To use a movie example this is why Hannibal Lector was so useful as a consultant. He would have immediately told Doenitz that something was wrong and said it so plainly that Doenitz would have been angry at himself that he listened to his Deltas/Gammas.
"So, if you think something might be wrong, be sure to bring in an outsider whose ego is not tied to the continuation of the status quo to root out the problem."
In a throwaway description on a completely unrelated topic, Vox has perfectly described why corporations continuously rely on consultants to affect change. genius.
So much failure is wrapped up in "We investigated ourselves and we found that we didn't do anything wrong." -- which has become nearly the theme song for every single case of an American police officer committing multiple Constitutional Rights violations, and ending with payouts in the millions to whatever person* was unfortunate enough to catch the eye of a member of the Badge Gang.
* typically innocent, or committing a non-arrestable violation that bothers nobody and exists solely for revenue generation. Usual excuse for harassing said individual minding his own business is "we got a call" as if walking down the sidewalk in your own neighborhood is evidence of a crime, especially if elderly.
Admiral Yamamoto supported the unpopular Washington and London Naval Treaties with Japan. He later went on to plan on the attack on Pearl Harbor and then the subsequent disaster at Midway, despite serious misgivings from the Naval General Staff.
From Shattered Sword:
"...[Yamamoto] and his officers were unpopular at Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo, which thought (somewhat justifiably) that Combined Fleet’s commander and cronies had a bit of an attitude problem. Worse was yet to follow.
As war approached, Yamamoto laid the groundwork for what was in effect a coup against IGHQ over who was to set strategic direction for the fleet. In so doing, he sowed the seeds of future military defeat by destroying the checks and balances within the Navy’s policymaking processes... he was opposed by several senior members of the Naval General Staff, including its head, Admiral Nagano Osami. Nagano was of the opinion that the United States would find it very difficult to go to war if Japan refrained from an outright attack."
Yamamoto said that attacking the United States would be suicidal "he was a college student in the United States for about 10 years, and has toured the great industrial metropolises such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.
He threatened to retire unless he was given FULL AND ABSOLUTE authority to to plan the attack, for the good reason that nobody else in the Japanese military hierarchy had the slightest clue about American culture ("a rifle behind every blade of grass " referring to private firearms ownership) let alone our publicly documented industrial capacity being more than 20x greater than that of Japan).
Yamamoto did so reluctantly, because he KNEW that attacking the United States was likely to be national suicide, but knew that anyone else leading the Japanese Navy would be less capable than himself.
Had FDR actually been interested in anything other than having a bloody flag to wave, the US Navy would have known where the carriers were. (The White House did -- Roosevelt had prohibited the Navy from monitoring civilian shipping radio transmissions, which oftentimes included "courtesy calls" to shore stations upon sighting another vessel while at sea -- the Japanese Carrier fleet was called in by several civilian ships as they travelled to the Hawaiian Islands but deliberately withheld this information from both the Army and the Navy)
Without a doubt Yamamoto was an expert, which is precisely why the Naval General Staff should not have folded to his demands for a "decisive battle." In effort to cover for his failure to sink any carriers at Pearl Harbor, he got four critical IJN carriers sunk even though his superiors knew Midway was strategically worthless and that American carriers could be lured in for a fight much easier by cutting off Australia.
"Predictably, when push came to shove, the Naval General Staff caved in once more. The men in a position to actually do something about Yamamoto’s near insubordination–Fukudome and Nagano-apparently did nothing to defend their subordinates against what was, in essence, a coup against their own authority. Nagano thereupon grudgingly ratified Yamamoto’s basic operational plan [for Midway] on 5 April."
Yamamoto obviously doesn't deserve the entirety of the blame for the disaster, but the fact of the matter is Fukudome and Nagano could have averted it had they not listened to the expert given and him carte blanche with Combined Fleet.
Yamamoto realized that he was surrounded by fools, and/but imagined that only his leadership could avert an inevitable disaster from the folly of attacking the U.S. He was the only person of importance in Japan who realized that industrial base is an important factor at the strategic level.
