Success preserved Japan's elite pilot-training model

The Imperial Japanese Navy entered the interwar years believing that its established systems had delivered repeated success. Naval aviation makes the institutional cost concrete. Japan had not been forced during the First World War to expand its air arm on the scale later required, so pilots could remain a small elite rather than the product of a high-volume training system. The service kept adapting that inherited model instead of rebuilding it around replacement depth. When the Second World War demanded many more trained aviators, the earlier absence of pressure to change contributed to persistent pilot shortages.