The World Has Just Witnessed A “Pearl Harbor Moment” In Armenia
How warfare has just changed forever. Again.
Inspired by the British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto a year before, on Dec. 7, 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed six Japanese aircraft carriers to launch an air raid against the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor where they would sink six and damage three battleships, and damage several light cruisers and destroyers, all at a cost of only twenty-nine aircraft. Naval vessels are prohibitively expensive, none more so than capital ships like battleships. In economic terms, this was probably the most lopsided battle in human history.
Even as the smoke was clearing, the world was coming to realize that the reign of the battleship was over. Never again would the pinnacle of naval warfare be one side’s fleet maneuvering to “cross the T” of the enemy’s fleet (as the British Grand Fleet did twice against the German High Seas Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in the Great War). From that day forward, battleships were effectively relegated to be floating artillery in support of amphibious assaults on beaches.
Pearl Harbor was not the first great paradigm shift in warfare. Examples abound, from the use of stirrups by Mongol cavalry to the English longbow at Agincourt, from the introduction of steam-powered ships in…
