The Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, and Imperial Japanese Navy conducted extensive fleet and tabletop exercises during the interwar years. Britain had advantages in obtaining funding for large maneuvers, but the scale of activity alone did not determine the quality of the lessons. Useful results depended on the framing of the problem, enforcement of the rules, and acceptance of unwelcome evidence. In the American cases, permissive adjudication and cheating undermined trust in results; Royal Navy officers faced career consequences in the examples given. Tightly framed Japanese exercises excluded results that challenged the intended outcome. Exercise rules therefore required scrutiny both before the event and when judging what happened.
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Exercise design determines institutional learning
Interwar navies exercised extensively, but rules, adjudication, and willingness to accept unwelcome evidence determined whether those events improved readiness.