Transcript
Sarah (0:00)
Before I get going, I've got to make a disclaimer. What I'm saying are my ideas, they don't necessarily represent the US Government, the US Navy Department, the US Department of Defense, let alone where I work, the Naval War College. You got it. This is just me here, nobody else. All right. Americans have a penchant for what I call half court tennis, which is they like to analyze international affairs and wars by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do. And then that explains causation in the world. And Americans, on the other hand, their beloved sport, I believe, is football. And those people who love football, many Americans, my understanding of it, I'm just someone who reads books. I don't follow football. But now that's disqualifying, I suppose. But anyhow, Americans who follow football, they study both sides, right? They look at their home team, but then they also look at not just one opposing team, but many, down to the individual player. And they would no more follow a football game by looking at one half of the football field. And yet Americans, when we do foreign policy, that's often what we do. And it gets us into all kinds of trouble. For instance, in the Iraq war, Americans thought that the Republican Guard was going to be really tough. And it turns out it wasn't so tough. But then there was this post conventional phase insurgency that went on and on and on. That surprised Americans. Well, the problem isn't actually a new one. In World War II, Americans were terribly surprised by the thing that Japanese did, starting with Pearl harbor. Right? That was a surprise, but also was the entire way the Japanese fought the war, the way they fought to the last man, the suicides, the brutality, not only to the POW civilians, but into their own wounded. And the question is, is there any way to anticipate in advance how other people are going to behave? Is there any way to get a sense of the other sides of the tennis courtnet? Now, here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu in Asia, and the other one, Clausewitz, is the big guru of warfare in the West. And both of them would say, hey, you want to understand the other side, you got to make a net assessment. What's that? You would look at political, military, geographic, economic factors, the strengths and weaknesses of all sides to get a sense of things. And today I'm going to make a case for culture. You need to look at that as well. And it's often said that mirror imaging is not what you're supposed to do. What's mirror imaging? It's we get into a situation and then I decide what I think you're gonna do based on what I would do. I project me and mirror image on you, and that doesn't work so well. Okay, if I'm not supposed to generalize on the basis of my experience, what am I supposed to do instead? And I'm gonna get at this problem today. How do you analyze the other side? Tennis court net? By looking at Japanese behavior in the 30s and 40s. But the method of analysis I'm using you could apply to anyone you want. You want to think about Russians today or whatever, you can apply it that way. So culture, it's important, but it's as amorphous as it is important. For instance, if I'm going to try to figure out the defining characteristics of another culture, it would be difficult to figure out what the list is of all the different things I would need to look at. And even if I could come up with that list, still, how would I figure out how that would work in something like warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away. And so we're going to look at it today, and we're going to look at Japanese theorists and belief systems and then if you believe these things, how this influences your practice. Tojo Hideki said in December 1, 1941, that our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion. He got that right. And he is at an Imperial conference where he is confirming with Hirohito that Pearl harbor is gonna be a go. But he felt that Japan really needed to do something rather than being ground down, being passive. And here is Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who was the man who came up with the operational plan for Pearl Harbor. He thought it had really long odds of being successful. General Tojo gave it a 5050 chance. Admiral Yamamoto wasn't even sure that it was that good, but he felt it was the best possible plan for Japan to get out of its predicament. Now, from a Western point of view, this makes no sense. You're talking about getting the United States potentially into a war with Japan that's already overextended in China. Who does this? Either you need to ratchet back the policy objective and or you need to downgrade your strategy to something a little more costly or risky. And I suppose what you can do is go, oh, they're stupid. Okay, I guess if I call you stupid, that makes me so smart, because I can denigrate you. Explains nothing. So rather than do that, they're very Intelligent men. And why are they doing these? Why do they consider their actions rational and rational in what context? So this is what I'm gonna be up to. And I can start with a little story to illustrate my point. In the summer of 1943, this is after the battles of the Solomons, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, they're all over with. The Imperial Japanese army had a war college. An instructor comes into class one day, and he says, from now on, the curriculum's changed. The main emphasis is going to be countering US Tactics instead of what they had been teaching was Soviet tactics and will become the A course. And if anyone can teach this, go ahead, because I don't know a damn thing about it. Talk about being unprepared for seminar, and then think about it. Where are the Japanese actually fighting most of the time? What is the country that most matters to them? At the end of the day, it would be China. And that's not what their war colleges are studying. Something's up here. Now, they're clearly making a really bad net assessment about the United States. Okay. This country also is known for lousy net assessments. I don't believe ours about Vietnam was particularly