 All right. Good afternoon, Naval War College. Ambassador Peters, Admiral Barrera, Naval War College Foundation, Captain Cunha from the Naval Academy Prep School, anybody who's here for any reason, welcome. This is a big honor for me. I got the seven-minute warm-up act for Dean Rubel here. I got six slides. There's no words or charts, but this is it. This is, you know, the C&O told us many years ago, we're going to celebrate two days in the United States Navy, our birthday and this day, June 4th. And the way I tell the story is it's the greatest victory in the history of the United States Navy and arguably the greatest underdog victory in the history of war at sea. So I see Holmes and Hattendorf rolling their eyes, but that's what I say. So this is a great picture. I commanded USS McCluskey. If you wonder why I'm particularly passionate about this topic, the ship I commanded was USS McCluskey and McCluskey was the air group commander on Enterprise on June 4th and I think that's McCluskey. He was not a particular, he only had less than 10 hours in the Dauntless dive bomber, but he knew that as the leader of the Enterprise air wing, if he was going to get to the fight, he needed to be in a plane with long legs. So he got an hour here and a couple minutes there and got checked out in it. I'll tell this to my intimate friends here. His bomb drop was a miss, but he led the way and while their doctrine had him dropping between, I think, 1,000 and 1,500 feet, McCluskey just kept going. And so with his lack of experience but heavy on courage, his more experienced junior pilots who actually were dive bomber pilots followed him down to that low altitude and there was no mistake in the outcome. But these are Dauntless dive bombers and this was the artist depiction of the cloudy day, the broken clouds that they were seeing. Next slide. Another reason I'm passionate about it is Enterprise was the strike group I commanded and needless to say, Enterprise played a key role. If I have a theme, you know, Dean Rubel is going to come up here and give you what you've been studying this past year about the theory and the theorists and great leadership and great leaders and how important they are to success or failure in war. But I'm also going to talk a little bit about here in three more minutes about how important little things are and how the old famous saying they made us memorize as midshipmen, men mean more than guns in the rating of a ship. And this is what's left of the Enterprise, the most decorated warship in the US Navy history. This is the stern plate. When Doolittle's Raiders took off, this was the piece of metal that was underneath them. When the survivors of the first wave in the morning and the afternoon came back, this is what they saw. This is in a park in Rivervale, New Jersey. I read about this in a book. It's near the New Jersey turn pike and I tracked it down and found it. The Navy was out of money. They were disposed of CV-6, the most famous ship we ever had. And the ship here said, are you kidding? You don't want any part of this? And they said, cut up and dispose. And so the guy that worked at the shipyard cut out the Enterprise. This is the part that's on the stern of the ship. Pilots all landed over. And he took it and he stuck it in the center field of the Little League Baseball Field. And for years in Rivervale, if you hit a home run over center field, you got a dinger off the Enterprise. They have moved it to the city hall if you're ever in Rivervale. But we don't care about the ship, the material. It wasn't the ship, although this is what's left of it. It's the people that were on the ship and the leaders that made their decisions from the ship. Next slide. This is a great picture. This was taken on May 27th of 42, eight days before the battle. I love it because it's McCluskey. Again, my ship's namesake. He's getting a distinguished flying cross from Admiral Nimitz. What does a four star do eight days before the biggest battle? And he knows it's coming. Is he doing briefings? Is he on the phone? Nimitz did two interesting things. One is he conducted an award ceremony because he thought that this would be important. And these are the squadron commanders from the Enterprise. The first guy that got the medal was the CEO of the Enterprise, Captain Murray got the Navy Cross. And the sailors, this is great about admirals, the sailors from early on in the war said about Captain Murray, their CEO in Enterprises, the Admiral will get us in Halsey. The Admiral will get us in. Captain will get us out. So they never had to worry about Halsey's aggressiveness, getting Enterprise into battle, but they trusted their Captain would get him home alive. And Enterprise did have a miraculous record of battle stars and engagements and surviving. So squadron commanders, this JG right here, this is kind of a personal interest story. He's getting promoted to Lieutenant this day. He's mad this day. He kept a very good diary of the war. And he's unhappy because one of his buddies just got killed in an accident. And he had to do the inventory of his buddies leftovers. And he also had to meet with his buddies widow. And he thought that the commanding officer of the squadron should have done that. But it got left to him. And so he's mad. And this is Dory Miller. This is the great leader Nimitz recognizing diversity back before it was a bad word or a good word. But this is Dory Miller, who was a cook stationed aboard West Virginia on Pearl Harbor. And he too was getting a Navy Cross for his heroism and trying to help save his captain's life and then mountain a machine gun to repel the attack. So this is in the next day, I always told it as it was this morning, it was actually the next day Yorktown is limping back into port from the Battle of the Coral Sea. She's leaking fuel. The Japanese are absolutely convinced they have sunk it. But it did not sink at length limped into port. They flown out engineers who predicted two months to fix it. Some people said three months Nimitz said you had two days and not only did he wear choker whites for an award ceremony, but he put on his fishing pants his waiters. And he was one of the first ones in the dry dock as they pumped down the water and challenged the engineers I need this ship back in two days. And they made it. But the bomb that hit Yorktown weighed 551 pounds. It hit 15 feet, hit the flight deck 15 feet from the island went through 15 decks before it exploded. And they had no refrigeration. They were in a bad way. But their their air wing arguably was the difference in midway and it came from Nimitz's leadership. Next slide. This is my dad. He flew an A1 Sky Raider. I just throw this in to make me feel good. You know, the Dauntless dive bomber was a was a dive bomber. And my dad flew the A1 Sky Raider. And I remember, you know, I was disappointed back in 98 when I found that I was going to command a frigate. It's like a frigate. Where's a destroyer? You know, don't I deserve a destroyer? Arleigh Burke. But because I'd had some great mentors and leaders over the day, they said, Hey, just read up on the on the namesake. And sure enough, I got given the McCluskey. So I made that connection. My dad flew a dive bomber. I'm going to command a little frigate named after a dive bomber pilot and kind of got me through the tour. I think it got me up on this stage. You know, just I had so much fun being in command of McCluskey. And and every June fourth, we would read the narration