Kimmel is presented as an aggressive carrier-minded commander whose Scouting Force experience gave him a strong grasp of naval aviation. After Pearl Harbor, he began organizing a carrier counterattack, a decision that alarmed his battleship commander and helped political opponents move against him. The deeper constraint was informational: Washington had stopped giving Kimmel the level of intelligence supplied to Admiral James Richardson, partly because Richardson had used it to challenge policy. Hawaii's army commander faced the same basic problem of positioning forces without the full warning picture available in Washington. This passage makes the alternate battle a leadership problem as well as a fleet-composition problem, because Kimmel could act only on the intelligence he actually received.
Notable Point · 18:58-21:34
Kimmel's carrier instincts and intelligence handicap
Kimmel's Scouting Force background made him unusually ready to answer an attack with carriers, even though Washington withheld intelligence that had been available to his predecessor.