War Plan Orange
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War Plan Orange was the US Navy war plan for dealing with Japan in World War II. The general idea was that it would take a while to get going, and during that time the US would mobilize the Pacific Fleet (in peacetime, each ship had only half of its crew), defeat any vainglorious attack on the Panama Canal, and then sail for Hawaii and finally Manila. It was presumed that the Japanese would attack the Philippines but that the islands could hold out until the US fleet arrived from Hawaii. Once the fleet was in Manila, it would sail due north and meet the Japanese battleships somewhere between the Philippines and Japan, defeat them, and then sail on to Japan. Once there, whether the United States invaded or not, the US fleet would blockade Japan.
The Imperial Japanese Navy developed a counter-plan to allow the US Fleet to sail across the Pacific while using submarines to weaken it. The Japanese fleet would then attempt to force a battle against the US fleet on territory that was favorable to it after the US fleet had been weakened.
War Plan Orange did not envision that aircraft could sink battleships, or that Japan would put the US battleship fleet out of action in an attack on Pearl Harbor. Many have questioned the move by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to send the fleet from California to Hawaii, since when war began it would have to be brought back to California to pick up the other half of the crews (consisting of mobilized reserves and new recruits).
American plans changed after Pearl Harbor demonstrated the dominance of aircraft in naval warfare, and the Japanese had gained air superiority over the Philippines early in the war. Even after severe Japanese defeats like Midway, the US fleet favored a methodical "island-hopping" advance that never took it far beyond land-based air cover.