from the back of Miracle at Midway over the one MC, you know, the pilots man their planes. Next slide. I think this is the last slide. This is this is 13 years ago today. And I'm in command of this ship. I'm a commander. And this is USS McCluskey. We're 40 miles because I have the position report in the book. We're 40 miles from San Clemente Island on our way to Portland, Oregon for the Rose Festival. This is USS Thatch. We call this picture Midway twins because thatch was the CEO of a fighter squadron off the Yorktown later went on to be a four star admiral the Thatch weave you heard of. But these are two Midway namesakes. And we're going up to the Rose Festival and it's just great memories. Next slide. Think up the people. This is if you're ever flying Southwest Airlines through Midway Airport. It's great sub shop. They're called potbellies. But they also have this display to the battle of Midway. And I think you recognize Admiral Nimitz back here. I talked about this is Admiral Spruance, who was president of the college had three tours here before coming back as president. Any Marines out there who can tell me who that is? That's Parks Floyd Parks. He was an enlisted destroyer sailor got an appointment to the Naval Academy was a water polo player and even though they had water polo at the Naval Academy then but became a Marine pilot and it was he commanded the squadron Midway Island flying the old buffalo fighters that that really showed unbelievable courage against the Japanese the day of the attack. So if you're ever traveling through Midway Airport stop in and check out some of these heroes always think like that's McCluskey of course wearing his Navy cross. I think that's the last slide. My real job is to get Barney Rubble up on stage. It's like I said this is a great day for the Navy. It's a great Victor great underdog victory for the United States Navy. But we got hard thinking to do now. Barney Rubble who commanded one of those dive bomber squadrons. He flew the A7 and the F-18 Hornet and we're lucky to have him here as one of our deans Dean Rubble. Come on up. Yeah, I got a message here for the College Enable Command of Staff folks. You here? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You presented your COAs this morning. Faculty didn't think they were any good. So you're going to have to redo them and they're going to extend the exercise two more weeks. So just that little message just to put you in the right mood for this receptive. Well, thanks for coming. Welcome to Midway Day. We're here to recognize the and celebrate the courage and the sacrifice of the sailors and airmen and marines that and soldiers that participated in the battle. Now we used to do that up right here. We had a thatch tut out on Colbert Plaza. We had airplane warbird flybys. We had swing music. We had all kinds of stuff we used to and of course today you got me. Now that is sequestration. What we always used to do and I'll do now is we used to ask are there any mid battle of midway veterans in the audience and so let me do that now. Anybody here that participated in the battle of midway? Yeah, that's what I thought. We had some but it's been 71 years ago and time has taken its toll. So I think the best way to honor the courage and sacrifice of those young men and a few young women is to learn. To learn from the battle. Now I usually use two methods for real learning. The first thing is I like to learn from defeat or misfortune rather than success. Success is a bad teacher. As a safety officer in the fleet I could always tell you why I had an accident yesterday. I could never tell you why I didn't have an accident yesterday. So the compelling lessons and you're going to see from this come from defeat. So instead of studying the U.S. victories here we're going to take a look at the Confederate and the Japanese defeats and see what they tell us about strategy and the operational art. The other thing I like to engage in is comparative analysis. I think that's revelatory. Just you look at one battle you might think well that's unique circumstances and it would never happen again. But as I hope to show you when the same exact errors lead to the same results. Now you got more than happenstance. Many of you may know the actor Johnny Depp. He's played Edward Scissor's hands. He's played Captain Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean. He's played a couple of other things wildly different looks. But underneath it's the same actor. So here we have a light infantry battle in the Civil War and we have an aircraft battle in World War II. And I contend the same actor is wearing the two different costumes and I'll see if I can prove that to you. All right. Got a little Venn diagram here. You see strategy operations and leadership. I mean that's what this college is meant for right to teach. This is what you study generally speaking and of course Gettysburg and Midway that the operational leadership of Lee and Yalamoto small smack dab in the middle of that. Now that's a nice clean looking Venn diagram but hopefully you understand from your studies here that it's anything but clear. Lines are blurry. Issues are not quite what they seem to be. It's hard to see the relationship sometimes. But I will say that when the relationships between strategy and operations start getting messed up it takes a special kind of leadership to retrieve the situation. A kind of moral leadership that is rare and is difficult special kind of courage. And we're going to take a look at where that courage was not present. All right. This is some barniology. Forgive me for this but it helps me. I'm a reductionist by nature and I like to categorize things and so I find this useful forms of warfare. I break them into three different kinds. Systematic warfare. This is what Ulysses Grant did in 1864 and 1865. Steamroll the enemy right. You got a lot of resources and you just keep unremitting pressure on the enemy and you overrun them and defeat them and we this is Omar Bradley in 1944 and actually Pacific Fleet in 44 and 45 too. Only the very strong nations can do can conduct this form of warfare because you got to have you know a gazillion Sherman tanks. You got to have a gazillion Wildcat or Hellcat fighters etc. And you just keep feeding the fight. If you're not strong enough to do that then you have to adopt the heroic I call it the heroic form. This is where generals of genius leading elite warrior troops outmaneuver the enemy and impose a checkmate on them. I mean you have to this is what you have to do. You can't rely on just resources alone. You have to rely on cleverness, smarts, outmaneuver the enemy. That's heroic warfare. Germany the Confederacy and Japan and Japan were in this situation. They could not outproduce their enemies. They had to rely on the heroic form of warfare. They had to rely on winning battles. And really the US was kind of in the same situation in 1861 through 1863 and 42 and 43 before our industrial might could be brought to bear. We had to rely on winning battles too defensively but there we were. The third type is disruptive warfare. That's the very weakest adopt that. That's insurgency irregular warfare, commerce rating at C, stuff like that. I won't go into it because but it's just there for completeness. All right here's another list. I'll get off these lists after this but these are ways that you would be defeated. Either you get your capital overrun or you suffer internal collapse like the Italians did