On that note, you might enjoy this AFJI article: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/04/3901424

The over-arching pattern seems to be consistent. The politico-military leadership is faced with an intractable problem. All avenues of escape, or at least face-saving resolution of the problem, seem closed. The desire to go to war, to break out of the political blind alley, grows. The politicians demand a plan to use force to solve the problem. The military, with a can-do spirit, looks for ways to respond to that demand. Counter-arguments get whittled down or shouted down, and gaps that should have given pause or terminated the planning process are papered over with wishful assumptions. No one is willing to say: “we cannot do this; it will be too costly and risky to do this; we need to take a political defeat, or choke back our ambitions, because we cannot make something this big work out in our favor. We need to face reality.” No one wants to have to answer to the second-guessing that would ensue, the accusations of cowardice, the historical record saying that a golden opportunity had been squandered, etc.

More leaders fall for this than succeed in resisting it. Eisenhower, who had nothing to prove to anyone, could say no to a deeper involvement in Vietnam. JFK, who had been, in his view, let down badly by the military in the Bay of Pigs and in the Cuban Missile Crisis (LeMay told him he had one option: A massive attack on Cuba. Kennedy and his civilians had to come up with the Naval quarantine plan), would not have trusted them to “do” Vietnam. LBJ, not a soldier, overly impressed by soldiers, failed to ask the right questions and demand answers, and he got a lot of people killed.

I agree with you Duncan on the failure of the Japanese to realize that the naval carrier had superseded the battleship. But the atomic bomb is not germane to a discussion about planning considerations regarding Pearl Harbor. The Japanese planners did not correctly factor the total war mentality which the U.S. would approach the Pacific campaign and WWII as a whole. A lack of imagination is related to red teaming if it applies to not correctly factoring an opponent’s response. I definitely believe though that much historical debate is done with hindsight bias and probably mine included.

Adam, thanks for your clarification, and that is what I meant. But planners do not just check if a nation has nuclear weapons but also what a nation’s or a nation’s leaders plan to do with its nuclear arms. China and Russia have nuclear weapons and we have not gone to war with them over them (I acknowledge this might be stretching the analogy), but nation’s go to war many times over not just off perceived ability but perceived intent. The previous administration had believed that Saddam had provided refuge for Al Qaeda and had interests aligned with these terrorists. Another part of the perceived threat was that Saddam could pass dirty bombs to AQ. But based off Saddam’s confessions and his political history and ideology, it seems he had no love for AQ and his nuclear weapons discussions were meant for Iran.

Did we attack India or Pakistan after finding out they had nuclear weapons? Have we attacked North Korea yet despite its possible amibitions for possessing nuclear weapons? No, and it’s because of what we’ve perceived their intentions to be. It could be persuasively argued that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons pose as much a danger as a theoretical case in which Iraq w/Saddam owned nuclear weapons. But we didn’t attack Pakistan because we understood it to be a regional struggle of arms between India-Pak rather then one directed to the U.S. If we had viewed Saddam thru the lens of a regional struggle between Iran-Iraq (which would not have been a huge logical leap given the large resevoir of animosity stemming from the Iran-Iraq war) then history might have played out differently.

Tim, what do you think?

The Pearl Harbor attack was modeled upon their earlier, successful surprise attack upon the Russian fleet at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War. This crippled the local Russian fleet and allowed them subsequently to destroy the relief Russian Baltic fleet at the Battle of Tsushima.

Like the Russian fleet, the pre-war American fleet was divided into the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Unlike the Russian fleet, the American battleships were linked by the Panama Canal. The Japanese had addressed this issue by building the superbattleships, Yamoto and Mushashi, which outclassed all existing American battleships and which could only be matched by ships too large to transit the Panama Canal. This placed the United States navy in precisely the same situation as the Russian once had been.

The fly in the Japanese’ ointment was that at precisely the time that Pearl Harbor took place, the battleship was being superseded by the aircraft carrier. Had the attack occurred only a few years earlier, the blow to our battleships would have been decisive for precisely the same reasons the Port Arthur attack had been decisive.

As for the total defeat of Japan: absent the atomic bomb, that would have required a costly and problematical invasion. So Japan would have had chances to secure terms.

Accordingly, Japan’s failure was not one of lack of information but rather inability to anticipate new, unheralded developments – a lack of imagination or perhaps pure bad luck.