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The basic strategic problems confronting the U.S. Navy during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s were how to move a large fleet across the Pacific, absorb or avoid Japanese attritional attacks, seize forward bases for further operations, and retain sufficient fighting strength to defeat Japan's Combined Fleet. Japanese and American policies in Asia were in conflict, and war was a possible result; the U.S. Navy planned to win by destroying Japan's navy, imposing a blockade, and forcing Japan's surrender. Details of the strategic dilemma were the focus of interwar plans, large fleet maneuvers, and complex war games at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. By the time war arrived in 1941, the concept of an advance across the Pacific had become the subject of extensive and detailed strategic planning.
However, the fleet that advanced through the Pacific in World War II was not the fleet of prewar plans. The prewar Navy had centered on a battle fleet, a battle ship -centric formation that, concentrated together with a large fleet train, would move as a unit, seizing objectives along its path. By early 1943, a new and more effective fleet organization had become available. Fast carrier task forces had demonstrated the ir ab ili ty to for m power ful striking forces , maneuver independently of slower as sault shipping, and force a decision on their own.3 The fleet that took the War to Japanese shores was built around carrier task forces.
It is generally assumed that the change from a battle s hip -c en tr ic formation to carrier task forces invalidated the strategic and tactical planning carried out before the war, but this view is incorrect. The continuity in the Navy's strategic planning has already been illustrated by Edward Miller's War Plan Orange; a similar continuity can be found in tactical plans and doctrine. Although the relatively high speed and flexibility of carrier task forces gave them operational maneuverability significantly greater than that of the battleship formations that preceded them, the basic tactical principles that the Navy employed in its battle doctrines remained unchanged.
The changes were confined to the method of applying and distributing these principles. Two important factors combined to temper the prewar concepts and produce a...