allies and apply effective force globally.
Changes in the threats that face the United States must have consequences. There is no point in any state’s armament other than to advance its interests in a material way. Many saw Nazi Germany and Japan’s preparations for war in the 1930s, but Western governments’ record of publicizing these was spotty. Harder still was imagining how the preparations could result in disaster. A description of a military’s condition and those that might oppose it is incomplete if it does not attempt to imagine the effects of changes in the balance of power.
Scenarios are the military’s time-tested instrument for juxtaposing current or anticipated forces alongside possible crises. Called “war games,” “command post,” or “table-top” exercises, they enlist the participation of senior civilian and military officials or defense experts to understand how they react to events that could happen. If such exercises are sufficiently difficult and innovative, they can yield valuable clues about strategy, tactics, escalation, logistics, and a host of other variables that challenge commanders in peace, in the dim light between peace and war, and in war itself. The U.S. Naval War College has long specialized in war games. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote of his experience there in the early 1920s that “the enemy of our games was always—Japan,” adding that, because of his preparation, “nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.”1
By 1939, American cryptanalysts could read Japan’s highest level of diplomatic code, which they code-named Purple. The yield from this rich vein was referred to as “Magic.” In late September 1941, U.S. codebreakers intercepted a message from Tokyo to an agent in Hawaii.2 Two weeks later, the message was decoded and passed along to Army, Navy, and State Department recipients. In the message, Japan’s Hawaiian agent was asked to divide the relatively small (ca. 5 square miles) naval area of the harbor into five zones. He was further instructed to report on the location and type of ships in each zone.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark read the report. He admired Japan’s efficient intelligence services and their attention to detail. Opinion remains divided today about Admiral Stark’s failure to send this intelligence to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. On December 3, the U.S. high command was also aware that the Japanese had destroyed their codes and encryption devices in Asian consulates as well as in London and Washington. In congressional investigations that followed the end of World War II, Admiral Kimmel stated correctly that not all Japanese codes were being destroyed and that “Such reports had been made to me three or four times in the course of the year.”3
Less senior officers peered into the approaching whirlwind’s opacity with similar results. Because of a November 28 war-warning message from Washington, Lieutenant General Walter Short, who was responsible for Hawaii’s defense, changed the Aircraft Warning Service’s (AWS) watch, which had lasted from 0600 to 1130. Thus, radar screens would now be manned from 0400 to 0700, the general’s estimate of the most likely time for an attack.
However, the watch standers and their immediate superiors were not told the reason for the added hours. Fewer than ten minutes after sunrise—at 0703—on December 7, the watch stander at the Opana radar station, just south of Kawela Bay at the northern tip of Oahu, saw planes approaching the islands 137 miles to the north and reported it to an Army lieutenant at the AWS center. The lieutenant, who was wholly inexperienced, judged that the unidentified aircraft were a flight of B-17s that was due to arrive from the mainland in the morning.
As with most mishaps, hindsight uncovered a host of other miscalculations, errors, and faulty interpretations. But the nub of the attack’s success was the failure of imagination among American political leadership and the high command. The idea that Japan could dispatch six aircraft carriers across the Northern Pacific undetected to strike Hawaii did not fit with what civilian and military policy makers believed was possible. As Roberta Wohlstetter observes:
For every signal that came into the information net in 1941 there were usually several plausible alternative explanations, and it is not surprising that our observers and analysts were inclined to select the explanations that fitted the popular hypotheses. They sometimes set down new contradictory evidence side by side with existing hypotheses, and they also sometimes held two contradictory beliefs at the same time. . . . Apparently human beings have a stubborn attachment to old beliefs and an equally stubborn resistance to new material that will upset them.4
The 9/11 Commission reached similar conclusions. Established by Congress and the president, the bipartisan commission found that the attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed failures in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. The commission report listed “imagination” first.
The 9/11 Commission report noted that, following the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996, which the FBI concluded was not the result of a crime, President Bill Clinton had established a commission headed by Vice President Al Gore. The Gore Commission was scrupulously exhaustive in its concentration on the dangers of bringing explosives aboard civilian aircraft, as had been planned—but foiled—in the so-called Manila plot of 1995, in which Islamists planned to place bombs aboard eleven passenger aircraft and destroy them as they flew from Asia to the United States. The Gore Commission identified a lack of rigor in searching passengers before they boarded. It did not mention the possibility of using aircraft themselves as weapons.
Other oversights complement that of the Gore Commission. In August 1999, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Civil Aviation Security intelligence office worried that al-Qaeda might try to hijack a plane. One of its scenarios was a suicide hijacking operation. The scenario was dismissed within the FAA because, as the 9/11 Commission recorded, “it does not offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining [i.e., releasing Omar Abdel-] Rahman and other key captive extremists.”5 “A suicide hijacking,” said FAA analysts, “is assessed to be an option of last resort.”6
In short, scholarly and official inquiries into the two largest and most lethal attacks against the U.S. military and the American homeland in the past three-quarters of a century identify a failure of imagination as critical in the unpreparedness that preceded disaster. Imagination is as essential in thinking about the consequences of sharply reduced or strategically distracted seapower as it is in considering future threats.
STRATEGIC CHANGE
The threats the United States faces have changed radically in a little over one generation. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the Soviet Union. He was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin, president of the newly formed independent state of Russia. U.S. policy makers bent their efforts to ensure that the United States would never again face a peer competitor that could cripple the nation in minutes and destroy it within hours.
Embers of the Soviet Union ignited in the Balkans, and Russia faced a constitutional crisis that was resolved by force. Terrorism grew. A short war was fought at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. China started its rise and began to invest heavily in arms. But great power competition seemed to have ended as the Soviet Union was replaced by a weak state, whose natural resources were more valuable than the finished products manufactured from them.
A single generation later, all has changed. The United States today faces a heretofore unfamiliar strategic challenge: the possibility
