Isegoria

The Japanese are an island race, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with the majority of their 127 million people living on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands:

At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

In the 1300s, the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria, and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korea Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a “Divine Wind,” which they called a kamikaze.

So the threat from the west and northwest was limited, and to the southeast and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name Nippon, or “sun origin”: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun.

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The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to one another along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills. Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join one another.

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By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was an industrial power with the third-largest navy in the world, and in 1905 it defeated the Russians in a war fought on land and at sea. However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialized nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber, and a shortage of many metals.

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It was the thirst for these products, notably iron and oil, that caused Japan to rampage across the far-less developed Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early ’40s. It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As each domino fell, the expanding empire and the growing Japanese population required more oil, more coal, more metal, more rubber, and more food.

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This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the United States, but grabbing the very resources, rubber, for example, that the United States required for its own industry.

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If the terrain had been easier the Americans’ choice may have been different—they might have fought their way to Tokyo—but they chose the nuclear option, unleashing upon Japan, and the collective conscience of the world, the terror of a new age.

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The postwar agreement imposed by the United States limited Japan’s defense spending to 1 percent of the GDP and left tens of thousands of American forces on Japanese territory, thirty-two thousand of whom are still there.

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The 2015 defense budget was its biggest to date, with the yen mostly going to naval and air equipment, including six US-made F-35A stealth fighters. In the spring of 2015, Tokyo also unveiled what it called a “helicopter-carrying destroyer.” It didn’t take a military expert to notice that the vessel was as big as the Japanese aircraft carriers of the Second World War, which are forbidden by the surrender terms of 1945. The ship can be adapted for fixed-wing aircraft, but the defense minister issued a statement saying that he was “not thinking of using it as an aircraft carrier.”

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The military infrastructure at Okinawa, which guards the approaches to the main islands, will be upgraded. This will also allow Japan greater flexibility to patrol its Air Defense Zone, part of which overlaps with China’s equivalent zone after an expansion was announced by Beijing in 2013. Both zones cover the islands called the Senkaku or Diaoyu (in Japanese and Chinese, respectively), which Japan controls but that are claimed by China, too. They also form part of the Ryukyu island chain, which is particularly sensitive as any hostile power must pass the islands on the way to the Japanese heartlands; they give Japan a lot of territorial sea space, and they might contain exploitable underwater gas and oil fields.

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China’s expanded Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or “face defensive measures,” Japan, South Korea, and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so.

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Japan also claims sovereignty over the Kuril Islands in its far north, off Hokkaido, which it lost to the Soviet Union in the Second World War and that are still under Russian control. Russia prefers not to discuss the matter, but the debate is not in the same league as Japan’s disputes with China. There are only approximately nineteen thousand inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, and although the islands sit in fertile fishing grounds, the territory is not one of particular strategic importance.

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Japanese statisticians fear that the population will shrink to under 100 million by the middle of the century. If the current birth rate continues, it is even possible that by 2110 the population will have fallen below the 50 million it was in 1910.

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Even if they do go on to solve a problem like Korea, the issue of China will still be there, and this means the US 7th Fleet will remain in Tokyo Bay and US Marines will remain in Okinawa, guarding the paths in and out of the Pacific and the China seas.

North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River:

The United States, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost thirty thousand troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.

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North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect. Its foreign policy consists, essentially, of being suspicious of everyone except the Chinese, and even Beijing is not to be fully trusted despite supplying 84.12 percent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 percent of its exports, according to 2014 figures by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

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To its captive population it says it is a strong, munificent, magnificent state standing up against all the odds and against the evil foreigners, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It has a unique political philosophy of Juche, which blends fierce nationalism with Communism and national self-reliance. In reality, it is the least democratic state in the world: it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also checks off every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century. Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and “reeducation” camps.

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If you come from the north, then once you are over the Yalu River there are few major natural defensive lines all the way down to the sea, and if you can land from the sea, the reverse is true. The Mongols came and went, as did the Chinese Ming dynasty, the Manchurians, and the Japanese several times.

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In the twentieth century the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory.

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The defeat of Japan in 1945 left Korea divided along the 38th parallel. North of it was a Communist regime overseen first by the Soviets and later by Communist China, south of the line was a pro-American dictatorship called the Republic of Korea (ROK).

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The Soviets pulled their troops out of the north in 1948 and the Americans followed suit in the south in 1949. In June 1950, an emboldened North Korean military fatally underestimated America’s Cold War geopolitical strategy and crossed the 38th parallel, intent on reuniting the peninsula under one Communist government.

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The North Korean leadership, and its Chinese backers, had correctly worked out that, in a strictly military sense, Korea was not vital to the United States; but what they failed to understand was that the Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for their South Korean ally, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them.

