Another factor in Leyete Gulf was the lack of carrier based aircraft. Four months before the Leyte landings - at the Battle of the Philippine Sea - the Japanese Navy made its final major effort to defeat the US fleet with carrier-borne aircraft. They sent 9 carriers with 473 aircraft into the battle, but their aircrew were poorly trained (they kept trying to replace their losses at Midway, but it was a meat grinder for their pilots), and at that point the American equipment was superior, that the Japanese air groups were massacred. Nearly 200 of their aircraft were shot down over or near Task Force 58, the Fast Carrier Force, in one afternoon. Three Japanese carriers were sunk in the battle, and the IJN lost nearly 500 carrier and land-based aircraft in two days. As a result of the destruction of their air groups the Japanese carriers, which at the start of the Pacific War were the spearhead of the Japanese offensive, were reduced by the time of the Leyte campaign to the role of decoys, and the task of making the real attacks on the Allied invasion fleet was of necessity left to the IJN's battleship and heavy cruiser forces, which were still largely intact, and to what land-based air power the Japanese could still muster.
I've always seen Confed's situation in WCIII mirroring the Japanese postion at this point in the war. The Cats had the upper hand and were outproducing Confed, part of what cost Japan the war was they weren't able to produce enough to continue the fight and were losing access to natural resources they did not have locally.
I've always seen Confed's situation in WCIII mirroring the Japanese postion at this point in the war. The Cats had the upper hand and were outproducing Confed, part of what cost Japan the war was they weren't able to produce enough to continue the fight and were losing access to natural resources they did not have locally.