in World War II which took Italy out of the war. You might be exhausted maybe like the Germans in 1918 or the US in Vietnam. We were morally and politically exhausted and you pull out of the fight. Or you suffer a checkmate and this is the brass ring that maneuverists that Liddell Harz and others you know reach for. This is where you've lost a battle and the government thinks well I still have the means to resist but if I try to continue to resist things are only going to get worse. I don't have a viable military course of action or a viable strategy left to me therefore I am going to negotiate an unfavorable peace. That's a checkmate. Now I would say that the Confederacy and Japan at the time of these respective battles they weren't going to overrun the United States. They weren't going to induce an internal collapse on us. They had to get out of the war. They didn't want to keep fighting the United States. How do they get out of the war? Well maybe exhaustion but that's a long hard road. What does that leave? Let's look a little strategic geometry here. Civil war. You got the south in the central position which is normally in theory an advantageous position but they're enclosed by a union blockade and Farragut had taken New Orleans, Porter and Grant were closing off the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and so the south couldn't really sustain itself. It was being starved both financially and resource-wise and so it had to do something or at least Lee thought they had to do something and what was needed was a decisive thrust that would produce a checkmate and of course the instrument of that decisive thrust would be their best maneuver instrument which is the army of northern Virginia with Lee their great captain at its helm. Japan. They have the greater east Asia cold prosperity sphere but they're in a central position. They're surrounded by the United States, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, Australia. They need to consolidate so they can take advantage of the southern resource area but they're being hard-pressed. What Yamamoto decides is needed is a decisive thrust to eliminate the US fleet and create a checkmate and of course the instrument of that decisive thrust would be the combined fleet, their best maneuver instrument with Yamamoto their great captain at its helm. Now here's the people involved. You got Robert E. Lee, a revered figure in the south both before and after his defeat at Gettysburg and he's saddled with a key subordinate over there oops Richard Ewell on his left who was recently promoted to corps commander because Stonewall Jackson over there on Lee's right was killed by accident at the Battle of Chancellorsville but this key subordinate is widely regarded as being indecisive and that indecision led to the loss at Gettysburg. Here you have Isoroko Yamamoto. He was a revered figure in Japan both before and after his defeat at Midway but he's saddled with a key subordinate whose indecision was widely regarded as losing the battle for him. That's Shuichi Nagumo. The guy over on the on Nagumo's right is Jizaburo Ozawa a true carrier admiral who many thought many in Japan thought ought to be in Nagumo's place. Yamamoto could have fired Nagumo but he didn't want to do that because Yamamoto despite being an admiral was a commoner. Nagumo was royalty and Yamamoto knew that Nagumo would commit suicide if relieved and he didn't want to have royal blood on his hands so he goes into battle with the guy he had. Let's look at the United States side. So the center there is George Mead. He's new to command of the Army of the Potomac. That's the bad news. The good news is he's got some competent subordinates. He's got on his left you're right there general John Reynolds widely regarded as one of the best generals in the Union Army and he's in charge of the first core and the left wing of the Army of the Potomac as they're marching northward so he's the guy nearest Lee and then over there on the other side is general John Buford the cavalry commander who's out there to the west as scouting and skirmishing. Both are good guys. Buford takes advantage of the new technology of the rifle musket and the carbine and makes a gutsy defensive stand the first day so he he takes advantage of the new technology. Mead himself makes a gutsy calculated risk decision which I'll talk a little bit about later but that calculated risk allows him to feed the fight faster than Lee can which ultimately leads to victory. So here's Pac Flea. Now you got Chester Nimitz a relatively new guy to command. Not so good but the good news is he's got competent subordinates and you got Frank Jack Fletcher there on on his left. Now Frank Jack is widely regarded as at least an unlucky admiral and of course the Marines don't like him much for taking off after he deposited the Marines of Guadalcanal but really Frank Jack did pretty good in the early part of the war and of course he was in charge of one of the task forces at Midway. The other guy is of course Raymond Spruance after whom this auditorium is named. Now the thing about Spruance is he took advantage of the new technology right and he made a gutsy move on the first day of the battle by launching a half organized strike. Striking effectively first was was key to the new technology of aircraft carriers. Nimitz himself took a calculated risk. Nimitz believed his code breakers Rokeford and Layton and positioned his force he believed that Midway was yes indeed going to be the operation and he positioned his limited forces concentrated them in a position to intercept the Japanese despite pressure from King and others to position his forces to protect other things like California Alaska Hawaii etc. Nimitz took the calculated risk and believed his intel guys. Let's drill down a little bit on these guys. Both of these guys were seen as masters of maneuver in a new form of warfare. Lee with tactical defense with rifled muskets I mean at the seven days battle he dug trenches and stuff and even at Chancellorsville you have to have faith in the power of the defense if you take a you're already inferior force in numbers and split it in half in the face of a superior energy and send Thomas Jackson out to flank them. All right you got to have faith in the defense the rifled muskets which was accurate out to a thousand yards as opposed to the smoothbore muskets that were only accurate up to 300 yards. This made a difference. The horrible consequences of that weren't fully appreciated until the trench warfare of World War one but the civil war was a harboring of that. Yamamoto was the organizer of the combined air fleet. This was not just aircraft carriers this was ganging them up in big numbers to create an air force at sea. It wasn't an issue of just the technology. It is that the technology changed the operational logic of warfare and that operate that new operational logic carried with it the need to change your value system. So in order to properly apply the new logic you're going to have to do things that seem professionally derelict that seem to wrong. This is the hard thing about change. You're going to have to do things that seem wrong feel wrong and look wrong to others and yet they're consistent with the new logic and you'll see more of this. There's that rifle musket. I've talked about that. You got to choose a strong defensive position and make the enemy attack you. All right that seems straightforward enough and God knows Longstreet made a lot of this after the war that you know we agreed that we were going to fight it on the defense tactically. But the thing is that logic leads to a situation where you might be facing an enemy on the battlefield and the situation calls for you to attack but you don't want to attack right so what do you got to do you got to and the enemy's not going to attack you you got to abandon the field. Well abandoning the field is like admitting defeat right that that's shameful cowardice in the face of the enemy. That's what a commander would have to do because that was the existing value system and it seemed wrong but that's what you would have to do to follow this logic. 