Ever since the exercise was done, the Millennium Challenge 2002 has been always brought out as an example of the US military/government ignoring any results that contradict their own set-in-stone doctrines and as an example of a significantly smaller military force destroying a much larger American naval force. On the Straight Dope itself I’ve seen it being used regularly over the years to counter ideas that the US Navy can easily destroy the North Korean or Iranian navies. In addition I’m seeing it a lot on twitter right now (for obvious reasons) as basically the be-all end-all argument against US military intervention in Iran.
However over the years I’ve heard a few contradictory statements about the MC2002 that claim the results gotten were actually achieved via cheating. Opposing force commander General Van Riper knowingly used the American invaders tactics against them to win, but it wasn’t to “teach them a lesson” but rather because Van Riper thought the whole thing was a sham to begin with and decided to just do whatever he wanted to win. So the often vaunted “motorcycle messengers to avoid American eavesdropping” delivered their orders impossibly fast, the swarm of cruise missile boats that destroyed the initial American naval forces were fired from small civilian craft that were much to small to actually fire cruise missiles, and the civilian suicide boats that were used to finish off the remains of the fleet were never suppose to have been used in the first place because the American computer systems were explicitly not allowed to fire on them at all.
So did Van Riper actually cheat to gain his desired results? Regardless of lessons learned overall, I’m curious if this really was basically one side entering GOD MODE in an RTS game.
Well, it’s certainly possible to cheat in a war game. It’s obviously not “cheating” in a real-life war to use guys on motorcycles to deliver messages, so in a war game it’s not “cheating” to say “Yeah, our guys don’t use radio [that the U.S. can intercept], we use couriers on motorcycles”. However, if you take advantage of a quirk in the mechanics of the game you are playing–that is, of the simulation–so that your “motorcycle courier” messages arrive as quickly as speed-of-light radio transmissions, then, yeah, that’s “cheating” at the game/simulation, and the “Blue” team could rightfully call bullshit.
I want to stress that I personally have no idea if the very popular Internet story is true (“General Van Riper [who has a very badass name] made the Pentagon brass look like idiots! Our military is hidebound and doomed–DOOMED!–in an actual war!”). OR if the “Well, actually…” revisionist story is true (“Van Riper basically enabled ‘God Mode’ on the simulation, just like Captain Kirk in the Kobayashi Maru test. Unless you are a very devout Shi’ite, though, you presumably don’t believe the Iranians could actually enable ‘God Mode’ in a real war”).
I’m just pointing out what the OP’s question is actually about. (And would kind of like to know the answer myself.)
Yes, I’m curious if the MC2002 is basically like the Stanford prison experiment, where the popular idea of it being a legitimate exercise is actually completely wrong.
If Van Riper was deliberately breaking the system up nobody really learns anything, especially since this is basically the bedrock of the whole “This is how North Korea can sink the entire US fleet!” like I’ve seen posted on SDMB in the past.
My first thought is, OK, in the real world you don’t load large amounts of ordinance on dozens or hundreds of small pleasure craft without spy satellites or humint sources finding out. Since this is a computer simulation, there’s bound to be room for shenanigans like saying “Surprise! Those boats were bombs after all!”
Interestingly, the 750 page USJFC report about the exercise is online. Far from being “swept under the rug,” they discuss this exact incident on page 59 of the report (page 110 of the PDF). To summarize a few points –
– there was an undue time lag in the intelligence response due to the experiment execution
– the command to attack was unrealistic given the method of delivery and the position of JTF ships, and
– the attrition rate of the ships was overcalculated by the simulation
After deliberation, the JETF allowed the surprise attack to stand, but simply adjusted the number of ships lost in blue force’s favor.
I think reading through the report you can see that the emphasis of the exercise from the USJFC’s perspective was to test communications between units/branches and mission response, not to prove that we could beat Iran/Iraq in a ground war. Gen Van Riper seems to have a chip on his shoulder in those interviews, admitting to taking his ball and going home when he didn’t feel that his brilliant tactics were being rewarded enough.
Wouldn’t the Navy actually have an interest in losing such a game? They want more government funding, don’t they? What’s the point then of showing: “Yeah, we’re good enough!”?
Game balance is hard. Thinking through the unintended consequences of rule combinations is hard. If you let someone loose in a complicated, rule-heavy game and they’re of a mind to munchkin, they’re gonna find some way to minimax the Hell out of some aspect of the game and score a win according to the combination of rules they’ve parsed out and Frankensteined together into a win condition.
In other words, rules have loopholes unless the people making those rules are very, very good, and have done a lot of playtesting, and people who don’t care about realism can exploit those loopholes to get some condition which technically qualifies as a “win” unless and until those loopholes get patched. This says very little about reality and a lot about the intricate details of whatever game the “winner” ran wild on.
War games are meant to be simulations, which means rule loopholes are meaningless unless you can tie them back to some aspect of reality. OK, you’re using minarets to be your radio. Does the game model how sound behaves? Or does it assume your computerized flotilla has perfect hearing at infinite range? Your pleasure craft are suddenly mounting anti-ship missiles. Do they have speed and maneuverability penalties attached to carrying a big load they weren’t designed for? Do they have accuracy penalties attached to not having targeting systems? Or are your yachts now equivalent to guided missile frigates because the rules neglected to say they weren’t?