good either. And that's one part of the problem. So here's my game plan for this evening. I'm first going to talk about Japanese, traditional Japanese theorists, and then it's gonna be talking about Japanese practice. How if you have this belief system, how explanatory is it for practice? This is my game plan right now. So the Japanese don't have just the one book like Sunza's the Art of War or Clausewitz's On War. What they have is Bushido Code of the Samurai. It's a whole literature, and it was written in the Tokugawa period, which quite ironically, was a period known for peace, not warfare. Never. And what's interesting about this literature from a Western perspective, it's really not about military strategy. It's about deportment. It's how a samurai should conduct himself. And this reflects Japanese values and what the things that they emphasize. And so I'm going to go through it with you. Here's the game plan on the theorists. First, I'm going to talk about the philosophical origins of Bushido, then the values that underpin it, and then the operational preferences that grow out of it. That's the game plan for first half. And I'm going to use as my cultural bridge this man, Nitobe Inazo, who wrote a book much later in 1900, Bushido's soul of why am I doing this? He provides a concise definition of Bushido. And you can see he's an important figure in Japan. Not everybody gets their mug on the 5,000 yen note. So he's an important figure in Japan. He had spent 18 years abroad, and he had received higher education in Japan and a variety of Western institutions. He married, believe it or not, I don't make up these things. A Philadelphia Quaker. And he converted to Christianity. And he spent his life trying to serve as a cultural bridge. And that's how I'm gonna use him today. And what he said is, unlike in the west, where notions of morality come from religion, in Japan, they come from Bushido. And what is it? It's a code of chivalrous, code of honor for the warrior class, these precepts of knighthood. There are three pillars of Bushido, according to Nitobe. They're Buddhism, Shinto and Confucianism. From Buddhism is where you see Japanese fatalism, the origin of it. And here you have Nitobe saying it's this calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable of friendliness with death. And it strikes Westerners, reading this Bushido literature as a preoccupation with death, that, for instance, Clausen will talk about violence in warfare, but he's not interested in what constitutes an honorable death, let alone choreographing a soldier's final moments. Different culture. And from Buddhism. There are four noble truths of Buddhism. One is that existence is suffering. Pessimistic view of this life. Second, it's caused by craving and attachment. So don't cling to this life or the things in it. It's all ephemeral. It's like a cherry blossom blooms for a day and then it's gone. But there's a. A good ending to it all, which is Nirvana. And how do you get there? The fourth noble truth, it's through forms of right conduct. So the emphasis isn't on what you achieve in your life, it's how you lead it. It's this focus on deportment. It's different from the West. Second pillar is Shinto, this extreme patriotism, reverence for the emperor. And the third pillar is Confucianism. These imported ideas from China. Confucianism is at heart of how it's organizing a society and regulating it through interlocking social obligations, hierarchical and through ritual and etiquette. So in the west, there's much talk about equality, right? And in the east, it's duty. It's what you owe other people. In the East. There is no such thing as social in Japan of equality. Even. Even twins have a birth order. And it's not about freedom either. It's about what you owe others. So if you think that these value systems seems really different. Yeah, no kidding. It has nothing to do with the Greco Roman, Judeo, Christian west, completely different value system. And so, Alice, welcome to Wonderland. Buckle up, we're off for a ride, and I'm gonna start. Here's my first piece of the Tokugawa literature, Yamamoto Tsunetomo's the Hagakure that he wrote in the early 18th century. It translates variously as hidden leaves, hidden by the leaves. And in it he is describing. I'm gonna read you some short passages from it all. What was he? He was a retainer for a daimyo, a feudal lord in Japan. He hadn't actually done any fighting, even though he's writing all about it. So if you don't do, what do you do? You publish. And I will tell you what the man had to say. So here we go. One of the first things is this preoccupation with death. And here's Yamamoto. The way of the Samurai is imagining the most sightly way of dying. Merit lies more in dying for one's master than in striking down the enemy. The way of the Samurai is found in death. It is not necessary to gain one's aim, but if you live on without achieving it, it's cowardice. However, if you don't game your aim and die, that's okay. This is really different from Clausewitz, where it's all about achieving the policy objective. It's not about how the soldier's leading his life. And here you can see the consequences of this. If you're focusing on on no fears of death. And if you can't succeed, living on is a disaster. Think of the banzai charges when Japanese remnants would go headlong into oncoming machine gun fire, knowing full well what was going to happen. This is not the way other armies have behaved. Different value system. All right. In addition to at death, this Bushido literature's emphasis on honor. Back to Yamamoto. The way of avoiding shame is different. It's simply death. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Think of General Tojo and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. And here's the if you suffer a catastrophic defeat, here's a solution. In the event of a mortifying failure, you're going to wind up committing suicide. Because the alternative. If you live on in shame, you're bringing everyone you're associated with so how does the suicide work? It's seppuku, or harakiri. The samurai who's doing it kneels down with short sword. He plunges it into his belly, tries to do a full revolution. And then his second, usually a close associate, takes the long sword. If he does it right, one sweep, head in, lap, upright corpse, blood everywhere. Diplomats. In the 19th century, Western diplomats were told to witness this. If a samurai had murdered a Westerner, okay, the diplomats had to come in and watch the proceedings. They just about lost their lunch. So the Japanese think that they are showing, and what the Westerners think they're seeing aren't aligning. And I'm going to use Nito Bay to be the cultural bridge. He said, in our minds, this mode of death is associated with the instances of noblest deeds and most touching pathos. So this vilest form of death assumes a sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life. It's a way to escape from disgrace. And in Japanese literature, there is the tragic hero who is pursuing noble but unattainable aims and rather than making disagreeable compromises, goes down in flames. This is what seppuku is all about. And Nitobe is saying, look, death involving a question of honor was accepted in Bushido as a key solution to many complex problems. And you can think In World War II, yeah, it was complex problems like battle plans not working out and a war that was truly not working out. And you could see the suicide going on, both individual and group. And I remember going in the caves in Okinawa and understanding how that works. Cause you could see a lot of the damage in if your commanding officer decides to commit suicide and tosses a grenade in the right direction, the entire room goes with him. All right, so in addition to death and suicide and honor, we've got loyalty. It's another key value. And back to Yamamoto. Being a good retainer is nothing other than being a supporter of one's lord. A man is a good retainer to the extent that he earnestly places importance in his master. Having only wisdom and talent is the lowest tier of usefulness. So much for Silicon Valley. For a warrior, there is nothing other than thinking of his master. And so back in the day, it's thinking of your feudal lord. In more recent times, it's prioritizing your company over family. In China, it's the reverse priority. It's family over company. And it's different cultures, different priorities. All right, There are strategic implications. If this is your value system, this is what arises from it. First of all, you're looking at damage limitation, damage control. Not in terms of the physical cost of losing lives, having property blown up, but in terms of honor. Also, there's a tendency to equate operational with strategic success. Operational success is I win this battle here and now. Strategic success is okay, we're in a war for some reason. What is the reason you're in the war? Japan's reasons for being in China had to do with containing Communist expansion and also stabilizing the place so they could make money out of business. So that's your strategic objective. It's not your operational one. But the Japanese samurai are equating the two, saying, if I take this hill, somehow it's automatically going to deliver the strategic objective. And in fact, they won most of the battles in China, but they lost that war. Also, there's this focus on what constitutes an honorable death. It's not. The Western focus of literature is all about preparing the field of battle in advance for success. And whereas this literature is focusing on what to do after disaster. So that here are some more implications. Once the Japanese are failing in battle, operational failure, they are on death ground. What does that mean? It means that death ground means the only way you survive is if you fight harder. This is what's going on in Ukraine right now, is that when you decide you're going to annihilate an entire culture, you put people on death ground and then they have very few choices on what they do next. That one means for the Japanese to feel that they're on death ground when they're failing means they're not going to give up. They're going to fight brutally against overwhelming odds. So in the west, when we like to mirror image, we want to think of the rational actor with some kind of mathematically based cost benefit of when you should give up. When the costs just are so high above whatever your value of the object is, you ought to call it quits. Well, that kind of calculation does not translate well across the divides between civilizations. I've got a nice picture here of Lieutenant Onoda, who had been hanging out in Philippine jungles for, what, 30 years after the end of the war, carrying on the war in isolation. I don't believe this is how most other armies work or soldiers in them. Different culture, different things you do with your life. And here is Sir William Slim, field Marshal, British 14th army, that he led in Burma, commenting on his experiences. If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495. Last five committed suicide before we could take the place. And it was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese so formidable. Okay, this brings me to another value that's emphasized in Bushido. Willpower. Back to Yamamoto. There is nothing that cannot be done. The way of the samurais in desperateness simply become insane and desperate, and it'll somehow work out for you. One could accomplish any feat. Think of Pearl harbor and this emphasis on willpower and just trying harder. It denigrates strategy. And here you see a picture of the supreme example of honor and loyalty and willpower and the kamikaze pilots. But if this is what you're doing, you're denigrating strategy, and here Yamamoto's me talking about tactics. But it has operational strategic implications. He says learning such things as military tactics is useless. The way of the Samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong. If one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts. So the idea is, if you think about these things in peacetime, you'll start hesitating in wartime. It won't work out for you if you do this during times of peace, when listening to stories of battle which never say, in facing such a situation, what would a person