The Challenge of Paul Van RiperThis story is several years old, but is still not widely known, and deserves to be told again, in pursuit of an understanding of what is happening to the US military.
The year was 2002, and the event was the Millenium Challenge '02, reputedly the most expensive war game exercise ever conducted. Running from July 24th to August 15th, 2002, and sponsored by the Joint Forces Command, the MC02 was supposed to be a test case for the new concept of "network-centric warfare" and Rumsfeld's theories of "transformation" of the US military in general. The game involved both computer simulations and real-world exercises involving 13,500 troops drawn from all branches of the military, 17 simulation locations, and 9 live-fire locations. The exercise was an engagement with an unnamed Middle Eastern rogue state, alternately described as Iraq, Iran, and even Israel. The US, represented as the Blue team, commanded by retired Army General Gary Luck, against the Red team, commanded by retired Marine Lt. General Paul Van Riper. General Van Riper has been a frequent participant in these exercises, and is widely considered an expert at commanding Red. The rules were simple: this was to be an unscripted, "free-play" exercise, with both sides free to adapt and improvise, and no prohibition against Red winning. In other words, a fair, objective, experiment, designed to produce results as close to the real world as possible.
Things did not go entirely according to plan. From The Guardian(9/6/2002):
What really happened is...in the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics... sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt. What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more.
Do...what?
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.
So...a reasonable person might assume at this point that the plans would be redrawn, right? As
Joseph Galloway explains it:
The referees stopped the game, which is normal when a victory is won so early. Van Riper assumed that the Blue Force would draw new, better plans and the free play war games would resume. Instead he learned that the war game was now following a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory: He was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed and he was told his forces would not be allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.
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