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THE AMERICAN ERA OF WAR

“The Curse of Colonel Yahara”

How sad to watch the Kiryan Cape

Now carpeted in green

After it was dyed red

With the blood of warriors.

—Hiromichi Yahara, June 23, 1945

The American era of warfare began in a tunnel. Late into the evening of May 3, 1945, three officers huddled around a map-strewn table in the stifling heat of a Japanese command cave buried safely below the ancient Okinawan fortress of Shuri Castle. The two lieutenant generals—Itsura Ushijima, the commander of the Japanese 32nd Army, and Isamu Cho, his chief of staff—argued tactics. It was an argument in the Japanese fashion: monosyllabic, measured, and interrupted occasionally by the guttural outbursts of General Cho. The question before them was limited to one narrow set of options: should the Japanese attack soon, before U.S. forces overwhelmed them, or should they remain burrowed in their caves, bunkers, and tunnels and continue to defend?¹

The third officer at the table was Colonel Hiromichi Yahara. He was a tall, quiet officer, deeply cerebral and intellectually gifted, a man with a mild, patrician manner. Yahara’s service had been spent mainly as a staff officer and instructor at the Imperial War College. He knew his enemy, because he had lived in the United States as an attaché. But his impressions, amplified after the last five weeks of fighting Americans there on Okinawa, were considerably different from those of his boss. General Cho was an arrogant, impetuous, cruel, and stupid man—typical of a generation of generals brought up in the prewar atmosphere of court politics and savage international aggression.

On occasion Yahara would interject a few words to elevate the discussion. While his seniors argued tactics, Yahara thought strategy. He had lectured them frequently on the unique opportunities that their inevitable sacrifice on Okinawa would signify for Japan. He knew that the battle for Okinawa was actually the opening battle for the Japanese homeland. He considered it a bloody prologue of what was inevitably about to happen on the beaches of Japan’s main islands of Honshu and Kyushu. He spoke frankly about how Japan should fight on in the face of a succession of tragic defeats. The United States controlled the air and sea absolutely. By invading the Marshall Islands the previous year, Americans had penetrated the final strategic perimeter of the empire and placed the home islands within range of the cruel killing power of U.S. B-29 bombers. He understood that a land assault on the home islands supported by the overwhelming firepower of naval artillery and carrier strike aircraft would follow immediately after the United States captured Okinawa.

The hard part of these discussions was the context. Four years before, Japan’s strategy had been to preserve victory. Now it was to manage defeat. The question that Yahara pondered with his staff was how to translate the looming yet necessary sacrifices of a losing land battle into some form of redemptive advantage for Japan. In typical Japanese fashion, Yahara sought to lessen the shame of what was to come by referring to his concept as an “offensive retreat.” His intent was straightforward: kill Americans with such efficiency that they would reconsider the wisdom of invading Japan. Perhaps if his Soldiers could kill enough Americans, an armistice similar to the Versailles treaty that had ended World War I might be negotiated with the United States. Perhaps even the emperor’s place as the “son of heaven” might be respected and preserved.

Like any competent staff officer, Yahara based his strategy on the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. He knew Americans well from personal associations during his time in the States. His superior intuition allowed him to filter out the prejudices of his samurai brethren to form a realistic appreciation of the fighting qualities of U.S. forces. Clearly U.S. matériel strength was far beyond anything the Japanese Imperial Staff could have imagined before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Once the battle for Okinawa began in earnest, Yahara discovered that the Americans were harder to kill than anyone had supposed. With a good pair of binoculars, he could watch U.S. Soldiers and Marines moving back and forth between the beach to forward foxholes with relative impunity. He concluded that the only efficient place to kill them was in close, at about one thousand yards, with small arms, mortars, and grenades. Yahara and his field commanders also noted that the fighting efficiency of Americans diminished as they moved toward the line of contact. The closer the Japanese infantry could hold the enemy “in its embrace,” the greater chance that it could kill Americans. From the beachhead to the infantry battalion rear area, U.S. Soldiers and Marines were very well trained and motivated. But their infantrymen’s performance seemed to fall apart as they closed to small-arms range, the last hundred yards—often less than fifty yards.

