possible. What difference does it make if they thought Hawaii was a territory vs state.
The difference is the expected reaction, probabilities, etc.
An attack on US forces in Saudi Arabia today would still be treated severely, but not the same as an attack on Virginia. FDR had to decide how to characterize it. He decided to treat Hawaii as US soil, The Philippines and other territories as less.
That doesn't answer the question? The attack was supposed to destroy as many carriers, battleships, fuel depots as possible. Who the hell cares about territory status versus actual military capability?
The US populace. The Japanese intention was a big blow that would force the US into favorable negotiations. Giving the US a propaganda win by attack our "soil" meant the population was willing to fight a long war that the Japanese knew they couldn't win.
That's not right. The US had no expectation or desire for the Philippines when the war with Spain began in 1898; it ended up with the Philippines (and Puerto Rico and Guam) because Spain was so decisively defeated so quickly that it was willing to give up its entire colonial empire to end the war. The US began discussing when and how to give the Philippines independence within two decades after the 1898 annexation. The Jones Act contemplated independence as early as 1920; the date was pushed back because Filipinos thought that it was too soon. By the attack on Pearl Harbor, 1945 had been legally set as the target date for independence, after a 10-year transition period.
Hawaii, by contrast, was contemplated by Americans and Hawaiians as inevitably becoming an American possession long before the 1898 annexation.
The uk also did it for real at Taranto in 1940. So there were lots of examples to draw from. Perhaps the magnitude of success stemmed from the insight by genda and onishi to put the carriers together and train for mass attacks.
Pretty much confirmed by my memory (my father-in-law was a retired Italian Navy Admiral, and knew war history very well), as well as by Wikipedia [0]:
"It is likely the Imperial Japanese Navy's staff carefully studied the Taranto raid during planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, as both attacks faced similar issues attacking a shallow harbour"
"The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, employing 21 Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea.
The attack struck the battle fleet of the Regia Marina at anchor in the harbour of Taranto, using aerial torpedoes despite the shallowness of the water. The success of this attack augured the ascendancy of naval aviation over the big guns of battleships. According to Admiral Cunningham, "Taranto, and the night of 11–12 November 1940, should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.""
> However, once again, politics and dismissal of “unfair” tactics led to a lack of bolstered defense at Pearl Habor and an unwillingness to restructure the U.S. Navy.
"After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed."
It is frightening that the world's largest arsenal is under the control of such an irrational institution.
Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong".
> Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong".
I recall an HN comment that the Van Riper story leaves out some details. Like, while he used motorcycle couriers, they were simulated. In network terms, they had low latency and no "packet loss". But it sounds funny, so it gets repeated without the qualifications.
Same thing with the F-15 vs F-22 fight, where the F-22's had to visually identify targets before engaging, stripping them of advantages.
That said, I don't think the US Navy is prepared for drone zerg tactics. I hope I'm wrong.
Even the MQ-9 has a top speed of 200 knots. Way too slow to overwhelm defenses. Most drones are hardly better than a typical fighter jet or a cruise missile. Cruise missiles have been around for decades now and we have pretty good defenses for them.
Drones cheap enough to be produced in massive quantities cannot carry enough payload to be effective against modern ships unless you are in such a short range you may as well shoot a shell at the target.
However, the autonomous F-16 project is something else. Small radar cross section, datalink guided missiles, AIM-120Ds and ship killer missiles on an autonomous fighter platform is just scary.
Doesn't much matter if the battle group runs out of ammo. They've only got a few hundred anti-aircraft missiles between them; hundreds of drones wouldn't be fun to have to deal with.
They don't have to use a missile to shoot down every drone. [0] That being said, it's a good question, how many drones could a destroyer shoot down, between the missiles, CIWS systems and other defensive equipment? I have a feeling it's a lot, but I have nothing actually supporting that.
Generally speaking, charging into an aimbot gatling gun that has the sensor-network + AI system to shoot down 500mph targets is a bad idea.
Especially when said gatling gun reloads in just 4 minutes, you're over water with no terrain to hide behind except the horizon, the horizon is 30km out, and the supporting aircraft (E2-Hawkeye) can see 300km out because its the eye-in-the-sky.
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Hoping that the enemy runs out of $30 bullets before you run out of $1000+ drones is... a bad bet I think
That’s the strategy that has been employed by armies for a long time - see Vietnam, the WW2 eastern front and numerous other conflicts. But instead of equipment versus equipment it was lots of ill trained farmers versus relatively few well trained soldiers.
I'm not entirely sure if the Russian strategy on the Eastern Front was a "good strategy", but the Russian soldiers at least had the benefit of knowing where the enemy was.
A drone flying out to sea doesn't know where the enemy ships are. The horizon is 30km away to 50km, depending on how high the drone is flying. E2 Hawkeyes fly very high, so they see out 300km.
Any reasonable fight will have the E2 Hawkeye spot the mass of drones long before the drones spot the ships. Once we account for how cheap bullets are and how effective they are on an aimbot (be it an F18 fighter or a CIWS on a ship), it seems impossible for a swarm of drones to even think about approaching any ship.
> I'm not entirely sure if the Russian strategy on the Eastern Front was a "good strategy", but the Russian soldiers at least had the benefit of knowing where the enemy was.
For sure, and the cost was immense. It worked though.
It might not be cost effective but that alone isn’t the full picture. Taking out a ship or carrier or something would be an incredible PR win/loss depending on one’s side and would change everyone’s strategies.
What's the launch platform? How do you program the drones to find its target?
Its not too hard to imagine the drone as a slow-moving missile, with maybe a similar launch platform where drones can be easily programmed with GPS-coordinates and go off on their mission.
But the minute we think about logistics of storing, programming, and deploying this hypothetical weapon... we realize that we're just building a really crappy version of the MLRS (multiple-launch rocket system).
> Hoping that the enemy runs out of $30 bullets before you run out of $1000+ drones is... a bad bet I think
If the prize is a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier it might not be.
More to the point, you're talking about cannons that fire at 4500 rounds per minute, and while this is outside my area of expertise, the fire control computer's strategy is absolutely not going to be to fire a single round and wait to see whether the target disappears. It's going to fire some minimum number of rounds, and it only takes a fraction of a second to burn through $1000 of 20mm ammo.
If it is a feasible option, it's pretty easy to imagine a conflict where keeping the cannons occupied with garbage $1000 decoy targets for a while is a cost-effective strategy. (it seems like the sort of thing you'd do during an attack alongside real anti-ship missiles, though, to improve the effectiveness of those weapons)
The main issue is that you can afford 10,000 cruise missiles against a $10 Billion carrier and still come out ahead.
The minute we're talking 10,000 cruise missiles vs 1-million drones, the cruise missiles suddenly look easier because its just fewer things to deal with.
EDIT: In particular, we know how to launch hundreds of cruise missiles simultaneously. How do you plan to launch hundreds, or thousands, of drones simultaneously? What kind of launch platform is that? Just thinking about the design of the truck that carries 1,000 drones is already a big headache.
We have trucks that can carry 12 cruise missiles, and launch all 12 of them near simultaneously. A bunch of those trucks lined up on a highway aiming to the ocean is pretty easy to think about.
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We also have boats that can carry 100s of missiles, and launch dozens of them simultaneously. Those are called Missile Destroyers or Missile Cruisers.
> We have trucks that can carry 12 cruise missiles, and launch all 12 of them near simultaneously. A bunch of those trucks lined up on a highway aiming to the ocean is pretty easy to think about.
If there's no “counter battery” to worry about, maybe. Lining up your trucks on a highway is a great way to get them all destroyed by a single air attack…
And there's no way it's gonna take a million drone to sink a ship. Modern ship defence systems haven't been designed against a huge number of small targets. A hundred armed drones might even be enough to overflow the tracking system. For reference, the Israelian Iron Dome[1] can only track 200 targets[2] and we're talking about a system that has been specifically designed against swarm attacks.
> If there's no “counter battery” to worry about, maybe. Lining up your trucks on a highway is a great way to get them all destroyed by a single air attack…
How do you plan to launch your drones?
A bunch of trucks on a highway is a really good strategy. Especially since these missile-trucks have 2000+km range.
These are the weapons the US Military is worried about. Hypersonic (3000mph), possibly homing (if China is to be believed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21
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In any case, a drone-launch platform will need a lot of launchers: little programmers that tell the drone its final orders before they fly off. It doesn't matter if its a TOW-like (follow the radio signal based off of this laser-pointer), or homing, or whatever capability you have.
Once you have a bunch of launchers + drones, you then need a way to transport them around, so that you can optimally launch them when needed.
TL;DR: You need MLRS, except for drone launching. That's the only feasible way you're going to effectively manage so many drones.
But even then, that just begs the question: why aren't you just using MLRS to begin with, with standard cruise missiles invented like 40 years ago?
Cruse missiles are really good, no question about that. But they are expensive, and hard to deploy (you've avoided the counter-battery issue in your response, and it's a bit unfortunate as the biggest issue with missiles is “how do you protect the missile launcher from being taken down before they fire”). China can probably do it, Russia also, but anyone else would probably be out of luck. (well, there's submarines also but that's another topic).
> How do you plan to launch your drones?
Ideally, from scattered units operating with light vehicles (say, a pick-up with a trailer). The key part is being able to launch your attack without being destroyed first. And as I said earlier, I think you're overestimating the number of needed drones by several orders of magnitude.
> you've avoided the counter-battery issue in your response, and it's a bit unfortunate as the biggest issue with missiles is “how do you protect the missile launcher from being taken down before they fire”
No, I haven't. My point is whatever launcher mechanism you have for your hypothetical drones has the exact same issue.
> Ideally, from scattered units operating with light vehicles (say, a pick-up with a trailer).
Yes. These are called MLRS when they're rockets or cruise missiles. If you think a cruise missile platform can be "counter-battery fired", then these light pickup trucks you're talking about have the same exact problem.
> My point is whatever launcher mechanism you have for your hypothetical drones has the exact same issue.
Not exactly, even it shares some.
First of all they are much less expensive, and you have much more of them, making them harder to destroy. They are actually likely to be cheapy than the cost of the missile used to shoot them, which is never the case with cruise missile platform).
Then you don't need an open field to launch a drone, sending cruse missiles from dense urban area is more of a problem.
