SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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It may cause Halsey to be a bit less aggressive in his tactics/strategy, actually. Which I honestly think is a good thing. Until mid-1943 or so, technology and equipment is not going to be really capable of making carriers truly capable of weathering full-out assaults. While this does mean that hitting the enemy's carriers first (and effectively) is all the more crucial, the Japanese carriers have a significant advantage in terms of their aircraft's operational range (and speed); thus, it's important to take steps to either ensure that the enemy carriers either strike another target before they detect your carriers' presence (and thus can't strike back quickly enough before you can hit them first, ala Midway) or that they're detected long before the enemy detects you--something only feasible through the use of flying boats (Catalinas) or through solid intelligence of the enemy's plans/composition (via codebreaking, which wouldn't be quite ready until shortly before the Battle of the Coral Sea) and some good luck (codebreaking was hardly fool-proof; there was far too much traffic to sort through to find useful info, so they had to develop filtering techniques to know where to look for the useful/important stuff--Thompson could suggest these techniques to the codebreakers, since he would have read about them and they're really simple in concept).
However, defensive tactics and ideas would help a hell of a lot--things like using unburdened Dauntlesses as anti-torpedo-bomber CAP, the Thach Weave, emphasizing evasive maneuvering against dive bombers until much better AA guns/tech comes out, having battleships be loaded with AA guns both for their AA defense and for contributing a lot to AA defense for carriers (even the battleship-obsessed admirals/skippers would approve of the concept, since the cover is mutual and it makes battleships more self-sufficient), practicing radar and flight-operations-coordination/control to better direct fighters to incoming enemy aircraft (and distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy aircraft on radar plots--like having CAP flying only at certain altitudes when not in combat).
That said, I imagine one of the big advances Thompson would suggest to Halsey in terms of offensive tactics would be overhauling the operational doctrine for submarines--namely, the coordination between submarines and between submarines and the rest of the fleet. A picket line of submarines would do wonders for detecting the enemy fleet and tracking them before they detect/track you--not to mention the chance that they'll take advantage of the pre-1944 IJN's deeply flawed ASW (including the fact that their depth charges are set far to explode in far too shallow a depth--you can thank an American senator for moronically leaking that fact to the Japanese, costing something like a thousand lives and ten+ submarines) to sink or cripple enemy carriers. It was these failings that led to the American submarine force at Midway being largely wasted, despite all of the intelligence available beforehand.
