By 1943, the US Navy had transformed naval warfare in the Pacific. Not only did the numbers of carriers in service dramatically increase, but so did the effectiveness of each ship and its air group. A new generation of aircraft manned by well-trained pilots, improvements in air search and fire control radars, the effectiveness of the Combat Information Center concept that fuzed information on a real-time basis, and the growing number and effectiveness of shipboard antiaircraft guns combined to make US fast carrier task forces essentially immune to conventional air attack. This defensive capability forced the Japanese to rely on night attacks and eventually on kamikaze, or suicide, aircraft. Together with these technological advances, there was a corresponding operational leap. A sophisticated mobile logistics capability was developed which allowed the US Navy to forward deploy to fleet anchorages and operate the Fast Carrier Force at sea for months at a time using underway replenishment. This maintained a high operational tempo, keeping the Japanese off-balance, and provided the capability not just to raid, as the Imperial Japanese Navy’s carrier task force had done early in the war, but to project power on a sustained basis. It was a war-winning formula.
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