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In September 1950, the United States, leading a United Nations force, surged into Korea, pushing the Northern troops back across the 38th parallel and then up almost to the Yalu River and the border with China.

Now it was Beijing’s turn to make a decision. It was one thing to have US forces on the peninsula, quite another when they were north of the parallel—indeed north of the mountains above Hamhung—and within striking distance of China itself. Chinese troops poured across the Yalu, and thirty-six months of fierce fighting ensued with massive casualties on all sides before they ground to a halt along the current border and agreed to a truce, but not a treaty.

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The geography of the peninsula is fairly uncomplicated and a reminder of how artificial the division is between North and South. The real (broad-brush) split is west to east. The west of the peninsula is much flatter than the east and is where the majority of people live. The east has the Hamgyong mountain range in the north and lower ranges in the south.

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South Korea’s capital, the megacity of Seoul, lies just thirty-five miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centers, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery.

In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ, the North Korean military has an estimated ten thousand artillery pieces. They are well dug in, some in fortified bunkers and caves. Not all of them could reach the center of Seoul, but some could, and all are able to reach the greater Seoul region. There’s little doubt that within two or three days the combined might of the South Korean and US air forces would have destroyed many of them, but by that time Seoul would be in flames. Imagine the effect of just one salvo of shells from ten thousand artillery weapons landing in urban and semi-urban areas, then multiply it dozens of times.

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The ROK’s economy is eighty times stronger than the North’s, its population is twice the size, and the combined South Korean and US armed forces would almost certainly overwhelm North Korea eventually, assuming China did not decide to join in again.

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Developing the north of Korea would be building from ground zero, and the costs would hold back the economy of a united peninsula for a decade. After that, the benefits of the rich natural resources of the north, such as coal, zinc, copper, and iron, and the modernization program would be expected to kick in, but there are mixed feelings about risking the prosperity of one of the world’s most advanced nations in the meantime.

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South Korea is now a vibrant, integrated member of the nations of the world, with a foreign policy to match. With open water to its west, east, and south, and with few natural resources, it has taken care to build a modern navy in the past three decades, one that is capable of getting into the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea to safeguard the ROK’s interests. Like Japan, it is dependent on foreign sources for its energy needs, and so keeps a close eye on the sea-lanes of the whole region.

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In early 2015, when the Americans, South Koreans, and Japanese got down to the details of an agreement to share military intelligence they had each gathered on North Korea, Seoul said it would pass along only a limited amount of secret information to Tokyo via Washington. It will not deal directly with the Japanese. The two countries still have a territorial dispute over what South Korea calls the Dokdo (solitary) Islands and the Japanese know as the Takeshima (bamboo) islands.

When Failure Thrives was the inaugural publication by the Army Press, back in 2015:

Regardless of how revolutionary they are at the time of their introduction, all military innovations gradually lose their utility as they are overtaken by further technical and societal developments. For example, while the Prussian drill regulations and tactical ordre oblique introduced by Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia in the mid-18 Century were revolutionary for his time, they became a liability a mere generation after Frederick’s death when battlefield developments during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars led to the diffusion of new models of military organization. However, Prussia proved too slow in responding to these new developments until, after an existential defeat in 1806, policymakers finally discarded the institutions and practices they had inherited from Frederick. This case and others like it demonstrate the validity of Joseph Schumpeter’s axiom that innovation is a process of “creative destruction.”

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For this reason, military innovators oftentimes advocate abolishing organizations considered impediments to reform. For example, Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, an early advocate of a Military Technical Revolution, passionately (yet unsuccessfully) lobbied for his government to shift resources from armored forces to digital command-and-control networks and long-range precision-guided munitions.

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Airborne forces are an ideal case for exploring the survival and evolution of a military capability of decreasing utility because of both the nearly universal creation of such forces by the great powers between 1928 and 1941, and their subsequent development along disparate lines in different states.

In this context, although the spread of integrated air defenses, armored vehicles and surface-to-air missiles gradually reduced the utility of airborne forces, states adapted to these developments in different ways.

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As both scholars and military professionals have long understood, military innovations occur when armed forces establish autonomous or semi-autonomous organizational structures (either a separate service, branch or unit) to explore new technologies and doctrines. However, the same qualities of organizational autonomy and institutional power that promote innovation in new organizations foster organizational inertia as an institutions’ favored tactics and technologies become obsolete.