do? Well, so much for my job at the Naval War College. So much for the case studies. No matter what the circumstances might be, one should be of the mind to win, one should be holding the first spear to strike. So here's the implications. If you believe this, what you're doing. It's a very unanalytical way to approach wars. It's all about whatever it is you want. You just steal the will and go for it, and somehow you'll get it if you want. There's a lack of grand strategy. What's grand strategy? It's integrating all the instruments of national power, not just the army or the army and the Navy, which is what the Japanese are trying to do, but all instruments of national power in pursuit of. If the bigger aim is to stabilize China and keep the Communists out, there ought to be some diplomacy and some other things going on. But that's not what's happening in the samurai literature. It's a focus on the military instrument exclusively. So I'll give you an example of how this works out. Before the Imperial Japanese army and the Imperial Japanese Navy invaded French Indochina, neither one of them did a little study saying, hey, if we do that, let's check the other side of the tennis courtnet and see what other people, how they might react. They just steal the will and march right in okay, that triggered the US 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Operational success, strategic mess. So it is this focusing on just the operational level. It's the basis for this ill founded optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places? And oh, we're going for these places for resources. So maybe we ought to check it out with the Finance Ministry and others about how we ever going to get these resources back home. None of that's going on. It's a disaster for them. Okay, I'm going to talk about a couple of secondary theorists. One of them is Tairo Shigesuke, who is a contemporary of Yamamoto because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture. Only three things are considered essential. Loyalty, duty and valor. So steadfastly loyal in battle as to disregard his own life. What he's actually talking about is group loyalty. In the west, the basic unit composing society is the individual, while in the east it's the group. And group interests take primacy over individual interests. And for the Japanese, society is divided by in groups and out groups. The most basic in group, biggest overarching one is the Japanese people vis a vis everybody else. But within Japan, everybody comes from a different province, a different locality. They go to different educational institutes, they graduate from different kindergarten classes, I kid you not. And college classes. If they work for different companies or they work for the, or they're in the military, they're in different branches. And you also have family loyalties. And you owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations. And sometimes these obligations conflict. And if the conflict's really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide. And then if you look at the Japanese language, the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese, you can immediately listen to the grammatical forms that are being used, the specific word choices to know what's the degree of hierarchy, like where do they sit in this unequal hierarchy and whether it's in group, out group, so everybody feels, or most people feel some level of group loyalty. This is human. But in Japan, the levels of membership are much more finely calibrated and they're re emphasized by these social, cultural and linguistic reasons. So this group membership and stove piping ultimately is going to be a much stronger feature of Japanese culture than some other places. All right, Last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi, who unlike the other two, actually did a little fighting. He was born a little earlier and he was a master of samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values. And I'm going to go through all of these in turn. First is risk intolerance. Because remember at the beginning I started with the two flag officers saying, well, we're going to do this war in the Pacific when it's unlikely we're going to succeed, we're going to do it anyway. And here is Miyamoto. Furthermore, to fight even 5 or 10 people single handedly in duels, that's what my military science is all about. So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up 10 people and 1,000 people beating 10,000? Logistics, my friend, but never mind. And then another thing that he emphasizes, in addition, don't expect long odds to deter the Japanese back in the day. Surprise is another one. Think about a situation that has stalemated and is going nowhere, which is what the China theater was for the Japanese. And, and how do you get out of it? And the answer that Miyamoto has is not come up with a new policy objective, but come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then get what you want that way. And the way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people by the new places that you were gonna start engaging in military operations. And here's how it worked. China had been a failed state since 19, and it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war. And the Japanese were appalled, particularly after the United States passed the Holy smoot tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade. So then they're thinking, now what? Well, we're going to need an empire big enough to survive since no one's going to trade with us. And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931, and they have it pretty much stabilized by 1933. So, okay, that was surprise number one. But the rest of China's a mess, and the Japanese, it's coalescing into a bilateral Communist Nationalist Nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek, Communists under Mao Zedong fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid. And the Japanese are appalled with all this. And so it's time to surprise Everybody again in 1937. And that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze River. And it works. They