The National Interest:
Like an urban dweller fearful of muggers around every corner, the U.S. Navy is now contemplating a grim future where no neighborhood is safe. Whether it operates in the South China Sea, the Baltic or the Persian Gulf, the Navy has to reckon on salvos of deadly antiship missiles. When even an organization like Hezbollah can get its hands on ship-killer missiles, it’s a signal that world’s oceans are a dangerous place.
But seventy-two years ago, the U.S. Navy faced a similar threat. By late 1944, the U.S. Navy was the mightiest fleet on Earth. The Nazi U-boat threat had been mostly vanquished, the Japanese surface fleet decimated, and Japanese airpower a shadow of its former glory.
When most people think of a twenty-first-century successor to the kamikaze, they probably think of a suicide bomber. Instead of a Japanese pilot crashing his Zero fighter into an American aircraft carrier, it’s an Al Qaeda terrorist plunging an airliner into the Pentagon on 9/11, or an ISIS fighter detonating his suicide vest in a crowded market.
However, whereas a suicide bomber is strictly an instrument of terror, the kamikaze was a tactical weapon for which terror was a byproduct, much as the Nazi Stuka dive bomber demoralized Allied soldiers with sirens embedded in the aircraft. Kamikazes were employed as expendable munitions, like a bomb or a torpedo, except with a human guidance system. Even a kamikaze damaged by U.S. anti-aircraft fire could still complete its mission by diving into an American ship. If they could terrify the Americans into making peace, so much the better. Regardless, every U.S. ship sunk was one less ship to continue the relentless U.S. drive across the Pacific.
Today’s counterpart to the kamikaze isn’t the suicide bomber, but the antiship missile, such as Russian-made hypersonic weapons streaking in at five times the speed of sound, or Chinese ballistic missiles designed to sink U.S. aircraft carriers.
What missiles and kamikazes share is a terrifying and inhuman relentlessness. Put up enough antiaircraft fire, and you might scare a human pilot into breaking off his attack. But you can’t scare off a kamikaze pilot determined—or resigned—to die, nor can you frighten off a missile. The only way to stop them is to blow them up, damage them so badly they crash into the ocean, or hope to God that they miss your ship.