42 the offense at sea was superior to the defense you had to strike effectively first to destroy the enemy's character carriers and you had to kind of let it all hang out to do that. Now this carrier air force a group of at least six carriers this is not just a naval task force when you got three four hundred plus airplanes this is a different animal this is an air force at sea and it allows you to do things that you couldn't with a naval task force. Nelson said a ship's a fool to attack a fort another more complicated way of saying is that you do not become decisively engaged with land forces unless you're decisively superior because otherwise you're going to get hammered but with a carrier air force the rules change and you get a level of defense that's commensurate with offensive power because you got a lot of fighters now what this allows you to do it gives you options a b it allows you to multitask in a way with aircraft carriers in a way you couldn't with fewer number of carriers and then third you got a lot of power behind it so this was the big new innovation now both of these guys believed in positive action to defeat the enemy in a decisive battle and I've talked about this it's heroic formal warfare and they're seeking the checkmate now they weren't using these terms at the time and it might have been better if they had these terms to talk with they might have been able to sort out the issues a little more clearly but uh in any case they were they felt the need to take positive action to achieve national salvation both of them both were willing to tolerate less than stellar subordinates when I say that let's talk about you'll for a second you'll was known as a brave and determined general and competent general he had proved himself in earlier battles the only thing about you or was he needed explicit instructions he told him what to do he would do it but the instructions had to be explicit and he was new to core command and uh Nagumo he was an aggressive admiral as you could see after his three carriers were first three carriers were sunk he sailed towards the americans not away he was aggressive he wasn't afraid but he was a gun club guy he was a battleship guy through and through he did not understand carrier air power and he and Yamamoto didn't get along well anyway um so you problem with these guys was they put them in in positions they put them out front in both cases you was in the second core he was out front in the order of march Nagumo was out front with the keto butai the carrier group right so they were going to be the first ones to run into the enemy and if there's a place where things can go wrong and things can get unexpected it's there and yet that's where they put these guys they had choices they didn't have to put these guys there but they did okay there were some strategic controversies going on before the battles took place uh like i said they're both nations strategically are trying to figure out how do we get out of this war with the united states all we want is to be recognized by the our our right to exist as we are recognized by the united states how do we get there now uh jefferson davis and john reagan the postmaster general in the south said let's send long street out west to short brachston brag on it chat nougat for strategic defense all right we'll just hang on and hopefully we can exhaust the union emeralds and the gondola and uh kusaka in japan said let's go on the strategic defensive here to consolidate our gains let's uh you know take advantage of our resource area maybe we can exhaust the americans by just going on the defensive not lee let's concentrate the available force and the army in northern virginia to invade pennsylvania yamamoto said let's come concentrate our force in a combined fleet to strike the central pacific those decisive thrusts well what's the strategic situation south needs a quick victory at least according to lee japan needs a quick victory according to yamamoto get out get the u.s out of the war but they these guys were insisting on their campaign there was opposition to these campaigns and so they had to overcome the composite the opposition and both of these guys use their reputation and their status to insist on them to override the doubts and opposition of other high ranking members in the government and in the military so you know it's like you break it you buy it they're buying it well in order to justify these campaigns they used a number of objectives they established a number of objectives not let's just go out and beat the army of the petomic or the pacific fleet they had a number of objectives like lee wanted to take pressure off richmond because the army the petomic was down in virginia and using up virginian resources and everything and he wanted to take pressure off richmond yamamoto wanted to remove the threat against tokyo and the empire emperor why because of the due little raid and that due little raid just swept away the opposition to yamamoto lee wanted to raid the north for supplies a civil war army used more supplies sitting still than it did on the move the animals were foraging etc and virginia was pretty much tapped out and to lee pennsylvania looked like low-hanging fruit they had a lot of stuff not just food and stuff but they had stuff like shoes things like that which they had too few of in the south yamamoto for his part thought well we need to secure the eastern flank for operations in the resource region to secure our resources and of course lee wanted to smoke out the army of the potomac and destroy it that was his in theory real reason and of course yamamoto wanted to smoke smoke out the u.s. carriers you know it's just it's like one more fredericksburg and the army of the potomacs done for and of course if the u.s. carriers are destroyed then the u.s. doesn't have the ability to interfere so the solution precipitated decisive battle both cases same solution now you got a focus problem here each commander like I said demanded his campaign even to the point of threatening to resign so he owned it so that creates a kind of momentum to the plan you're going to see that as things start going going awry in subtle ways what's going to be hard for that guy to do is say oh stop let's not proceed he's got too much reputation too much psychic investment in that campaign and the plan takes on a momentum of its own the multiplicity of goals used to justify the campaign so if we're going up north to get to forage and get supplies well then he'll would see no reason why Henry Heath can't take his division into Gettysburg a second time to get more shoes of course the problem there is he runs into Buford and the cavalry and becomes decisively engaged Nagumo well wait a minute yeah we're trying to smoke out the Pacific fleet but we're going to be running