And in any case I think you moving goalpost a bit here, since when talking about counter battery, I initially responded to your suggestion to put the MLRS lined up, in plain sight on a highway… Now if you told me you're going to put your MLRS in isolated barns in the countryside, then it's of course the same situation whether it's launching drones or missiles, the number being the only significant difference.
> Rocket / Missile launchers are just a tube. The launcher itself isn't expensive, its the programmer and truck platform that costs money.
You must have forgotten the missiles in it…
> The PLARF has plenty of missiles. We can't destroy all of them anymore.
I don't know why you keep bringing China in this conversation, really. Drones have the power to make ships almost useless even against small army forces, the Millennium Challenge already proved that cruise missiles were very good against fleets. But deploying them efficiently against the US Navy would be a challenge for most army (but, as I said earlier, not China nor Russia). Drones could give the Houthis Yemeni faction the ability to sink a US carrier, and this isn't a good thing for the US Navy.
> Drones are so slow you wouldn't use a missile. You'd use a CIWS, a $30 bullet.
Their slow speed is actually a feature. It's really easy to make them have a completely unpredictable trajectory. Good luck shooting that with bullets. Also, because they are slow, they can also deploy some sorts of decoy to fool the aiming systems. Shrapnel is going to be extremely effective against them though, so it's completely possible to design dedicated defence mechanism, but hoping that a defence designed to stop ancient weapons against a new one isn't usually a good strategic move.
> Drones could give the Houthis Yemeni faction the ability to sink a US carrier, and this isn't a good thing for the US Navy.
Read up on the "USS America", a former Aircraft carrier built on 1960s technology and armor. As part of a retirement exercise, the USS America was subject to a number of bombs and explosions to test the armor of the old ship.
So these drones you're talking about... how much explosives can they carry? Do remember: F18 regularly crash-and-burn on a carrier deck, with no real long-term damage to the carrier.
I have my doubts that a small drone carries enough firepower to damage a carrier. There's a reason why these cruise missiles carry 1000lbs of high-explosives (*per missile*), and no one seriously expects just one missile to sink a carrier.
Iran had to hit a fake aircraft carrier (a big boat they bought and dressed up to look like a carrier), and Iran was basically unable to sink it with just missiles. You need a lot of explosives to kill a boat of that size, let alone an armored / compartmentalized, well-studied, computer-simulated $13 Billion war-version.
> It's really easy to make them have a completely unpredictable trajectory.
Quadcopter motors aren't known for thrust. You know what is known for thrust? Rockets.
Without thrust, you won't have an unpredictable trajectory. Rockets can push 2Gs laterally while traveling at 500mph and still end up on the target that they're aiming at.
You ain't gonna get that kind of behavior from quadcopter drones. You just won't.
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> I don't know why you keep bringing China in this conversation, really.
Because I do think that China's strategy is a good one on face value. I hope that the US strategy is better, but I think the Chinese are making enough moves here that proves that they know what they're doing.
EDIT: When you have a rocket that achieves 2G of thrust and hypersonic speeds, its not too difficult to use that thrust to start erratically dodging CIWS. In fact, that's the expectation: you need that amount of thrust to break the sound barrier anyway, so might as well put that rocket to good use dodging bullets.
> I have my doubts that a small drone carries enough firepower to damage a carrier. There's a reason why these cruise missiles carry 1000lbs of high-explosives (per missile), and no one seriously expects just one missile to sink a carrier.
Carriers are notoriously difficult to sink. But there's a well known strategy: 1) you destroy the carriers defence, 2) you target the direction (not the propulsion) of the carrier so it cannot flee 3) you send a shit ton of whatever you have to sink it.
Drones are obviously unable to do 3), but they are completely apt for 1 and 2. Small boats controlled remotely (which are drones, as a matter of fact) loaded with TNT would do the job eventually when all defences are lost. And even if 3) never happens because the Navy still manages to prevent those small boats from approaching (this is pretty likely, with air support), CNN looping on live footage of USS Gerald R. Ford stuck sailing in circle in the Gulf of Aden after a drone attack would be pretty humiliating for the US Navy to say the least.
Also, as I said earlier, cruse missiles are awesome against ships, and it is a well know fact nobody discusses. Nowhere in this thread am I arguing that drones are superior to cruise missiles. The question is: can a state with limited cruse missile capability piss the US Navy off with drones, and I'm convinced the answer is a big yes.
The US army would likely not taking a single casualty from a single cruise missile targetting air carrier convoy. But they are much less prepared against few hundred drones swarming upon them.
The carriers are steered by a 50-ton rudder made out of solid steel.
How many drones do you think it will take to break and/or significantly damage that rudder?
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You're avoiding the hard question. How many lbs of explosive do these drones carry. 100lbs of explosives? 500lbs? 1000lbs? These war machines are measured in the hundreds-and-hundreds of lbs of explosives it takes to deal serious damage.
Its not going to be a cheap drone that can steer / move agile while carrying an explosive payload of that weight.
That's why we use missiles: because rocket engines have a superior thrust-to-weight ratio. Quadcopters cannot carry 100lbs of explosive, let alone 500lbs or 1000lbs. Not cheap quadcopters anyway.
So after attacking the “Drones are better than cruise missile” argument that I never held, you are now aiming at the “quadcopters” I've never talked about?
I'm gonna end this discussion here because I've made my points and you look way too determined to fight against straw men than discussing them.
> I've no doubt a modern warship can shoot down a lot of drones, but at a few thousand bucks a pop, an adversary can field a lot of drones.
"A few thousand bucks a pop" per drone sounds like a quadcopter drone to me. That's not a jet-drone or a rocket-drone.
Now if you are saying that a bunch of Predator drones shooting a bunch of missiles at a carrier can probably disable it... well... sure. I can agree to that. That probably will work. But such a drone will be rather expensive, and you wouldn't want those drones shot down by a CIWS.
What kind of drones is an adversary fielding in large numbers for a few thousand dollars per drone? And how far can said toy drones fly so as to reach a destroyer in the first place?
Unless we're talking about China or Russia, how are they going to manufacture, move and maintenance those drones once we've pancaked their infrastructure? The adversary will be under non-stop bombardment, all of their relevant infrastructure will be targeted, all major manufacturing, their electrical grid, all transport roads, all rail, all bridges, all ports. How are they getting the toy drones out to deep water if they have no ports? How will they manufacture replacement boats / ships with no manufacturing? And so on.
Sure, if we're talking about war with China or Russia, that's entirely different. Then you're talking about something closer to WW3 (and good luck). Everyone else is trivial to cripple.
I mean, I worry about "drones" like the DF-21. Except most people call the DF-21 a "ship-killer hypersonic missile" (with big questions on whether or not it actually works as China claims)
That's the thing: "drones" that most people are talking about in these discussions are just really bad Tomahawk cruise missiles or really really bad ICBMs.
> I linked an example of such a drone up-thread; $5k
So that's what? 150 CIWS bullets per drone for cost-equivalency? ($30 bucks per CIWS bullet). Seems like a good trade, the CIWS can shoot down 500mph missiles, it will take out the much slower drone with far less ammo and far cheaper.
You also know that warships would be stationed 1000km away, with an E-2 Hawkeye looking over the horizon (300km range radars). So the first thing the drone will see is the E-2 Hawkeye. The drones wont even know where the ships are, and the Carrier is already deploying a mass of fighters at the drone swarm.
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Once the numbers are figured out by the E-2 hawkeye, the Carrier probably will deploy F18, which will use a 20mm Gatling gun to kill all the drones and return home.
The drones won't even see where the ships are in practice. The best they'll ever discover is the E-2 Hawkeye through line of sight. All the ships would be "too low" and hidden away by the horizon itself. The CIWS won't even get a chance to shoot because the drones never even made it to the horizon (ie: 50km) of the ships. All the drones are killed 300km out.
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There's a reason why China is mass-producing Destroyers. Because Destroyers work. Mass drones aren't really a strategy.
China is playing with DF-21 missiles and relying upon them.
200km/hr drones (or slower) won't be effective against any of the US Naval forces. There's a reason China is spending billions developing 5000km/hr homing "ship-killer" missiles.
If a $5000 drone could even pose a threat against any US Warship, China wouldn't have bothered with 5000km/hr hypersonic speeds or research.
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The goal of China's naval forces is to search for the US Fleet. Once China finds the US Fleet, it shoots the DF-21 ship-killer missile at it, hoping that the Chinese Fleet can stay in the game long enough to provide accurate targeting against the US ships.
That's called A2/AD, Anti-access area denial. This works because the missiles move very, very fast, so the US ships need to kill the enemy Chinese ship within 15 minutes or so (ie: the time it takes for the missile to travel from China to 1000km out and hit a US ship).
> Sure. The scary bit of drone swarms is not the individual basis, but the fact that shoot down ten drones and your CIWS is empty.
It takes 4 minutes to reload a CWIS and the horizon is like 50km out.
How fast are your drones again? Do you really think that a mass of drones will spend 15 minutes flying towards a group of warships and actually survive to make contact?
How many drones? How did they not get picked up by radar and killed 300km out by E2 Hawkeye eye-in-the-sky + F18 fighters?
This whole discussion has serious "Biplanes? Taking out our battleships? Hahahahaha!" vibes for me.
The state-of-the-art for drones has moved forward immensely in the last few years. F-18s don't always hit enemy fighters, let alone uncrewed much smaller targets able to do extremely high-G maneuvers.
This discussion from my perspective is more like you're the guy arguing for the use of armored bicycles, when I'm already aware of the development of Tanks.
Just because some people thought it was a good idea, doesn't mean it was in fact... a good idea.
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Large-masses of suicide explosives work. We just call them cruise missiles. There's a particular strategy: you fly low to the ground so that radar don't pick you up, you fly as fast as possible (500mph / subsonic is one cutoff), and you throw a bunch of sensors onto it to auto-aim / home into the target.
Deciding to go from 500mph down to 200mph (or slower) just so that you can make it work with quadcopter technology has the big issue that you're suddenly easier to shoot down. Our guns / AI systems are designed to shoot down 500mph missiles. Letting your mass of bots get shot down on purpose is... a strikingly odd strategy to say the least.
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Similarly: the armored bicycle might have worked in WW1. But it turns out that the Armored Tank was a better weapon more suited for invading no-man's land.
