Eight decades on from the attack that brought the US into the Pacific War, the United States faces a similar conflict in similar geography.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 demonstrated how a major power, despite its intelligence and a robust defense planning apparatus, can misunderstand its strategic weaknesses, and incorrectly assess the probability of a potentially crippling first strike.
Eighty-one years after the Pearl Harbor attack, the US should recognize a sobering possibility: despite all potential indicators and warnings, the People’s Republic of China can still achieve strategic surprise, and can still cripple US combat capacity by striking ships in-port throughout the Western Pacific.
Pearl Harbor has achieved a mythology in American public discourse only otherwise reserved for the attacks of September 11, 2001. However, these two instances of strategic surprise diverge.
On September 10, few American policymakers knew of, or gave much thought to, a small organization that termed itself al-Qaeda. It seemed a remote threat, akin to a host of nagging sub-threshold issues, that simply faded into the background.
In retrospect, it was abundantly clear that al-Qaeda had the means and motive to attack the US. Indeed, it had waged a coordinated campaign for several years against America and linked with various anti-American groups. However, the country’s attention, alongside that of its major policymakers, was focused elsewhere.
By contrast, it was abundantly clear that a US-Japanese war was likely years before Pearl Harbor. The US Navy in particular, and military in general, had planned for a war with Japan since the early 1920s. By the late 1930s, Japan’s invasion of China and attack on the USS Panay indicated its hostile intentions to the American public.
Sino-Russian collaboration
Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland inaugurated a broader European ground war. Germany and Japan, formally bound by the Anti-Comintern Pact, were thus waging war across Eurasia. It was deemed only a matter of time before the war expanded to the Pacific.
A similar situation exists today. The Sino-Russian Joint Declaration of “No-Limits Cooperation” just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be read as a modern-day entente.
Moscow and Beijing both harbor revisionist ambitions. Their clear target is the US-led international system, particularly its security elements that deny both powers their hegemonic Eurasian ambitions.
The confrontation with Russia has already begun. The confrontation with China is likely to begin within the next five years. Its focal point may be Taiwan, but the stakes implicate the broader Indo-Pacific region, and by extension, the fundamental pillars of America’s Eurasian position.
Clear grand strategic outlines, however, typically contain multiple strategic-level possibilities. Therein lies the complication – and the key to American failure at Pearl Harbor.
Nominally, the US had the “intelligence” to anticipate the Pearl Harbor attack. Best known to the public are the Winds signals and the MAGIC program, the United States’ cryptographic effort that successfully broke Japan’s coded communications.
Every intelligence signal is received alongside a massive tranche of noise, a variety of communications that point in different directions, generate alternative hypothesis, and simply distract the analyst from relevant information. Part of America’s failure was an improper ability to sift signal from noise and to disseminate this information bureaucratically.
War warnings
Yet the backbone of good intelligence analysis, and indeed good political forecasting, is sound strategic instincts. The difficulty is not one of available information or methodology, but of a coherent understanding of an enemy’s intentions, capabilities, and potential courses of action.
Hence the three war scares that preceded the Pearl Harbor attack are eminently relevant. Each stemmed from a particularly complex Eurasian environment.
The first scare, in June 1940, stemmed from news of an impending Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact. Paris fell on June 14, nine days after Germany began its direct invasion of France. Just nine months prior, the Soviets and Nazis had carved up Eastern Europe, working in concert to destroy Poland, this being the proximate cause of the Second World War.
Josef Stalin seemed content to watch Nazi Germany destroy the British and French Empires. Hence it was eminently reasonable – and given American intelligence, also quite probable – that Japan would conclude an alliance with the Soviets, thereby giving Tokyo a free hand to attack British and French possessions in the Indo-Pacific region, and perhaps the Philippines as well.
In the event, the US forward-deployed major naval combat elements to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to deter Japanese intervention.
A year later, a second war scare occurred, this time partly because of US actions. Japan had invaded French Indochina in September 1940, a first attack against the European powers’ Indo-Pacific possessions, but not a politically decisive one given Vichy France’s odd diplomatic status. After negotiations, however, Japan occupied French Indochina’s airfields in July 1941, thereby obviating a potential Japanese concession.
The US responded by freezing all Japanese assets, intensifying its economic pressure on Japan. Although the US embargo included a variety of loopholes and graduated levers that Washington could use to signal amity, the US Navy in particular, and military in general, feared that Japan would immediately strike. Hence another readiness message was distributed across the fleet – and Japan never attacked.
The final war warning came in October 1941 upon the collapse of the Konoe cabinet. Prince Konoe, a traditional Japanese aristocrat viewed rationally or otherwise as a reasonable interlocutor, was replaced by Hideki Tojo, the Kwantung Army’s former chief of staff and Konoe’s minister of war.
Known as an aggressive imperialist with anti-American views, Tojo was complicit in Imperial Japan’s greatest crimes, and was not a man with whom peace could be made. Nevertheless, despite the war-warning, Japan did not attack.
