Shortly after World War I, the United States began preparing for future conflicts. The U.S. Navy focused most of its attention on a potential Pacific war against the growing power of Japan. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Navy held a series of war games at the Naval War College to study history, promote tactical and strategic thinking, and develop plans for a clash with Japan.[1]
Those war games dispelled some key tactical and operational considerations, but failed to anticipate Japan’s opening moves. The Japanese blitz on Hawaii and other locations was never seriously considered, leading to the strategic catastrophe of December of 1941. Groupthink at best, and racism at worst, resulted in a devastating blind-spot in national defense thinking.
In his analysis of World War II in Asia, historian Richard Frank remarked that, “Intensive interwar study of a possible war with Japan . . . disclosed to American naval officers that the Japanese would wait in the Western Pacific for the U.S. fleet to approach. American professionals deemed this the ‘correct’ Japanese stance.”[2] It was precisely because this was the accepted way for the war to progress that Japan pushed its fleet forward for its infamous surprise attack. It is after all one of Sun Tzu’s chief tenants that “highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans,” and the attack on Pearl Harbor is certainly an example of great generalship.[3]
The United States is in danger of repeating this strategic mistake with the way it thinks about potential war with China. Today, significant military planning focuses on defeating Chinese antiaccess/area denial strategy.[4] This is not imprudent, as Chinese investment into new military technology including missiles makes this type of war highly possible.[5] However, some level of consideration must be applied to other ways for a Sino-US conflict to start, escalate, and conclude. Failure to think beyond the “correct” situation could lead to a second Pearl Harbor.
Interwar War-gaming and Plan Orange
The Naval War College ran 136 strategic war games during the Interwar period, and 127 of those were dedicated to defeating Japan, referred to as “Orange.”[6] The early game iterations assumed that the U.S. Pacific Fleet, or Blue forces, would sortie from Hawaii en masse to relieve the Philippines, resulting in a triumphant Mahan-style battle, pitting each side’s prized battleships against each other. However, enterprising Orange teams demonstrated key drawbacks in this battle-plan by attriting the Blue force with torpedo attacks and submarine attacks as it crossed the vast Pacific. Worse, Orange forces never allowed Blue forces to regroup and recover their force before any big fight.[7]
Year after year, Blue forces arrived in Philippine waters with less of its combat power intact. By 1933, the big-fight concept reached its nadir when only 46 percent of battleships and 25 percent of cruisers survived the transit, not to mention the loss of four aircraft carriers and numerous auxiliary and support vessels.[8] The Navy recognized it needed a new campaign plan to defeat Japan, yet it still failed to consider a broad range of strategic scenarios.
From 1933 on, a new concept evolved that avoided the rapid deployment of Blue forces to the Philippines, and instead focused on attacking the periphery of Japanese territory. War Plan Orange grew to include the successful island-hopping campaign for which World War II in the Pacific is remembered.[9] What the games never predicted, or even seemed to consider, was the Japanese blitz against targets across the Pacific. In fact, the majority of war game conclusions proved incorrect. Fleets of battleships never clashed as predicted, and the war games failed to anticipate the clash of the carrier fleets at places such as Midway.[10]
The war games and the way that U.S. naval officers thought the Pacific war would progress, were off. Particularly the opening phase.
Other Chinese War Scenarios
To avoid a similar tragedy to Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. military must consider multiple courses that a war with China could take. Developing possible aggressive Chinese actions is limited only by the imagination of military strategists. Cyber and space attacks are likely candidates for a war’s opening phase, or even as self-contained conflicts. Chinese pursuits in these domains almost ensure that these activities will be a part of conflict, and planners are readying for these eventualities.[11]
But what about additional strategies? Application of gray war techniques are extremely likely and are already being conducted in some places such as the South China Sea and through debt entrapment enterprises across the Pacific and Indian Ocean theaters. Again, these courses of action are heavily discussed in military circles.[12]
So, how about looking even further? Could China support Iranian aggression to draw U.S. attention away from the Pacific? Might China quietly fuel a conflict between its Pakistani allies against India? Such action would certainly demand U.S. attention.
