The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had a legendarily poor inter-service relationship, with a very strong rivalry between the two branches of the Imperial military. This rivalry in turn indeed impacted Japan's ability to properly project power, as often decisions of policy or operations was based as much on the political needs of cooperating between the two branches of the Imperial military as it was Japan's actual interests or the needs of combat operations.

At this point it's helpful to discuss at least some of the reasons why the inter-service rivalry between the two branches was so extreme. For a variety of reasons, when the IJA was established, the General Staff reported directly to the Emperor and bypassed the civilian cabinet completely. Later, when the IJN received its own independent General Staff, this body also reported directly to the Emperor. The Emperor, for his part, was the Supreme Commander of both the Army and the Navy, but custom and tradition commanded that he remain mostly detached and not take an overly active role in managing the government. Importantly, there was no unified body responsible for coordination between the IJA and IJN short of an Imperial Conference between the two branches with the Emperor in attendance. This meant that while there were draft Imperial Defence Policies created and circulated, they were ultimately little more than two entirely separate operational plans from both the Army and the Navy with little thought given to crafting a true unified strategy for Japan. There was no effort made to craft a unified view that would apply all of Japan's resources to a particular strategic vision. Rather, the Army and Navy each pursued their own version of the same.

The Army, for its part, saw Japan's main interests as on continental Asia, and thus the main threat to Japan's security as first a potentially revanchist Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. The Navy on the other hand, sought to increase its own relevance in order to create further justifications for its expansion, and so made its main rival the United States. Importantly, when the Navy initially decided that it would begin building against the US, there was little in the way of direct conflict between the US and Japan. Rather, the United States Navy served as a simple budgetary enemy for the IJN, enabling the IJN to demand a fleet capable of challenging the US Navy. When combined with Japan's relatively limited resources--not only shares of the national budget, but also resource allocations like steel--these completely separate targets resulted in both the IJA and IJN squabbling against each other for resource allocations. While some of these demands could be relieved by squeezing resources out of the civilian sector, ultimately, an increased focus on one service meant a reduction of resources for the other. The two branches simply refused to work together, resulting in a duplication of efforts on a variety of fronts. One example helps to illustrate this, pulled from Mark Peattie's *Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941* :

An example of the obdurate nature of such interservice suspicion and hostility was provided by Germany’s wartime naval attaché to Tokyo, Capt. Paul Wennacker. After the war Wennacker recalled that during a tour of the Nakajima aircraft plant he was first guided by several naval officers around the navy’s development and manufacturing division of the plant. At the conclusion of the tour, the navy men opened a door that had been kept tightly closed. Here the naval officers bade him good-bye, and on the other side of the door a group of army officers took him on a tour of their section of the plant, an area to which the navy officers had no access.

To say that interservice relations were "poor" is a bit of an understatement.

This divide was astoundingly apparent in the immediately lead up to the Pacific War. The IJA had found itself heavily tied down by the apparently endless war in China, and its eyes had turned southward to the European colonies in South East Asia (the Navy's traditional area of interest). The Army hoped that operations there would not only seize resources vital for Japan's economy and war machine, but also help isolate China from the West, which the Army hoped would enable them to finally win the war. Operations in the South would require cooperation with the Navy, which was all too happy to play a dangerous game, using the Army's need for their aid to demand increased resource allocations to prepare for war against the United States and the European colonial powers, while also attempting to avoid provocations against the same, as the IJN doubted its ability to defeat the European and American fleets. These internal political squabbles between the IJN and IJA ultimately led to the decision to occupy all of French Indochina as a "compromise" between the two, which set the final chain of events in motion that would culminate at Pearl Harbor.

During the war itself, cooperation between the IJA and IJN remained fraught at best. While the initial offensive operations had gone well, once these were completed, the lack of strategy meant that the IJA and IJN were effectively at odds with what they were to do now that they had achieved much of what they had set out to. The IJA was more defensively minded and wanted to fortify Japan's early conquests and was very hesitant about future aggressive operations. The IJN on the other hand, sought to keep expanding Japan's defensive perimeter by launching operations to defeat the remnants of the US Pacific Fleet and also further isolate Australia. This lack of strategic vision caused by the limited cooperation between the two branches resulted in Japanese operations in the spring of 1942 to be far more haphazard, with forces spread out engaged in limited operations to satisfy the demands of the Army in order to support Navy operations and vice-versa. This dispersal was one factor (among many others) in what led to the Japanese disaster at the Battle of Midway.

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