tlb wrote:The short answer is no; for example, the tactics of the submarine had been well worked out in WW1 and in WW2 by the time of the Reuben James incident; before the formal entry of the US into the war. It was the stupidity of Admiral King (and his possible dislike of the British) that resulted in the "Second Happy Time".
In the Pacific War, the USA took much more benefit from the submarine (after the problem with the torpedoes was solved), than the Japanese ever contemplated. The US submarines were the greatest single threat to the Japanese merchant fleet; while the Japanese never attempted to cut the flow of supplies between the US mainland, Hawaii and Australia.
Whereas the tactics of the Kamikaze, while unexpected, did not require any different defense than was already being used against either dive bombers or torpedoes. It was a tactic of weakness brought on by the fact that trying to attack an Allied fleet was already tantamount to a suicide mission at that period of the war.
I'd quibble slightly. King did obviously make the wrong decision. But he was working under the belief that a convoy without a significant escort was simply handing the uboats an all you can eat buffet.
He was wrong; but I'm not sure the operational impact, and decreased overall loses, of unescorted or poorly escorted convoys was entirely understood by early '42.
So I grant that he honestly believed, with the lack of escorts he felt he could make available, that instituting unescorted/barely escorted convoys on the eastern seaboard would have made things worse, not better. AFAIK, at that time there wasn't yet definitive proof that he was wrong in that belief; though with the benefit of hindsight we believe he was.
I'd also quibble about Kamikaze not requiring different defenses. Their higher probability of hit, and tendency not to break off when taking fire, drove at least two changes to defenses.
One was the radar picket concept -- putting destroyers down the threat axis to provide both early warning and fighter direction to allow the (enlarged) CAP to begin engaging further from the fleet. Could be hard on those destroyers, but their risk and sacrifice helped keep the rest of the fleet, and amphibious forces, safer.
Also this need for increased air defense distance drove experiments, under Project Cadillac, of the first proto-AWACs (though the control wasn't actually airborne, the modified avenger sent the image of its radar screen down to the carrier and only acted as a radio relay for the afloat fighter directors who acted on what it saw).
Second was widespread replacement of 20mm Oerlikon aa guns with 40mm Bofors; the larger shell being more likely to inflict sufficient damage that a Kamikaze would break up and hit the sea short of its target. And even that wasn't seen as sufficient and the US rushed development of an even more effective replacement for the Bofors, a radar directed dual automatic 3"/60 Mark 27 AA mount with proximity fuzed shells; however even rushed development didn't have them ready before the end of the war -- and with the urgency relaxed the USN extended their development program, releasing them to the fleet in 1948.
So Kamikaze didn't require radically new defenses, but by being higher threat that previous air attacks they caused the USN to adjust its tactics and seek to deploy and develop defenses that were better suited to this somewhat different threat. (Said defenses, of course, would also have been more effective against conventional air attacks)