Strategic blind spots about Western industrial power

Western assessments of Japan ranged from racist dismissal to simple unfamiliarity and failure to look beyond immediate experience. Japanese planners are presented as making a comparable mistake about the Western powers. They increasingly treated war with the United States as inevitable without preparing enough for the opponent's clearest advantage, industrial capacity. Because American and British production would take time to mobilize, Japan had reason to create more reserve and convertible capacity in peacetime. The hybrid-carrier improvisations expose the gap between anticipating war and acquiring the means to sustain it once Western production accelerated.