From 1905 to 1941, War Plan Orange had undergone countless dogged revisions and scenarios, and it is widely credited with giving the United States the road map it needed to defeat Japan. The surprise Pearl Harbor attack, of course, had not been factored in and was categorized by military analysts as a black swan, a hard-to-predict, unexpected, and rare event that happens regardless of how much planning has been done. A second omission was the nuclear weapon that led to Japan’s surrender, which had not been invented in 1941. A third was the kamikaze suicide pilots deployed at the end of the war
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