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Even so there was still a trajectory of time involved until they got squared away into a wartime footing. A strong "peacetime inertia" was in play, that didn't get dispersed until around mid-43. Regulations, procedures, attitudes, equipment that didn't fit the new posture had to be discarded or revamped. I know of one captain relieved of command due to his obsession for requiring everything to be constantly polished or painted. Ship crews in the fleet were not permitted to service their own weapons, they didn't even have tools to do so, servicing was to be done by certified armorers at the nearest base. That one got thrown out pretty fast as soon as they could get custom tools made down in the machine shop. Number of shipboard weapons underwent modifications on the fly, since what worked on land didn't necessarily translate to what would work and be reliable in conditions at sea, particularly under the duress of combat. We started off the war with the same damage control strategy as the Japs with specialized personnel, which turned out to be inadequate since casualties, being cutoff from each other and getting separated from being an effective team rendered them mostly useless. That's when fire school was adopted, "every man a firefighter" and had to have a certificate before being eligible for deployment aboard ship. I could go on, but you get the picture.

My pleasure, AB.

Desk jockeys weren't prepared to lead men in combat on or under the sea, or on land. The small initial US submarine fleet had to be given a new commander just to get things moving. Some skippers had to be relieved. In that crucial first year of the war, Adm Halsey would go ahead with a mission if he had even one working aircraft for either surveillance or "air support".

Less than three months after Pearl Harbor, Doolittle's Raid struck their capital. It didn't achieve much, technically, but was a massive humiliation, and every Japanese realized, big trouble now. Meanwhile, most of the US industrial production and shipbuilding was in eastern N America, and out of reach.

Six months in, the Japanese lost their best carriers and many of their best pilots (best carrier squadrons in the world up to that time). The US sent its three remaining carriers, under-experienced pilots, and used Midway itself as the fourth carrier. The US carriers hovered out near the Japanese flight radius, which exceeded US flight radius at that point in the war, on a somewhat overcast day. US planes could strike the Japanese carriers, then refuel and whatnot on the island, while the Japanese could not do that.

The US taking of Guadalcanal surprised the Japanese in its early scheduling and rapidity, and they had no idea US fighting men would just hang in there and kick the living crap out of them. Abandonment of the effort to retake Guadalcanal meant the plan to control the air and sea along the Solomons using land-based aircraft was at an end.

Japan's cities, then as now, are coastal and vulnerable. It had a great industrial base (not as great as even prewar US') but had to import raw materials. With the arrival of US long-range B-29 bombers in large numbers (over 2500 were built during the war, and as many as 1000 at a time bombed Tokyo late in the war) every city, port, factory, and even moving trains were hit. Before Hiroshima, 45 Japanese cities had been pretty much burned to the ground via conventional incendiary bombing.

Best case scenario, the Japanese would need more early success against the US Navy, would need to raise, train, and equip another huge land army, take the western coast (probably just parts of California), fight its way across 1000 miles of altiplano, hundreds more miles to reach the Mississippi...

The Japanese attack on the US didn't make sense then, doesn't make sense now, and can't be made to make sense.