(06-14-2014 07:54 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  US military history is not full of great generals.

As someone noted above, Washington is the only US military leader to win a war as an underdog. And he did it without really winning a major battle, but by being a pest and outlasting the British resolve--kind of like what is happening to us today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We win wars, not by having great leaders but by having superior logistics. The greatest military leader in US history was probably someone like Henry Ford or Henry J. Kaiser, because that's how we win wars.

It is often said that there are two types of officers--warriors and paper shufflers. War in this era is such a political event that ideally you need one of each. Ike and Bradley were paper shufflers, Patton and MacArthur were warriors. In Desert Storm, Schwartzkopf was the warrior and Powell the paper shuffler. Probably the best leadership we ever had was WWII in the Pacific, with Nimitz and Halsey and Spruance. But they were helped because Honolulu was not exactly on the beaten path so they didn't get the same level of media scrutiny as the war in Europe, so their paper shuffling needs were lower, and even then it was our industrial capacity the made the difference.

The Japanese had three possible targets at Pearl Harbor. The carriers would have been #1, although by coincidence or luck or perhaps something more sinister, they were away at the time. Without carriers, the Japanese opted for the battleships. Had they gone instead for knocking out the repair facilities, they might have won the war.

It was something more sinister. There's plenty of evidence that our government knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, and they left the battleships there to be attacked. It was the only way to gain enough popular sentiment for the U.S. to enter the war on the right side.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, popular sentiment was split, with about half of the nation wanting us to enter as Germany's ally. Letting Japan attack Hawai'i changed that sentiment overnight.