The U.S. Military Rigged a War Game. It Still Lost.The Lessons Remain Carefully Ignored.
Millennium Challenge 2002 was the U.S. military’s most elaborate and expensive war game ever, designed to showcase the “military of the next century” on full display. Three years in the planning, budgeted at $250 million, it involved 13,500 participants waging mock war in nine training sites across the United States as well as 17 “virtual” locations in the powerful computers of the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. The scenario, on Iran, posited a “Blue” U.S. force pitted against a “Red” enemy bearing a strong resemblance to Iran. The U.S. lost. Unwisely, the planners had recruited a retired Marine Lieutenant General, Paul Van Riper, to lead the Red forces. In a series of brilliantly imaginative initiatives and maneuvers, Van Riper made quick work of the Blue force, sinking most of the attacking fleet in short order while circumventing his opponent’s attempts to cut off communications with his forces. Afterwards, he wrote a scathing report outlining ways in which the game had been rigged to ensure a Blue victory. Unsurprisingly, the report was immediately classified. Now, twenty years later, it has finally been released, albeit with many redactions. It makes for instructive reading. The organizers forbade Van Riper to attack at night, for example, because “there were insufficient Blue service cell personnel..to support 24-hour operations.” Other restrictions included a ban on “adaptive thinking” on his part, an all-too realistic possibility in a real war. It was assumed that Blue force weapons would all perform perfectly. Critical press were thrown out of Blue force briefings. He was forbidden to use chemical weapons. It was assumed that he, the enemy commander, would be assassinated at a certain point by a Special Operations team - even though they had no idea where he was. Reviewing the report today, it is striking how much the thinking underlying the strategy and tactics deployed by the losing U.S. force still dominates today’s Pentagon, including a crass preoccupation with military force to the exclusion of diplomacy. “High Value Targeting” meaning assassination of enemy leaders, is still an essential feature of our approach to war, as demonstrated by ongoing U.S.-Israeli operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. “Joint All-Domain Command and Control,” currently being pursued with the aid of many billions of dollars and artificial intelligence with the aim of enabling total awareness of a battlefield at every level sounds like an echo of “Operational Net Assessment,” derided and defeated by Van Riper. His approach was fundamentally different, stressing in his report that 'he wanted to be "in command" of his forces, but he also wanted them to operate “out of any direct control,” relying on subordinates’ “implicit understanding” of what needed to be done. His philosophy, he wrote, was “In command and out of control.” For those unfamiliar with the full story of Millennium Challenge, here is my account, excerpted from my book Kill Chain, The Rise of the High Tech Assassins, and based on an extensive interview I had with Van Riper in 2013. Van Riper was a twofold enemy. Not only was he playing the role of an opponent, he made no secret of his contempt for the concepts underpinning the Blue Team’s plan for the game. “The hubris was unbelievable,” he told me, after delivering a droll recitation of the full range of acronyms pumped out by the command. “They claimed to be able to understand the relationship between all nodes or links, so for example if something happened to an enemy’s economy, they could precisely calculate the effect on his military performance.” In short, the Blue plan encapsulated the core belief system of US military doctrine. The Red enemy was to be treated as a mechanistic system, replete with critical nodes to be targeted and eliminated thanks to the necessarily expensive weapons and tools at Blue’s disposal. Naturally, decapitation, as high value targeting was generally known in those days, was a key element in the plan, so Van Riper himself was in the virtual cross hairs. High value targeting, as Van Riper was well aware, was inherent in the official doctrine’s assertions of the capabilities of effects-based operations, i.e. total situational awareness of everything, including his whereabouts. But given his low regard for the entire concept, “none of it was scientifically supportable,” he was not unduly worried. In the scenario designed by the exercise planners, Van Riper was playing the role of a rogue military commander somewhere in the Persian Gulf who was willfully confronting the United States. Though there were thousands of troops, as well as planes and ships taking part in the game across the country, much of the action was to occur in computers and be displayed on monitors. It was to be the ultimate video game. Among the digital tools available to the Blue team was an enormous database labeled “Operational Net Assessment,” ONA, which they believed contained everything they needed to know about their opponent, and how he would behave. But they were wrong. For a start, they did not know what he looked like. The Blue commander, a three star Army general, worked in full uniform, surrounded by his extensive staff. As the game was getting underway, Van Riper, dressed in casual civilian clothes, took a stroll, unrecognized, through the Blue Team headquarters area to get the measure of his opponent. With his own staff, he was informal, though he forbade the use of acronyms. “We’ll all speak English here,” he told them. In the first hours of the war, the Blue Team knocked out Van Riper’s fiber-optic communications, confidently expecting that he would now be forced to use radio links that could be easily intercepted. He refused to cooperate, quickly turning to motorcycle couriers and coded messages in the calls to prayer from the mosques in preparing his own attack. He was no longer performing an assigned part in a scripted play, Van Riper had become a real, bloody minded, middle eastern enemy who had no intention of playing by the rules and was determined to win. Just a month earlier, the Bush Administration had unveiled a new national security policy of pre-emptive attacks, justified by “our inherent right of self-defense.” So, when a Blue Team carrier task force loaded with troops steamed into the Gulf (at least on the computer simulation) and took up station off the coast of his territory, Van Riper assumed that they were going to follow the new policy and attack him without warning. “I decided to pre-empt the pre-empter,” he told me. Oddly enough, the Blue general sensed this, saying, “I have a feeling that Red is going to strike,” but his staff was quick to assure him that their ONA made it clear that this could not happen. Van Riper was well aware of the U.S. Navy’s “Aegis” anti-missile capabilities, and how many missiles it would take to overwhelm them. “Usually Red hoards its missiles, letting them out in dribs and drabs,” he told me in retracing the battle. “That’s foolish, I did a salvo launch, used up pretty much all my inventory at once.” The defenses were overwhelmed. Sixteen virtual American ships sank to the bottom of the Gulf, along with twenty thousand virtual servicemen. Only a few days in, the war was over, and the idealized U.S. military had been beaten hands down. It had been a textbook demonstration of what John Boyd, the fighter pilot and theoretician of conflict, had meant about “getting inside the other guy’s OODA loop.” Van Riper, who had been an attentive student of Boyd’s theories, had won by adapting quickly and imaginatively to changing circumstances (such as using motor-cycles and calls from the minarets of mosques when his phone links were destroyed.) In contrast, his opponent’s rigid “effects based” approach had locked him into a preset vision of how the battle would play out. For General William Kerner, the joint forces commander, there could be only one solution to this crisis. Van Riper was informed that the sunken ships had magically refloated themselves, the dead had come back to life, and the war was on again. But this time there would be no surprises. He was not allowed to shoot down Blue Team V-22 “Osprey” troop transports, though these are highly vulnerable planes. The Red team was ordered to switch on their radars so that they could be more easily detected and destroyed. The umpires announced that all Red Force’s missile strikes had been intercepted. The game was now unashamedly rigged to ensure that the U.S. won and all the new theories proven correct. |
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