this amphibious invasion on midway so we got to neutralize the defenses on midway right so when his air air wing commander reports hey we need a second strike on midway well then the right thing to do would be to download the reserve aircraft that were loaded for anti-ship work and upload them with land attack bombs right now this violates an order that Yamamoto had given him verbally but Yamamoto was a jerk anyway in Nagumo's eyes and so he thought he was doing the right thing a multiplicity of goals fuzzes things and when subordinates have to make decisions bad things happen and of course the mantle of now national salvation descended on the shoulders of an operational commander and i'm going to show you the effect of that in a minute there's some interesting questions what does Lee do if he wins what does Yamamoto do if he wins the dog catches the car you know both these guys seem to focus on the battle winning the battle they didn't seem to have a vision a clear vision for beyond that have we seen that in recent history maybe like Baghdad it's too easy to do that the operational tail is wagon the strategic dog clausowitz talks tells us that strategy is the use of the battle for the purposes of the war if you use that definition neither guy was thinking strategically he was out to win a battle and if you did that good things probably would happen after that in both cases in order for the victory to have necessary meaning the americans that have to feel defeated and no negotiate what were the chances of that successful operation you know stop stop successful military operations don't automatically lead to strategic benefits or strategic success all right so we're going to use some jmo language here and talk about operational ideas lee move unexpectedly into pennsylvania to get hooker to react create conditions for decisive engagement on on his terms now mamoto attack midway unexpectedly get nimbus to react create conditions for a decisive engagement on his terms now there's some embedded assumptions a the americans were tactically inferior both confederacy and the japanese thought they learned that lesson in previous battles they were wrong and there was evidence to see that they're wrong but it's hard to when you're winning it's hard to perceive problems and both of them thought americans aren't going to come out and fight for any old reason they're going to need powerful bait to lure the americans out and fight to give themselves up for destruction so an invasion of pennsylvania and a capture of midway would be the bait campaign oh yeah you need stealth and you need the enemy to react as as expected so let's go to campaign design here boy i sent my slides to an army guy down at carline i got all excited campaign design over into design and sent these out to sams and everything they're all liquored up on it all right so lee is going to go up the cumberland valley and shielded by the the the cumberland ridge there he's going to be stealthy and but his order of march is core train core train core train the train is all the wagons with the ammunition the supplies and all that so you got yule out ahead with his train in back of him you got hill in the middle with his train in back of him then long street bringing up the rear with his train in back of him this is going to cause a traffic jam at chambersburg that prevents lee from bringing long street up day two people think long street had a case of the slows or he was deliberately delaying he wasn't the steward was sent out to the east to scout to get bring back information on the whereabouts of the army the petomic so that lee could adjust as he saw the army of the petomic reacting and it would react in the battle to be somewhere north west of dc yalamoto north pacific approach carriers the skirmishers out front he's got the main body bringing up the rear he's got condo with his amphib force here and then he's got another force which according to partiality was not a deception force it was a separate independent operation that yalamoto grudgingly agreed to that the naval general staff insisted on but anyway everything spread out the subs were sent to scout pearl harbor to keep an eye on the pacific fleet so he knew what they were doing so he could adjust when they came out and the pack pack fleet would react in a battle that would be south of midway both movements to approach the forces were not in position to rapidly concentrate if the unexpected occurred an unexpected engagement an unexpected time or place they were all spread out when you talk a little bit about skirmishers because this is an important concept the beavers happily ranged out ahead to find delay and disrupt the enemy find a delay and disrupt this is an important thing for skirmishers we have we tend to forget about that nagumo's carriers ranged out ahead to neutralize midway and prompt an american reaction essentially they were skirmishers the problem with that as we now we now know the carriers were really the main force but they were put in a position of skirmishers a high-risk position now there's so there's some flies in the ointment for both of these plans first of all union signal core on the ridges overlooking the nobody knows about this apparently they forget about union signal core those guys were up there and they were wig wagon back to mead the position of lee's forces of course in midway we were breaking japanese code and we were getting these reports of where where they were going to be steward loses touch right he goes out to the east he's supposed to be feeling for lee's army his right right side to report back on what he sees the problem is mead moves faster than expected and gets between steward and lee and so steward can't report so lee's not getting any reports operation k the japanese scouting operations the submarines are supposed to go out there and keep an eye the americans moved faster and they thought they were going to move and by the time the submarines established their picket line the carriers were out of there they were gone so they were given no reports back to yamamoto or nagumo in both cases both commanders and chief these decisive battles in mind moving to contact they're not getting the scouting information they thought they were going to get that they needed to get no news is good news and they just kept rolling and then for the u.s. part mead puts buford rentals out to the west as skirmishers to delay and disrupt find a delay and disrupt we had skirmishers that caught midway that was our fourth carrier deck essentially they if you look at the course of the battle that's what they did they scouted they delayed and they disrupted the kido butai allowing mccluskie and leslie and best and all those guys to show up unmolested to do their dirty work we had information superiority now let me these this is the movement to the approach and i think this is as important as the battle itself because it sets up the conditions under which the battle is going to occur and it allows scope for getting lucky or rules out the possibility of getting lucky lee's moving up here they're through the cumberland valley and up behind here now i've driven this and i will tell you that it's narrow and it's going to be single file wagons and horses and gun carriages and stuff like that and there's no way on to the battlefield through here you've got to come up here's chambersburg here's cashed out here's the uh the chambersburg pipe right and this is now what happens on one