Additional light cruisers would leave Japan's more serious naval problems unresolved. More effective employment of existing submarines would require a different doctrine, while building more carriers would run into limited shipyard capacity. The criticism of Japanese wargaming concerns what happened after an unwelcome result: resetting a failed exercise could protect an existing plan from scrutiny. A useful exercise instead required officers to investigate why the plan failed and adapt it. Improving that process would affect the use of the fleet already available.
Notable Point · 38:55-40:32
Why Japanese naval wargaming needed to confront failure
Japan's cruiser counterfactual leads to a separate problem: exercises cannot improve naval planning if unwanted results are discarded.