Get the game “Victory in the Pacific.” (Avalon Hill, 1977) — or download the rules from BoardGame Geek and then play it with Vassal (http://vassalengine.org — download the engine and then download the “Victory in the Pacific” module.
Now try playing the game WITHOUT Japan going to war with the United States (therefore, only Dutch, Australian, New Zealand and British forces) and adjust the Victory Conditions in terms of Japan’s actual economic/strategic goals before the folly of trying to take over the entire Northern and Western Pacific Ocean.
By attacking the U.S., the Japanese turned a very achievable goal (capture of mines and oil fields in Eastern Asia) into a very unachievable goal (outproducing the United States’ industrial base).
There was pressure to take Midway that weren’t grounded in rational strategic reasons, but in the Doolittle raid and the “loss of face” from the bombing of Tokyo by Doolittle’s squadron. That, and the “Victory Fever” from a string of successful raids all over the Pacific, but worse yet, because the Japanese had never planned THE WAR ITSELF, whereas the U.S. merely pulled “Plan Orange” off the bookshelf, and put Gen. MacArthur and Adm. Nimitz in charge of executing it.
I have read the book, particularly because the authors actually went to Japan to look at the ships logs, and discovered that the common narrative (“Midway was an upset and a complete surprise”) was perpetuated as a useful myth by BOTH the Japanese and U.S. Navies, when it was practically a predetermined outcome due to culture (Japanese Navy’s WW1, and early WW2 battle by the carriers being raids against fixed land targets and ports, compared to the U.S. Navy spending years practicing meeting engagements, in which it was found that whoever discovered the other first wins; U.S. carriers having 2x dive bombers + 1x torpedo bombers + 1x fighters vs Japan carrying an equal share of each aircraft type; American emphasis on designing ships to contain damage and minimize its effects vs Japanese designs in which damage mitigation is an afterthought, and finally, American personnel training — EVERY sailor gets fundamental damage control training vs Japanese training: “Damage Control” is an MOS — which Japanese captains tended to under-draw because “they’re useless eaters” who take up space but add nothing to the ship’s fighting capabilities)
“The Decisive Battle” had won Japan three naval wars, against China twice, and the Russians at Tsushima Straights.
Simliarly, the critical weapon which had won the last two naval wars was the torpedo. leading to their development of the compressed oxygen (as opposed to compressed air) flasks for their alcohol fueled torpedoes (ironically due to a Japanese Naval Attache in the U.K. thinking he had heard a Royal Navy officer saying they were developing such a torpedo, when in fact the RN had never even studied the idea)
I SPECIFICALLY read Shattered Sword precisely because I have been working on a WW2 naval warfare system specifically designed to address these DIFFERENCES in building, training, and fighting doctrines between the U.S. and Japanese, and later to explore along similar lines the British Empire, German, French, Italian, Soviet fleets. (Contrasts: German navy treated crew sleeping compartments as temporary quarters for crews who spent most of their nights ashore; French warships were designed like floating hotels but with guns and armor, on the theory that a French sailor can retire having spent years at sea and seen only hours, at most, of combat. The Royal Navy and it’s Canadian/Aussie/New Zealand fleets were a “happy medium” between the French and German extremes. The German penchant for building 3-propeller warships — all of the problems 2 propellers, with few of the advantages of 4 propellers).
In other words, Naval games have been designed as if empty and combat displacement are the last word on ships’ abilities to take and survive damage; “Shattered Sword” shows that to be not true — 3 of the 4 Japanese carriers were NOT sunk by American attacks — but had to be abandoned and taken under tow due to out of control fires; the 3 carriers, aflame from stem to stern, but with hulls intact, were torpedoed BY THE JAPANESE once they realized that towing the hulls was slowing down the fleet, and letting them go WITHOUT sinking them made them likely to be captured by the U.S. Navy.
War at Sea (Atlantic/Med theaters of operation) and Victory in the Pacific, for various reasons, being grand strategic level, don’t cover this aspect at all. “Bismarck” (1980 edition), and “Flat Top”, both building off of “Jutland” and miniatures rule sets COULD have incorporated this at the tactical combat level, but didn’t do so.