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In effect, airborne forces suffered cutbacks in countries, such as the United Kingdom, where they did not enjoy a high level of institutional strength or autonomy to begin with. Contrarily, they proved largely immune to cutbacks in the Soviet Union, where they were originally endowed with a great deal of organizational clout and independence before the war. Finally, airborne forces remained large, but were obliged to engage in frequent and sustained efforts to reinvent themselves in the United States, where the airborne community’s institutional strength was substantial, yet not so great as to enable airborne forces to entirely neglect the implications of technical and tactical developments.

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The invention of tanks in 1916 and subsequent improvements to their performance created opportunities for land warfare to be waged in radically new ways.

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In many great powers, including Britain, France and the United States, the responsibility for employing tanks was assigned to two traditional service branches — the infantry and the cavalry. Contrary to certain misconceptions, both of these branches viewed tanks as potentially very useful. Nevertheless, they narrowly defined the tank’s role and technical requirements in terms of supporting preexisting infantry and cavalry missions. This meant that the infantry demanded tanks and armored units that were heavily armored, slow moving and optimized for supporting infantry assaults. Meanwhile, the cavalry developed tanks and armored units designed to substitute for the traditional horse cavalry missions of scouting and reconnaissance. In the American case, the cavalry even insisted on combining tanks and horses in hybrid units.

Unfortunately, entrusting the infantry and cavalry branches with tank development squandered their revolutionary potential. This became apparent when Germany launched its blitzkrieg campaigns in 1939-41. Rather than subordinating tanks to existing branches, the Germans created a dedicated armored branch, the Panzerwaffe, to exploit the new technology. In sharp contrast to the approach taken by existing branches, these special-purpose organizations exploited the full potential of armored vehicles for deep maneuvers and causing chaos in opponents’ rear areas. Consequently, although Germany’s armored forces were actually numerically inferior to those of their opponents in 1940 and 1941, they nevertheless dominated the battlefield and won remarkable victories.

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The rapid development of military aircraft in the early 20thth Century sparked just such a development of independent air services, beginning with the British Royal Air Force’s creation in 1918. However, because the creation of new armed services is costly owing to their many support and administrative services, policymakers frequently prefer to create new branches within existing services.

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How too little institutionalization can impede innovation is illustrated by the case of United States special operations forces prior to the creation of the Special Operations Command. Before 1986 special operations forces existed as discrete units within each of the services. Because they neither possessed large staffs nor could offer appealing career prospects, special operations forces failed to attract officers of the needed quality, were neglected in national-level debates, and were unable to develop specialized equipment for their missions.15 As a result, American special operations forces did not provide the strategic value that had been anticipated at the time of their creation—a fact illustrated in the dramatic failure of the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue operation, Desert One. It was in light of these shortcomings that policymakers eventually created an institutionally robust Special Operations Command.

While the case of special operations forces illustrates the perils of under-institutionalizing a capability, the example of Soviet/Russian National Air Defense Forces (the PVO-Strany) illustrates the inverse error of over-institutionalizing a capability. Impressed by the technological promise of integrated air defense networks—combining radars, aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles—Soviet leaders established the National Air Defense Forces in 1948 as an independent armed service on a par with the nation’s ground, air and naval forces.17 This entailed endowing the National Air Defense Forces with a sizeable bureaucracy, educational institutions (a military academy and staff colleges), and training facilities that replicated many of the functions already performed by the other armed services.18 To make matters worse, the National Air Defense Forces procured costly aircraft and surface-to-air missiles that were similar to, yet different from those procured by the air force and army. Over time, this unnecessary duplication of effort came to be seen as an excessive drain on the state’s scarce resources, leading to the National Air Defense Forces’ abolition as an independent service in 1998.

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Because warfare is a matter of life and death for individual combatants — and national survival for states — it is mistakenly assumed that military professionals are ruthless and unsentimental when it comes to discarding old technologies and tactics. However, one tends to find more examples of clearly obsolescent tactics and technologies in military organizations than in many other fields of human behavior. In one extraordinary case, horse cavalry survived in even the world’s most industrialized states until the 1950s, a half-century after they ought to have been abolished. There are, however, many more examples of this kind of obsolescence. The Swiss military maintained carrier pigeons into the early 1990s, long after the advent of electronic communications. The United States Army has retained a sizeable Chemical Corps since the First World War despite the declining importance of chemical warfare. Military forces in states such as France (the Spahis), Spain (the Regulares) and the United Kingdom (the Gurkhas) all retain regiments whose traditions and recruitment reflect the exigencies of long-vanished colonial empires.

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One reason for greater inertia in military organizations lies in the incomplete and intermittent nature of how military organizations are tested.