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The best argument you have against the CIWS is "hope the Aimbot-Gatling Gun runs out of ammo", ignoring the fact that it reloads in 4 minutes and that a typical Cruiser has two of them, and you're facing a fleet not just a single gun.
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And you haven't even told me how the drones know where to go yet. How did the drones find the ships to begin with?
> The state-of-the-art for drones has moved forward immensely in the last few years. F-18s don't always hit enemy fighters, let alone uncrewed much smaller targets able to do extremely high-G maneuvers.
That's not a $5000 drone anymore and you know it.
In any case, no quadcopter drone is going to have the high-G maneuverability of a jet or rocket.
If you make a "rocket drone with an explosive payload", that's just a cruise missile. And yes, I'm aware that cruise missiles are a good idea. They also cost nearly $2 million each.
You didn't. You linked to a drone that could never threaten a destroyer, doesn't do anything like zerg'ing, a drone that could never likely reach a destroyer in the first place, and in the large sizes doesn't cost a few thousand dollars. You linked to a drone that can kill soldiers nearby, that's all; and the slightly bigger version can maybe disable armored vehicles nearby.
> You build the drones before the war, not during.
Which is an admission that you can't stay in the war once it begins. You'll quickly get wiped out. And the toy drones never reach the destroyers, because you have no ports, no transport, no manufacturing, no electricity, no boats, no ships.
> Doesn't have to be too far.
The toy drones you linked to can't threaten a destroyer at meaningful distances (and would be unlikely to severely damage a destroyer in the first place). And if the US is at war with eg Iran, the US is not going to sail its ships right up to Iran's shoreline and invite them to launch hundreds of poorly aimed, weak toy drones at them.
> > You build the drones before the war, not during.
> Which is an admission that you can't stay in the war once it begins. You'll quickly get wiped out.
You can apply that logic to any equipment, and drones are going to be easier to build than a lot of other war waging equipment (eg how long does it take to build a ship?).
There is a long history of unsophisticated groups waging long and successful wars against large, powerful nations. Preparing for the previous war is superpower 101.
Yes, but CWIS isn't the only anti-air defense on a US Navy ship -- there's also the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile, as well as vertically-launched anti-air missiles (RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile). CWIS is the weapon of last resort, after all of the other anti-air options have failed.
Additionally, ships are usually not alone. The other vessels in the battlegroup will also provide their anti-air capabilities. If they are with an aircraft carrier, then there are also planes to provide air defense.
The alleged argument... is apparently that quadcopter drones are cheaper than missiles.
So the enemy can always deploy more suicide quadcopter drones than missiles.
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Which seems like an insanely bad strategy to me, because of the whole CIWS thing. Sure, you negate the usefulness of missiles by making drones cheaper, but you can't negate the cheapness of a CIWS, or the gatling gun of an F18 Hornet / F35B / F35C.
That's why we still use guns today: because bullets are really, really cheap.
That's also a good point. Warships have the thickest armor out of everything in our armory by a significant margin.
The M1 Abrams has 350mm armor, the biggest, baddest tank of the US Army.
The Arleigh Burke Destroyer doesn't have one armor plate like the M1 Abrams: it has multiple plates wrapping other plates wrapping its hull which wraps Kevlar to protect the people inside.
It turns out that boats can just have much much thicker armor than any tank, because floating is much easier than moving with an engine.
I believe that the Armenian defeat was caused by their soviet era tactics and command and the fact that the Azeris had a way better strategic position than the Armenians. Also, drones could have been replaced with pretty much any other plane on that war, Armenia just didn't have air superiority, air defense or mitigation tactics on the lower levels
Armenia defeated Azerbeidzjan in the early 90s, whom then spent 30 years building up their military forces with oil money and get revenge.
The outcome was never in question.
It's perhaps not all that dissimilar a story with China's PLA.
Azeri doctrine changed to reflect a more western style. Also, if you watch drone footage from the war, you'll see that the armenian infantry and armor took very few (if any) measures to mitigate that disadvantage, there's a seriously noticeable lack of dispersion, camouflage and many identifiable patterns throughout the war that could have been changed if a more western, professional approach had been taken
"Royal Marines commandos 'dominated' US troops and forced them into a humiliating surrender just days into a mass training exercise in the Mojave desert, it has been revealed today.
British forces took part in a five-day mock battle at the US Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms base in southern California, one of the largest military training areas in the world, and achieved a decisive victory against their American counterparts.
The Royal Marines, along with allied forces from Canada, the Netherlands and the UAE, destroyed or rendered inoperable nearly every US asset and finished the exercise holding more than 65 per cent of the training area, after beginning with less than 20 per cent.
Combatants used paintball-style training ammunition, which fires with reduced pressure and velocity, along with hi-tech simulators for heavier firepower like artillery, and live ammo on expansive ranges.
Seeing no opportunity for victory, American combatants asked for the exercise to be 'reset' halfway through the five-day exercise, having taken significant casualties from British commandos. "
Resets, on their own, aren't an issue, and the goal is for one side to win and learn something. If you can slip two exercises instead of one into a five day visit, why not?
There's nothing in that article that asserts the sort of "reset, then script it to ensure the 'good guys' win" scenario from the 2002 case.
This does make great propaganda for the Brits until you know that they were actually part of a larger element, under the command of US 7th Marine Regiment. This exercise demonstrated integration of NATO commando forces and modern tactics against outdated tactics.
> “ ‘Winners’ are never determined,” Capt. Zachary Colvin, the communications and strategy director with the Marine Air Ground Combat Center, told Military Times in a statement. “This exercise does not provide an opportunity to ‘surrender,’ ‘keep score,’ or ‘reset.’ The objective of the exercise is to heighten unit performance and increase readiness.”
> In short, among several statements made in the opening four paragraphs of the Telegraph article, none was accurate. I know this because – as they say – I was there.
You're right to suspect the Daily Mail, but I'm not sure the Marine Corp Times quoting a Marine Corp PR flack is a particularly unbiased source for this story, either.
There is no suggestion in the article that the non-US forces were required to operate with their hands tied after the reset in order to allow a US victory.
More generally, many exercises consist of multiple 'phases' anyway, which are in effect wholly separate parts of an operation set within the same broad scenario. They might separately test (e.g.) advancing to contact, a contact situation and then some sort of holding operation. Resets are wholly expected: each phase usually starts in a pre-planned state independent of the previous phase. E.g. if a force fails it's objective in the first phase and gets wiped out it will start the second phase in a refreshed state so that the force can train for the second type of activity rather than waste the sometimes significant cost of assembling the exercise in the first place.
I remember this one, thinking it was isolated prior to knowing about the Pearl Harbor exercises. Is declaring “unfair” tactics just a US Navy tradition or do other branches do the same thing?
What I find even more interesting, was that the US demonstrated for Japan the winning tactic to attack Pearl Harbor...
> Unbeknownst to the U.S. military at the time, we now know that Japan had been watching Admiral Yarnell’s 1932 mock attack with keen interest.
> Tokyo’s spy organization in Oahu had observers across the island that relayed information back to Japan - which studied and absorbed the lessons the U.S. Navy failed to learn.
This speak volumes about how the results of war games need to remain classified. ...in the same way you would want a pen-test you've contracted out to remain confidential. If it's public, you give your adversary a blueprint for attacking you.
Having occasionally worked with pen-tests, I think perhaps a different lesson is in order. If you can find it in a pen test, so can your adversaries. You have no way of knowing if they've done so already. The best way forward is to address the issues as quickly as is reasonably possible.
Secrecy protects the pen-test findings document, but not your vulnerability. The map should never be confused for the territory.
> Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed
active search radars would be very visible targets and be targetted by any opposing force, especially if they are planning for an air drop, no? I don't disagree there was some egregrious rules, but I don't think it was one of them
I also believe it wasn't. Western air forces put a very big emphasis on SEAD operations. And given the fact that they are simulating an attack on soviet made (which they have fought against on multiple occasions) air defence just turning off the radar is delaying the inevitable.
There's an issue with Millenium challenge though. General Van Riper gamed the system heavily. For example, he claimed to use motorcycle messengers instead of radios, but transmitted on radio anyways. He also tried to "use" fast attack craft carrying silkworm anti ship missiles that wouldn't even fit on the type of craft he described on the exercise. It's also worth noting that many wargames are similarly scripted to account for external factors
Interestingly, "Shattered Sword" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Sword) a modern book about the battle of Midway, from the Japanese point of view, starts with something similar. Japanese navy did wargames before the attack, and one of the admiral of Red Force acted similarly to what the American navy did, positioning his force north-east of Midway, and inflicted heavy damages to the invading force. Yamamoto, the author of the plan and the navy top chief, shut him off and forced everyone to replay following his rules, ensuring the success of his plan.
I recommend the book, well written and approachable to casual readers like me. A lot of details about carrier operations, fog of war and visual representations of attack vectors and bomb hits and their outcome.
Also, Drachinifels had a good session/interview about the book with Jon Parshall, one of its author:
its important to note that the Fleet Problems (of which this was one, and there were many) also simulated sneak and non-sneak attacks against the Panama Canal, and there were multiple simulated attacks against Pearl Harbor. There were also tests of carriers acting alone, carriers acting as scouting forces, carriers acting as the head of a strike force. For anyone interested in this - I highly recommend "All the Factors of Victory" about Admiral Reeves. During this time period there was a deliberate and systematic effort to develop carrier aviation and tactics. Far from being some rogue effort that was suppressed for political reasons, it transformed the navy and put in place the foundations for eventually winning the war - even with a rough start. The Essex carriers (for example) where specified and laid down according to what the USA had learned from the fleet problems.
Why the rough start? I would point at Admiral Kimmel. Kimmel's predecessors (Reeves and Richardson) understood that American Bases (Subic Bay, Panama Canal San Diego, Pearl Harbor - in that order) were at risk from a Japanese surprise attack. Reeves was obsessed by it - which is partially why this Fleet Problem occurred. When Reeves retired, Richardson took his place. While story goes that Richardson was fired for making the point that Pearl was vulnerable, that doesn't appear to be the whole story. Richardson's main complaint was not sneak attack, but rather that Pearl Harbor didn't have the facilities to adequately service and train the fleet, and his solders would be bored during peacetime. Regardless, he was also concerned about a sneak attack against American assets.