Yahara knew that the only remaining American vulnerability was public opinion. Prior to assuming their duties on Okinawa, Ushijima and Yahara had served together as senior leaders at the war college at Zama. From their studies they had concluded that the American public was increasingly concerned about the human cost of the Pacific War. The press exposed the horrors of the Pacific campaign, beginning with pictures of dead Americans on the beaches of Buna in 1942 and continuing through the bloody battles of Tarawa, Peleliu, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines. American patience had waned even further in the winter of 1945 after the war in Europe appeared to be substantially won. Opportunities to influence American opinion were amplified by a new openness by the Truman administration, which allowed vivid pictures and written imagry of the Pacific battlefields to be revealed to the American people. The public began to protest the cost of a war against a hated but clearly secondary foe. Why, it was asked, were so many men dying so horribly for bits of rock and coral?

YAHARA’S LONG SHADOW: WAR IN THE AMERICAN ERA

Unlike Ushijima and Cho, Yahara did not die on Okinawa. By the third week in June the once-powerful Japanese forces had been reduced to small huddles of cave-bound Soldiers preparing for ritual suicide. On the 23rd, Ushijima gathered his two colleagues in a small command cave perched just above the cliffs that defined the connection between the absolute end of the island and the emerald-green sea to the south. Yahara watched with resignation as Ushijima and Cho changed into white kimonos and exchanged poetic remembrances of their homeland and past campaigns. In this surreal setting, Yahara noted, he was excluded from the ritual. Ushijima bent forward and spoke in hushed tunes as he gave last instructions to his brilliant and faithful staff officer: “Colonel, the Homeland must be defended next. You have shown us both how Japan must prepare to defend the Emperor. Leave us before it’s too late and return to Japan.”

The next three days would haunt Yahara for the remainder of his life. Even an officer with such great intellectual gifts believed that in such circumstances continuing to live was a cowardly act. His shame increased unbearably when the U.S. Army captured him only three days after his escape from the funereal cave of Ushijima and Cho. His dead seniors had expected him to convey the secrets learned fighting the Americans back to the defenders of the Japanese home islands. Both had been convinced that in spite of their overwhelming firepower, the Americans could be defeated if only enough of them died.

U.S. command knew it as well. Deep in the bowels of the National Archives rests a set of yellowed papers—only recently declassified—that is the operational plan for the invasion of Japan.² Operation Downfall was finalized in Washington as the battle for Okinawa reached its bloody zenith. The preliminary invasion, Operation Olympic, was scheduled to begin on October 25, with an invasion of the Japanese southern island of Kyushu. The invasion would include almost 1.5 million men, thousands of aircraft and ships—the greatest armada the world had ever seen. However, confidence in the Olympic plan continued to wane as stories about Japanese fighting effectiveness began to circulate among the Pacific planning staffs. Only after the war would the Americans learn about the enormously complex defense of the home islands the Japanese had planned.

More than fourteen Japanese divisions as well as seven independent and two tank brigades awaited the invasion. This force was composed of the hard core of Japan’s army, well equipped and fed and anxious to die for the homeland. Today a visitor can still walk along the beach defenses on Kyushu: thousands of concrete bunkers and artillery positions. U.S. command learned later that the Japanese had been able to collect more than 14,000 aircraft to support the defense. Clearly, Adm. William Leahy’s prediction of 250,000 American dead on Kyushu alone was understated. Okinawa and the strategic genius of men like Yahara had put paid to the optimistic plans of U.S. forces. Yahara’s ideas would kill many, many more. Fortunately, for millions of GIs (including my father) Yahara’s genius would become irrelevant the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

THE AMERICAN ERA OF WAR

Yahara lived until 1972, long enough to see his strategic wisdom played out as the last U.S. fighting units left South Vietnam. By then, he knew that he had charted a conceptual template that subsequent enemies of the United States would apply with deadly consequence. History would make Yahara’s revelations in the death cave the enduring template for challenging the global might of the U.S. military in a new epoch that historians term the “American era of warfare.”