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It is, therefore, almost always possible for military organizations to ignore unpleasant truths by arguing that the circumstances of future wars will be more favorable to their preferred tactics and technologies. For example, in one particularly brash example of a military professional drawing biased conclusions from contemporary conflicts, British General John French summarily dismissed the need for reevaluating the cavalry’s role after their poor performance in the Boer War. To this end, French wrote, “It passes comprehension that some critics in England should gravely assure us that the war in South Africa should be our chief source of inspiration and guidance…we should be very foolish if we did not recognise at this late hour that very few of the conditions of South Africa are likely to recur.”

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Driven by necessity, military organizations emphasize tradition, continuity and the value of received tactics as a means of instilling the confidence needed to perform difficult tasks amidst the chaos of battle. Put another way, Edward Katzenbach argued in a classic study that, “Romanticism, while perhaps stultifying realistic thought, gives a man that belief in the value of the system he is operating that is so necessary to his willingness to use it in battle….But faith [in a weapons system or tactic] breeds distrust of change.” Thus, a degree of bias and resistance to change is a natural by-product of military organizations’ efforts to develop élan and esprit de corps.

In addition to these unconscious biases, military professionals also develop conscious biases as a result of career incentives. Because officers are promoted within well-defined military organizations, they have a natural interest in seeing those organizations prosper.

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In recent times, no better example of this phenomenon can be found than the US Marine Corps’ steadfast defense of the V-22 Osprey program. Because Marine leaders considered the V-22 Osprey essential to the service’s amphibious assault mission, Marines (and former Marines) successfully lobbied to save the program in the face of grave technical problems, sustained cost overruns, and politicians’ repeated efforts to cancel the program.

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One strategy, the preferred one of military organizations under pressure, is to invest in technological innovations that promise to restore the validity of the organizations’ core missions.

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Having obtained its status as a separate service in 1947 by arguing that air power could independently win wars, the Air Force has repeatedly faced criticism when it either failed to destroy targets considered essential or failed to achieve the anticipated strategic objectives. However, such shortcomings have never prompted the Air Force to fundamentally question the dogma of strategic air power.

Rather, the Air Force has consistently sought to develop new tactics and technologies capable of reinvigorating its preferred strategic mission. Such was the case, for example, when the Air Force encountered grave difficulties during the Vietnam War as a result of both North Vietnam’s sophisticated Soviet-provided air defense system and the Air Force’s own difficulties destroying precision targets. However, rather than renounce the strategic air campaign against North Vietnam, the Air Force instead concentrated its efforts at developing new technologies and tactics. Within this context, the Air Force developed a host of electronic warfare equipment, precision-guided munitions, drones, and airborne early warning systems. Tactically, the Air Force also implemented revolutionary new training and exercise methods (eventually culminating in the “Red Flag” exercises) shortly after the war. These costly efforts at resolving the Air Force’s tactical and technical problems bore fruit later in the Vietnam War and in subsequent conflicts. Nevertheless, the service’s goal of achieving victory through airpower alone has proven elusive.

Besides seeking innovative remedies for the technical and tactical challenges ailing them, another strategy military organizations under pressure can adopt is to seek new roles and missions. In effect, even if developments render a military organization’s original mission impossible or irrelevant, the organization can nevertheless survive if it identifies and fulfills another mission vital to national security. A good example of this phenomenon can be found in the United States Marine Corps’ conversion from imperial policing to amphibious warfare in the 1930s. Because the Marine Corps had hitherto justified its size and autonomy by spearheading the United States’ frequent interventions in Latin America, many openly questioned whether there was any reason to preserve the service once President Franklin Roosevelt promulgated the “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1933, which curtailed the interventions (the “Banana Wars”) that previously constituted the Corps’ raison d’être.

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Assistant Commandant John Russell, therefore, urgently initiated reforms to transform the Marines from an imperial policing organization to an amphibious assault force as soon as the “Good Neighbor Policy” was announced. In short order, the Marines constituted the embryo of an amphibious force — the Fleet Marine Force — in late 1933 and suspended teaching at the Corps’ schools in 1933-34 to allow the schools’ personnel to devote their undivided attention to crafting amphibious doctrine.

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In addition to innovating to preserve an existing role or adapting to accomplish a new mission, military organizations can also protect themselves by arguing that past contributions to national defense constitute an argument for future survival.

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Within this context, the Green Jackets were founded in 1800 as a unit of skirmishers and long-range marksmen and the Bersaglieri were formed in 1836 to execute the gymnastic and high-mobility infantry tactics that were favored by certain tacticians at that time.

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Moreover, the units were able to perpetuate their elite status because their reputations drew their countries’ best officer cadets and most qualified recruits to join them, enhancing these units’ effectiveness relative to functionally identical “ordinary” infantry formations.