july you got you will with his core up here his train is somewhere down here hill is sitting here at chambersburg now hill is moving his tooth up this way but he's parked all his wagons right here right to get them out of the way well when he becomes decisively engaged he starts moving his wagons down this way and this causes a massive traffic jam and there ain't no way that long street's going to get to that battlefield before the end of the second of july for at least pickets divisions all right so he can't be the fight on the other hand mead is moving faster than anybody thought steward gets separated in meads between steward and lee they're moving up now mead takes the calculated risk he takes all his wagons and parks them over here at west mincer right this frees up all these roads for his tooth to get forward quickly so the night of the first battle you all can get down there you got this soda straw through which the rest of the argon northern virginia is coming the union forces can hold on just enough just long enough to establish their good defensive positions to fish hook all right so now here's the approach to midway you got forces spread all over here now it's not bad to rain that screwing things up it's just your distance at sea it's got the striking force then the main force is 300 miles behind you got the invasion force who screw up they left too early they got out ahead and this is the first thing the americans found that was the indicator oh yeah the intel is right that on the other hand the american carrier striking forces already sitting here they're cocked and ready to go they can feed the fight faster the forces at gittiesburg you know you get different numbers this is a pick I picked a number some say 82,000 for the army the petomic I don't know it doesn't matter the important thing here is they're roughly evenly matched what it shows you though in those days with the rifle musket you needed that was the start of you need three to one force ratio for effective offense neither guys got it right you might be able to get it locally if you're free to maneuver and you can maneuver local superiority and then unhinge the bell but guess what because of his direction of approach lee can't do that he's in handcuffs as it were from a maneuver standpoint so no three to one ratio for offense and yet we know what lee did now the forces in midway we call it an underdog thing sorry animal but the forces were pretty evenly matched the forces in contact if you regard midway is our fourth deck we got 350 aircraft nagumo in the keto booties only got 248 we actually have a number we got more destroyers more cruisers we don't have any battleships but we got a skirmisher that's the right thing for a skirmisher they don't all these other forces never saw action at the battle in midway because of the way nagumo organized the approach to the battle assuming that the americans would wait and come out when he was good and ready and we didn't I would say also just we just came out with an unclassed version of airsea battle I don't know if you've seen it yet just came out this is airsea battle on the part of the americans we got army air force we got marines we got navy all not cooperating but they're working out anyway all right so here are the battles now the battles themselves the way they turned out are a function of the strategy the defects in strategy and operations and the order of march of both both these commanders and chiefs you know you have here's the chambersburg pipe okay so henry heath comes in buford sets up they start the fight here buford because of carbines and rifled muskets can hold on with a cavalry force against infantry long enough for john reynolds to bring up first core infantry and now they get into this fight how yule is coming down from the north but it's a forced march these guys have really potted the pavement to get here but nonetheless the confederates are good and they they push the union forces back meanwhile as this is going on what's happening down here sed wake and double day and and sites they're off those cores are all feeding in here unimpeded by their wagon trains and they're setting up good defensive positions here right so these forces fall back now the evening of the first day they're now the union positions set up here and a number of confederate officers see that colts hill here is really the key to the union line and you know yule's coming down and so lee says lee sends this famous message to yule if practicable take colts hill well so i guess the yule well yule this is a discretionary order if and you don't have to take it but if it's practical pay it well yule decides it's not practical because he's got rumors of union forces coming in from york over here and he doesn't want to get flank his men have had a force march they fought successfully and they're tired he had a number of good reasons why besides his own kind of ploddy character that it wasn't practicable to take colts hill well by the next day of course the union had finished in placing here and now the day two lee orders a flanking attack with what he's got available he doesn't have picket yet there but he takes what he's got and makes an attack on the flanks and of course he's a tax fail because the rifle musket is king the third day and of course chamberlain's heroic defense a little round top et cetera but there's a lot of heroism below finally he gets long street up in total so the third day lee decides well you know the strength must be here so the center of the line must be vulnerable so he concentrates everything here from the polyonic style charge and of course we know that it's a bloody repulse but why does he do that again he is a operational commander for whom the mantle of national salvation has descended on his shoulders right and in my view he reverted to what he saw work at chipotle peck when he was a junior officer in blend of this the polyonic style charge he reverted to what he saw work as a jail he had faith in his man it was a heroic situation he wasn't about to disengage and leave the field to the union that was unthinkable wrong value system and he orders pickets charge midway magumo 430 launches a strike on midway you know the americans are searching they finally get some locating information on him the pty's the strike leader says well we damaged a lot but we're going to need a second strike at which time the gumo says okay let's download the reserve ship strike forces and upload land strike about that time the americans screw it on enterprise and hornet launch their strike and they're having all kinds of trouble getting in there there's a lot of mistakes being made by the americans miles browning sprints as chief of staff was an alcoholic and borderline psychotic and uh you know they screw up the launch order everything they so finally sprints says just go and you so the dive bombers and the fighters go the torpedo planes are still trying to launch that's a mess but they take off it would wade mcclussky in the lead max leslie's there and dick best so they set off but they they think it's down here but it's really up the pitot group ties really up here so meanwhile there's all these attacks coming from midway island the marines and and the b-17s from the air core and they're all getting the b-17s miss the torpedo planes and and all the marine airplanes from midway are getting cut apart but what they're doing is disrupting flight operations the japanese are trying to rearm at the