Kantai Kessen and its dangerous assumption

Kantai Kessen aimed to mass a superior Japanese force for a devastating fleet action. Tsushima offered a misleading model because the Russian fleet had completed a punishing voyage before the battle. Zinovy Rozhestvensky still achieved an extraordinary logistical feat by bringing that difficult force around the world in anything resembling fighting order. The doctrine treated its exhausted arrival as a repeatable condition and required a significant part of the enemy fleet to assemble close enough to Japan for the Imperial Japanese Navy to concentrate against it. By the same standard, the 1941 attack on Force Z was not a decisive fleet battle because Prince of Wales and Repulse formed only a small part of Royal Navy capital strength. British and American forces in this scenario would have different basing, support, and freedom of movement, weakening the doctrine's central assumption.