In each case, it was clear that confrontation was possible, and military action increasingly probable. But Japan had multiple courses of action.
Options
An attack on Pearl Harbor, and thereby the American fleet, was seen as particularly risky. It might succeed in striking a decisive first blow against the US. But it would also guarantee a direct American-Japanese War.
Japan’s other options seemed more prudent. An attack on the Soviet Union, conducted concurrently with Hitler’s Barbarossa Offensive, might collapse the USSR, still Japan’s adversary under the Anti-Comintern Pact.
The Japanese might snatch Eastern Siberia from the Soviets, thereby gaining a valuable East Asian possession, limiting potential Soviet support for the alliance between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC), and consolidating Japan’s hold over Northeast Asia.
Alternatively, Japan could attack the European powers’ remaining colonial possessions, capturing Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Borneo, and squeezing India and Australia. Japan might attack the US in this circumstance.
The Philippines, however, was deemed the most likely target, given its location along Japan’s eastern flank. If Japan were to stage such a broad offensive, its most prudent move would be to keep the Kido Butai combined carrier group near the Japanese home islands to counter an American response.
Japan would leverage its maritime strategic depth, submarines and destroyers, slowly eroding the US battle fleet as it sought a decisive engagement, using a fleet action fought in the Philippine Sea. Pearl Harbor might be sabotaged – Japanese agents were thought to exist along the US west coast and throughout Hawaii – but a direct attack was unlikely.
Similar calculations exist today. China has a variety of courses of military action, even if Taiwan is the focal point of its ambitions.
It might engage in a smaller third war, perhaps against Vietnam to secure the South China Sea. It might be drawn into a land war with India, splitting its attention between west and east. It also might, as Russia did, maintain its forces at a high level of readiness for an extended period before actually attacking Taiwan, thereby keeping Taiwan, the US and its allies on edge for months.
Moreover, it might be more prudent – and according to deep-seated tropes, more in line with China’s strategic tradition – to use gray-zone capabilities, harassing Taiwan politically and with China Coast Guard vessels, and imposing a hybrid naval-coast guard blockade.
Taiwan, after all, has only a month or so of critical supplies: US leaders would think twice about the risk of starting a war with a nuclear-armed power and attempt to break a Chinese blockade of the island.
Therefore, the argument runs, simple prudence implies that a direct Sino-American war is highly unlikely absent a severe miscalculation even as Indo-Pacific tensions rise.
These repeated war-warnings may lull the US into a false sense of security. Alternatively, they will stress US operational competence, undermine US bureaucratic decision-making, and fray the nerves needed to engage in a long-term militarized crisis that may boil over into war at any moment. And they will allow various competing hypotheses to develop, some of which will advocate limiting US responses to Chinese mobilization and exercises.
US naval strengths – and vulnerabilities
American warships are rather capable of defending themselves, even against China’s most advanced long-range missiles, its hypersonic “carrier-killers” designed to destroy American capital ships. The same was ultimately true of the US Navy in 1941-42: Japan landed a heavy blow at Pearl Harbor but lost at Midway some seven months later.
Once American warships deploy, US combat power becomes actualized. Similarly, once US aircraft are dispatched to a variety of small, dispersed airfields, China’s missile arsenal becomes far less effective.
The danger, however, is in port. China has the missiles, aircraft, warships and submarines to wage a long-range strike campaign throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Practically every major airfield and port can be a target in an initial attack.
Absent nuclear use, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is unlikely to destroy port, airfield, and base infrastructure wholesale. But it will destroy a significant number of aircraft and ships, along with forward-positioned materiel stockpiles critical to a Sino-American War’s opening weeks.
In 1941, the mere existence of the US Navy in Pearl Harbor did little to deter Japanese action. The same can be said of the US Navy’s Indo-Pacific presence in peacetime vis-à-vis the PLA.
The reality is that China has strong incentives to hit first and hit hard if it thinks it can land a major blow. American stockpiles are low. They will remain low for some time, and the public including Congress and the administration are occupied elsewhere. This is partly a function of the Ukraine war, but more fundamentally a reality of the peacetime US defense industrial base.
Political divisions persist within the US. The American foreign-policy establishment, meanwhile, loosely recognizes the China threat, but has no coherent understanding of what that threat might entail, or what a proper response might demand.
Staging a variety of gray-zone activities and slowly eroding American and Taiwanese will – or more accurately, betting that the US will not counter a Chinese move if the stakes are made apparent – gives the US time to reorient and deploy, actualizing the deterrence and combat power of its Indo-Pacific military forces. A Chinese first strike, like its Japanese antecedent, is an eminently predictable event given adversary decision-making pressures.
The two years before Pearl Harbor were fraught with portents and signs, warnings identified but misinterpreted, warnings simply missed, and competing assessments of Japanese action. America’s failures stemmed from a lack of anticipation and imagination, an inability to apply political good sense to the strategic question at hand.
The US risks repeating the same mistake today – and beginning a confrontation with a nuclear-armed power in the process.