Preface
The growing threat of communist Chinese and Russian hypersonic and space weapons is now continually in the news. Nearly 30 years ago in the mid-1990s, I began to participate in Department of Defense futures wargames to help anticipate what technology threats may emerge over the next quarter century. My role was to use this participation to aid Air Force science and technology planning and investment decisions.
After several years of participation, I decided to write a fictional story looking 20 years in the future. The title for this fiction future was “Pearl Harbor II”. I wrote this as a series of newspaper articles. This fictional work was approved for public release by the Air Force and, for a time, they were published online on an official Air Force website. The goal was to encourage out-of-the-box thinking within the Air Force regarding possible future threats and needed technology-based defenses.
In deciding to republish this fictional future, I am releasing it just as it was first published in 1995. Where some additional explanation is needed, these are clearly noted. Updated images are used to illustrate the types of systems being discussed.
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This future war scenario is largely about paradigms and the role they play in planning for warfare in the future. We all live in a world full of paradigms that govern how we perceive what we see and hear and how we react to this information. Sometimes our paradigms are so strong that we fail even to recognize or acknowledge information we receive. Other times, while we acknowledge the information, we do not believe that it is pertinent or useful, and we dismiss it.
The problem is that paradigms are analogous to theory—an imperfect attempt to capture complex interactions through a series of simple, understandable rules. With most theories, as our understanding of reality improves, the theories need to be updated to remain acceptably consistent with our perception of reality. In a like manner, paradigms also need to be updated as the circumstances that created the paradigm change.
Joel Arthur Barker in Paradigms (previously titled Future Edge) talks about paradigms, how we perceive them, and what causes them to change. From Paradigms:
• A paradigm tells you how to play the game according to the rules.
• A paradigm shift, then, is a change to a new game, a new set of rules.
• Watch for people messing with the rules, because that is the earliest sign of significant change.
• And, when the rules change, the whole world can change.
(The following makes use of information contained in “The Visions of Hector Bywater,” C. V. Glines, AIR FORCE Magazine, December 1990):
In 1924, Brigadier General Billy Mitchell projected a Japanese attack upon American forces at Pearl Harbor in a lengthy 323 page report he wrote following a Far East trip. This was barely six years after World War I.
“Attack will be launched as follows,” it prophesied. “Bombardment, attack to be made on Ford Island at 7:30 a.m. … Group to move in column of flights in V. Each ship will drop … projectiles on targets.” He also predicted Japan’s follow-up assault against the Philippines: “Attack to be made on Clark Field at 10:30 a.m.”
General Mitchell was no stranger to air warfare. He was the first U.S. officer to fly over enemy lines during World War I. In 1918, he led a joint French-U.S. air armada of 1,500 aircraft that conducted massed aircraft bombing raids against German positions. Following the war he was the youngest officer to be assigned to the United States Army’s General Staff. In 1921, he demonstrated the potential of air power in naval engagements that included the sinking of the captured German battleship Ostfriesland by 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs dropped from bombers.
In 1921, Hector C. Bywater, a former British intelligence agent and naval correspondent, wrote Sea Power in the Pacific. This book detailed Japanese and U.S. strengths following the Japanese takeover of the German Pacific possessions of the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands. In 1925, Bywater expanded the final chapter of this book, “Possible Features of a War in the Pacific,” into a fictional account titled The Great Pacific War. Bywater postulated Japanese raids that destroyed much of U.S. naval power in the Pacific, carrier-based aircraft attacks, torpedo planes, kamikaze attacks, a fall-back and regrouping of U.S. forces, a U.S. island-hopping strategy to retake lost islands, and a “demonstration air raid” on Japan to win the war.
Both of Bywater’s books were translated into Japanese, made required reading at the Japanese Naval War College, and debated at the Imperial War College. The second book was reviewed in the New York Times in September 1925.
Isoroku Yamamoto, later Fleet Admiral, was a naval attaché in Washington in 1925. Yamamoto spoke and read English. During World War II, Yamamoto largely followed the strategy Bywater had outlined in his books. In 1940, following naval maneuvers to assess the potential of carrier aircraft, Yamamoto remarked to his chief of staff, “Well, it appears that a crushing blow could be struck [by torpedo bombers] against an enemy surface fleet. It makes me wonder if they couldn’t get [the U.S. fleet at] Pearl Harbor.”
The U.S. military planners’ paradigm in the late 1920s was that these projections of Japanese capabilities and actions were not feasible. Thus, the warnings of Mitchell and Bywater did not fit within the prevailing U.S. military paradigm. As a result this information was largely dismissed. The Japanese military, on the other hand, was still forming a new paradigm to support military expansion and conquest. Bywater’s writings were noted in the Japanese military’s translation as having “a certain degree of rational probability.” It is possible that Mitchell and Bywater’s writings, intended to help reshape the U.S. military paradigm, may have inadvertently helped Japan define its new military paradigm.
This Japanese paradigm proved superior, initially, to the largely unchanged U.S. paradigm. It was only after the U.S. paradigm failed, first, in preventing war through effective deterrence and, second, through the destruction of a large percentage of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, did the U.S. paradigm begin to shift.
This future war scenario has been written to assess the flexibility of our paradigms of air and space warfare. Will we constantly adapt our paradigms through openly assessing changing old threats, evolving new threats, and technology advances or will it take another Pearl Harbor?
Note: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
If not already following this blog, please click the “follow” button at the bottom right to sign up. Receiving notification via email is best to ensure that you do not miss a new posting. Sending notifications is the only use of your email address. It is not sold or used elsewhere. Besides, you can always unsubscribe. Please forward these postings to your friends who share your spacefaring interest. Also, please check out the Spacefaring Institute’s YouTube channel.
James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.