Trouble, Strategic Insight
Abstract
The world was on fire. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland: gone. France, a Great Power by any reckoning eighteen months before, had been crushed by German armies in a matter of weeks. The Balkans and North Africa were ablaze. Much of China had been overrun by Japan in a war of stark barbarity that was four years old, and showed no signs of abating. Britain, assailed from the air and beset by sea, hung by a thread. The Mediterranean was impassable. In Central Asia ten million Soviet and German soldiers were locked in annihilatory combat along a thousand-mile front. It was on such a Sunday afternoon that my mother walked downstairs to my father's shop and said, "Honey, I just heard on the radio that the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor." And then, my dad told me, he put down his tools and said, "There's going to be trouble."
Description
Strategic Insights are authored monthly by analysts with the Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC). The CCC is the research arm of the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.