Pearl Harbor Day

December 7, 1941; a date which will live in infamy. Yet today Pearl Harbor Day lies in the shadow of another date that lives in greater renown: September 11, 2001. Just as Katrina overshadows the deadlier hurricane that obliterated Galveston, Texas in September 1900, the events of 9-11 now eclipse one of the most iconic dates in American history. Not to take anything away from 9-11, but the lessons we didn’t learn from Pearl Harbor continue to haunt us to this very day. Americans seem to relish playing the role of Sisyphus, the Greek king condemned to eternity to pushing a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll down the other side. With a sigh and a short memory, we trot down after the rolling stone to push it back to the summit.

In the months following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, Congress and the American people asked how we could be taken by surprise. The commanding General and Admiral in the islands were both summarily relieved of command and the conspiracy theories that arose in the years after blamed even the President for letting the Japanese pull off a stunning surprise victory.

It was hardly a surprise.

As early as 1921, General Billy Mitchell predicted that the Japanese would launch an air attack upon Hawaii, an alarming prophecy that was lambasted by his peers and ignored by his superiors. Mitchell, an early aviation pioneer and staunch advocate of air power, is perhaps best known for his court marshal following his spat with the Navy. He boasted excessively how air power had made the centerpiece of the fleet – the battleship – obsolete. The Navy disagreed; how could the flimsy bombers of the day vanquish the unsinkable battleship? So Mitchell pulled a couple of captured German battleships from mothballs, anchored them off the Virginia coast, and with the naval brass watching from a safe distance, his squadron of bombers quickly proved his point. Ever defiant, the Navy claimed he cheated and when he did not back down from his rhetoric, he was sacked.

Moral: Americans do not like others to question their preconceived notions. And more often than not, our preconceived notions color our views of foreign affairs and warfare. We are always fighting the last war. Visionaries like Mitchell are seen as anachronistic barbarians, more easily dismissed than heeded. It is easier to change our behavior or concede our beliefs than to force adversaries to make concessions. In the midst of two asymmetric conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, our national leadership has declared that all future warfare will follow the current model. State versus state warfare is a thing of the past; low-level regional conflicts against non-state actors is the new vogue. They think it’s a new type of warfare, yet it actually extends to the beginning of recorded history.

To meet this new challenge, ex-Secretary Rumsfeld and current Defense Secretary Gates have slashed weapon systems left and right. Can’t use the F-22 to bomb terrorists, they say. The Comanche, the Crusader? Nope, don’t need them either. We’ve gotta make the army lighter and more organic. Hell, nuclear attack subs don’t fight terrorists either, yet we’re not scrapping them fortunately. But to look at the next 25 years, as the Defense Department’s QDR demands, the brain trust at the Pentagon doesn’t seem to think there’s a single nation out there that we might disagree with enough that might lead to warfare.

In a joint Indian-American exercise a few years back, the underdog Indian Air Force gave our F-15 drivers in the red, white, a blue jerseys a bloody nose. On the way out of the debrief, one of our boys, ever defiant even in defeat, seemed hopeful about the future, especially given the fact that the F-22 was slated for a large production run. We’ll get ‘em next time! The F-22 would ensure American aerial superiority over every nation on earth, unlike the aging F-15 so easily trumped in the mock war of the Ganges. By the time the rest of the world closed the technology gap with the F-22, perhaps 30 years in the future, we’d be off to the next generation fighter, thereby ensuring the home team would always enjoy a home field advantage. But with the recent cut in production for the F-22, we'll have to hang on to 35-year-old fighters barely better than anything our adversaries may soon have.

Then there’s North Korea, nipping at our heels like your aunt’s chihuahua, its eyes bulging out of its quivering skull like some kind of possessed rat. The North Koreans are just deranged enough that they might decide to end the cease fire and resume the war. Yes, the Korean War is still officially a war. There never was a peace treaty. No winner, no loser, just a draw. Who knows what may spark another confrontation? Another crop failure, China finally cutting off their allowance, a South Korean fishing boat straying across the watery DMZ – it could be anything. And North Korea is just dangerous enough militarily to cause some real pain for us and our allies.

