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Both in US Naval War College Review, Winter 2015 Issue

DECONSTRUCTING NIMITZ’S PRINCIPLE OF CALCULATED RISK

THE KEY TO MIDWAY CORAL SEA AND A CULTURE OF LEARNING

Thanks for posting witpqs! Great read!

Thanks for posting. [:)]

Thanks for posting. The articles are great.

An US Navy made of flexibility that doesn't exists anymore. Now it is all the "process".
And not even the process they can get right. US Navy of today is without escorts except for carrier TF's.

Thnx from here too. I have a quibble with "only one type of capital ship at a time". Clearly today both aircraft carriers and submarines carrying nuclear weapons are capital ships.

Thanks
Coral Sea to Midway article was an Awesome read!

Interesting, thank you witpqs.

Printed and read both. REALLY liked the 'Culture of Learning' article.

ORIGINAL: John 3rd

Printed and read both. REALLY liked the 'Culture of Learning' article.

The thing that always struck me in reading the history of the Pacific War is that the USN was much better at learning from experience than the Japanese. If you read USN after action reports, there will always be a "Lessons Learned" section to the report, detailing what worked and what didn't and recommending changes to procedures, and those lessons were quickly distributed to the fleet. That sort of openness to change didn't happen in the Japanese military, and they paid the price for it.

Yes. US had much less dogma, ideology. But that is related to a widespread culture of mobility and practicability. It is inseparable from culture. I don't think that is convened well in the article.

As an example in 1944 Japan was still heavily dwelling into failed float-plane fighters. That means facts had much more difficulty to change the ideology.
Japanese had a much more passionated view of war, so they had a much more set piece idea how it should be fought and by what.

On the float plane fighters, they really only work in areas not covered by US fighters. They can give some rude surprises to bombing raids, but one facet not to forget is they will shoot down a lot of Catalinas, and that is worth a lot.

As an example in 1944 Japan was still heavily dwelling into failed float-plane fighters. That means facts had much more difficulty to change the ideology.
Japanese had a much more passionated view of war, so they had a much more set piece idea how it should be fought and by what.

Just as indicative of the lack of doctrinal development was the belated adoption of a compact formation of warships focused on providing AAA defense to the carriers in 1944 and the failure to institute any kind of formal fighter direction center in the IJN at any point at all during the war. Studies of an FDC in 1945 were sadly moot - by that time there was virtually nothing left of the IJN.

I conjecture that if Halsey had the flag at Midway, the calculated risk would have been difficult for him weigh. I also find it difficult to assign him to
carriers in the game for precisely that reason. Kudos to the devs for so many details.