You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
How are they supposed to know their computing technology is worse than the US's? THIS IS SECRET RESEARCH!
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Option A: roll the dice and see what happens, depending on a host of unknowable fog-of-war matters
Option B: vacate China and Indo-China, resulting in massive rioting and the collapse of the government since the public won't be happy about admitting defeat after tens or hundreds of thousands have died in the war.
Suppose the Chinese completely obliterate the US military, using amazing advances in hypersonic weaponry, satellites, cyberwarfare, drones and so on, along with their US+EU sized manufacturing sector. They capitalize on their advantage to occupy Japan, Australia, the Pacific and bring the US to its knees by blockading all its ports.
Should we say 'oh the US was completely retarded going to war over Taiwan and losing 5 million men, all its prestige, overseas territories, alliance networks'. No because this wasn't a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Nobody knew beforehand that the Chinese were so capable, only with hindsight does 'oh their manufacturing capacity is so enormous' really become obvious, since people are assuming a short war fought in a single decisive battle. Only with hindsight do we know they had backdoors in all this critical infrastructure, that they'd stolen the specifications for US weapons, that there were 5th columnists feeding them intelligence. Only with hindsight would we learn that, since there hadn't been a naval war for decades, the meta had changed decisively in ways that benefitted the Chinese and obsoleted US strategy.
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Notes -
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
How are they supposed to know their computing technology is worse than the US's? THIS IS SECRET RESEARCH!
Option A: roll the dice and see what happens, depending on a host of unknowable fog-of-war matters Option B: vacate China and Indo-China, resulting in massive rioting and the collapse of the government since the public won't be happy about admitting defeat after tens or hundreds of thousands have died in the war.
Suppose the Chinese completely obliterate the US military, using amazing advances in hypersonic weaponry, satellites, cyberwarfare, drones and so on, along with their US+EU sized manufacturing sector. They capitalize on their advantage to occupy Japan, Australia, the Pacific and bring the US to its knees by blockading all its ports.
Should we say 'oh the US was completely retarded going to war over Taiwan and losing 5 million men, all its prestige, overseas territories, alliance networks'. No because this wasn't a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Nobody knew beforehand that the Chinese were so capable, only with hindsight does 'oh their manufacturing capacity is so enormous' really become obvious, since people are assuming a short war fought in a single decisive battle. Only with hindsight do we know they had backdoors in all this critical infrastructure, that they'd stolen the specifications for US weapons, that there were 5th columnists feeding them intelligence. Only with hindsight would we learn that, since there hadn't been a naval war for decades, the meta had changed decisively in ways that benefitted the Chinese and obsoleted US strategy.
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