Japan’s bloody defeat on Okinawa, followed three weeks later by the bombing of Hiroshima, ended a three-hundred-year run of European dominance in war. Virtually all historically significant wars fought between the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay were shaped by the colonial and state-on-state actions of Western European armies. Of course, not all major wars of this period were fought by European militaries, but the shadow of European military skill, technology, and global reach affected most. Prior to Okinawa every military on the planet either fought using European methods or, in the case of anticolonial forces, sought means to defeat European militaries. After Okinawa, European militaries became witnesses, bystanders, aggressive mimickers of or allies to the new dominant actor so powerful that it displaced the European, in the American era of war.

The foundational element in the epochal shift from the European to American era was the U.S. development of and willingness to use nuclear weapons. The global fear engendered by the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took off the table any prospect of a third world war fought between great powers. Of course all of the traditional elements of military competition—greed, envy, hegemonic ambitions, and ethnic and religious hatred—remained and flourished after World War II. Yet the prospects of mutual destruction triggered by escalation to a nuclear response served to eliminate total, apocalyptic war as a reasonable option for competition among the great powers, principally the United States and the Soviet Union.

Since the invention of expensive bronze artillery, the power of a military system has been dependent on the economic power of the state. U.S. economic dominance emerged when the horribly destructive bombings and invasions in Europe and Asia left the United States the last untouched great power. The disappearance of global prewar competition was the second factor that served to usher in the American era. U.S. nuclear dominance has led to two generations of “limited” conflicts fought for limited strategic ends, often in the most distant and inhospitable corners of the globe. Often these wars have pitted a Western military (that of Israel, Britain, or France) against a non-Western military, often acting as a surrogate for a competing nuclear-armed adversary.

Not all wars in the American era have been fought by Americans. Nevertheless, the long shadow of U.S. technology, doctrine, and tactical methods can be found in all of them, regardless of opponent or level of war, from preinsurgency in places like the Philippines to something approaching general war in the Middle East and East Asia. We know from many years of observed behavior that aggression in the American era is practiced by an assortment of healthy conventional states, rogue states, and transnational entities. It works for enemies at many places along the spectrum of warfare—from, again, preinsurgency in places like the Philippines to full-blown insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to what amounts nearly to conventional war in Lebanon and Korea.

At the strategic level, wars in the American era generally have started through mutual miscalculation. The enemy, usually a regional potentate with limited hegemonic ambitions, seeks to achieve his aggressive ends while dissuading a Western power from interfering. From Lin Biao to Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Laden, our enemies’ leaders have embraced a consistent operational and tactical pattern of behavior to confront the militaries of first-world states. Their intent has not been to win in battle so much as to avoid losing. They have sought to stretch out warfare and to kill intruders, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. They are able to match Western firepower with iron will, familiarity with terrain and culture, willingness to die, and selection of battlefields in very far and inhospitable places.

As Colonel Yahara predicted on Okinawa, none of the United States’ more recent enemies have succeeded in winning conventional fights. All of these regional hegemonic leaders have telegraphed their intentions, in unambiguously clear language and actions. They also have established a remarkably straightforward pattern of response based on common sense, a keen sense of U.S. military capabilities, and will to persevere. This collection of bad actors has demonstrated a remarkably refined ability to learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of their malevolent fellow travelers.

In a curious twist of conventional wisdom, enemies in the American era have been remarkably open and forthright about their aggressive intent. Kim Il Sung stated his military objective as the reunification of Korea, and the North Koreans have held to this aim for seventy years. Ho Chi Minh never strayed from his dream of reunifying Vietnam under his rule. Saddam and bin Laden never wavered from their aggressive intentions. Unfortunately, a succession of U.S. leaders has shifted strategic objectives based on momentary perceptions of popular support. If the enemy’s past behavior has been so open and consistent, we should treat his declarations as truthful, sincere, and consequently worthy of our attention. We should add the enemy’s confidence, fidelity, and winning style into our calculation of future challenges.

