I don't think I will ever be happy with this: it seems incredibly simplistic, surface level and fuzzy, but that's from my perspective. Better to release it than tweak it forever.

Must remember to skip the Roman numerals for the titles... I don't think Youtube would appreciate that.

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War Room 30: Policy, Strategy and Tactics at Pearl Harbour

Welcome back to the War Room, where we are on the flight deck of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi on the morning of December the 7th, 1941. Akagi is the flagship of the six carriers that make up the Kido Butai, at the time the strongest carrier battle group in the world. 370km over the horizon to the south is Hawaii and the naval base at Pearl Harbour where the bulk of the unsuspecting US Pacific Fleet is lying at anchor.

The Imperial Japanese Navy is about to open the War in the Pacific with a pre-emptive strike that is simultaneously a tactical victory and strategic disaster.

This is a slight departure from the usual War Room format. Instead of focusing on the events of a single battle or campaign, we’re going to use a historical event to frame some concepts that will hopefully help shine a light on some element of war and warfare.

For this first episode, we’re going to look at a framework for examining conflict: the interplay between national policy, strategy and tactics.

Strategic and Tactical

That means we need to start off with some definitions.

Policy

Policy refers to overarching objectives, the result or end-state that a belligerent wants. War is a continuation of politics by other means, so policy objectives are fundamentally political in nature.

Strategic

Gray describes strategy as “the bridge between military power and policy.” In a similar vein, FMFM-1 states: “Activities at the strategic level focus directly on national policy objectives… Military policy is thus subordinate to national strategy.”

In other words, strategy is closely interwoven with politics. Wars don’t just happen. Political entities like states have policy objectives that they try and impose on others through violent means.

Tactical

Those violent means are found at the tactical level. Tactics refer to how military force is actually applied. Again, if we look at Gray, he says “Tactics refers to actual use of armed forces...” and according to FMFM1: “Activities at the tactical level of war focus on the application of combat power to defeat an enemy in combat at a particular time and place. Tactics can be thought of as the art and science of winning engagements and battles.”

So tactics are the means of violence which strategy is attempting to link to ends of policy. The Prussians want to conquer France, to do so they need to defeat the French army, so they envelop them at Sedan. Policy, strategy, tactics.

There is a spectrum here: we could break strategy down into grand strategy, military strategy, regional strategy and so on, just like we could insert the operational level above tactics and the technical below. I’m very consciously sticking to ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ here to keep things simple, the important point is the hierarchy: policy is the ends, tactical is the means and they’re connected by strategy.

Japan’s Strategic Position

In the specific example of the War in Pacific, Japan’s long term political aim was to establish itself as the dominant East Asian power. Essentially, that boiled down to conquering the Chinese mainland.

Beginning with its defeat of China in the first Sino-Japanese War back in 1895, Japan had fought a number of wars to seize Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria. Starting from 1937 it had expanded operations in China, ultimately occupying about a third of the country.

The downside to all this empire-building was that Japan far exceeded the raw material constraints of its home islands. The army, the navy, the military industrial base and the economy at large became dependent on imported resources. Most critically, by the 1940s Japan imported 90% of its oil.

The United States, meanwhile, strongly opposed Japanese expansionism in China. US-led efforts to deter the Japanese by applying economic sanctions culminated in July 1941 with an oil embargo. Without oil supplies from the USA and the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese war machine would inevitably grind to a halt and then collapse.

So Japan had a crisis on its hands. It could allow itself to be coerced, back down and abandon 50 years of empire building. Or, it could take the raw materials it needed, principally from the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and British Malaya.

Inevitably given the cultural outlook of a hyper militarised Japan, abandoning operations in China and giving up on the Empire was not considered an option and began to look south.

The Decision to Attack

Taking the Dutch East Indies by force was unlikely to be a problem. Japan was the third naval power in the world, it had a large army with combat experience and an understanding of amphibious landings courtesy of operations in China.

It would principally be up against the Dutch and the British… the Dutch were a minor power unlikely to offer significant opposition even if the Netherlands weren’t currently occupied by Germany. The British were a different prospect, with a global empire and the world’s largest navy, but they were tied up in the Atlantic and Mediterranean fighting the Germans and Italians and could only realistically devote a fraction of their attention to East Asia. In other words, the Japanese could count on local superiority.

The Americans were a different matter. They not only possessed the only regional force capable of going toe-to-toe with the Imperial Japanese Navy- the US Pacific Fleet- but were in the process of rearmament and, critically, controlled the Philippines, which sat directly between the Japanese Home Islands and their objectives in South East Asia.

The Japanese believed that they could not afford to bypass the Philippines and leave US air and naval forces in their rear. It seemed implausible that the Americans would stay out of the planned conflict. They were the leaders of the anti-Japanese American-British-China-Dutch Coalition, they were materially supporting Japan’s enemies in China and they were attempting to coerce Japan with crippling economic sanctions.

Given that belief, war with the United States was inevitable and Japan had to deal with the US Navy. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s existing plans to destroy the US Pacific Fleet relied on the Americans sailing into the Western Pacific, where they would be crushed in one decisive battle. But this approach failed to take into account other Japanese commitments.

The planned operations in South East Asia were expected to take about five months and involve a massive commitment of naval assets that would have to be pulled out and concentrated in the north if the decisive battle loomed. That would be incredibly disruptive and potentially fatal to Japan’s overarching plan to secure the raw materials it needed.

