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Notes -
How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do? They did add an extra rotor in '43. How is this remotely foreseeable? It's just bad luck, like when their magnetic mines got captured and countermeasures developed shortly after being deployed. There were many legitimate Axis errors like the bad plan at Midway, or Germany not fully mobilizing its economy sooner. Failing to perceive massive Allied codebreaking operations is not one of them. If the Cold War went hot in the 1980s and the US lost because of this guy, that's not really a US error (though trusting a felon with such important information is a dubious decision): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
I think the blob says how they could have known:
_
If my adversary has broken my codes then I'd avoid orchestrating a large military operation that relies on my adversary not knowing it is a trap.
It is worth noting that the Japanese were not actually aware that carriers were in the South Pacific until the Battle of Coral Sea. They initially assumed that land-based aircraft were attacking them in a prior operation.
I can hardly fault them for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the carriers of the US were engaging in their own operations and it was just happenstance that the two forces happened to meet. But it's the job of military planners to assume the worst, so the Japanese definitely failed to be good analysts in that regard.
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I wonder is it just a chance or have their politics impacted them. How likely it is that false claims of their racial superiority, rampant oppression and doing everything to ensure that everyone hated them impacted their intelligence? Note German spies in UK that proceeded to immediately defect. In fact some became spies so they could escape Nazi Germany!
Similarly how Jewish physics has bitten them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ). Turn out that denying reality does not work well.
Well, they could also stop empire building and realize they are not some superior race. Reminds me about poor innocent Russia forced to invade Ukraine (while they could just realize they are not superpower).
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You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
How are they supposed to know their computing technology is worse than the US's? THIS IS SECRET RESEARCH!
Option A: roll the dice and see what happens, depending on a host of unknowable fog-of-war matters Option B: vacate China and Indo-China, resulting in massive rioting and the collapse of the government since the public won't be happy about admitting defeat after tens or hundreds of thousands have died in the war.
Suppose the Chinese completely obliterate the US military, using amazing advances in hypersonic weaponry, satellites, cyberwarfare, drones and so on, along with their US+EU sized manufacturing sector. They capitalize on their advantage to occupy Japan, Australia, the Pacific and bring the US to its knees by blockading all its ports.
Should we say 'oh the US was completely retarded going to war over Taiwan and losing 5 million men, all its prestige, overseas territories, alliance networks'. No because this wasn't a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Nobody knew beforehand that the Chinese were so capable, only with hindsight does 'oh their manufacturing capacity is so enormous' really become obvious, since people are assuming a short war fought in a single decisive battle. Only with hindsight do we know they had backdoors in all this critical infrastructure, that they'd stolen the specifications for US weapons, that there were 5th columnists feeding them intelligence. Only with hindsight would we learn that, since there hadn't been a naval war for decades, the meta had changed decisively in ways that benefitted the Chinese and obsoleted US strategy.
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It's actually even more complex than that! After breaking the code, we intentionally obfuscated our responses to keep the Axis from identifying the leak.
Always practice your OPSEC!
Also, part of gathered intelligence was not used - and some real info was deliberately leaked.
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