Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

The warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to Communist expansion in Asia. Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese wiped him out. And then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to Communism? Well, it's the Japanese. So what do you get? A unified Communist China. It's the gift that keeps on giving. The Japanese remnants would go headlong into oncoming machine gun fire, knowing full well what was gonna happen. This is not the way other armies have behaved. Japan thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. Not only do I wanna do regime change, but I wanna kill all your people while I'm at it. If you compromise with them, you are simply setting them up and putting them in a stronger position when they come at you for the final kill. Uh, before I get going, I've gotta 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, uh, wars by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do and then that explains causation in, 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 an, uh, uh, someone who reads books. I don't follow football, but, now I'm, 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, uh, 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, uh, Americans thought that the Republican Guard was gonna be really tough, and it turns out it wasn't so tough. But then there was this post, uh, 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 things that Japanese did, uh, starting with Pearl Harbor, right? That was a surprise. But also it 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 POWs, civilians, but into their own wounded. And the question is, is there any way to anticipate in advance how other people are gonna behave? Uh, is there any way to get a sense of the other side, of, of the tennis court net? Now here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu for, uh, Asia, and the other one, Clausewitz is the big guru of warfare in the West. And both of them would say, "Hey, you wanna understand the other side, you gotta 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 gonna 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, uh, 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 of the tennis court net by looking at the Jap- Japanese behavior in the '30s and '40s. But the method of analysis I'm using, you could apply to anyone you want. You wanna, uh, 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 gonna 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, uh, still, how would I figure out how, um, that would work in something like, uh, warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away, and so, um, I'm gonna, we're gonna look at it today and, uh, we're gonna lo- uh, look at Japanese theorists and belief systems and that if you believe these things, how this influences your, uh, your practice. Tojo Hideki said in December 1st, 1941 that "Our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion." He got that right, and he's in 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 50/50 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 is makes no sense. Uh, you're talking about getting the United States potentially into a war with Japan that's already overextended in China. Who does this? Uh, either you need to ratchet that 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, uh, explains nothing. So rather than do that, it's, they're very, uh, intelligent men and why are they doing these things? 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, uh, the Imperial Japanese Army had 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. If anyone can teach this, go ahead because I don't know a damn thing about it." Uh, talk about being unprepared for seminar.