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decades of pre-war planning for a decisive battle with the U.S. Navy

Everyone knew it was coming if the factory workers at Curtis-Wright in New Jersey knew it was coming.

It was a matter of where and when.

It does not take a rocket scientist to see that you can either attack a navy in port or at sea.

How much money was invested in thousands of people working for the Army and Navy at Pearl, all the installations, all the ships ? And we can't "afford" to adequately patrol - knowing that war is imminent ? And do some practice drills for a counter-attack against a carrier group ? I mean, the enemy won't be arrive by spaceship. They won't be swimming over.

When I say "public support", you know (I hope) I'm talking about accepting rationing, price and wage controls, draft of millions of men into service, etc. If it started as a teeny-tiny incident and gradually kept escalating - public support for the current administration dries up - because the public typically starts blaming the administration for escalation of the war. Without the blow to national pride and the sting of thousands of innocent lives lost, rationing tires, gasoline, butter, meat, etc., having no new car models for the duration, etc., all that sets up for a President not getting re-elected and a call for exiting the war.

As far as atrocities in the Philipines go, that would have been another alternative. Again, care would have to have been taken (at the top) to ensure that we had a horrific loss.

Either way, our war-planning elites knew that we needed to get sucker punched. As it was, all they had to do was have enough knowledge of timing to have the carriers at sea somewhere to the south and other than that sit there with our pants down.