Could China take advantage of the ongoing military coup in Myanmar to take control? China has pushed troops through the region before, during Britain’s retreat from Rangoon in 1942, and the modern Chinese military is much more capable than Chiang Kia-shek’s. [13]
How about a move to take control of the Malacca Straits, perhaps under the pretext of keeping the chokepoint safe from piracy or some other threat? A move like that could take years for the world to untangle through the United Nations, if ever, given China’s veto power.
The point of these examples is not to insist on them as likely Chinese courses of action. Instead, they are meant to spark discussion of how else a war could start. There are dozens more scenarios that could and should be discussed ranging from war in the Arctic to an Indian Ocean naval conflict. All of these ideas and more must be part of the discussion. While they cannot perfectly predict what might really happen, the exercise of creative thought and preparing for a multitude of plausible scenarios is the essence of developing generalship outside of drawing blood.
Conclusion
Naturally, some pockets of the U.S. military discuss these threats because they see them developing and affect their particular area. But how much of our planning, acquisitions, and strategic messaging are dedicated to these other areas? The Navy needs to avoid tunnel vision on antiaccess/area denial in the Western Pacific and another decade of war games focused on one campaign concept.
The Navy’s interwar war games were successful in rooting out one bad idea—the clash of battleships—and it also helped build the eventual Plan Orange which underpinned the island-hopping campaign. It also taught a generation of naval officers incalculable levels of strategic and operational thinking. However, the structure of this strategy lab encouraged too little creative thinking and that directly tied to the failure to anticipate anything remotely like Pearl Harbor. The failure is not in the Navy’s inability to predict the future, but rather as an institution it failed to broaden discussions beyond how they assumed the war would go.
Japan did not wait in the Western Pacific for the United States to arrive and fight, and there is reason to believe China will not only fight by denying the United States access to its territory. The U.S. military needs to think more broadly when considering the many ways a war might start and how it might progress. Surprise may be inevitable in war, but it also can be mitigated by preparation and experience. Experience is bought with blood, so it is in our best interest to vigorously prepare now with varied mental exercises and avoid unnecessary bloodshed later. Avoiding the groupthink shortfalls of the interwar navy is a good place to start.
Endnotes
[1] James Miller, “Gaming the Interwar: How Naval War College Wargames Tilted the Playing Field for the U.S. Navy During World War II” (thesis proposal, US Army Command and General Staff College, 2013), 1.
[2] Richard Frank, Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume 1: July 1937–May 1942, (New York, NY: Norton, 2020), 229.
[3] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles (The Internet Classics Archive, last updated 2011) book 3, line 3, http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html.
[4] Roger Cliff et al, Entering the Dragon’s Lair: Chinese Antiaccess Strategies and Their Implications for the United States (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2007), https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG524.html.
[5] Missile Defense Project, “Missiles of China,” Missile Threat, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 14 June 2018, last modified July 16, 2020, https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/china/.
[6] Michael Vlahos, “HM 4: The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919-1941” (1980) Historical Monographs, 143, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-historical-monographs/Michael Vlahos/143.
[7] Miller, Gaming the Interwar, 26-27.
[8] Miller, 28.
[9] Miller, 29.
[10] Vlahos, The Blue Shield, 157.
[11] Michael Peck, “China’s New War Strategy Is More About Confusing Enemy Forces Than Missile Strikes,” The National Interest, 6 February 2021, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/china%E2%80%99s-new-war-strategy-more-about-confusing-enemy-forces-missile-strikes-177822.
[12] Michael O’Hanlon, “The Challenge of Confronting China Over a Gray Zone Crisis,” The National Interest, 9 July 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/challenge-confronting-china-over-gray-zone-crisis-66141; Kinling Lo, “Debt-Trap Diplomacy? Report Finds China Can Cancel Loans if Displease,” South China Morning Post, 31 March 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3127705/debt-trap-diplomacy-report-finds-china-can-crunch-loans-if.
[13] Frank, Tower of Skulls, 468–86.
