An Army focused on China tries to direct a global war

Would an invasion have produced a complete Japanese military takeover and a fight to the last man?

Army dominance was already largely in place by 1940-41, but its China-focused leadership was poorly suited to directing a global war.

The prompt suggests that an invasion might have produced a full military takeover of Japan and a fight to the last man. In this interpretation, the takeover had largely occurred by 1940-41 because the Army was already calling the shots. The deeper strategic mismatch was that an institution concentrated on the war in China was trying to run a global conflict it did not fully understand. This diagnosis sets up the following Pearl Harbor counterfactual by separating political control from coherent grand strategy.