it is not now. More than 99 percent of the American people have never served, and many do not know the difference between an F-16 fighter and an M16 rifle. The tradition of avoiding resource fights in Washington too often leaves Soldiers last in priority. Sadly, some of the criticisms of politicians about the Army leadership ring true. For whatever reason, the Army does not do public relations very well. Listen and compare testimonies from the services; the Army seems at times to be intellectually outflanked. Too many congressional briefings are killer exercises in “death by PowerPoint.” When on camera, too many senior Soldiers come across as wooden and humorless. Their speech is heavy with acronyms and Soldier jargon. The Air Force takes congressmen and the media on thrilling fighter rides, and the Navy lands them on aircraft carriers; the Army gives them briefings at Fort Hood.
Next time you see a news video of Americans in action on television, listen to the anchor call them “Marines” although, as those of us who know can tell from their uniforms, they are Soldiers. Even my own network, Fox News, occasionally and inadvertently makes this same mistake.
In strategy as in science, nature abhors a vacuum. Someone always comes along to fill it. Vacuums in warfare are usually filled by people who seek to do harm. We are again creating a global vacuum. Our Soldiers are being given pink slips, and many of the best and brightest are voting with their feet. As our Soldiers disappear, really bad actors like ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Iranian Quds force, and many other Islamic extremists are filling the vacuum. Eventually, “ground truth” will force America to rebuild a ground force to take them on. It will take time, of course, to fix the Cinderella service, and, sadly, the handsome prince holding a glass slipper is nowhere in sight. Soldiers will die needlessly, and when that happens, Washington defense insiders will look for someone to else to blame. “I told you so”s will not count any more. After three hundred years of sordid history, we know who the culprits really are.
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“The Curse of Colonel Yahara”
How sad to watch the Kiryan Cape
Now carpeted in green
After it was dyed red
With the blood of warriors.
—Hiromichi Yahara, June 23, 1945
The American era of warfare began in a tunnel. Late into the evening of May 3, 1945, three officers huddled around a map-strewn table in the stifling heat of a Japanese command cave buried safely below the ancient Okinawan fortress of Shuri Castle. The two lieutenant generals—Itsura Ushijima, the commander of the Japanese 32nd Army, and Isamu Cho, his chief of staff—argued tactics. It was an argument in the Japanese fashion: monosyllabic, measured, and interrupted occasionally by the guttural outbursts of General Cho. The question before them was limited to one narrow set of options: should the Japanese attack soon, before U.S. forces overwhelmed them, or should they remain burrowed in their caves, bunkers, and tunnels and continue to defend?1
The third officer at the table was Colonel Hiromichi Yahara. He was a tall, quiet officer, deeply cerebral and intellectually gifted, a man with a mild, patrician manner. Yahara’s service had been spent mainly as a staff officer and instructor at the Imperial War College. He knew his enemy, because he had lived in the United States as an attaché. But his impressions, amplified after the last five weeks of fighting Americans there on Okinawa, were considerably different from those of his boss. General Cho was an arrogant, impetuous, cruel, and stupid man—typical of a generation of generals brought up in the prewar atmosphere of court politics and savage international aggression.
On occasion Yahara would interject a few words to elevate the discussion. While his seniors argued tactics, Yahara thought strategy. He had lectured them frequently on the unique opportunities that their inevitable sacrifice on Okinawa would signify for Japan. He knew that the battle for Okinawa was actually the opening battle for the Japanese homeland. He considered it a bloody prologue of what was inevitably about to happen on the beaches of Japan’s main islands of Honshu and Kyushu. He spoke frankly about how Japan should fight on in the face of a succession of tragic defeats. The United States controlled the air and sea absolutely. By invading the Marshall Islands the previous year, Americans had penetrated the final strategic perimeter of the empire and placed the home islands within range of the cruel killing power of U.S. B-29 bombers. He understood that a land assault on the home islands supported by the overwhelming firepower of naval artillery and carrier strike aircraft would follow immediately after the United States captured Okinawa.
The hard part of these discussions was the context. Four years before, Japan’s strategy had been to preserve victory. Now it was to manage defeat. The question that Yahara pondered with his staff was how to translate the looming yet necessary sacrifices of a losing land battle into some form of redemptive advantage for Japan. In typical Japanese fashion, Yahara sought to lessen the shame of what was to come by referring to his concept as an “offensive retreat.” His intent was straightforward: kill Americans with such efficiency that they would reconsider the wisdom of invading Japan. Perhaps if his Soldiers could kill enough Americans, an armistice similar to the Versailles treaty that had ended World War I might be negotiated with the United States. Perhaps even the emperor’s place as the “son of heaven” might be respected and preserved.
Like any competent staff officer, Yahara based his strategy on the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. He knew Americans well from personal associations during his time in the States. His superior intuition allowed him to filter out the prejudices of his samurai brethren to form a realistic appreciation of the fighting qualities of U.S. forces. Clearly U.S. matériel strength was far beyond anything the Japanese Imperial Staff could have imagined before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Once the battle for Okinawa began in earnest, Yahara discovered that the Americans were harder to kill than anyone had supposed. With a good pair of binoculars, he could watch U.S. Soldiers and Marines moving back and forth between the beach to forward foxholes with relative impunity. He concluded that the only efficient place to kill them was in close, at about one thousand yards, with small arms, mortars, and grenades. Yahara and his field commanders also noted that the fighting efficiency of Americans diminished as they moved toward the line of contact. The closer the Japanese infantry could hold the enemy “in its embrace,” the greater chance that it could kill Americans. From the beachhead to the infantry battalion rear area, U.S. Soldiers and Marines were very well trained and motivated. But their infantrymen’s performance seemed to fall apart as they closed to small-arms range, the last hundred yards—often less than fifty yards.
Yahara knew that the only remaining American vulnerability was public opinion. Prior to assuming their duties on Okinawa, Ushijima and Yahara had served together as senior leaders at the war college at Zama. From their studies they had concluded that the American public was increasingly concerned about the human cost of the Pacific War. The press exposed the horrors of the Pacific campaign, beginning with pictures of dead Americans on the beaches of Buna in 1942 and continuing through the bloody battles of Tarawa, Peleliu, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines. American patience had waned even further in the winter of 1945 after the war in Europe appeared to be substantially won. Opportunities to influence American opinion were amplified by a new openness by the Truman administration, which allowed vivid pictures and written imagry of the Pacific battlefields to be revealed to the American people. The public began to protest the cost of a war against a hated but clearly secondary foe. Why, it was asked, were so many men dying so horribly for bits of rock and coral?
YAHARA’S LONG SHADOW: WAR IN THE AMERICAN ERA
Unlike Ushijima and Cho, Yahara did not die on Okinawa. By the third week in June the once-powerful Japanese forces