Richardson was insubordinate - at one time questioning the role of congress and the president in dictating military policy - FDR fired him, and replaced him with Kimmel.
Kimmel on the other hand was obsessed with the Japanese population of Hawaii, particularly the risk of sabotage. Rather then focus on radar, or keeping the Fleet at Lahaina roads - where they could move freely in case of a sneak attack - he kept the fleet bottled up (save the aircraft carriers) and the planes lined up in roads.
Even then - the USA had put in place things like Radar and built up Pearl Harbor rapid ally enough that they could have responded if everything was perfect. But you had one force that had been at war for 8 years before the USA entered, and the other at peace time. The focus on sabotage instead of fleet defense doomed them.
While the Niihau incident occurred, it was obviously a far smaller problem the the Fleet burning in Honolulu.
Finally it needs to be noted that a ton of people expected a surprise attack. They just expected it against the forward US base (the Philippines) or Singapore
Ironically, the one area task force wise that that the Japanese were inspired by the USA was based on not by Fleet Problems, but instead propaganda. The story goes that the Japanese commander in charge of Planning - Minoru Genda - was watching American news reels, which showed American carriers acting in formation, in the same frame of film. While this was done for filming, Genda applied it to actual battle formations. That gave Japan enough firepower to target the entire Pacific Island, not just a single ship or even a single base.
The Japanese were also far more inspired by the attack on Taranto by a set of obsolete biplanes that basically wiped out Italian sea power (not that there was a ton of that) in Europe.
> The Japanese were also far more inspired by the attack on Taranto by a set of obsolete biplanes that basically wiped out Italian sea power in Europe.
The biplanes were not totally obsolete, they were equipped with radar which allowed them to attack at night and find their carrier again, none of the USN or IJN aircraft could do this until a lot later in the war.
> Finally it needs to be noted that a ton of people expected a surprise attack. They just expected it against the forward US base (the Philippines) or Singapore
And they expected it in 1942, not 1941. And in point of fact, there was ALSO a surprise attack on the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
The historiography (how we handle the narrative of history and how that narrative has changed over time) around the attack on the Philippines and the subsequent defense is very confusing and interesting to me.
A few thoughts - The US Navy was not ready to fight the Japanese Navy in 1941; it was only by the end of 1942 that you see the US getting a real advantage. Look at the Battle of Savo Island in August of 1942. [0] But much of the history of WWII is viewed from the highest point of each participant.
The US public needed some kind of hopeful news, it needed to sound like the US was fighting back. The news out of the Philippines was not good, but it could be made to sound like a struggle to get behind.
The defense of the Philippines was a disaster, but it could not be presented that way to the American public, so MacArthur was made to be a hero. This is oversimplified and I'm sure a lot of people will disagree.
0. Midway is not a fluke, but a result of excellent planning and deception operations, with a bit of luck thrown in. Even in Midway you can see that many US battle elements were not ready: ineffective torpedo bombing, ineffective dive bombing, ineffective high level horizontal bombing (which remained ineffective against competent enemy vessels for the entire war), poor navigation.
>The historiography (how we handle the narrative of history and how that narrative has changed over time) around the attack on the Philippines and the subsequent defense is very confusing and interesting to me.
I am with you. Blame Douglas MacArthur for that one. it's inconceivable that his planes where still lined up just waiting for the shots to be fired. I get that it's hard to figure out how to stage aviation forces so they are not on the deck at a bad moment (see Midway, Battle Of), but by any definition, it was incompetant then.
On Midway, I think Shattered Sword has the correct narrative. Midway is amazing not in that it a miracle, but rather that we almost still bungled it, despite having total and complete surprise, a great battle plan, and a significant advantage in airpower.
Ineffective dive bombing at Midway? It was the only thing that was effective!
And, why do you say that "the defense of the Philippines was a disaster"? It was a battle against hopeless odds, but are you saying it was bungled? If so, how?
And, what was poor about the navigation at Midway?
SOME of the dive bombing at Midway was effective, a lot of it was not. This was the first combat mission for many US pilots and so their dives were slow and shallow.
Yes, it was bungled. The odds were hopeless at a certain point - which is what makes this operation so interesting to me. When did the odds become hopeless? October 1941 or December 7th or 10th or ... 1941?
For poor navigation - it's not all on the pilots, this was hard throughout the war for all sides, but specifically I mean that different groups went different places.
For Midway, I highly recommend reading Shattered Sword or watching any number of the presentations the authors have given.
> Ineffective dive bombing at Midway? It was the only thing that was effective!
Poorly executed would be a better term. They succeeded by almost pure luck.
Two different squadrons managed to accidentally attack in different directions at the same time while the Japanese carriers had fully fueled and armed airplanes in their hangars waiting for an opening to launch an attack.
Their hit ratio was terrible, but one bomb on a carrier was enough to destroy it given the conditions.
> And, what was poor about the navigation at Midway?
USS Hornet's Flight to Nowhere. The carrier completely screwed up launching their squadrons and then went in the wrong direction. Their torpedo bomber squadron mutinied and went in a different direction. The torpedo bombers found the Japanese but without any friendly fighters to protect them, all where shot down.
All 10 Wildcat fighters ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. The other groups aborted to Midway after getting critically low on fuel and not finding any targets. At least four planes lost from the other groups.
> > Ineffective dive bombing at Midway? It was the only thing that was effective!
> Poorly executed would be a better term. They succeeded by almost pure luck.
If you mean pure luck in finding the carriers, I could agree with you. But...
Three to five hits on the Kaga. Only one hit on the Agaki. Three hits on Soryu. No hits on Hiryu in the first attack. Four or five hits on the second attack on Hiryu. That's not just getting lucky.
For me one of the best things about the article is the link to the awesome 32-page WWII OSS sabotage manual [0]. Section 11 (General Interference with Organisations and
Production) is a great list of behaviours and anti-patterns that seem to exist in dysfunctional organisations and individuals. E.g.
If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
and
Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
Also on the same morning as Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong was also attacked by the Japanese. Allies never took it back during the war, till the Japanese surrendered in 1945.
Surprised there is no mention that during this period 1932 and 1938 the US was de-militarized! In 1939 the The US had the 17th largest Army in the world by size, and half of it was the national guard.
What's striking here is the Japanese trust into their own intel. If someone came up to me with a plan for a "surprise" attack that the defender had wargamed not once but twice and wouldn't know about any countermeasures I would be highly suspicious of a trap.
For instance, how did Japan not consider that the US Navy deployed top secret radar after the first wargame that then perfectly warned about the second attack? You can easily stack multiple wargames in one. Another option could have been a submarine screen that "intercepted" the attacking force.
If you want to visualize how the attack at Peal Harbor happened and have about 20 minutes to spare, consider watching the Montemayor video that explains how the attacks occurred, in the order they occurred, along with historical photographs.
Unfair tactics! It's endemic in military exercises that anything that doesn't follow the script is suppressed.
My son was 'insurgent leader' for an Army exercise in Korea. His team of 6 used various tactics (inside information between exercises gained from friends in the camp; feints; bribing their way in through the back gate) and ultimately got a 'suicide bomber' into the command tent. After that they went round behind the defenders and only stopped when they ran out of simulated ammo. 6 guys defeated a company.
There was curiously no 'after action review', and further exercises were scripted if I remember right.
Anyway yeah, nobody wants that kind of result on the record.
You'd think the US would have learned from the Korean war. When the PLA entered the fight they used human wave attacks that tore right through the UN lines.
This is perhaps tangential, but since it was all part of the same operation, maybe it is fitting. We also tend to only talk about Pearl Harbor. It was but one piece of a much larger strategy for the Japanese.
On Dec 7 or 8th over a roughly 12 hour period, Imperial Japan launched simultaneous invasions of Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, what are now Indonesia and Malaysia, and a half-dozen small islands including Guam and Wake, with about a million soldiers across a theatre spanning some 8000 miles. Allied control in Asia was essentially eliminated within two months. A systematic, wilful, underestimation of the Japanese potential before their flood outwards is a theme throughout, from Pearl Harbor to "Fortress Singapore".
In 1979 I got a small VIP tour of Pearl Harbor from the Navy. They made sure we understood that the Japanese attack was effective, but far from perfect. I remember they mentioned three strategic mistakes by the Japanese:
1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally.
2. They did not hit any of the dry dock facilities, so almost all the damaged ships were repaired in place without having to be towed back to the west coast.
3. They did not hit the fuel depots, so the remaining fleet had plenty of fuel ready to go.
And, of course, the carriers were out on operations, which was a critical miss, as it turned out.
> 1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally.
Japanese submarine doctrine (attached to fleet elements in support of seeking battle/harassing the enemy fleet) may have influenced their target selection in going after larger surface combatants in preference to submarines.
And yes, that was a huge strategic mistake. U.S. submarines inflicted grievous damage to Japanese merchant shipping throughout the war.
US submarine effectiveness in the early part of the war was largely nil because the US torpedoes failed to work properly. This wasn't fixed until 1943, so there's a decent chance that even if the submarine facilities had been damaged, they would have been repaired before the US submarines got effective torpedoes anyways.
This is a good point. Some of the stories around the early war torpedos almost belie belief.
"On 24 December 1941, during a war patrol, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired eight torpedoes at two different ships with no results. When two additional merchantmen came in view, Jacobs took extra care to set up his torpedo shots. He pursued the targets for fifty-seven minutes and made certain the TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship from an average range of 1,000 yd (910 m). The shots should have hit, but all failed to explode.
A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem, Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close range of 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed. Exasperated, Jacobs broke radio silence to question the Mark 14's reliability."
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadHe didn't mention any of these failed wargames in the podcast. Reading about it now gives a lot more context on why the commander in chief of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor knew his head was going to roll following the Japanese attack.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml
"Supernova in the East" is his latest series.
OMG, did I never realize how terrifying war in the Pacific was.
Quite a few times I've been mesmerized by his podcasts only to find out later its either mostly made up or a "classic" but totally discredited version of the story.
He really doesn't bother reading up on the latest and most accurate material for his topics.
It's the main reason why I stopped listening to him (the smaller one is that I will never get used to his grating accent).
I read https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppmsm/thoug...
