Millennium Challenge was a war game held in August 2002 pitting US forces against an "unnamed" middle east state controlled by a megalomaniac dictator. Lasting several weeks and using new US military technology, networking, 13,500 military personnel, and computer simulation, Millennium Challenge cost a total of $250 million dollars. In September 2002, Bush gave the UN and Iraq an ultimatum, saying "action will be unavoidable" unless impossible conditions are met. The war officially began on March 20th; planning for Millennium Challenge began two years earlier. Certainly at the end of August, the end of Millennium Challenge, and the beginning of September, when Bush gives his ultimatum, there was extreme confidence and momentum for the inevitable upcoming Iraq war.
But US forces, known as Blue Team, lost in Millennium Challenge.
Before the war game began, William Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command was quoted as saying that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than "the key to military transformation" and "This is free play. The OPFOR has the ability to win here." The commander of Red Team, the "unnamed" middle east state, was retired Marine Corps general Paul Van Riper, who had served in Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm. Riper went decidedly low tech to stress the large, expensive military system the US had built and was testing.
When games began, Riper attacked first, using small boats and planes (very many of them civilian), which he'd placed circling in the Gulf. Riper used coded messages broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer, as well as motorcycle messengers to transmit orders. There were no high-tech communications for the US to intercept. He ordered unanticipated chemical attacks. He also ordered al-Qaida-style suicide attacks by the small boats and planes, and Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles, which sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. Altogether, sixteen ships were sunk. In the first day Red Team had essentially defeated Blue Team.
Command decided to restart the game, they raised the fleet. But this time the game would be played with rules. Riper was told to move forces out of the way of invading Blue Team, and that certain attack methods could not be used. He says he was even told to reveal the position of Red Team units. His subordinates received and followed countermanding orders from the exercise director. This did not sit well with Riper, who quit the game after four days. "Nothing was learned from this," he says. "A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future." And, "A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,' And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Center... but nobody seemed interested." Army Times reported him as saying, "There's very little intellectual activity," he said about Joint Forces Command, "What happens is a number of people are put into a room, given some sort of a slogan and told to write to the slogan. That’s not the way to generate new ideas."
The military, in the face of scrutiny by the press, changed the goals of the war game. What began as "free play", ended up being called an "experiment" of unifying forces and testing concepts.
The reality of war is never expeditious or clear cut. US forces did quickly defeat organized Iraqi government forces, but now, more than a year in, still face the kind of unorthodox strategies from opponents that Riper proved could be so effective. Fighting house-to-house, unsure whether civilians will turn against you, fighting bands of insurgents, huge cultural differences, booby-traps and bombings, low-tech guerilla warfare methods, suicide attacks and deeply ingrained religious fundamentalism all show that Riper's win should've been a lesson of what to prepare for.
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related links
-- Wolfowitz: U.S. underestimated Iraqi enemy (05-18-04)
-- Remember Millenium Challenge?
-- Wake-up call
-- How Do the Pentagon's "War Games" Work?
-- War game was fixed to ensure American victory, claims general
-- Millennium Challenge chief defends exercise’s integrity
-- War game outcome was no done deal, DoD officials say
-- Joint war game’s mission: Total domination
-- Ex-General: War Game Rigged
-- General says Millennium Challenge 02 'was almost entirely scripted'
-- Iraq timeline
permagoof on 2004-05-12 wrote:
Good book I read recently about the German invasion of France in 1940 attributes the German victory to superior wargaming prior to the invasion.
It was German General Staff doctrine to assign the strongest commander to run the enemy side in a wargame. They did this, and the fellow went off and learned all he could about French doctrine, read French newspapers, learned not only how their military would fight, but WHY they would fight -- what they considered important to defend, what not, etc. These things were quite different from what the Germans initially assumed; they assumed that the French would prioritize the way Germans would prioritize.
In the ensuing wargame, the French kicked the Germans back across the Rhine with heavy losses. Rather than change the rules so that the results fit their parochial expectations, the German staff studied their defeat and altered the plan accordingly. The resulting plan was quite different from the first one and based on entirely different assumptions. They gamed this out too, several times, tweaking and changing assumptions as they went.
In practice, the much-revised plan worked to perfection, defeating France even faster than the best projections had anticipated.
I find this interesting given the stereotype of Germans as rigid and doctrinaire. One of the hallmarks of the WW II era German army was its flexibility, it's ability to change plans on the fly and to always question orthodoxy if it wasn't producing desired results. Seems like the modern U.S. Army could learn something from this.