take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system. Oh, and by the way China's not pacified, it's just churning. And so now Japan is even more overextended as a result of doing that. Russian aid goes up, and then you're going to get US Aid in there. So the problem's actually getting worse. Okay, time for another surprise. Really big one. On that infamous day in December 41, it wasn't just Pearl Harbor. That's Team America focusing only on Team America. The Japanese attacked all across the Pacific that day. Okay, now what? Here? The United China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands, while the United States here, the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. Well, after Pearl harbor, they sure could. And suddenly the United States isn't isolationist anymore and they're coming to get the Japanese. So you can see the samurai values in operation here. Just try harder. More dosages of willpower. Eventually you'll win or you'll die trying. Okay, Another operational preference that you can see, which is as part of the surprise or preemptive attacks. And that's just how Japan began all of its wars. The First Sino Japanese War and the Second Sino Japanese War, Russo Japanese War and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin. And finally, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy willpower. And in this case, it's, you've already won conventionally, but they're waging an insurgency against you on modernizing the terminology. And the idea is you want a psychological victory, you want them just to quit, and somehow you're going to break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing, and the rape of Nanjing and other atrocities, that they were going to do these horrifying things, and that would break the will of the other side. Okay, be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis, which is if you're dealing with even a failing state, which Russia was. Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the 30s, and then he'd inflicted a famine on Ukraine. But when the Nazis came in and they were going to wipe out not only the Russian government, but also the Russian people, you will super glue people, government and military, and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese brutality does to Chinese, and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine. Don't do it. Bad strategy. All right. There are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive preemption. It's emphasis on military action to solve all your problems. And you have a fixed policy objective, whatever it is. And if you're in a given battle, you have to win that battle. It's not, oh, I have an overarching objective. It's too costly here. I'm going to call off this battle and I'm going to try again somewhere else. The moment your plan is failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of SQLs. And there'll be unexpected events that take place. You'll adapt to none of that. You're a failure if any of that stuff happens to you. So there's a real insensitivity to risk and there's no grand strategy. But if you believe these things, you will be lethal in warfare. You're not going to give up easily at all. And so you look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go, why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well, it's because in a way, they're already dead men. They suffered social death. And so they're going to keep on until the very, very end of all of this. And it's a great sin of omission, this absence of, of grand strategy. The Japanese aren't the only ones to have done this. The belligerence on all sides in World War I were thinking all in terms of using the military instrument got themselves into trouble. So if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities. But there's no definition of what win in this war is how much territory should Japan take and then call it a day and say, done, we've been successful here. Rather, their territorial acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what in anger they did take, but also a function of strategic failure. No matter what they did, it never pacified the China theater problem for them. Okay, Alice, that was Wonderland. Now we're going to get to how it works, how other people live of. If you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in World War II? I'm going to start with two sins of omission. The Japanese neglect of paying more careful consideration to logistics. And then another sin of omission is a neglect of protecting their sea lines of communication. And then the last two are about these in group out group divisions and the problems it caused for within each military service intra service rivalries. And then between the two services, the navy and the army and the war that caused them such difficulties okay, the Japanese, if you start at the beginning of the war, Japan never produced more than 1 113th U.S. steel and coal production. It never did more than 10% of what U.S. munitions productions were. I believe if you do the math and take all the battleships and divide people into everything, that each US Soldier had four tons of equipment per, whereas each Japanese soldier had about £2 of equipment. Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bayonet. Their artillery and machine guns were totally. Were very obsolete what they had going in the Pacific War. And then you flip it around. Look at the United States. The United states had about 18 men in supply, or men and women, but mostly men in supply services supporting each rifleman at the front. Other militaries in this period had about an 8 to 1 ratio. Japan had about a 1 to 1. So Japan's already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor. And then when you get to the winter of 1942, 43, the Japanese are having critical shortages of oil, so they no longer can deploy the fleet at will. That means forget about convoying anything, because you just haven't got the oil to do it. And yet, when you get to 45, when they're predicting they're gonna have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of 45, you have the government saying, still, we're gonna fight on for this honorable