However, never take the book he's actually using...most of the time it's plain outdated.
As you say, you can't really blame a guy who says 5 times per episode that he's "not a historian", but plenty of times I just can't help and wonder why didn't he spend 30 minutes extra researching a topic and choosing better material and sources. The only answer I got is that bad material makes for better stories.
It seems worryingly common for this kind of simulation to ironically lead to disaster. Chernobyl would be another example (the explosion happened during a safety test). And it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).
Ps I read the book from Adam Higginbotham, I didn't just watch the show :)
He also said it would have happened eventually but I doubt it would have in normal operation. In a power loss situation similar to what they were testing perhaps...
We can argue about technicalities all day long, but in my mind Chernobyl had the following critical issues:
- The crew was kept deliberately in the dark about the weaknesses of the design. - The crew had the ability to disable all the safety measures and bring the reactor into a very unstable condition.
Are you seriously going to place the main blame on the crew? They were pawns who made bad decisions in an environment where they were missing crucial information. In my mind, the buck stops with the people in power who discouraged the questioning of superiors, encouraged checkbox ticking exercises and withheld information by default.
It's easy to say "of well they never should have been able to do this in the first place" but what does that actually look like? Reactor controllers need to be able to control the reactor. There are many reasonable scenarios where any given valve or control rod would need to be manipulated, and a long list of scenarios where you don't want to limit the options of engineers to avert a disaster. Having trained engineers be free to access what they need to but putting warning indicators in place to alert them about potentially hazardous actions is the right option. You could shift authority to other people, but at some point you have to trust that whoever it is you have placed in control of this thing will make reasonable choices.
The secrecy and the bootlicking came after the reactor blew up. Yes, had the soviet government been transparent people could have been evacuated faster and workers trying to tame the reactor could have been better equipped. The number of casualties could have been reduced, but the disaster still would have happened.
Everything is ultimately rooted in deeper issues. But none of those deeper issues made this disaster inevitable. The world is full of secretive bootlickers who have never pulled 94% of a reactor's control rods out. Secretive bootlicking does not necessitate nor encourage control rod removal. At the very worst, secretive bootlicking might prevent someone who was already going to remove a bunch of control rods from reconsidering that decision, but something else had to cause that decision to be made in the first place. That's not to say that addressing these issues can't be beneficial, and many changes were indeed implemented after the disaster, but the fact remains that this disaster didn't have to occur.
The graphite accelerated the reaction, which jammed the rods and prevented them from being fully inserted.
Had the rods not been constructed with reaction accelerants, the disaster might not have been so severe.
I think it’s more likely that when you don’t fix obvious points of failure, the system will tend to fail in that way.
UK government issued a pandemic readyness report. Report said the country has no protective equipment and will get rekt. This is exactly what happened. Blaming the messenger is very misguided. Negligence is endemic and always comes back to haunt you
I don't think one does. The imperial Japanese planning staff had strongly favored the doctrine of decisive battle since at least the Tsushima Strait, when it worked splendidly for them against the Russian imperial navy - a much weaker adversary than the US, true, but this was well understood and only made more pointed the need to immediately disable the US navy's ability to conduct significant operations in the intended sphere of Japanese imperial influence.
Too, it's not as if the Imperial Japanese general staff was anything less than world-class. The British made the mistake of assuming otherwise, even ignoring reports from their own observers that Japan needed to be taken seriously as an opponent. That mistake cost them Singapore and Malaya at the outset of the war, and depending on whose arguments you buy, eventually India as well. In light of that and other related history, it verges upon the absurd to repeat the mistake now.
(Really, it was entirely the other way around from what you're positing here; rather than the IJN taking a cue from US war games, we followed the Pearl Harbor attack with our entirely symbolic "Doolittle Raid" on Tokyo a year later.)
That illustrates the strategic incompetence of the IJN. They had, without a decisive battle, won control of the seas--which is why you want the decisive battle. But they didn't exploit their control of the seas (to some degree, they couldn't--the core interests of Britain and the US were outside of the range of Japan to plausibly threaten). And by the Guadalcanal campaign, the USN wrested control of the seas (at least around Guadalcanal) away from Japan--without a decisive battle, still--and used that to devastating effect: the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal was unable to be receive sufficient supplies because of it. And still, the Japanese fretted about not having their decisive battle.
It's not for nothing that Pearl Harbor is often considered an example of simultaneous spectacular tactical success and ruinous strategic failure.
I do think it's fair to describe Pearl as an attempt to reconcile the doctrine of decisive battle with the increasingly evident primacy of naval air power and the numerical and resource superiority of the US. I'll grant that a surprise strike on ships in port doesn't exactly qualify as battle per se, but it was certainly intended to be decisive, and in that circumstance waiting to receive an attack in the classic style doesn't work.
As planned, the attack very well could have worked; after all, if the US fleet carriers had been at Pearl when the Japanese strike force arrived, the IJN could have counted on superiority in the Pacific until at least 1943. While in the long run that might still not have been enough, it would certainly have at least enabled them to consolidate gains and better prepare to receive US attacks in the Pacific, and in any case it's well documented that that was what they were going for.
[1] http://rethinkinghistory.blogspot.com/2021/06/pearl-harbour-...
Its quite a bit more broad-ranging than just a single question, and has a lot of Japanese nationalistic sentiment, but I don't think that detracts from it being an entertaining and thoughtful watch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konpeki_no_Kantai
The USN risked their somewhat inferior (naval aviation and carrier) assets at Midway, and despite their intelligence advantage, knowing where the Japanese were going (as opposed to December 1941, when they expected an attack, but had no way of narrowing down the list of potential targets), won with the help of good fortune, which is usually a part of a victory.
If the Japanese fleet had not been so damaged at Midway, the evacuation of civilians from Hawaii had already been planned to commence post haste, ...
FDR had been advised by an expert that an early attack on the home islands would do important damage to Japanese morale by deflating the myth that their military war-cabinet regime was not putting any civilians at risk.
Sure it's possible. But at least, according to US intelligence, it's highly unlikely. Much more likely is the virus was of natural origin.
Another interesting thing is that a bunch of US agencies did a similar exercise - a pandemic - as recently as 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion
Just as the Covid-19 virus was taking off in China. Coincidence?
That battle kind of proved out one of the concepts that the Japanese used later at Pearl Harbor: namely using ship-launched torpedo bombers to attack other ships in shallow water.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto#Influence_on...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...
It's plausible in terms of cause and effect. The "if-this-then-that"s follow pretty well.
However, counting on something like Pearl Harbor is pants on head moronic. Japan shipped the majority of its fleet across the Pacific to hit a single target. If the U.S. was counting on an attack, they probably weren't counting on an attack of that scale. Which is poor planning.
And what happens if the Japanese never attack?
Over time, the U.S. would have entered the war, just like it did with World War I. Eventually, trade would have been hindered or too many U.S. ships would have been incidental casualties. The U.S. consistently thought that being across an ocean on either side protected it from being affected by European/Asian affairs and was consistently proven wrong.
That was Hitler's single biggest error.
And yet... Stalin was going to attack Hitler eventually, maybe 1942 or 1943. So the pre-emptive attack has it's virtues. Could he have conquered England in time to get be ready for war with Russia when it came?
And, could Russia have done as well as they did without US materiel? (I freely acknowledge that Russia did most of the bleeding in World War II. I don't want to minimize that at all. But US materiel was also essential to them.)
That totally explains why the USA never attacked Stalin, and in fact provided lots of logistical material from oil, rubber, and ammo, to tanks and airplanes.
Did I remember that correctly?
I don't know of any large scale thoughts that Britain tricked the US into entering initial aid attempts. The US was heavily into anti Axis attempts early in the war.
You are remembering incorrectly.
I’m not sure William ever fully recovered from the combined strain of breaking PURPLE and Pearl Harbor being attacked.
According to his wife’s papers, one of the things Mr Friedman said during his mental break at that time was “they knew!”
How well informed people actually were is a matter of debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Friedman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...
People forget the democratic/political constraints on Roosevelt though, including Hitler who thought of it as normalizing relations but Roosevelt wouldn't have had the political capital for declaring war on Germany.
This is absurd on its face, especially when you consider that successfully repelling a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would achieve the same thing without the massive loss in men and material, and allow the U.S. to go on the offensive immediately, before Japan consolidated its Pacific holdings.
Besides, at the time of the attack, public sentiment was 2:1 in favour of risking war with Japan to curtail its expansion; German submarines were already sinking U.S. ships in the Atlantic. The U.S. public had already swung towards war with both powers. The PR boost of the attack wasn't needed.
US anti-communism was a Cold War thing. You're getting your timelines messed up here.
[1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730
What I'm saying is that anti-communism to the point of orchestrating quasi-false flags to get drawn into another World War was not a focus of FDR's administration. As I pointed out, FDR's admin fully and materially supported foreign communist governments.
> Browning laid out his tactical logic in a 13-page, single-spaced, typewritten memorandum on carrier warfare prepared at the Naval War College in 1936, the year that Nazi Germany allied with Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Browning's essay briefly noted the vulnerability of carriers during the aircraft re-arming process, which he later successfully exploited during the Battle of Midway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning
You can really see how each side wound up where it did. Neither side wanted war, the Japanese all assumed they would lose, but because of the immediate successes thought maybe they were wrong. Even terrible translations and a lack of understand of different cultures had a large role.
An attack on US forces in Saudi Arabia today would still be treated severely, but not the same as an attack on Virginia. FDR had to decide how to characterize it. He decided to treat Hawaii as US soil, The Philippines and other territories as less.
Literally everyone. Welcome to the martial history of earth. Remember 9/11?
Hawaii, by contrast, was contemplated by Americans and Hawaiians as inevitably becoming an American possession long before the 1898 annexation.
Pretty much confirmed by my memory (my father-in-law was a retired Italian Navy Admiral, and knew war history very well), as well as by Wikipedia [0]:
"It is likely the Imperial Japanese Navy's staff carefully studied the Taranto raid during planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, as both attacks faced similar issues attacking a shallow harbour"
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
"The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, employing 21 Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea.
The attack struck the battle fleet of the Regia Marina at anchor in the harbour of Taranto, using aerial torpedoes despite the shallowness of the water. The success of this attack augured the ascendancy of naval aviation over the big guns of battleships. According to Admiral Cunningham, "Taranto, and the night of 11–12 November 1940, should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
We still haven't learned from this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
"After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed."
Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369
This sums up the whole US justice system too.
Same thing with the F-15 vs F-22 fight, where the F-22's had to visually identify targets before engaging, stripping them of advantages.
That said, I don't think the US Navy is prepared for drone zerg tactics. I hope I'm wrong.
Drones cheap enough to be produced in massive quantities cannot carry enough payload to be effective against modern ships unless you are in such a short range you may as well shoot a shell at the target.
However, the autonomous F-16 project is something else. Small radar cross section, datalink guided missiles, AIM-120Ds and ship killer missiles on an autonomous fighter platform is just scary.
Doesn't much matter if the battle group runs out of ammo. They've only got a few hundred anti-aircraft missiles between them; hundreds of drones wouldn't be fun to have to deal with.
Imagine a thousand of something like these:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/kamikaze-drones-new-we...
lining the Strait of Hormuz.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
I've no doubt a modern warship can shoot down a lot of drones, but at a few thousand bucks a pop, an adversary can field a lot of drones.
EDIT: CIWS shoot 20mm autocannons, which are estimated to be $30 per shot.
Much cheaper until they run out. If (a big if) one drone can disable the ship, it’s all suddenly very worthwhile.
Especially when said gatling gun reloads in just 4 minutes, you're over water with no terrain to hide behind except the horizon, the horizon is 30km out, and the supporting aircraft (E2-Hawkeye) can see 300km out because its the eye-in-the-sky.
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Hoping that the enemy runs out of $30 bullets before you run out of $1000+ drones is... a bad bet I think
A drone flying out to sea doesn't know where the enemy ships are. The horizon is 30km away to 50km, depending on how high the drone is flying. E2 Hawkeyes fly very high, so they see out 300km.
Any reasonable fight will have the E2 Hawkeye spot the mass of drones long before the drones spot the ships. Once we account for how cheap bullets are and how effective they are on an aimbot (be it an F18 fighter or a CIWS on a ship), it seems impossible for a swarm of drones to even think about approaching any ship.
For sure, and the cost was immense. It worked though.
It might not be cost effective but that alone isn’t the full picture. Taking out a ship or carrier or something would be an incredible PR win/loss depending on one’s side and would change everyone’s strategies.
What's the launch platform? How do you program the drones to find its target?
Its not too hard to imagine the drone as a slow-moving missile, with maybe a similar launch platform where drones can be easily programmed with GPS-coordinates and go off on their mission.
But the minute we think about logistics of storing, programming, and deploying this hypothetical weapon... we realize that we're just building a really crappy version of the MLRS (multiple-launch rocket system).
If the prize is a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier it might not be.
More to the point, you're talking about cannons that fire at 4500 rounds per minute, and while this is outside my area of expertise, the fire control computer's strategy is absolutely not going to be to fire a single round and wait to see whether the target disappears. It's going to fire some minimum number of rounds, and it only takes a fraction of a second to burn through $1000 of 20mm ammo.
If it is a feasible option, it's pretty easy to imagine a conflict where keeping the cannons occupied with garbage $1000 decoy targets for a while is a cost-effective strategy. (it seems like the sort of thing you'd do during an attack alongside real anti-ship missiles, though, to improve the effectiveness of those weapons)
The minute we're talking 10,000 cruise missiles vs 1-million drones, the cruise missiles suddenly look easier because its just fewer things to deal with.
EDIT: In particular, we know how to launch hundreds of cruise missiles simultaneously. How do you plan to launch hundreds, or thousands, of drones simultaneously? What kind of launch platform is that? Just thinking about the design of the truck that carries 1,000 drones is already a big headache.
We have trucks that can carry 12 cruise missiles, and launch all 12 of them near simultaneously. A bunch of those trucks lined up on a highway aiming to the ocean is pretty easy to think about.
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We also have boats that can carry 100s of missiles, and launch dozens of them simultaneously. Those are called Missile Destroyers or Missile Cruisers.
If there's no “counter battery” to worry about, maybe. Lining up your trucks on a highway is a great way to get them all destroyed by a single air attack…
And there's no way it's gonna take a million drone to sink a ship. Modern ship defence systems haven't been designed against a huge number of small targets. A hundred armed drones might even be enough to overflow the tracking system. For reference, the Israelian Iron Dome[1] can only track 200 targets[2] and we're talking about a system that has been specifically designed against swarm attacks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
[2] “per minute” whatever that means https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...
How do you plan to launch your drones?
A bunch of trucks on a highway is a really good strategy. Especially since these missile-trucks have 2000+km range.
https://blog.usni.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/12722150-0-...
These are the weapons the US Military is worried about. Hypersonic (3000mph), possibly homing (if China is to be believed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21
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In any case, a drone-launch platform will need a lot of launchers: little programmers that tell the drone its final orders before they fly off. It doesn't matter if its a TOW-like (follow the radio signal based off of this laser-pointer), or homing, or whatever capability you have.
Once you have a bunch of launchers + drones, you then need a way to transport them around, so that you can optimally launch them when needed.
TL;DR: You need MLRS, except for drone launching. That's the only feasible way you're going to effectively manage so many drones.
But even then, that just begs the question: why aren't you just using MLRS to begin with, with standard cruise missiles invented like 40 years ago?
> How do you plan to launch your drones?
Ideally, from scattered units operating with light vehicles (say, a pick-up with a trailer). The key part is being able to launch your attack without being destroyed first. And as I said earlier, I think you're overestimating the number of needed drones by several orders of magnitude.
No, I haven't. My point is whatever launcher mechanism you have for your hypothetical drones has the exact same issue.
> Ideally, from scattered units operating with light vehicles (say, a pick-up with a trailer).
Yes. These are called MLRS when they're rockets or cruise missiles. If you think a cruise missile platform can be "counter-battery fired", then these light pickup trucks you're talking about have the same exact problem.
Not exactly, even it shares some.
First of all they are much less expensive, and you have much more of them, making them harder to destroy. They are actually likely to be cheapy than the cost of the missile used to shoot them, which is never the case with cruise missile platform).
Then you don't need an open field to launch a drone, sending cruse missiles from dense urban area is more of a problem.
And in any case I think you moving goalpost a bit here, since when talking about counter battery, I initially responded to your suggestion to put the MLRS lined up, in plain sight on a highway… Now if you told me you're going to put your MLRS in isolated barns in the countryside, then it's of course the same situation whether it's launching drones or missiles, the number being the only significant difference.
Rocket / Missile launchers are just a tube. The launcher itself isn't expensive, its the programmer and truck platform that costs money.
> and you have much more of them, making them harder to destroy.
The PLARF has plenty of missiles. We can't destroy all of them anymore.
> They are actually likely to be cheapy than the cost of the missile used to shoot them
Drones are so slow you wouldn't use a missile. You'd use a CIWS, a $30 bullet.
Counter-missiles are extremely expensive, because the counter-missile needs to move faster and be more maneuverable than the original missile.
You must have forgotten the missiles in it…
> The PLARF has plenty of missiles. We can't destroy all of them anymore.
I don't know why you keep bringing China in this conversation, really. Drones have the power to make ships almost useless even against small army forces, the Millennium Challenge already proved that cruise missiles were very good against fleets. But deploying them efficiently against the US Navy would be a challenge for most army (but, as I said earlier, not China nor Russia). Drones could give the Houthis Yemeni faction the ability to sink a US carrier, and this isn't a good thing for the US Navy.
> Drones are so slow you wouldn't use a missile. You'd use a CIWS, a $30 bullet.
Their slow speed is actually a feature. It's really easy to make them have a completely unpredictable trajectory. Good luck shooting that with bullets. Also, because they are slow, they can also deploy some sorts of decoy to fool the aiming systems. Shrapnel is going to be extremely effective against them though, so it's completely possible to design dedicated defence mechanism, but hoping that a defence designed to stop ancient weapons against a new one isn't usually a good strategic move.
Read up on the "USS America", a former Aircraft carrier built on 1960s technology and armor. As part of a retirement exercise, the USS America was subject to a number of bombs and explosions to test the armor of the old ship.
So these drones you're talking about... how much explosives can they carry? Do remember: F18 regularly crash-and-burn on a carrier deck, with no real long-term damage to the carrier.
I have my doubts that a small drone carries enough firepower to damage a carrier. There's a reason why these cruise missiles carry 1000lbs of high-explosives (*per missile*), and no one seriously expects just one missile to sink a carrier.
EDIT: A more recent test was the Iranian 2015 public test: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/world/middleeast/in-mock-...
Iran had to hit a fake aircraft carrier (a big boat they bought and dressed up to look like a carrier), and Iran was basically unable to sink it with just missiles. You need a lot of explosives to kill a boat of that size, let alone an armored / compartmentalized, well-studied, computer-simulated $13 Billion war-version.
> It's really easy to make them have a completely unpredictable trajectory.
Quadcopter motors aren't known for thrust. You know what is known for thrust? Rockets.
Without thrust, you won't have an unpredictable trajectory. Rockets can push 2Gs laterally while traveling at 500mph and still end up on the target that they're aiming at.
You ain't gonna get that kind of behavior from quadcopter drones. You just won't.
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> I don't know why you keep bringing China in this conversation, really.
Because I do think that China's strategy is a good one on face value. I hope that the US strategy is better, but I think the Chinese are making enough moves here that proves that they know what they're doing.
EDIT: When you have a rocket that achieves 2G of thrust and hypersonic speeds, its not too difficult to use that thrust to start erratically dodging CIWS. In fact, that's the expectation: you need that amount of thrust to break the sound barrier anyway, so might as well put that rocket to good use dodging bullets.
Carriers are notoriously difficult to sink. But there's a well known strategy: 1) you destroy the carriers defence, 2) you target the direction (not the propulsion) of the carrier so it cannot flee 3) you send a shit ton of whatever you have to sink it.
Drones are obviously unable to do 3), but they are completely apt for 1 and 2. Small boats controlled remotely (which are drones, as a matter of fact) loaded with TNT would do the job eventually when all defences are lost. And even if 3) never happens because the Navy still manages to prevent those small boats from approaching (this is pretty likely, with air support), CNN looping on live footage of USS Gerald R. Ford stuck sailing in circle in the Gulf of Aden after a drone attack would be pretty humiliating for the US Navy to say the least.
