Percy sent an email to his friends, of his musings.
"I'm fascinated by sticking to whatever you're doing as long as you can and the work is worth doing," Percy wrote. "So if you're cleaning up a part of your room, you would try to keep cleaning until the whole room is clean, or you expand the cleaning to other parts of the house. Or you might expand the cleaning of the room to other things being done in the room, like maybe you fix a door in the room that has been stuck by sanding its edges or something. There are more than one way of sticking to something until you're sick of it. I've come across this idea of sticking with something as long as you can from multiple places--I think the productivity/cleaning guru Don Aslett argued for something like this principle in his writings. And I know productivity guru Steve Pavlina has argued for something like this too. Tim Ferriss argues for time-batching, as have other productivity people I think, and probably others I am forgetting.
"Jackson was telling me about his ideas about using the computer science algorithm of Shortest Job First. Very interesting. He applied something like that algorithm to foreign policy in World War II--American foreign policy anyway. The quickest of the great powers to be dispatched with were focused on in Jackson's musings. I think if you adapted the 'stick with it till you're sick of it' approach (SWIT for short) to American foreign policy in World War II, the idea would be to focus on problems as much as you can until they are unpopular with the American people or they are not feasible anymore, or the job has been complete and the US can turn to something else. Aside from the main focus, the US would send minimal help in directions it absolutely had to to serve its ends, since the US would have to deal with more than one thing at a time.
"Anyway, I think possibly things might look this way. The US wanted to help curb Germany it seemed as they accrued power, and wanted to pass the buck to Britain and the Soviet Union in doing so. They wanted to keep these two powers in the war and so implemented Lend-Lease to keep Britain and Russia in the game. They would do this as long as possible. Then Japan struck the US in Pearl Harbor and the US declared war on Japan, which caused Germany to declare war on the US, since it was allied with Japan.
"I suppose you could say that the US could maintain sticking to Lend-Lease and not getting into a proper war with Japan or Germany at this point, if the US is going with a SWIT approach. I think at this point war with Japan was popular, and so you might say that Lend-Lease was something that the public mood had gotten sick of. So I think probably the US would turn in the direction of the most proximate fight, which was with Japan, and prosecute this battle until it was over, while continuing to supply Britain--but the main focus would be on Japan, which would be different than how things really happened, which was that the US shifted focus on Germany and Japan was a secondary concern, I think.
"So the US would keep supplying Britain and Russia while going after Japan. I think this would mean that Japan would have exited the war first instead of Italy, who was in reality knocked out by the Allies either in North Africa or in Italy depending on how you look at things. So the US would make a concerted effort to knocking out Japan, focusing most of its might on them, while supplying Britain and the USSR to keep them in the fight. I'm not sure if this would have worked in the case of the USSR--a major concern for invading Europe was to keep the Soviets from settling with the Axis. So it seems in this alternative view there would have been a greater chance of the USSR separately treating with the Germans and leaving the war, which would free up Germany to fight the British.
"In this alternative view it also seems likely that the Brits 'peripheral strategy' as it has been called by historians--would have been employed. The idea was to encircle Europe and launch small tough armored attacks amphibiously onto the continent, and to use these attacks would be used to stimulate guerrilla support against the occupying Nazis. This approach would be used anywhere possible--in France, Norway, Italy, and the Balkans.
"Anyway, the US would knock out Japan earlier all else being equal. Whether the USSR could or could not get a separate peace with Germany, I think it's probably unlikely that Germany could supply Japan with much help, and I doubt the Soviet Union would have helped the Japanese against the US, though I don't really know. So I'll just assume that the US knocks Japan out of the war quicker and then turns to knocking out Germany, or I suppose Italy as they are Axis partners. I'm guessing Italy and Germany are on more stable footing than they would have been had the US helped Britain and the USSR with an actual army. I think Italy would stick around in North Africa and there would be no invasion of Sicily or Italy on the scale that actually was the case, though Britain might have had more little attempts in line with the peripheral strategy and this might or might not have born some fruits in uprisings against the Axis.
"The US would have come into the battle and I suppose the easiest object might have been the Axis in North Africa--the US would have mobilized most of its strength against Japan and so would be in the Far East, but could not make its way towards Europe most directly through the Suez Canal, putting them in the Mediterranean Theater, and in proximity to Axis forces there. So the US might have moved its troops that way and launched attacks against the Axis from the East from British-controlled Egypt rather than as they did in real life by hopping on North Africa from the west and attacking Axis troops that way, while the Brits faced off against the Axis from the East.
"I think then the war would have moved roughly as it did from North Africa to Sicily, to Italy, and then I think probably would have lead to actions in the Balkans, which were easier to get to from Italy than say Southern France I think, and then Germany would perhaps be pushed back from combined USSR and US and British troops from the east.
"Would this have been a better approach than the one that happened? I don't know really. My instinct is to say probably not, since the actual planners were probably smarter than me and they were hashing out these ideas over years, while I am just tossing off something in many minutes. But it's fun to think about.
"But you see the basic application of SWIT to foreign policy tends to favor ideas or proximity and concentration. I think Robert Citino characterized what he called 'The German Way of War' as something like 'hit the closest enemy as fast and as hard as you can.' This is in the operational level of war. This idea seems similar to the SWIT approach to foreign policy."
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