The most obvious candidate is Iran. We’re trying hard to avoid warfare, but as they march farther down the road to the nuclear arms club, we’re going to have to do something. We’ve already used all our instruments of national power, except the military one, with little effect; what other tool in the toolkit will convince them to listen to us? Economic? We’ve had an embargo since the ’79 revolution and you can see how well that’s worked. Diplomatic? They won’t talk to us directly, so we have to use intermediaries like a kid passing a note in class. Informational? Let me know when that Voice of America broadcast starts to change the hearts and minds of the mullahs in Tehran. Intelligence? The CIA has been a dirty word in Iran since the Eisenhower days – think we’ll find willing recruits in Tehran today? At some point, we either have to accept the fact that they’ll get the bomb and hope nobody gets nuked, or we’ll have to actually do something militarily about it. Those are really our only two options and neither one looks promising. But if we have to go to war, we’d better have something more than a lighter, more agile army and a bunch of UAVs.

Back to Pearl Harbor. It perhaps is our biggest Achilles Heel. What worked for the Japanese will work for other nations, just as the Germans marched on Paris using the Schlieffen Plan time and time again. Who might have the most to gain from dusting off Yamamoto’s war plans and taking out the largest, most powerful bastion of military strength in the entire Pacific?

China. Don’t think Pearl Harbor couldn’t happen again? I hope not, but we have to be ready. And paring down our military to deal with non-state actors with visions of grandeur is playing into the hands of Beijing. Think about it; what is a bigger threat to the very existence of our nation and its liberties – Islamic terrorists seeking a new Islamic Caliphate or China? Sure Al Qaeda might take out an American city eventually – and that would be a disaster of epic magnitude – but our nation would not perish in its aftermath. But if the Chinese decided to go head to head with us, their missile technology is nearly good enough to wreak some serious havoc upon our nation.

What would be China’s motivation? Taiwan. They unswervingly claim that it is an integral part of China; they call it the One China Policy, which is the Chinese equivalent of America's Manifest Destiny. The United States is probably the only reason Taiwan is still free. If China decided to take the island by force, they’d have to neutralize an American response before it started. And they wouldn’t have to send a fleet of carriers halfway across the Pacific to do it like the Japanese did. Hawaii would face a rain of ballistic missiles, taking out every military facility in the islands, including our carriers. There would be other targets also: Alaska, Guam, Japan, and Okinawa. Every runway and port from which an American counterattack might originate would be rendered unusable. There might even be a space Pearl Harbor as well; take out a few military and commercial satellites and we lose communications, intelligence gathering, and precision navigation abilities. The Chinese would consolidate their hold on Taiwan before we could reconstitute our forces, effectively taking us out of the fight with a sucker punch in the first round.

We’d lose more than our Pacific military muscle; we’d lose the ability to project American power anywhere in the Pacific. Our diplomatic muscle would perish as well – why would the Chinese need to listen to us without a military threat? They already own most of our debt. We would have no recourse but to concede Taiwan along with our role as superpower. Some Americans may not think that our superpower status is vitally important, but that role guarantees the success of American commerce, and champions human rights the world over. Our entire way of life could change in the blink of an eye, forever changed simply because we have a preconceived notion that we do not want questioned.

We have to be ready for another Pearl Harbor as well as another 9-11. We cannot pretend that we only face one threat. America needs military forces able to deal with the kind of low-level asymmetric conflicts like we are currently facing, but to redefine the entire Department of Defense to face only one kind of conflict is to set us up for another Sunday morning surprise. Let’s quit fighting the last war. It’s time to be prepared to fight the next war, whether on the plains of a broken African nation, the deserts of Iran, or the Far East.

We, as a nation, have vowed to remember 9-11; nearly our entire military has been remade in a model to ensure that we will not let it happen again. But let us not forget Pearl Harbor. Let’s stop pushing the heavy stone up the mountain. Let us ensure that another Pearl Harbor can never happen again.