Also, as I said earlier, cruse missiles are awesome against ships, and it is a well know fact nobody discusses. Nowhere in this thread am I arguing that drones are superior to cruise missiles. The question is: can a state with limited cruse missile capability piss the US Navy off with drones, and I'm convinced the answer is a big yes.
The US army would likely not taking a single casualty from a single cruise missile targetting air carrier convoy. But they are much less prepared against few hundred drones swarming upon them.
How many drones do you think it will take to break and/or significantly damage that rudder?
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You're avoiding the hard question. How many lbs of explosive do these drones carry. 100lbs of explosives? 500lbs? 1000lbs? These war machines are measured in the hundreds-and-hundreds of lbs of explosives it takes to deal serious damage.
Its not going to be a cheap drone that can steer / move agile while carrying an explosive payload of that weight.
That's why we use missiles: because rocket engines have a superior thrust-to-weight ratio. Quadcopters cannot carry 100lbs of explosive, let alone 500lbs or 1000lbs. Not cheap quadcopters anyway.
I'm gonna end this discussion here because I've made my points and you look way too determined to fight against straw men than discussing them.
Look, this is the root of this thread.
> I've no doubt a modern warship can shoot down a lot of drones, but at a few thousand bucks a pop, an adversary can field a lot of drones.
"A few thousand bucks a pop" per drone sounds like a quadcopter drone to me. That's not a jet-drone or a rocket-drone.
Now if you are saying that a bunch of Predator drones shooting a bunch of missiles at a carrier can probably disable it... well... sure. I can agree to that. That probably will work. But such a drone will be rather expensive, and you wouldn't want those drones shot down by a CIWS.
Unless we're talking about China or Russia, how are they going to manufacture, move and maintenance those drones once we've pancaked their infrastructure? The adversary will be under non-stop bombardment, all of their relevant infrastructure will be targeted, all major manufacturing, their electrical grid, all transport roads, all rail, all bridges, all ports. How are they getting the toy drones out to deep water if they have no ports? How will they manufacture replacement boats / ships with no manufacturing? And so on.
Sure, if we're talking about war with China or Russia, that's entirely different. Then you're talking about something closer to WW3 (and good luck). Everyone else is trivial to cripple.
That's the thing: "drones" that most people are talking about in these discussions are just really bad Tomahawk cruise missiles or really really bad ICBMs.
I linked an example of such a drone up-thread; $5k. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/kamikaze-drones-new-we...
> how are they going to manufacture, move and maintenance those drones once we've pancaked their infrastructure?
You build the drones before the war, not during.
> And how far can said toy drones fly so as to reach a destroyer in the first place?
Doesn't have to be too far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz
We're on a thread about Pearl Harbor, after all. Load up thousands of drones on a number of container ships and do a surprise attack with them.
So that's what? 150 CIWS bullets per drone for cost-equivalency? ($30 bucks per CIWS bullet). Seems like a good trade, the CIWS can shoot down 500mph missiles, it will take out the much slower drone with far less ammo and far cheaper.
You also know that warships would be stationed 1000km away, with an E-2 Hawkeye looking over the horizon (300km range radars). So the first thing the drone will see is the E-2 Hawkeye. The drones wont even know where the ships are, and the Carrier is already deploying a mass of fighters at the drone swarm.
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Once the numbers are figured out by the E-2 hawkeye, the Carrier probably will deploy F18, which will use a 20mm Gatling gun to kill all the drones and return home.
The drones won't even see where the ships are in practice. The best they'll ever discover is the E-2 Hawkeye through line of sight. All the ships would be "too low" and hidden away by the horizon itself. The CIWS won't even get a chance to shoot because the drones never even made it to the horizon (ie: 50km) of the ships. All the drones are killed 300km out.
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There's a reason why China is mass-producing Destroyers. Because Destroyers work. Mass drones aren't really a strategy.
Sure. The scary bit of drone swarms is not the individual basis, but the fact that shoot down ten drones and your CIWS is empty.
> There's a reason why China is mass-producing Destroyers.
You don't think they're also playing with drones?
200km/hr drones (or slower) won't be effective against any of the US Naval forces. There's a reason China is spending billions developing 5000km/hr homing "ship-killer" missiles.
If a $5000 drone could even pose a threat against any US Warship, China wouldn't have bothered with 5000km/hr hypersonic speeds or research.
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The goal of China's naval forces is to search for the US Fleet. Once China finds the US Fleet, it shoots the DF-21 ship-killer missile at it, hoping that the Chinese Fleet can stay in the game long enough to provide accurate targeting against the US ships.
That's called A2/AD, Anti-access area denial. This works because the missiles move very, very fast, so the US ships need to kill the enemy Chinese ship within 15 minutes or so (ie: the time it takes for the missile to travel from China to 1000km out and hit a US ship).
It takes 4 minutes to reload a CWIS and the horizon is like 50km out.
How fast are your drones again? Do you really think that a mass of drones will spend 15 minutes flying towards a group of warships and actually survive to make contact?
How many drones? How did they not get picked up by radar and killed 300km out by E2 Hawkeye eye-in-the-sky + F18 fighters?
The state-of-the-art for drones has moved forward immensely in the last few years. F-18s don't always hit enemy fighters, let alone uncrewed much smaller targets able to do extremely high-G maneuvers.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b4/97/05/b497058ef6f0a0af5a30...
Just because some people thought it was a good idea, doesn't mean it was in fact... a good idea.
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Large-masses of suicide explosives work. We just call them cruise missiles. There's a particular strategy: you fly low to the ground so that radar don't pick you up, you fly as fast as possible (500mph / subsonic is one cutoff), and you throw a bunch of sensors onto it to auto-aim / home into the target.
Deciding to go from 500mph down to 200mph (or slower) just so that you can make it work with quadcopter technology has the big issue that you're suddenly easier to shoot down. Our guns / AI systems are designed to shoot down 500mph missiles. Letting your mass of bots get shot down on purpose is... a strikingly odd strategy to say the least.
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Similarly: the armored bicycle might have worked in WW1. But it turns out that the Armored Tank was a better weapon more suited for invading no-man's land.
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The best argument you have against the CIWS is "hope the Aimbot-Gatling Gun runs out of ammo", ignoring the fact that it reloads in 4 minutes and that a typical Cruiser has two of them, and you're facing a fleet not just a single gun.
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And you haven't even told me how the drones know where to go yet. How did the drones find the ships to begin with?
> The state-of-the-art for drones has moved forward immensely in the last few years. F-18s don't always hit enemy fighters, let alone uncrewed much smaller targets able to do extremely high-G maneuvers.
That's not a $5000 drone anymore and you know it.
In any case, no quadcopter drone is going to have the high-G maneuverability of a jet or rocket.
If you make a "rocket drone with an explosive payload", that's just a cruise missile. And yes, I'm aware that cruise missiles are a good idea. They also cost nearly $2 million each.
You didn't. You linked to a drone that could never threaten a destroyer, doesn't do anything like zerg'ing, a drone that could never likely reach a destroyer in the first place, and in the large sizes doesn't cost a few thousand dollars. You linked to a drone that can kill soldiers nearby, that's all; and the slightly bigger version can maybe disable armored vehicles nearby.
> You build the drones before the war, not during.
Which is an admission that you can't stay in the war once it begins. You'll quickly get wiped out. And the toy drones never reach the destroyers, because you have no ports, no transport, no manufacturing, no electricity, no boats, no ships.
> Doesn't have to be too far.
The toy drones you linked to can't threaten a destroyer at meaningful distances (and would be unlikely to severely damage a destroyer in the first place). And if the US is at war with eg Iran, the US is not going to sail its ships right up to Iran's shoreline and invite them to launch hundreds of poorly aimed, weak toy drones at them.
> Which is an admission that you can't stay in the war once it begins. You'll quickly get wiped out.
You can apply that logic to any equipment, and drones are going to be easier to build than a lot of other war waging equipment (eg how long does it take to build a ship?).
There is a long history of unsophisticated groups waging long and successful wars against large, powerful nations. Preparing for the previous war is superpower 101.
Destroyers aren't even anti-air. Cruisers are, since Cruisers have two CWIS per ship while Destoyers only have 1x CWIS.
England's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer are primarily in an anti-air and anti-missile role, even.
While Modern Cruisers were closer to specializing in the air-defense role.
But yes, Destroyers have lots of anti-air on them for sure.
Additionally, ships are usually not alone. The other vessels in the battlegroup will also provide their anti-air capabilities. If they are with an aircraft carrier, then there are also planes to provide air defense.
So the enemy can always deploy more suicide quadcopter drones than missiles.
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Which seems like an insanely bad strategy to me, because of the whole CIWS thing. Sure, you negate the usefulness of missiles by making drones cheaper, but you can't negate the cheapness of a CIWS, or the gatling gun of an F18 Hornet / F35B / F35C.
That's why we still use guns today: because bullets are really, really cheap.
The M1 Abrams has 350mm armor, the biggest, baddest tank of the US Army.
The Arleigh Burke Destroyer doesn't have one armor plate like the M1 Abrams: it has multiple plates wrapping other plates wrapping its hull which wraps Kevlar to protect the people inside.
It turns out that boats can just have much much thicker armor than any tank, because floating is much easier than moving with an engine.
I don't think any military is.
Look at what happened to Armenia recently.
It's perhaps not all that dissimilar a story with China's PLA.
Mao actually assumed the USSR would back him up but he was betrayed.
The military doctrine hasn't changed much from the soviet era, except guess what: drones!
"Royal Marines commandos 'dominated' US troops and forced them into a humiliating surrender just days into a mass training exercise in the Mojave desert, it has been revealed today.
British forces took part in a five-day mock battle at the US Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms base in southern California, one of the largest military training areas in the world, and achieved a decisive victory against their American counterparts.
The Royal Marines, along with allied forces from Canada, the Netherlands and the UAE, destroyed or rendered inoperable nearly every US asset and finished the exercise holding more than 65 per cent of the training area, after beginning with less than 20 per cent.
Combatants used paintball-style training ammunition, which fires with reduced pressure and velocity, along with hi-tech simulators for heavier firepower like artillery, and live ammo on expansive ranges.