The wisdom of Colonel Yahara provides all sides with a template for winning wars in the American era. He tells our enemies that winning begins with a willingness to translate sacrifice into a national strategic advantage. He tells them that American vulnerabilities begin with American public opinion and the reluctance of American Soldiers to die. So the first principle is to kill as publicly and as horrifically as possible. Also, avoid the “hard kill” whenever possible: infantry knows how to fight back. Truck drivers and cooks traveling in open trucks are easy kills.

Yahara knew that his greatest ally was time. Americans are impatient and want to win quickly. Yahara knew that Americans would die merely from the natural attrition that attends long wars. He learned on Okinawa that the United States can be beaten only on the ground. Opposition on the sea and in the air is a senseless diversion. Thus a successful opposition strategy begins by “spotting” to the U.S. control of the air and sea (what contemporary gurus call the “global commons”).

Yahara taught that the will is superior to weaponry. Thus, like the Japanese, contemporary enemies of the United States tend to follow a strategy of repurposing older weapons and technologies to fight superior U.S. technologies. Watch any newsreel today provided by the likes of ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other successful rogues. They have left behind captured air and ground systems in favor of an assortment of portable, low-tech substitutes carried by ground Soldiers—for example, shoulder-fired and tripod-mounted antiair and antitank missiles. Newer weapons of our enemies are also derivative in nature, from cell phones to off-the-shelf drones for aerial reconnaissance. Just as in Yahara’s day, the greatest killers of Americans remain the simple mortar, mine, and small arm.

The tactics employed by Yahara remain the tactics of choice for all contemporary enemies: hide from orbiting aircraft and drones, and dig in, fortify, disperse, and hide in cities among the people, where the Americans will not strike. Fight close and make human shields of the innocent to obviate the killing effects of U.S. tactical weapons. Use social media to showcase every error that causes casualties. The Americans who fought and destroyed Yahara’s army fought a “war without mercy.” By 1945 revelations of endless Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, human banzai attacks on virtually every defended atoll, and of the thousands of Americans dead from aerial kamikaze suicide attacks had left U.S. Soldiers without empathy for their enemy. The Japanese had become so dehumanized that “any dead Jap was a good Jap.” Things are different now. If alive today Yahara would envy our enemies who exploit rules of engagement to extract themselves from losing fights. Of course, our enemies fight without such rules.

If war were a football game, Yahara’s asymmetric warfare team would yield a winning record of five-two-two over the seventy years since Okinawa. Enemies such as Saddam in 1991 and any number of other Middle Eastern conventional wannabies would suffer a zero-and-seven season when attempting to mimic Western states in the use of their conventional (and expensive) weapons and doctrine.

WHAT DOES COLONEL YAHARA TEACH US?

The first lesson is counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom tells us that we must never fight the next war like we did the last. Yahara tells us that maybe we should. Perhaps wars in the American era would end better if we considered the past as prologue, if we postulated that the pattern of progression in our wars has been essentially unchanged from Greece in 1948 to Afghanistan today. The fundamental conditions of warfare will last for many generations. While Yahara tells us that the pattern of wars will not change, he certainly would concede that it is a losing proposition to try to predict specific times, enemies, technologies, or war-fighting scenarios. It has never worked before, and it likely never will.

From a practical perspective, Yahara is telling us that war is a test of will, not technology. Of course, we need to exploit new technologies, and we must never seek to fight fair. All too often in the American era Soldiers have died needlessly, killed by enemies like the Japanese who used simple things to achieve extraordinary outcomes. Perhaps we should spend first to buy things that work best against wise and diabolical enemies.

Most importantly, Yahara knew where to strike for maximum effect. If he was right and if our most vulnerable center of gravity is dead Americans, perhaps we should place highest priority on protecting those most likely to die.