whatever it's gonna be. These Bushido ideas, you just persevere. Loyalty, honor, duty. Keep going. All right, I'm gonna be quoting this gentleman's diary. Admiral Ugaki Matome. He was the chief of the staff of the Combined Fleet until and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroko's plane were shot down. US Code breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were, and we killed Admiral Yamamoto. But this man survived. And by the time he wrote this entry, he was the head of an air fleet on the home islands sending kamikaze flights out because Japan simply lacked the ability to do too much else this late in the day. And here is his last diary entry, written on August 15, 1945. This is after two atomic bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria. And he said, okay, there are various causes for today's tragedy, and I feel that my own responsibility is not light. But more fundamentally, it was due to the great differences in natural of national resources between the two countries. Okay, it's too late to come to that conclusion. U.S. production statistics had been on the books forever, but when Japanese read these numbers, they thought they were ludicrously high and Discounted them as propaganda. And those who knew better, who'd done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, they weren't promoted because they were defeatists. I believe that admiral Ugaki kept and maintained his diary is because he was an honorable samurai. He had believed in bushido, the ability of material, of willpower to more than compensate for inferior resources. But the war's outcome had proved him incorrect. And so as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life and he kept his diary. Nothing to be ashamed of. He'd done what he was going to do. Here I have the last prime minister of imperial Japan, Prince Higashikuni Nariko, talking about his take on the war. He said, I think the basic cause of defeat was a loss of transport shipping. Okay. By the end of the war, Japan was down to one ninth of its transport shipping. It meant the empire was paralyzed. What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back? The navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Thurmahan, who's from where I work back in the day, it was all about fleet on fleet engagements and things. But it turns out that the Japanese navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific that US submarine services paralyzed. There are sea lines of communication. Go submarines. So here's admiral Ugaki Matame, who is talking about. He eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it. But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either. Earlier in the war. Here's his take before all that bad stuff had happened. It's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchantmen. Well, his disdain for the target would cost him. And he noted later on when he's trying to account for why the battle of Guadalcanal is going so badly for Japan. He said the aim of supply and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time it led those on the verge of death, that is the army, to be extremely skeptical about the navy and thinking that the navy is just sacrificing the army. Well, no kidding, that's what the army thought. Because for an expeditionary force, you absolutely need the navy to deliver you there, to maintain your supplies there. And they're thinking, the army's thinking, you Navy are being irresponsible not doing any of these things. So there are tremendous inter service rivalries between the army and Navy in Japan. And it goes back to the pre war budget wars where Japan's a resourced poor country and both services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded. Japan didn't have the money to fund both. And then when you get in war and you start expending these things, you need even more money. And so the disagreements were brutal. But before I get there, the in group out group differences, that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between army and navy. They're within each service. So I'm going to start there and to be fair, I'm going to provide one example for each service. I'll start with the army. It was the Guangdong army or Japan's army in Manchuria that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 31. It was not the home office back in Tokyo, but it's this branch that turns out kicks off a 15 year war. So these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the empire and they're just off and running. Meanwhile, there are a series of coup attempts. Some of them were navy is part of it, more of them with the army that's dealing with it going back and forth. And at the very end when Emperor Hirohito is capitulating, there was one last coup attempt which amen, it failed because the war might not have terminated quite the way it did if it had succeeded. So the point is, if you got coups running on that is not called unified command. It's a mess. And the Navy wasn't any better. I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the US Air service people who are flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learned something from combat to tell new people the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed and some other things. Well, in Japan, in groups, out groups, you sign up together, you train together, you fight together and you die together. It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups. It's just culturally, it's not the natural thing that comes to mind. Moreover, and this apparently applies to the present, that in the US military they have what are called hot washes after different operations where you come back and you're very self critical about all the things that went wrong to figure out how to do it better the next time. Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that. In Japan, it's different. So if these in group out group things are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services. And I've got four examples. And I'm going to start with organizational issues. So. But it's only in 1944 that the army and Navy finally get it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo. Great. Just in time to figure out how the capitulation's going to work. Then the army wanted to unify the two high commands. The Navy wanted nothing to do with that one because they knew they'd just become the box lunch delivery service for the army. Didn't want to do that. So by 1945, they did unify their information department. Great. They could spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo Rose on a good day, who knows? But there was no planning, even under the imminent threat of invasion, to how they're going to coordinate their assets to protect the home island. They aren't even coordinating their air assets. Disaster. And this disaster goes back way in time. They had a very far back in time. They'd had a very successful war against Russia that ends in 1905. But afterwards, in 1906, immediately afterwards, the army and Navy are allowed to have completely separate war plans. The army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The Navy plan has completely different set of enemies. It'd be the United States and Britain for the big gambit. You're not gonna use ships in Siberia. The big gambit for empire in the Pacific. And each of these plans, a, they're secret from the other service, and B, each plan assumes the other service is gonna do all kinds of important things for them. Okay, great. So I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise, normally you apply that to your enemies, not your sister service. But that's how it works in this setup. Now, the army does come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because they get walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Nomanhahn. The Russians just decimate them in 1939. So now the army says, okay, okay, maybe that southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea. And so the Navy thinks this is great, and they do their southern advance. They go zooming down. The Japanese mind over matter stuff seems to be going really well because in 1942, the army takes more land over more dispersed theater than any country on the planet. The Navy hasn't lost a single ship. I mean, it's looking really good, except there are a few little details here that are a problem. What the Navy hadn't told the army is that actually they weren't ready for this whole thing, that they needed this outer perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work. And that wasn't complete. And the army learned about this on August 17, 1942, because one of these airfields was being built in this tropical nightmare called Guadalcanal that the United States knew about even though the army didn't. And all of a sudden, the Navy is in deep, dark trouble and needs the army to help them out of Guadalcanal. So now think samurai. The Japanese 17th army had been ordered to take Port Moresby and New Guinea. That's what they were up to. But with Guadalcanal, they are told, ah, you need to tack on Guadalcanal to that Port Moresby event. Okay, enter logistics. They're 1,000 kilometers apart. So now the army is going to be lying to the Navy about how many people they've got at Guadalcanal because they're scared the Navy won't provide enough rations and things. The Navy doesn't provide enough rations. People starve anyway. And then the Navy that got the army into this mess wants to call it off and move out. But the army, good samurais, want to fight on and they just expend all kinds of resources. And this thing has enormous strategic effects. Prior to Guadalcanal, the Japanese army wanted to continue their strategy of chasing the Nationalists out of China. Back in 1937, the Japanese had conquered Nanjing, which is the original Nationalist capital, and the Nationalists had fled up the Yangtze river to Chongqing, beyond some gorges and some other things, and beyond the rail network. And in 1943, the Japanese were planning to attack Chongqing. And then at that point, I think if you're a Nationalist, you're fleeing into Burma. And if that had happened, then the Japanese could have probably pulled hundreds of thousands of people out of the China theater and put them elsewhere, and that would have caused all kinds of problems. Also, the Japanese had to call off their plans to invade Australia. So Guadalcanal has enormous strategic implications. So if you're focusing samurai on one battle, Guadalcanal, well, it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off. Okay. The United States also had inter service rivalries between our army and Navy. And that's why you have two separate campaigns for Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, big egos, one campaign for each ego. And apparently that wasn't even big enough for MacArthur. Okay, but even so, I don't believe the inner service rivalries in the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan. I have one final example to prove that one. So after Pearl harbor, that had been tremendously successful for Admiral Yamamoto, he wanted to do the next thing was to attack Midway because us basing there and the army said, I don't want, we're not going to do this. And Yamamoto goes, I'm going to resign. And the army, we don't care. I'll commit suicide, we'll buy popcorn. And here's what changes this. So after Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them. And so this is where Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, the Doolittle Raid's named after him. In April 1942, it was a one way trip off an aircraft carrier because they had so much fuel in order to get to Japan that the idea was they're going to go bomb Japan and then ditch in China. Whoever survives, very brave people who did this. Are they going to cause massive damage in Japan? Well, yeah, if you're directly underneath, you won't appreciate it. But in general, it causes minor damage, but it has a major unanticipated strategic benefit. Think samurai. The army all of a sudden is backing the Navy that they're going to now do Midway with them. And it's right, don't think, retaliate, avenge your honor. The army was appalled that anyone had been able to bomb Japanese skies. So now they're all over it. Okay, so how does Midway work out? Really poorly for the Japanese. They lose