Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…hat other people, how they might react." They just steel the will and march right on in. Okay, that triggered the U.S. 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Strategy operational success, strategic mess. Focusing on just the operational level is the basis for this ill-founded optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, "Hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places?" Oh, we're going for these places for resources. So maybe we ought to check it out with the finance ministry and others about how we’re ever going to get these resources back home? None of that's going on. It's a disaster for them. 0:23:34 Okay. I'm going to talk about a couple of secondary theorists. One of them is Taira Shigesuke, who is a contemporary of Yamamoto because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture. Only three things are considered essential: loyalty, duty, and valor. So steadfastly loyal as to disregard his own life. What he's actually talking about is group loyalty. In the West, the basic unit composing society is the individual. Well, in the East, it's the group. And group interests take primacy over individual interests. And for the Japanese, society is divided by in-groups and out-groups. The most basic in-group, biggest overarching one, is the Japanese people vis-a-vis everybody else. But within Japan everybody comes from a different province, a different locality. They go to different educational institutes. They graduate from different kindergarten classes, I kid you not, and college classes. If they work for different companies or they work for the military, they're in different branches. 0:24:49 And you also have family loyalties and you owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations, and sometimes these obligations conflict. And if they're really - if the conflicts are really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide. And then if you look at the Japanese language - the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese, you can immediately listen to the grammatical forms that are being used, the specific word choices to know what's the degree of hierarchy, like where do they sit in this unequal hierarchy and whether it's in-group, out-group. 0:25:27 So everybody feels, or most people feel, some level of group loyalty. This is human. But in Japan, the levels of membership are much more finely calibrated and they're re-emphasized by these social, cultural and linguistic reasons. So this group membership and stove-piping ultimately is going to be a much stronger feature of Japanese culture than some other places. All right. Last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi who unlike the other two actually did a little fighting. He was born a little earlier and he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values and I'm going to go through all of these in turn. he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values and I'm going to go through all of these in turn. 0:26:15 First is risk intolerance because remember at the beginning I started with the two flag officers saying “well, we're going to do this war in the Pacific when it's unlikely we're going to succeed but we're going to do it anyway”. And here is Miyamoto: "Furthermore, to fight even five or ten people single-handedly in duels, that's what my military science is all about. So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up ten people and a thousand people beating ten thousand?” Logistics, my friend, but never mind. And then another thing that he emphasizes, and in addition, don't expect long odds to deter the Japanese back in the day. Surprise is another one - a situation that has stalemated and is going nowhere, which is what the China theater was for the Japanese. And how do you get out of it? And the answer that Miyamoto has is: not come up with a new policy objective, but come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then get what you want that way. 0:27:22 And the way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people by the new places that you were going to start engaging in military operations. And here's how it worked: China had been a failed state since 1911. And it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war and the Japanese were appalled particularly after the United States passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade. So then they're thinking, now what? Well we're going to need an empire big enough to survive since no one's going to trade with us. And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931 and they have it pretty much stabilized by 1933. So okay, that was surprise number one, but the rest of China's a mess and the Japanese - it's coalescing into a bilateral communist-nationalist, nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, communists under Mao Zedong fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid and the Japanese are appalled with all this. 0:28:31 And so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937. And that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze river. And it works: they take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system. Oh, and by the way, China's not pacified. It's just churning and so now Japan is even more overextended. As a result of doing that, Russian aid goes up and then you're going to get US aid in there. So the problem's actually getting worse. Time for another surprise - really big one on that infamous day in December '41. It wasn't just Pearl Harbor. That's Team America focusing only on Team America. The Japanese attacked all across the Pacific that day. 0:29:16 Uhh, okay. Now what? Here, China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands. Well the United States - here, the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. w what? Here, China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands. Well the United States - here, the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. Well, after Pearl Harbor, they sure could. And suddenly, the United States isn't isolationist anymore, and they're coming to get the Japanese. So, you can see the samurai values in operation here; “Just try harder”. “More dosages of willpower”. “Eventually you'll win or you'll die trying”. Okay. Another operational preference that you can see, which is these, [inaudible] surprise or preemptive attacks. And this is how Japan began all of its wars. The First Sino-Japanese War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin. 0:30:07 And finally, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy willpower. And in this case, you've already won conventionally. But they're waging an insurgency against you. I'm modernizing the terminology. And the idea is you want a psychological victory. You want them just to quit and somehow you're gonna break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the Rape of Nanjing and other atrocities. That they were going to do these horrifying things and that would break the will of the other side. Okay, be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis, which is if you're dealing with even a failing state, which Russia was - Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the thirties and then he inflicted a famine on Ukraine - but when the Nazis came in and they were going to wipe out not only the Russian government, but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government, and military, and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese brutality does to Chinese, and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine. Don't do it. Bad strategy. 0:31:34 All right, there are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive preemption. It's emphasis on military action to solve all your problems. And you have a fixed policy objective, whatever it is. And if you're in a given battle, you have to win that battle. It's not, "Oh, I have an overarching objective. It's too costly here. I'm going to call off this battle and I'm going to try again somewhere else." Uh-uh. This is your field, the moment your plan has failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of sequels and there'll be unexpected events that take place you'll adapt to - none of that. You're a failure if any of that stuff happens to you. So there's a real insensitivity to risk and there's no grand strategy. 0:32:26 But if you believe these things you will be lethal in warfare. You're not going to give up easily at all. And so you look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well, it's because in a way, they're already dead men. They suffered social death. And so they're going to keep on until the very, very end of all of this.…

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