From n+1 a quick overview of what happened in the wargame.
In the summer of 2002, the United States put together a military exercise with a name that broadcast the nation’s ambitions for projecting force not just into a New American Century, but beyond. Years in the planning, and costing around $250 million ($435 million today), the “Millennium Challenge” was the single most expensive simulation the military had ever mounted. Mustering some 13,500 American servicepersons across military branches and theaters for three weeks of intricate joint-service operations, the enterprise sought to put the latest in military doctrine, hardware, and communications infrastructure to the test. With the war in Afghanistan in full swing and the invasion of Iraq on the near horizon, the wargame also offered George W. Bush and his cabinet a nonpareil opportunity to rehearse their much-coveted fantasy of taking the global war on terror to the next target on the Axis of Evil: Iran. The primary antagonists were cast accordingly: Team Blue would be the US, and Team Red would be a Persian Gulf power whose resources and disposition of forces approximated an amalgam of Iran and Iraq. Blue and Red were set into conflict per an elaborate background scenario involving disputed island territories, threats to regional shipping, sectarian fundamentalists, naval showdowns, high-priority land-based targets, and the like. To head Red’s forces, the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) tapped a retired Marine Corps Brigadier General with a bullet-headed central casting mien, a chest bedecked with decades of combat decorations, and the Pynchonesque name of Paul K. Van Riper.
Sailing into the theater, Blue demanded the immediate surrender of Red. Van Riper, however, declined to serve up his comparatively backward forces to his enemy’s cutting-edge reconnaissance and surveillance technology. Instead, the veteran counterinsurgency fighter went analog, running communications to units via motorcycles and dispatching his vintage Soviet and American-made planes on sorties using light and flag signals instead of radio. And then, using local fishing boats as cheap patrol craft, he launched a sneak attack on the US fleet, swarming them with inexpensive missiles and ramming them with suicide runs.
The effect was catastrophic. On the first day of the exercise, in just ten minutes, Riper’s Reds “sank” sixteen American warships, including an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and all but one of Blue’s amphibious landing vessels. Had the wargame been real, the cost in hardware would have been billions; by USJFCOM’s own reckoning, twenty thousand Americans would have come home in boxes, or, to put it more bluntly, been vaporized, drowned, or eaten by sharks. A subordinate broke the news to General William “Buck” Kernan, one of the Millennium Challenge’s designers: “Sir, Van Riper just slimed the ships.”
What to do? Having lost its game of Battleship against a developing world adversary that never had any battleships to begin with, US military brass immediately called foul and demanded a do-over. After all, there were thousands of assets already in the field, and still plenty of time to “learn.”
When the Millennium Challenge’s organizers rebooted the exercise, they placed a suite of new restrictions on Red. Troops had to use radios, even if doing so guaranteed their prompt annihilation. Van Riper was forbidden from using his abundant chemical weapon stockpiles. His forces were no longer allowed to open fire on American transport aircraft, meaning that Blue’s venerable C-130s, and its brand-new $84 million V-22 Ospreys, could fly in unthreatened by anything except mechanical malfunctions.1 Most importantly, it was decreed from the outset that no matter what happened, Blue would win. Or, to put it in the terms of USJFCOM’s own report, after being
attrited to a combat ineffective state . . . Blue forces were regenerated to support experimental objectives. As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR [Red] free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a Blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.
Facing a scripted loss from the outset, and increasingly disgusted as the exercise went on, Van Riper resigned six days later, damning the affair as “rigged,” “prostituted,” and “a sham intended to prove what [USJFCOM] wanted to prove.” It didn’t matter. The military got its exercise, the Red threat to American interests and regional security was neatly vanquished, and that was that.
The intervening quarter century has witnessed abundant new technological developments, from the profusion of cheap and effective drones like the Iranian Shaheds to a new generation of American Littoral Combat Ships. The former run between twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars per unit, while the latter cost taxpayers upwards of a billion dollars each and have already spent more time at dock being repaired than at sea. LCS safety and performance records have been so comically abysmal that their crews have been driven to seek mental health care.2
....MORE, but it is at this point the author and I part ways. It appears that eventually the American military actually did learn some lessons from Van Riper, including that you had better be prepared for an opponent to flip over the board and begin playing an entirely different game.
Our last mention of the General was exiting from October 2023's "The U.S. Army's Mad Scientist Lab Looks At The Issue Of Trust And Artificial Intelligence":Gen Z is Likely to Build Trusting Relationships with AI...***
Ah, Gen Z has an exploitable vulnerability!.
And for some reason I'm thinking of U.S. Marine Corps Lt. General (Ret.) Paul Van Riper. and the Millennium Challenge 2002 wargame.