Seeing no opportunity for victory, American combatants asked for the exercise to be 'reset' halfway through the five-day exercise, having taken significant casualties from British commandos. "
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10159949/Royal-Mari...
There's nothing in that article that asserts the sort of "reset, then script it to ensure the 'good guys' win" scenario from the 2002 case.
> “ ‘Winners’ are never determined,” Capt. Zachary Colvin, the communications and strategy director with the Marine Air Ground Combat Center, told Military Times in a statement. “This exercise does not provide an opportunity to ‘surrender,’ ‘keep score,’ or ‘reset.’ The objective of the exercise is to heighten unit performance and increase readiness.”
https://taskandpurpose.com/voices/us-marines-didnt-surrender...
> In short, among several statements made in the opening four paragraphs of the Telegraph article, none was accurate. I know this because – as they say – I was there.
There is no suggestion in the article that the non-US forces were required to operate with their hands tied after the reset in order to allow a US victory.
More generally, many exercises consist of multiple 'phases' anyway, which are in effect wholly separate parts of an operation set within the same broad scenario. They might separately test (e.g.) advancing to contact, a contact situation and then some sort of holding operation. Resets are wholly expected: each phase usually starts in a pre-planned state independent of the previous phase. E.g. if a force fails it's objective in the first phase and gets wiped out it will start the second phase in a refreshed state so that the force can train for the second type of activity rather than waste the sometimes significant cost of assembling the exercise in the first place.
> Unbeknownst to the U.S. military at the time, we now know that Japan had been watching Admiral Yarnell’s 1932 mock attack with keen interest.
> Tokyo’s spy organization in Oahu had observers across the island that relayed information back to Japan - which studied and absorbed the lessons the U.S. Navy failed to learn.
This speak volumes about how the results of war games need to remain classified. ...in the same way you would want a pen-test you've contracted out to remain confidential. If it's public, you give your adversary a blueprint for attacking you.
Secrecy protects the pen-test findings document, but not your vulnerability. The map should never be confused for the territory.
active search radars would be very visible targets and be targetted by any opposing force, especially if they are planning for an air drop, no? I don't disagree there was some egregrious rules, but I don't think it was one of them
I recommend the book, well written and approachable to casual readers like me. A lot of details about carrier operations, fog of war and visual representations of attack vectors and bomb hits and their outcome.
Also, Drachinifels had a good session/interview about the book with Jon Parshall, one of its author:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN79g34wjQA
Why the rough start? I would point at Admiral Kimmel. Kimmel's predecessors (Reeves and Richardson) understood that American Bases (Subic Bay, Panama Canal San Diego, Pearl Harbor - in that order) were at risk from a Japanese surprise attack. Reeves was obsessed by it - which is partially why this Fleet Problem occurred. When Reeves retired, Richardson took his place. While story goes that Richardson was fired for making the point that Pearl was vulnerable, that doesn't appear to be the whole story. Richardson's main complaint was not sneak attack, but rather that Pearl Harbor didn't have the facilities to adequately service and train the fleet, and his solders would be bored during peacetime. Regardless, he was also concerned about a sneak attack against American assets.
Richardson was insubordinate - at one time questioning the role of congress and the president in dictating military policy - FDR fired him, and replaced him with Kimmel.
Kimmel on the other hand was obsessed with the Japanese population of Hawaii, particularly the risk of sabotage. Rather then focus on radar, or keeping the Fleet at Lahaina roads - where they could move freely in case of a sneak attack - he kept the fleet bottled up (save the aircraft carriers) and the planes lined up in roads.
Even then - the USA had put in place things like Radar and built up Pearl Harbor rapid ally enough that they could have responded if everything was perfect. But you had one force that had been at war for 8 years before the USA entered, and the other at peace time. The focus on sabotage instead of fleet defense doomed them.
While the Niihau incident occurred, it was obviously a far smaller problem the the Fleet burning in Honolulu.
Finally it needs to be noted that a ton of people expected a surprise attack. They just expected it against the forward US base (the Philippines) or Singapore
Ironically, the one area task force wise that that the Japanese were inspired by the USA was based on not by Fleet Problems, but instead propaganda. The story goes that the Japanese commander in charge of Planning - Minoru Genda - was watching American news reels, which showed American carriers acting in formation, in the same frame of film. While this was done for filming, Genda applied it to actual battle formations. That gave Japan enough firepower to target the entire Pacific Island, not just a single ship or even a single base.
The Japanese were also far more inspired by the attack on Taranto by a set of obsolete biplanes that basically wiped out Italian sea power (not that there was a ton of that) in Europe.
The biplanes were not totally obsolete, they were equipped with radar which allowed them to attack at night and find their carrier again, none of the USN or IJN aircraft could do this until a lot later in the war.
And they expected it in 1942, not 1941. And in point of fact, there was ALSO a surprise attack on the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
The historiography (how we handle the narrative of history and how that narrative has changed over time) around the attack on the Philippines and the subsequent defense is very confusing and interesting to me.
A few thoughts - The US Navy was not ready to fight the Japanese Navy in 1941; it was only by the end of 1942 that you see the US getting a real advantage. Look at the Battle of Savo Island in August of 1942. [0] But much of the history of WWII is viewed from the highest point of each participant.
The US public needed some kind of hopeful news, it needed to sound like the US was fighting back. The news out of the Philippines was not good, but it could be made to sound like a struggle to get behind.
The defense of the Philippines was a disaster, but it could not be presented that way to the American public, so MacArthur was made to be a hero. This is oversimplified and I'm sure a lot of people will disagree.
0. Midway is not a fluke, but a result of excellent planning and deception operations, with a bit of luck thrown in. Even in Midway you can see that many US battle elements were not ready: ineffective torpedo bombing, ineffective dive bombing, ineffective high level horizontal bombing (which remained ineffective against competent enemy vessels for the entire war), poor navigation.
I am with you. Blame Douglas MacArthur for that one. it's inconceivable that his planes where still lined up just waiting for the shots to be fired. I get that it's hard to figure out how to stage aviation forces so they are not on the deck at a bad moment (see Midway, Battle Of), but by any definition, it was incompetant then.
On Midway, I think Shattered Sword has the correct narrative. Midway is amazing not in that it a miracle, but rather that we almost still bungled it, despite having total and complete surprise, a great battle plan, and a significant advantage in airpower.
And, why do you say that "the defense of the Philippines was a disaster"? It was a battle against hopeless odds, but are you saying it was bungled? If so, how?
And, what was poor about the navigation at Midway?
Yes, it was bungled. The odds were hopeless at a certain point - which is what makes this operation so interesting to me. When did the odds become hopeless? October 1941 or December 7th or 10th or ... 1941?
For poor navigation - it's not all on the pilots, this was hard throughout the war for all sides, but specifically I mean that different groups went different places.
For Midway, I highly recommend reading Shattered Sword or watching any number of the presentations the authors have given.
> Ineffective dive bombing at Midway? It was the only thing that was effective!
Poorly executed would be a better term. They succeeded by almost pure luck.
Two different squadrons managed to accidentally attack in different directions at the same time while the Japanese carriers had fully fueled and armed airplanes in their hangars waiting for an opening to launch an attack.
Their hit ratio was terrible, but one bomb on a carrier was enough to destroy it given the conditions.
> And, what was poor about the navigation at Midway?
USS Hornet's Flight to Nowhere. The carrier completely screwed up launching their squadrons and then went in the wrong direction. Their torpedo bomber squadron mutinied and went in a different direction. The torpedo bombers found the Japanese but without any friendly fighters to protect them, all where shot down.
All 10 Wildcat fighters ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. The other groups aborted to Midway after getting critically low on fuel and not finding any targets. At least four planes lost from the other groups.
Blog post: http://pilotpropwash.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-flight-to-nowh...
> Poorly executed would be a better term. They succeeded by almost pure luck.
If you mean pure luck in finding the carriers, I could agree with you. But...
Three to five hits on the Kaga. Only one hit on the Agaki. Three hits on Soryu. No hits on Hiryu in the first attack. Four or five hits on the second attack on Hiryu. That's not just getting lucky.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075
If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
and
Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-imag...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180124005751/http://ssi.armywa...
For instance, how did Japan not consider that the US Navy deployed top secret radar after the first wargame that then perfectly warned about the second attack? You can easily stack multiple wargames in one. Another option could have been a submarine screen that "intercepted" the attacking force.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI
My son was 'insurgent leader' for an Army exercise in Korea. His team of 6 used various tactics (inside information between exercises gained from friends in the camp; feints; bribing their way in through the back gate) and ultimately got a 'suicide bomber' into the command tent. After that they went round behind the defenders and only stopped when they ran out of simulated ammo. 6 guys defeated a company.
There was curiously no 'after action review', and further exercises were scripted if I remember right.
Anyway yeah, nobody wants that kind of result on the record.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Colonel_...)
On Dec 7 or 8th over a roughly 12 hour period, Imperial Japan launched simultaneous invasions of Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, what are now Indonesia and Malaysia, and a half-dozen small islands including Guam and Wake, with about a million soldiers across a theatre spanning some 8000 miles. Allied control in Asia was essentially eliminated within two months. A systematic, wilful, underestimation of the Japanese potential before their flood outwards is a theme throughout, from Pearl Harbor to "Fortress Singapore".
1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally.
2. They did not hit any of the dry dock facilities, so almost all the damaged ships were repaired in place without having to be towed back to the west coast.
3. They did not hit the fuel depots, so the remaining fleet had plenty of fuel ready to go.
And, of course, the carriers were out on operations, which was a critical miss, as it turned out.
Japanese submarine doctrine (attached to fleet elements in support of seeking battle/harassing the enemy fleet) may have influenced their target selection in going after larger surface combatants in preference to submarines.
And yes, that was a huge strategic mistake. U.S. submarines inflicted grievous damage to Japanese merchant shipping throughout the war.
"On 24 December 1941, during a war patrol, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired eight torpedoes at two different ships with no results. When two additional merchantmen came in view, Jacobs took extra care to set up his torpedo shots. He pursued the targets for fifty-seven minutes and made certain the TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship from an average range of 1,000 yd (910 m). The shots should have hit, but all failed to explode.
A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem, Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close range of 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed. Exasperated, Jacobs broke radio silence to question the Mark 14's reliability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems