Island hopping

Island hopping is a term that has several different definitions as it is applied in various fields. Generally, the term refers to the means of crossing an ocean by a series of shorter journeys between islands, as opposed to a single journey directly across the ocean to the destination.

World War II

Island hopping, also called leapfrogging, was an important military strategy in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The strategy employed by the Allies of World War II Combined Chiefs of Staff, beginning with Operation Cartwheel, was to bypass heavily fortified Japanese positions and instead concentrate the limited Allied resources on strategically important islands that were not well defended but capable of supporting the drive to the main islands of Japan. This strategy was possible in part because the Allies used submarine and air attacks to blockade and isolate Japanese bases, weakening their garrisons and reducing the Japanese ability to resupply and reinforce. Thus troops on islands which had been bypassed, such as the major base at Rabaul, were useless to the Japanese war effort and left to "wither on the vine."

Other uses

In anthropology, island hopping is the method by which the Polynesian people settled the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

In biology, island hopping is the method by which plant and animal species colonize islands. Organisms will move or drift from one island to another and eventually become native to that region. Some species are only endemic to a small group of islands and never are able to "hop" to the mainland, as is that case with many birds of the Galápagos Islands.

In the computer security and intrusion detection field island hopping is the act of entering a secured system through a weak link and then "hopping" around on the computer nodes within the internal systems.

ee also

* Kangaroo Route
*Extreme points of the World