four aircraft carriers. They've only got 12. They've lost a third. Oops. And here we go. In group, out group. The Navy doesn't tell anyone for three or four months. Incredible in a war. Right? So they're thinking about their little stovepipe and they're ignoring Japanese interests when this is going on. Okay, different story. So they do get their operational end to the whole thing. It's called, I mean, this is the firebombing of Tokyo. The whole place went up in flames. In fact, it got so hot, the canals boiled. It's an operational solution. It's unconditional surrender after a protracted war of annihilation that destroys just about every single Japanese city, minus a couple that survived. What broke the stalemate. And here's what happened. It's three really bad things that happened in four days. Talk about a concentration of really bad events from a Japanese point of view, happening all at once. When you want to talk about this is the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese. First, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two days later, the Russians pour 1.5 million people into Manchuria, the nightmare scenario of the Japanese army. And they know if this war protracts, the Russians are going to come down through Manchuria, down the Korean peninsula, onto Hokkaido and down the home islands. It'll yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time. And then you have the next day, the United States drops the second atomic bomb with a bluff. The idea being we're going to keep doing this daily or every other day, except we don't have any more atomic bombs and we cannot build them quickly for a long time. So that's big bluff. But the Emperor then has had enough, and he breaks the deadlock in the Cabinet, and the Cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day. And then he makes an unprecedented radio broadcast, never had that happen before to his subjects, telling them game over. And then the next day, he sends three Imperial princes to the Manchurian, Chinese and Southern theaters, conveying his orders at game over. And from that moment on, his samurai obeyed him and they absolutely cooperated with the occupation. There's no insurgency, no nothing going on after this. And at the end of the war, the United States came to understand the Japanese at the beginning totally misread the situation with the oil embargo that's meant to deter and state it. It precipitates the war that we didn't want. But at the end of the war, the United States realizes you're going to need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're going to occupy the place. And they're going to use Emperor Hirohito for this. Hirohito is scared to death that it's not so much that he'll be hanged, but that the United States will extinguish his dynasty, kill him and his son, and then that it's over. And so he's willing to sign any piece of paper that MacArthur puts under his pen. And one of those is the Constitution of Japan that is going to change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place, and try to get a democracy going there. The Constitution was written in one week by MacArthur's staff. They're running around raiding bombed out libraries for examples of Western constitutions. And they cobble this thing together. And this is the unamended constitution of Japan. Still in effect to this very day, MacArthur's gift to Japan. All right, I've been incredibly critical of the Japanese. But to sum up here, there are cultural explanations for their neglect of grand strategy, inability to cut their losses, inability to coordinate, and the ferocity with which they fought. So if you look at their values and they're explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off, but I've been really critical of Japan. I want to even out the story by ending on the United States a little bit, because the United States played a good game or a bad game of half court tennis and mirror imaged at the beginning of this war. So when the Japanese go into MANCHURIA and in 1931, we want them out, we don't ask, well, why are you doing this? And their answer would be, well, hey, you passed the Hawley Smoot Tariff. That means we're trade dependent. Whom are we going to trade with? And once you did the tariff, everyone retaliated. So you've now shut down international trade. So we need an empire that's big enough to survive. So that's why we're in Manchuria. And by the way, there are way too many communists here and we gotta get rid of those. And then in 1937, when they up the ante going into the rest of China, we didn't inquire what's going on. And what the Japanese want to do is wall off Communism. Don't want that. And then they want to stabilize China so that you can have some productive economic growth. And if you go, well, what were us post war objectives for China? Ooh, sounds remarkably familiar. Communists out stabilize the place. Okay, well, how does the war affect all this? Well, actually, the warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to communist expansion in Asia. What are the barriers? Well, one, it's Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists in China. The Japanese wipe him out. They don't totally defeat him, but they have so weakened him and so discredited him. But by the end of the World War II, he is really poorly positioned to win the Chinese Civil War, which he promptly loses. And then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to Communism? Well, it's the Japanese. We wipe them out. So what do you get? A unified Communist China, which makes really complicated wars in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. And the problem, it's a gift that keeps on giving. We're still dealing with this problem today. So take a little word from Sun Tza. Know your enemy or the other side know the person you're talking to. Don't play half court tennis. It's a really dangerous game. Rather, try to analyze why. Ask yourself, why is someone doing whatever they're doing? And just because you're trying to understand it doesn't mean you're condoning it. It's just trying to figure out the logic of the other person. It'll set you up for more informed choices.