The Age of Sail game “Wood Ships and Iron Men” addresses crew quality among the British/French/Spanish/Dutch/American navies.
So, I’ve been working, off and on, for some years, on reshaping these into something that takes into accounts the character of shipbuilding and personnel training, and operational/fighting doctrine and the effects on combat results due to these differences in how these navies built their ships (and the older half of the Japanese Navy is all British designed-and-built), how they trained, and fighting doctrine how they fought is a direct reflection of national culture.
The Japanese Navy suffered from a problem similar to that of Arab armies — the belief that there’s absolutely no point in training for, or trying to do anything about effective enemy gunfire — kind of a Shinto version of “Insh Allah”
The problem was literally staring them in the face. The pathological HEIL HITLER closing in every single radio message using the electromechanical rotary disk encryption equipment is what cracked opened the door on every message.
What he needed was his codebreakers to look at the German military's own radio traffic. Had that been done, it would have been found and fixed rather quickly.
This is being repeated in real time. Apparently Western Intel agencies are reporting Russian losses to be 1000+ a day. This would explain the odd confidence shown by Western leadership.
Some are so invested in not looking bad, that they will defend a malfunction as part of the original design because for them to admit the malfunction would question why they didn't catch it earlier.
The malfunction was actually in the radio operators putting HEIL HITLER at the very end of every message using that encryption system.
The Japanese were using the exact same system (other than rotor disks wired differently) and the US NAVY had a terrible time trying to decode Japanese traffic, even though they also knew the mechanism. The difference was that the Japanese weren't signing off every message with "Praise Emperor Hirohito"
Several German subs were captured over the course of the war.
The Brits took U-110 in tow while grabbing all cryptographic materials that they could find, and then scuttled it before coming in sight of land, because the chance of anyone else finding out would have jeopardized the value of the captured crypto material. So U-110 was sunk in deep water within hours of its capture.
The one in Chicago is U-505, captured late in the war. It's a type XI (11) and much more advanced than a type VII such as 110 (which was essentially just a WW1 with sonar equipment and periscopes -- neither of which were available for WW1 German subs)
Oh thank you! That's right it was a U-505! For some reason I was under the impression they only ever captured one, but that makes perfect sense. I much appreciate the explanation.
I’ve been planning to go to Chicago to see the type XI U-505 and then to Muskegon, MI, to tour the Gato-class USS Silversides (SS-236), being that both subs are the pinnacle of their respective navy’s traditional diesel-electric attack submarines
Understanding this phenomenon, although I couldn't explain it as clearly as this, simultaneously broke the spell of consultants and underscored the potentially critical need. In probably over 1000 board rooms this year, someone will put up a slide that says "increase revenues, reduce costs," and the internal experts will scoff but that is usually exactly what needs to happen but a CEO needed to hear it wasnt actually happening as it had been told. Companies can't run without sales like armies cant fight without supplies.
The biggest problem in the United States is companies saving so much money that they alienate their customers and go Bankrupt. It happened to General Motors, and General Motors II is on a path to do the exact same thing.
Here is a paragraph on vision from the GM CEO, Mary T. Barra: "Under Barra’s leadership, GM envisions a world with zero crashes, to save lives; zero emissions, so future generations can inherit a healthier planet; and zero congestion, so customers get back a precious commodity – time."
No mention of making cars that customers want. Convergence complete.
Yeah. Here in Detroit, I gauge a the combined intelligence and awareness and observation of anyone in the auto industry by their response to “What do you think about Mary Barra?”
Fantastic historical observation
Half my new job is to keep the Deltas cooing whoie rooting out gammas
Glad "Sigma consultancy" wasn't available to Doentiz in ww2. Starvation isn't a good way to go. Happened to the Dutch soon after.
To use a movie example this is why Hannibal Lector was so useful as a consultant. He would have immediately told Doenitz that something was wrong and said it so plainly that Doenitz would have been angry at himself that he listened to his Deltas/Gammas.
"So, if you think something might be wrong, be sure to bring in an outsider whose ego is not tied to the continuation of the status quo to root out the problem."
In a throwaway description on a completely unrelated topic, Vox has perfectly described why corporations continuously rely on consultants to affect change. genius.