carrier on the hangar decks but the carriers are on these tight turns you know avoiding torpedoes and bombs and stuff japanese fighters operate organically all right what does that mean it's like little kids rushing to the soccer ball they don't have radar direction and so they tend to go when when a cruiser out in the screen or destroyer sees enemy aircraft coming in they start firing shells in the air to say to the fighters hey come over here there's something over here and that's what the fighters do and so the fighters are all all morning running back and forth and you know some are being recovered some are launched but it really disrupts the operations of course and then torpedo eight shows up and some of the other other torpedo squatters they're cut to pieces not long after that of course then McCluskey and rent and dick best show up here McCluskey got down here didn't find anything sites to search up this way and at this point he cites the japanese destroyer that had been trying to depth bomb the USS Nautilus which has been harassing them and is heading back so McCluskey in a brilliant move decides to follow the destroyer's track which leads him right to the keto bootie and he and best roll in on kaga and akagi they all roll in on kaga best at the last minute says oh wait a minute we're all going for just one carrier so he and two of his wingman just three guys break off and go after a kagi both wingman miss but best bomb hits the right smack dab in the middle of the flight deck and that was enough kaga just gets rained on meanwhile quite independently max leslie from Yorktown comes looks he makes the same kind of judgment he goes north this way and arrives overhead at about the same time and rolls in on here you on soryu actually nobody only torpedo squadrons go after here you and they don't get it and soryu is all three carriers are left for flaming wrecks okay they go back the staff screws that they don't issue a point option the dive bombers and all come back to what they think is point option which is 44 miles east of where the task force really is and a lot of them fall into the water because of lack of gas some of them land are able to get back and now sprues doesn't know he knows he's got some carriers but he thinks there's more out there so now what do you do he doesn't want to keep closing so he starts mutating around here meanwhile uh Nagumo changes his flag to a cruiser they try to and it's heads for the Americans and decides to launch an attack and they do on they find Yorktown not the other two and inflict damage on her which spells eventually her end but he keeps moving towards where he thinks the Americans are with his last remaining character carrier this is a real indicator he doesn't understand carrier warfare he should have gotten that carry out way before that but she doesn't and by the evening she's I hear you's hit by a strike from Yorktown and they lose her now they got no air cover at all it takes a little while but Yumamoto finally figures out yeah that the jig is up so they retreat two days worth of kind of ineffective tail chase by the Americans and then they they come home and the battle's over so that's that's the two battles so let's talk about some key fatal decisions Lee advances with no word from Stuart and he creates a situation through his plan his campaign design which a cautious subordinate would have to be daring he's out front Lee can't envision Colts Hill nobody could but he's out front some darn things going to happen so why have Yule out there why not have Longstreet there and he orders Pickett's charge Yule deciding not to take Colts Hill had Jackson been there yeah he would have taken it Yamamoto advancing with no word from the subs creating a situation which a cautious subordinate would have to be daring I mean it would have been harder for a Nogumo for Yamamoto he would have had to place either replace Nogumo or totally abandon the battleship centric way of thinking that he saw work when he was Holy Rose at the battle at Tsushima and go with a true character carrier centric plan but the burden of national salvation had descended upon his shoulders and he reverted to what he saw work as a J.O. Oops Nogumo that's not quite right Nogumo cooked his goose when he decided to rearm the reserve force on us by then the Americans had launched and he was going to get an attack no matter what the Americans did some stuff right a lot of mistakes were made they did stuff right need prioritized too stood his ground on day two Buford taking advantage of the new technology stood his ground on the first day then chamber Nimitz took the calculated risk by believing Rolf Kurtzen that information outward as he got it to his forces which Nogumo didn't Spruitz taking advantage of the new the new technology logic launched a half organized strike to get something in quickly and then the Klusky some tactical brilliance by following its hunch on the destroyer so we did some stuff right we did a lot of stuff wrong too but the battle plan allowed us to concentrate our forces to feed the fight faster and there was congruence between strategy and operations and that allowed subordinates to either get lucky or display effective brilliance in the battle so what's the significance of these battles well we gained this strategic initiative in both cases we could now decide what to do instead of reacting to the other guys moves rank Consent Sherman south to Atlanta us as down streamaways and King can initiate Guadalcanal so we can take the offense and of course Guadalcanal ended up being a real meat grinder according to Parchell and Pully you know the common wisdom is the Japanese lost a lot of the key aviators at midway they didn't only about seven I mean they lost a lot of aviators but other key elite guys only about seven they fished the rest of them out of the water it was the Guadalcanal canaping where they lost them all over the grinding months of that a learning moment the fleets at midway were fighting over command of the sea they weren't fighting over sea control the Navy's documents are all messed up on this we have we've been doing only power projection for so long we have completely forgotten what it all means to be fighting at sea command of the sea rightly understood is a strength relationship between two fleets the stronger one can do what it wants it can transport the Army by sea it can disperse its main force to exercise sea control in specific situations there's a lot of things if you don't have command of the sea you can't do any of that stuff or you don't dare you can't do it except it will give you a risk after midway you know it kind of balanced things out but we could undertake Guadalcanal sea control rightly understood is the operational level of defensive function of protecting ships and protecting places ships we were exercising sea control by protecting convoys in the Atlantic in the world war two we were exercising sea control by protecting Henderson field at Guadalcanal sea denial is the operational level offensive function of denying the enemy his operational mission whatever it is battle space superiority that's about the water denial and control functions they are not conditions of the water battle space superiority is a condition it's the condition a temporary and localized condition of a battle space that allows you to undertake an operation at an acceptable level of risk so we had battle space superiority temporarily if only for hours at Tulagi and