Sarah Paine

No matter what the circumstances might be, once you be of the mind to win, once you be holding the first spear to strike.

So here's the implications if you believe this.

What you're doing, it's a very unanalytical way to approach wars.

It's all about whatever it is you want, you just steal the will and go for it, and somehow you'll get it if you want.

There's a lack of grand strategy.

What's grand strategy?

It's integrating all the instruments of national power, not just the army.

or the Army and the Navy, which is what the Japanese are trying to do, but all instruments of national power in pursuit of, if the bigger aim is to stabilize China and keep the communists out, there ought to be some diplomacy and some other things going on, but that's not what's happening.

In the samurai literature, it's a focus on the military instrument exclusively.

So I'll give you an example of how this works out.

Before the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy invaded French Indochina, neither one of them did a little study saying, hey, if we do that, let's check the other side of the tennis court net and see what other people, how they might react.

They just steal the oil and march right in.

Okay, that triggered the U.S.

100% oil embargo.

That's a problem.

Operational success, strategic mess.

Focusing on just the operational level, it's 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 are we ever going to get these resources back home?