Red Team - Other Examples

Other Examples

• Billy Mitchell – a passionate early advocate of air power – demonstrated the obsolescence of battleships in bombings against the captured World War I German battleship Ostfriesland and the U.S. pre-dreadnought battleship Alabama.
• Rear Admiral Harry E. Yarnell demonstrated in 1932 the effectiveness of an attack on Pearl Harbor almost exactly showing how the tactics of the Japanese would destroy the fleet in harbor nine years later. Although the umpires ruled the exercise a total success, the umpire's report on the overall exercises makes no mention of the stunning effectiveness of the simulated attack. Their conclusion to what became known as Fleet Problem XIII was surprisingly quite the opposite:

It is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force."