Outside audits will always find things they don't want you to find.
Investigations should ALWAYS done by outsiders.
So much failure is wrapped up in "We investigated ourselves and we found that we didn't do anything wrong." -- which has become nearly the theme song for every single case of an American police officer committing multiple Constitutional Rights violations, and ending with payouts in the millions to whatever person* was unfortunate enough to catch the eye of a member of the Badge Gang.
* typically innocent, or committing a non-arrestable violation that bothers nobody and exists solely for revenue generation. Usual excuse for harassing said individual minding his own business is "we got a call" as if walking down the sidewalk in your own neighborhood is evidence of a crime, especially if elderly.
Brilliant. And now we see why consulting companies exist since your own workers could be doing nothing but talking their own book
Admiral Yamamoto supported the unpopular Washington and London Naval Treaties with Japan. He later went on to plan on the attack on Pearl Harbor and then the subsequent disaster at Midway, despite serious misgivings from the Naval General Staff.
From Shattered Sword:
"...[Yamamoto] and his officers were unpopular at Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo, which thought (somewhat justifiably) that Combined Fleet’s commander and cronies had a bit of an attitude problem. Worse was yet to follow.
As war approached, Yamamoto laid the groundwork for what was in effect a coup against IGHQ over who was to set strategic direction for the fleet. In so doing, he sowed the seeds of future military defeat by destroying the checks and balances within the Navy’s policymaking processes... he was opposed by several senior members of the Naval General Staff, including its head, Admiral Nagano Osami. Nagano was of the opinion that the United States would find it very difficult to go to war if Japan refrained from an outright attack."
You have completely misinterpreted that book.
Yamamoto said that attacking the United States would be suicidal "he was a college student in the United States for about 10 years, and has toured the great industrial metropolises such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.
He threatened to retire unless he was given FULL AND ABSOLUTE authority to to plan the attack, for the good reason that nobody else in the Japanese military hierarchy had the slightest clue about American culture ("a rifle behind every blade of grass " referring to private firearms ownership) let alone our publicly documented industrial capacity being more than 20x greater than that of Japan).
Yamamoto did so reluctantly, because he KNEW that attacking the United States was likely to be national suicide, but knew that anyone else leading the Japanese Navy would be less capable than himself.
Had FDR actually been interested in anything other than having a bloody flag to wave, the US Navy would have known where the carriers were. (The White House did -- Roosevelt had prohibited the Navy from monitoring civilian shipping radio transmissions, which oftentimes included "courtesy calls" to shore stations upon sighting another vessel while at sea -- the Japanese Carrier fleet was called in by several civilian ships as they travelled to the Hawaiian Islands but deliberately withheld this information from both the Army and the Navy)
You apparently haven't even read the book.
Without a doubt Yamamoto was an expert, which is precisely why the Naval General Staff should not have folded to his demands for a "decisive battle." In effort to cover for his failure to sink any carriers at Pearl Harbor, he got four critical IJN carriers sunk even though his superiors knew Midway was strategically worthless and that American carriers could be lured in for a fight much easier by cutting off Australia.
"Predictably, when push came to shove, the Naval General Staff caved in once more. The men in a position to actually do something about Yamamoto’s near insubordination–Fukudome and Nagano-apparently did nothing to defend their subordinates against what was, in essence, a coup against their own authority. Nagano thereupon grudgingly ratified Yamamoto’s basic operational plan [for Midway] on 5 April."
Yamamoto obviously doesn't deserve the entirety of the blame for the disaster, but the fact of the matter is Fukudome and Nagano could have averted it had they not listened to the expert given and him carte blanche with Combined Fleet.
Yamamoto realized that he was surrounded by fools, and/but imagined that only his leadership could avert an inevitable disaster from the folly of attacking the U.S. He was the only person of importance in Japan who realized that industrial base is an important factor at the strategic level.
Get the game “Victory in the Pacific.” (Avalon Hill, 1977) — or download the rules from BoardGame Geek and then play it with Vassal (http://vassalengine.org — download the engine and then download the “Victory in the Pacific” module.