The non-cynical answer is that the Navy crews and equipment aren’t being tested in these games, as evidenced by the fact the sunk flotilla was all a digital simulation. What’s being tested is the command structure, the lines of communication, the overall organization of the joint fighting team, etc. An action item from a loss might be something like, “Airborne intel was aware of a threat to Navy assets but was too slow to relay that message to the ship commanders because they didn’t have a direct line of communication, instead of they had to relay through multiple command centers. Recommend allowing ABMs to communicate directly with vessels.” Which might mean more money but most likely just means a minor improvement to the way joint forces interact.
The cynical answer is that if the Navy wants to trick congress out of more funds they’d pick very specific ways to lose, like in a way where the only fix would be high tech stealth destroyers with on-board espresso machines.
Here is the deal.
You get some bright young colonel and you make him the North Korean, Iranian, Nazi commander. He goes into another room and dreams up some evil stuff. In the main room, the Blue Force people roll out their best war plans.
The enemy attacks! He does something really clever. He busts through the lines! He is approaching Cleveland!
Then they reset the game. Now the Blue Force gets a couple of free moves before the game starts again.
Then the colonel strikes a massive counter-stroke. The Blue Force flees.
Then they reset the game again. Now to you this looks like cheating. It is not. In the first go the Blue Force learned some important lessons. The same in the second round and so on. The object of a war game is not let the Blue Force (or the enemy) win. The object is to learn stuff. We do that by making the Blue Force fail time and time again.
This is, indeed, very cynical, but as much as the Navy (or any military branch!) would love new shiny tools to play with, I still think they care more about their paychecks. If something doesn’t work as expected: educate the personnel! (Guess who does the instruction, and gets paid for it?).
And the newly “educated” officers will certainly get an advance in the payroll…!
(I’m not specific about the country – I guess this is how it goes down mostly everywhere, not only in the US)
Pretty much the same way. Most militaries run the same way in much the way that jet fighters (specifically air superiority fighters) look similar. There’s only a few ways to effectively manage and use military assets, the hard part is knowing which tactics are most effective for a given response to a force. To stay in the Western world for a second, this is why Exercises like the Air Force Flags and the large Army exercises occur. It enables you to run various scenarios and see what works and what doesn’t without the cost of attrition.
Yes, yes, yes! The term “war game” is thoroughly misleading in this context. Many people hear “war game” and think it is like a video game, sort of like how in Super Bowl pre-game shows there’s some famous people playing Madden 2020 or whatever with the two teams, and if one team beats the other it has some vague informing function as to which team has the superiors players and playbook and therefore might be expected to win.
War games as used by the military have many different purposes, depending on how and why they are being used, but predicting the winner of a future conflict isn’t really the point – but that’s the headline that gets people’s attention.
War games can be anything from scripted scenarios intended for leadership development (“When I was presented with this problem, I didn’t think about how it related to this issue issue… so if I’m ever in this position again, I know to think about it!”) to testing how information moves through actual organizations (which seems closer to what happened in this case) to seeing if some new technological capability changes the way we fight (if we had next-generation stealth technology, does that change how an air war might play out?).
To extend the football metaphor further, think about preseason games: the coaches aren’t playing to figure out whether they can beat the Patriots in the AFC divisional championship six months from now. They are playing to figure out which players they need to keep and which to cut in order to put their best team on the field in three weeks.
So whether or not there was cheating, or what the outcome was, is really not the point at all.
In other words, the question isn’t really “can the enemy use coded messages in the call to prayer to defeat us?”. It’s “How will our troops respond if the enemy comes up with some way of communicating that we aren’t eavesdropping on?”. Because we don’t know what ways of communicating they’re going to come up with, and it’s quite likely that someone, somewhere, will find some way to surprise us.
I think the actual situation is muddied by the interests of the varied sides - some of what Van Riper did was ‘metagaming’, taking advantage of the limits of the operation, and some of it exposed real weaknesses, but not to the extent that ‘legend’ seems to have it. This article appears to be a pretty balanced overview of the situation: Naval Gazing Main/Millennium Challenge 2002
If the intent is to preserve your career, you don’t want “I commanded these forces in a wargame and got my ass kicked.” You want “I commanded these forces in a wargame and kicked the other guy’s ass.” That’s plenty of incentive to manipulate results right there.
A relevant example from a science fiction novel I won’t name (to avoid spoilers - people who have read the book will know which one I mean): A space navy had a high officer who was convinced that new technologies could upend the accepted wisdom on fleet tactics, and pressured the navy to refit a small vessel with a very high powered close range weapon (picture a PT boat with a gigawatt laser). During the first war game during which this small vessel was deployed (as part of a larger fleet), the rest of its fleet retreated when the “enemy fleet” approached, but the small vessel lagged behind, ignored by the “enemy” - until it fired its super weapon destroying the enemy flagship and fleeing - which allowed the blue force to return and wipe the enemy out (simulated, of course).
During all subsequent war games in that sent, any ship that looked remotely like it was a superpowered PT boat was destroyed immediately.
Lessons learned
don’t trust a harmless-appearing vessel
A new tactic will work by surprise only once - it better have some other advantages for the following encounters
Note: Later in the book the new weapon saves the day in a real encounter - but the ship would probably not have lost so many crew if its original standard weaponry had not been removed to allow space for the new weapon.
That’s what war games are for - to explore the effects of new weapons and tactics, and to train people so they can learn from mistakes in a non-fatal manner. A single devastating defeat in a war game isn’t a condemnation of the losers or a commendation for the winners - it’s an opportunity for both to learn.