Mistakes from Pearl Harbor - Essay Example

t is the hope of this author that a better and more complete understanding of each can be appreciated by utilizing the lens of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a focal point to identify the failures of US strategy in preparing for and responding to such an attack. Though hindsight is always perfect, it is through an examination of past failures that the current student and/or researcher can hope to gain a level of inference into the means by which prior failures have occurred and why they have taken place in the precise means by which they have.

Accordingly, the principles to be analyzed are as follows: objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, maneuver, unity of command, security, surprise, and simplicity. The objective of the raid on Pearl Harbor was clear and evident. Due to the fact that Pearl Harbor represented the highest concentration of American naval power in the Pacific region, an attack on such a target would yield a high level of reward for the enemy in that it could cripple the American ability to project force into the Pacific theater and held the potential of reducing the United States involvement in the Pacific to such a level that it would not be able to counter Imperial Japan’s actions and acquisitions.

As the United States Army describes, “the ultimate military purpose of war is the destruction of the enemy’s ability to fight and/or will to fight”1. As such, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a clear and definitively targeted operation that was meant to destroy American capability. As a function of such an obvious threat and the concentration of American power that Pearl Harbor represented, it should have been perennially within the minds of the American military leadership that Pearl Harbor and other concentrations of American power within the Pacific region, as well as the rest of the world at that time, should be safeguarded beyond any level of steps that had previously been taken.

As a function of the clear and