Now try playing the game WITHOUT Japan going to war with the United States (therefore, only Dutch, Australian, New Zealand and British forces) and adjust the Victory Conditions in terms of Japan’s actual economic/strategic goals before the folly of trying to take over the entire Northern and Western Pacific Ocean.
By attacking the U.S., the Japanese turned a very achievable goal (capture of mines and oil fields in Eastern Asia) into a very unachievable goal (outproducing the United States’ industrial base).
There was pressure to take Midway that weren’t grounded in rational strategic reasons, but in the Doolittle raid and the “loss of face” from the bombing of Tokyo by Doolittle’s squadron. That, and the “Victory Fever” from a string of successful raids all over the Pacific, but worse yet, because the Japanese had never planned THE WAR ITSELF, whereas the U.S. merely pulled “Plan Orange” off the bookshelf, and put Gen. MacArthur and Adm. Nimitz in charge of executing it.
I have read the book, particularly because the authors actually went to Japan to look at the ships logs, and discovered that the common narrative (“Midway was an upset and a complete surprise”) was perpetuated as a useful myth by BOTH the Japanese and U.S. Navies, when it was practically a predetermined outcome due to culture (Japanese Navy’s WW1, and early WW2 battle by the carriers being raids against fixed land targets and ports, compared to the U.S. Navy spending years practicing meeting engagements, in which it was found that whoever discovered the other first wins; U.S. carriers having 2x dive bombers + 1x torpedo bombers + 1x fighters vs Japan carrying an equal share of each aircraft type; American emphasis on designing ships to contain damage and minimize its effects vs Japanese designs in which damage mitigation is an afterthought, and finally, American personnel training — EVERY sailor gets fundamental damage control training vs Japanese training: “Damage Control” is an MOS — which Japanese captains tended to under-draw because “they’re useless eaters” who take up space but add nothing to the ship’s fighting capabilities)
“The Decisive Battle” had won Japan three naval wars, against China twice, and the Russians at Tsushima Straights.
Simliarly, the critical weapon which had won the last two naval wars was the torpedo. leading to their development of the compressed oxygen (as opposed to compressed air) flasks for their alcohol fueled torpedoes (ironically due to a Japanese Naval Attache in the U.K. thinking he had heard a Royal Navy officer saying they were developing such a torpedo, when in fact the RN had never even studied the idea)
I SPECIFICALLY read Shattered Sword precisely because I have been working on a WW2 naval warfare system specifically designed to address these DIFFERENCES in building, training, and fighting doctrines between the U.S. and Japanese, and later to explore along similar lines the British Empire, German, French, Italian, Soviet fleets. (Contrasts: German navy treated crew sleeping compartments as temporary quarters for crews who spent most of their nights ashore; French warships were designed like floating hotels but with guns and armor, on the theory that a French sailor can retire having spent years at sea and seen only hours, at most, of combat. The Royal Navy and it’s Canadian/Aussie/New Zealand fleets were a “happy medium” between the French and German extremes. The German penchant for building 3-propeller warships — all of the problems 2 propellers, with few of the advantages of 4 propellers).
In other words, Naval games have been designed as if empty and combat displacement are the last word on ships’ abilities to take and survive damage; “Shattered Sword” shows that to be not true — 3 of the 4 Japanese carriers were NOT sunk by American attacks — but had to be abandoned and taken under tow due to out of control fires; the 3 carriers, aflame from stem to stern, but with hulls intact, were torpedoed BY THE JAPANESE once they realized that towing the hulls was slowing down the fleet, and letting them go WITHOUT sinking them made them likely to be captured by the U.S. Navy.
War at Sea (Atlantic/Med theaters of operation) and Victory in the Pacific, for various reasons, being grand strategic level, don’t cover this aspect at all. “Bismarck” (1980 edition), and “Flat Top”, both building off of “Jutland” and miniatures rule sets COULD have incorporated this at the tactical combat level, but didn’t do so.
The Age of Sail game “Wood Ships and Iron Men” addresses crew quality among the British/French/Spanish/Dutch/American navies.