Guadalcanal after that it kind of closed down and then we had to keep fighting for it but it's easy to get confused and our doctrinal pubs are not in good shape in this I've tried to make this point to Navy warfare development command but they don't listen all right what significance of the battles we gain confidence there's no victory mechanism now for the Confederacy the checkmates out the window maybe exhaustion maybe not same way with Japan there's no victory mechanism left to them there all they can do is hold on so let's get to the lessons we by this I mean there needs to be a constructive dialogue between the different operational and strategic levels the mechanisms will differ there's not a formula answer for this but there has to be constructive dialogue going on people listening to each other you know having a Brad fist says no strategy is viable unless it's based on understanding that the tactical mechanisms required to carry it out so it's not like strategy can occur in a vacuum you don't want the operational tail wagging the strategic dog and you got to understand what's going on at the tactical level so there's got to be this dialogue organizational personal whatever you got to build consistency in your plans if your plan is to go all in at the strategic level and you're going for a decisive battle to win at all then you buy value better minimize operational level risk in other words you better have scouting an intel down path and if the duckies outlining up bail out no news is not good news you got to fight for information first don't script the enemy you can't expect the enemy to react like your plans require them to act they won't engage with a manager don't engage but look at the kind of moral strength and courage it would have taken on the part of both Lee and Yamamoto to take their foot off the accelerator and put on the brakes with that it's been possible earlier on in the in the debates over this who in the Confederate government or in the Japanese government had the juice to override Yamamoto or Robert E. Lee you know this takes strength and courage I mean this stuff is not cold clinical kind of theoretical stuff this is this is moral that's why we teach leadership here at college you got to have faith in your methods and this is not easy because it changes your value system I know when I was started flying the hornet I was not happy for the first six months because all the value all my professional values is an a7 pilot a good instrument scan you know good contact navigation using strip charts all that kind of stuff was absolutely irrelevant in the hornet and I honestly felt professionally negligent but climbing in that airplane not you know having not being able to scan instruments not being able to do partial panel on stuff took me about six months to get over it but I felt wrong I felt like I was being derelict this is the problem there's value here in new values in new methods that get challenged and so it feels wrong when you execute and pretty self evident balance of delegation influence your subordinates are a couple at the operational level your commanding commanders and you're a couple levels of cause and effect away from them ootaloops and so you want them to act as if as you would want them to act in circumstances you can't foresee so you two things you better have the right guys in the right places and you better have a constructive relationship with those folks or something's going to go wrong so what about today how often does our doctrine talk about raft decisive operations and there's a good article written by a couple of army guys called alien how operational art deviled strategy and I think it's in military review of parameters if you're interested I can find it for you but we've had our own disconnects short talk going into the tent in the desert after desert storm unsupported by the bush administration and not taking full advantage of the political capital and telling the Iraqis they couldn't fly their helicopters he just wanted to get out of there declare victory and get out Baghdad of course at the end of OIF we've got silver bullet weapons here our inventory is not set up for a level of effort so that means you've got to plan something that you've got to achieve decisive results with the limited amount of stuff you got and it's not like B-17 raids over germany or world war two where you just keep raining down there's no conveyor system that brings that out or at least not a very big one so that might force you into a decisive battle type of mindset how much faith are they going to have in cyber and unmanned do we even know what the logic of these is yet we're trying to figure that out here but it's going to be different than what we're used to and that means the values will change and we're going to some admiral some general somewhere is going to have to do something that feels wrong and the question is whether they have the strength of character to do that Air Force at sea there's a big controversy about aircraft carriers right now ganging up aircraft carriers we did that in Desert Strum but all we were doing was feeding an ATO in the new world where there's a threat at sea where we might have to do power of rejection and war at sea at the same time have we thought that through more is better or we're going to be victims of midway say well look what we did with three you know there's a Yamato class battleship battleships did not immediately become obsolete with Pearl Harbor we kept them for the whole war and they served usefully there on what became obsolete was battleship centric thinking our minds got changed by Pearl Harbor we were forced into a carrier centric mindset the Japanese weren't and so they drug it into midway and it was only after midway when they reorganized and the third the Japanese third fleet started doing lessons learn that they finally figured out oh yeah carrier centric well now carrier centric but now you got these DF-21Ds you got SSN-22s and 27s and all kinds of stuff carriers aren't going to go obsolete for a long time but what about carrier centric thinking is that going to we're infected with it right now and I say that that's not pejorative I mean we're we're a carrier navy but if our thinking remains rigidly carrier centric I'm afraid that we're going to have smoking holes in the water like the Japanese did at the battle in midway if we're not careful this is what we're fighting all right so let me read you something here at the end here courage and sacrifice are necessary ingredients of battle but those virtues are for naught if thoughtful leadership is not present it is not enough to learn principles and formulas the operational commander must think for him or herself moral courage lies in the willingness and the ability to break free from the bonds of the past even as one has learned from experience and history corporate cultures impose values which generate great intellectual inertia study and reflection help build a moral fortitude to break these mental chains the american leaders that triumphed that midway attended this institution and I believe that their ability to take well reasoned calculated risks their willingness to adopt the new warfare logic and to act with boldness was in part a legacy of that period of study and reflection here I trust that you will help carry on that tradition and thereby honor the courage and sacrifice of our predecessors that they demonstrated on this day 71 years ago thank you very much