(Photo: Jacek Bartosiak)
The war plans, war games, councils and simulations described in this fascinating book lasted not only throughout the entire twentieth century up until the outbreak of war in 1941. They actually began earlier – along with Washington’s growing concern over the rise of Japan’s power after the Meiji revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, which changed the balance in East Asia and the Western Pacific.
Miller describes in detail how the Americans intended to defeat the Japanese fleet in the Pacific and cut off sea communication lines between the Japanese islands and the Asian source of raw materials and markets, and to prevent the construction of a Japanese ‘defensive bastion’ along the Second Island Chain up to Australia and Oceania, from which the American fleet and the projection of US strength into Asia would be pushed out.
The title of the book itself refers to the official name of the war plan with Japan. In the era of the recent development of US ‘AirSea Battle Concept’ against China in the Western Pacific, it is a must-read that shows how great powers calculate strategic interests in the long run and that they are constantly preparing for armed confrontation in response to constantly-changing correlation of forces and alignments in pivotal places of the world that have a decisive impact on the balance of power.
While reading, I found out that American strategists in various versions of War Plan Orange (which had evolved over the years, for example with the development of a new type of main fleet surface combatant – the aircraft carrier) predicted almost everything that happened later in the war of 1941-1945. Well, except maybe for the suicide attacks of kamikaze pilots (which after all were the equivalent of modern cruise missiles except that instead of a computer they were controlled by a man reconciled with his coming death), of which Admiral Chester Nimitz (no doubt he was the main architect of victory over imperial Japan) said with “characteristic charm” that they were the only development in the war that had not been predicted and exercised at US Naval War College in Newport prior the Great Pacific War.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
Trwa ładowanie...