So, I’ve been working, off and on, for some years, on reshaping these into something that takes into accounts the character of shipbuilding and personnel training, and operational/fighting doctrine and the effects on combat results due to these differences in how these navies built their ships (and the older half of the Japanese Navy is all British designed-and-built), how they trained, and fighting doctrine how they fought is a direct reflection of national culture.
The Japanese Navy suffered from a problem similar to that of Arab armies — the belief that there’s absolutely no point in training for, or trying to do anything about effective enemy gunfire — kind of a Shinto version of “Insh Allah”
I think that some good bravos would help prevent this. Because they would back the Alpha and also shut down the worst of the gamma crap.
The problem was literally staring them in the face. The pathological HEIL HITLER closing in every single radio message using the electromechanical rotary disk encryption equipment is what cracked opened the door on every message.
What he needed was his codebreakers to look at the German military's own radio traffic. Had that been done, it would have been found and fixed rather quickly.
This is being repeated in real time. Apparently Western Intel agencies are reporting Russian losses to be 1000+ a day. This would explain the odd confidence shown by Western leadership.
True numbers:
Ukraine - over 40, 000 per month and climbing
Russian - less than 100 per month and dropping.
Which is exactly what you would expect since Russia is running an attrition operation, NOT a land grab.
And women. This applies to your women, too.
Some are so invested in not looking bad, that they will defend a malfunction as part of the original design because for them to admit the malfunction would question why they didn't catch it earlier.
The malfunction was actually in the radio operators putting HEIL HITLER at the very end of every message using that encryption system.
The Japanese were using the exact same system (other than rotor disks wired differently) and the US NAVY had a terrible time trying to decode Japanese traffic, even though they also knew the mechanism. The difference was that the Japanese weren't signing off every message with "Praise Emperor Hirohito"
"The capture, intact, of the damaged boat U-110 complete with all its cipher materials, keys, and signal book was a particularly significant coup."
Oh, I expect that's the U-boat that's in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Several German subs were captured over the course of the war.
The Brits took U-110 in tow while grabbing all cryptographic materials that they could find, and then scuttled it before coming in sight of land, because the chance of anyone else finding out would have jeopardized the value of the captured crypto material. So U-110 was sunk in deep water within hours of its capture.
The one in Chicago is U-505, captured late in the war. It's a type XI (11) and much more advanced than a type VII such as 110 (which was essentially just a WW1 with sonar equipment and periscopes -- neither of which were available for WW1 German subs)
Oh thank you! That's right it was a U-505! For some reason I was under the impression they only ever captured one, but that makes perfect sense. I much appreciate the explanation.
No problem.
I’ve been planning to go to Chicago to see the type XI U-505 and then to Muskegon, MI, to tour the Gato-class USS Silversides (SS-236), being that both subs are the pinnacle of their respective navy’s traditional diesel-electric attack submarines
I've seen the one in Chicago a couple times but it was long long ago. It's very very cool.
Understanding this phenomenon, although I couldn't explain it as clearly as this, simultaneously broke the spell of consultants and underscored the potentially critical need. In probably over 1000 board rooms this year, someone will put up a slide that says "increase revenues, reduce costs," and the internal experts will scoff but that is usually exactly what needs to happen but a CEO needed to hear it wasnt actually happening as it had been told. Companies can't run without sales like armies cant fight without supplies.
The biggest problem in the United States is companies saving so much money that they alienate their customers and go Bankrupt. It happened to General Motors, and General Motors II is on a path to do the exact same thing.
Yup.
And for anyone interested in a look at the GM board of directors...
https://www.gm.com/company/leadership
Here is a paragraph on vision from the GM CEO, Mary T. Barra: "Under Barra’s leadership, GM envisions a world with zero crashes, to save lives; zero emissions, so future generations can inherit a healthier planet; and zero congestion, so customers get back a precious commodity – time."
No mention of making cars that customers want. Convergence complete.
Yeah. Here in Detroit, I gauge a the combined intelligence and awareness and observation of anyone in the auto industry by their response to “What do you think about Mary Barra?”
“Deltas are always eager to prove that they are competent and Gammas will never admit that they are wrong.”
We really saw this play out during Covid.