The solution was to strike the US Pacific Fleet at the very start of the war, cripple it and gain the time and space needed to go south.

A Strategic Death Spiral

So what we’ve got is a chain of strategic decision-making. Japan wants to be the dominant power in East Asia, to do that it needs to conquer China, to get the resources it needs to do that it has to take the Dutch East Indies, to take the Dutch East Indies it needs to secure its sea lines of communications, to do that it needs to neutralise the US Pacific Fleet.

This is logical enough, but there are two big issues here.

First, Imperial Japan can’t win a war against the United States. If the US decides to dismantle the Japanese Empire, then that’s what’s going to happen. Japan can resist, it can make it painful, it can make it expensive, but it just doesn’t have the industry, population or technological base to prevail against a determined America.

Secondly, this line of strategic reasoning assumes that the United States would be willing to go to war if it was not itself attacked. The Japanese were not wrong in assessing the geostrategic threat presented by the Philippines and the US Pacific Fleet. But they wildly over-estimated the American political acceptability of going to war to defend European colonial territories.

Imperial Japan was functionally a kind of militarist oligarchy. It didn’t have to worry about popular support, political consensus or getting re-elected. But in America, the government needed to accommodate isolationist and anti-war sentiment. Just because the US had the opportunity to ruin Japanese plans didn’t mean they would take it.

We’ll never know, but it’s reasonable to assume that Japanese operations to seize the Dutch East Indies and Malaya would not trigger automatic American military intervention in the same way that attacks on US forces and territories would.

The takeaway from all this is that although strategy connects policy and tactics, it doesn’t mean that it can align those elements in productive ways. Approaching Japan’s oil shortage dilemma from a top down perspective, everything lines up nicely until the Philippines enter the picture. At that point, bottom up tactical concerns about the prospect of American intervention and the resulting need to neutralise the US Navy start to bring Japanese strategy out of alignment with the ultimate goal.

In other words, for all the logic there’s an inherent contradiction in Japan’s strategic reasoning here. If we remove the intervening steps, it’s clear that attacking the United States of America isn’t compatible with becoming the dominant East Asian power.

The Slimmest of Chances

There was, however, a narrow and difficult path out of this Japanese strategic contradiction.

By the end of the projected five months, Japan hoped to be set up behind such a strong defensive perimeter in the Western Pacific that the Americans would baulk at attacking. They would hopefully examine the new status quo, determine that defeating Imperial Japan was not worth the human and economic cost and let Imperial Japan get on with conquering China.

This was not entirely implausible, but it relied wholly on the reaction of the United States.

The Pearl Harbour Attack

Enter the attack on Pearl Harbour. From a purely tactical perspective, a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in harbour makes total sense. American naval combat power is concentrated in one known location, it’s tied up and stationary, it’s not prepared to defend itself. It’s certainly a stronger tactical option than waiting until the Pacific Fleet goes to sea and disappears into the vastness of the Pacific, alert and dispersed.

In the event, the results of the attack are impressive. The Japanese brought a fleet including 6 carriers with over 400 aircraft 5500km across the Pacific without being detected, then launched two waves of strikes that sank 4 of the US battleships present and damaged the other four along with 3 cruisers and 3 destroyers. On top of that blow to US naval combat power, the Japanese also sank a minelayer and a training ship, damaged a repair ship and a tender and destroyed a grand total of 188 aircraft, damaging another 159.

By the end of the day, the Americans had sustained a total of 3581 casualties, 2403 of which were dead. In contrast, the Japanese lost 129 dead between 29 aircraft destroyed, 74 damaged and the loss of five midget submarines. All of these losses were sustained during or as a result of the actual attack: the Japanese fleet was able to disengage successfully.

But this tactical victory slammed the door on Japan’s hopes of ultimate victory. Pearl Harbour didn’t cow the United States or encourage it to carefully consider the cost benefit equation of war with Japan: it provoked outrage. That slim, if vaguely plausible, possibility that the United States would back down in the face of Japanese aggression became, at a stroke, politically unacceptable in Washington.

The day after the Pearl Harbour attack, the United States congress voted to declare war on Japan with only a single vote in opposition. Japanese strategy had failed and from that point onwards, Imperial Japan’s days were numbered.

Tactical Actions have Strategic Effects

This highlights two important points at the tactical end of the process.

First of all, events at the tactical level can have strategic effects. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour created the psychological backlash in the United States that denied the possibility of accommodation or compromise Japan needed to prevail.

Second, tactical success is not the same as strategic success. The Japanese were tactically effective at Pearl Harbour: they sank American ships, they killed American personnel and they got away with minimal loss themselves. But that didn’t help Japan achieve any of its goals. If anything, Japanese tactical prowess at Pearl Harbour was actually counterproductive.

Policy-Strategy-Tactics

If we want to evaluate conflicts, the policy-strategy-tactics framework is a useful tool. Strategy needs to align tactics with policy and falling short in any of those three categories will compromise the entire process.

Unrealistic, unclear and poorly articulated policy goals cripple the ability of strategy to link them with tactical effects. Activity at the tactical level may be inappropriate, counterproductive or meaningless depending on the situation. Strategic decisions are easily railroaded by assumptions, misunderstandings and prejudices.

It’s not hard to find examples of any of those in recent history, never mind the whole scope of human conflict. War is difficult, that’s part of what makes it so interesting to study.

Hope you all enjoyed this slightly different episode of the War Room. If this goes down well, we can dive into some more theory and concepts.

For now though, if you’d like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.