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They did the same thing before Midway, when the guy playing the part of the U.S. Navy made a move that ended up closely paralleling the way the U.S. actually acted in the battle, and (in the war game) the Japanese lost the carrier Kaga. And yet, later on, that very same ship was refloated and allowed to take part in follow-up operations.
It might not have been cheating, but it certainly did display a lack of intellectual rigor on their part. They should have continued with the "what-if" scenarios and worked out how they would have responded to such an event, instead of just saying "it could never happen" and moving on.
Sorry, but you don't understand war gaming. Refloating the ships was not a breach of the rules, it was how the games are done. By playing through various scenarios and discussing how to respond in that situation the commanders gain insight. They would not have ended the games if the weather roll had given them a typhoon on Day One of the trip to Midway. They would have had a chance to discuss and consider the implications of a sudden storm.
Sorry, but you don't understand war gaming. Refloating the ships was not a breach of the rules, it was how the games are done. By playing through various scenarios and discussing how to respond in that situation the commanders gain insight. They would not have ended the games if the weather roll had given them a typhoon on Day One of the trip to Midway. They would have had a chance to discuss and consider the implications of a sudden storm.
I may not understand war gaming, but I do understand not considering the ramifications of various potential scenarios. As you said before, war gaming is the playing out of various "what-if's" in order to consider ways to respond to them or overcome them or avoid them or whatever. When the U.S. player launched a successful attack on the flank of the Japanese carrier fleet (in the pre-Midway war games), the umpire, Admiral Ugaki, overruled it on the grounds that it could not happen. Too bad they didn't play the game through and deal with the situation as presented (i.e. discuss and consider the implications of an unexpected event), because in real life, it turned out that this is exactly what did happen.
You are correct that I don't know the rules of war gaming. But I find it hard to believe that they would not have at least gamed the possibility that their downstream actions might have been affected by the loss of a carrier, since the Kaga had been "lost" earlier on. That, to me, seems awfully sloppy of them. Of course, as events showed, they didn't handle it too well when the Americans deviated from the script that the IJN had prepared for them.
I would offer that same advice to Admiral Yamamoto!
That's just silly. Yamamoto was at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, and a career IJN officer. But the time he graduated from Eta Jima he would have been well grounded in war gaming.
That's just silly. Yamamoto was at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, and a career IJN officer. But the time he graduated from Eta Jima he would have been well grounded in war gaming.
The use of the means that I was being facetious. But there's also some amount of truth to my comment. For all his experience, Yamamoto badly bungled the planning for the Midway battle. Under his heavy-handed direction, his war games were little more than going through the motions; certainly they were not the detailed analysis of potential pitfalls and counter-strategies that they should have been.
As Prange put it (in Miracle at Midway), if a military strategist had set out to determine just how many principles of warfare he could violate in a single campaign, he would have come up with Operation MI.
If you do war gaming properly you lose points for assuming the enemy will do what you want them to do.
You have just made my point for me: that Yamamoto did not do war gaming properly in the lead-up to Midway. Because one of his foundational assumptions was that the Americans would do exactly what he expected them to do. Indeed, instead of losing points for making this assumption, he forced the games to proceed accordingly. Nor was this fault limited to Midway. In the years leading up to the war, IJN fleet exercises were often tightly choreographed, with the "Americans" playing their role exactly as assigned.
If Hawaii had not been part of the U.S., President Obama's mother would not have lived there when she gave birth. She would have lived on the mainland.
It should also be pointed out that Mr Obama's Kenyan father would probably not been an economics graduate student at the Univ. of Hawaii so a mixed race Barrack Obama would not have been born.
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