People have to remember that in some cases, the purpose of war games is to practice procedures for certain situations. So the war game will be scripted so the situation arises. The red force can go off-script and do something the blue force didn’t expect. That doesn’t mean the red force won. The red force just screwed up the purpose of the exercise.
Here’s a sports analogy. Let’s say I’m the general manager of a baseball team and I’m thinking about moving one of my players, Smith, from center field to left field. So I want him to get some practice in this new position.
So I tell Jones to pick up a bat and start hitting balls out to left field. Jones, however, decides that this is a dumb idea. That’s hitting the ball to where Smith is and it means Smith will be able to catch them. Instead, Jones decides to hit balls to right field where there’s no outfielder. By doing so, Jones does much better. The GM yells at Jones and tells him to knock it off and hit the balls into the area where Smith is.
Later on, Jones talks to a reporter and tells how he had a great strategy for hitting balls but he was told he had to follow some artificial rules that prevented it from working. The only reason he did poorly was because the GM forced him to follow some rules that made him play a bad strategy. Jones said that in a real game he would never intentionally hit balls towards an outfielder so why should he do it in practice?
This may be the situation with Millennium Challenge 2002. The purpose of the exercise may have been to test out how some military units performed under a given set of circumstances. General Van Riper misunderstood his role and thought he was supposed to “win” rather than to present a specific form of attack. When he did this, he was told to stop going off script and to follow a given set of rules defining how he was supposed to attack.
Of course, it’s also possible that he was specifically told to go off script, to test the other side’s readiness in case “the script” was leaked to them somehow.
It also helps that the commanding officer for that battle was a tactical genius who could’ve figured out a way to take down a ship of the line with a slingshot. Oh, yeah, and who also had about ten meters of ceramsteel plot armor.
$250 million dollars was spent on this and it was ‘reset’ when one man used tactics the planners did not think of. It’s foolhardy to dismiss Riper’s complaints. If the model was wrong, the US military is foolish in either wasting funds or believing they know truly with what they’re dealing with.
I do not think it is any way unbelievable that a low tech force with surprise and ingenuity can be a threat to our forces. I hope we are looking into it, despite what looks like embarrassed brass.
This is incorrect. You’re giving a computer “game” way too much credit for realism, when it consisted of nothing but little sprites on a screen. The “ships” didn’t know they were being attacked until the computer said they were sunk. All the humans on the other end saw were objects depicting “civilian” boats and aircraft. In reality, the minute those vessels attacked, the personnel on the ships would have identified the threat. All necessary stimuli, such as actual missiles and rockets coming from those vessels, are absent in the simulation. The program we use now, almost 20 years later, doesn’t simulate this well. I can’t imagine how much less so it would have been during the Millennium Challenge. Most likely, the ships were all floating fine one minute, and the next second the computer said they were all destroyed. Riper is giving himself way too much credit. He claims that he was able to coordinate the attack using the call for prayer? How would someone hear this in an airplane? This whole thing about his “low tech” communication plan, was just his excuse for why he wasn’t using the established coms plan for the simulation. It’s not like the computer actually had a way to simulate any of this. He got called out for not using the coms plan, and his excuse was “I used motorcylce messengers and had secret messages in the call for prayer, so nyah nyah”. It’s like kids playing war in the street arguing back and forth. “I got you!”
“No you didn’t!”
“Yea huh!”
“Nu ugh. And besides, I have special armor. So there!!”
I’ve watched simulations were everyone is playing by the rules, and still it’s hard to determine what exactly is going on. Sometimes the little sprites representing your personnel and vehicles just start blowing up and dying, without any determinable cause. In reality, you would know if you were taking indirect fire, or if a sniper was shooting you, or if there was a dismounted element attacking you. It’s not always easy to tell in the computer environment. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for those ships, to start sinking when there was no enemy for miles and miles. “Why the hell are the ships blowing up? What’s wrong with this computer?”
“I don’t know, I’ll look into it…” “Okay, I just got a call from EXCON and they said that there were missiles in all of those civilian planes, and that’s why you’re dead”
“That’s bullshit!!”
“Yea, that’s what they said”
“They all attacked at once! That would require some kind of coordination. This guy is cheating. Just because he’s sitting in the same room with all of the pucksters* doesn’t mean he’s allowed to communicate with them orally instead of using the radios like he’s supposed to”
“He says he doesn’t need to use the radios because he used motorcycles”
“Motorcycles? Now he’s just making shit up.”
“Yea. He obviously has an axe to grind”
“Well how did the motorcycles communicate with the boats and planes?”
“He said he used the call for prayer”
“That’s stupid”
“Yup. Don’t worry, EXON says they are going to refloat most of us and continue the mission”
“Okay. It’s still bullshit.”
It’s not that the “man used tactics the planners did not think of”. The ideas were not revolutionary. It’s that the man went outside the scope of the training simulation. Every training exercise has established goals and training objectives. None of these objectives were served by this guy doing his own thing just to make a point. The point didn’t need to be made to begin with. And regardless, this exercise was not the avenue for making those points. If you look at the link provided upthread, none of the training objectives had anything to do with combating “motorcycle messengers” or other unconventional communication methods. Not did it have to do with responding to a massed attack from civilian flagged ships and airplanes.
They chose the wrong person to lead the OPFOR in this exercise. Personally, I don’t understand why they used a nonmilitary person (he was retired) to begin with.
*pucksters are the humans sitting at the computer terminals controlling the simulated units
I have experience with these types of training exercises both as a participant, as an observer/coach, and as a controller. I currently work at the largest NATO training facility in Europe. I don’t know what kind of IS or computer simulation environment that had for Millennium Challenge, but seeing as it was two decades ago, I think it was not as advanced as what we currently have. And even our current system cannot replicate “hidden messages in the call for prayer”. It isn’t designed to allow civilian aircraft to fire large missiles either, but I’ve seen enough exploits and cheats to suspect someone could probably pull that off somehow. Most likely, someone was just sitting at the master terminal killing off the fleet with simple mouse clicks and using all of these bullshit scenarios like “armed” civilian planes and “motorcycle messengers” as his justification for cheating.
Riper somehow took a quarter billion dollar joint service training exercise consisting of thousands of service men and women across all branches of the military and made it all about himself. That’s something. He was actually a very small part of this whole thing, but he acts like this was all a test of his skill as a commander. It wasn’t.
So, they developed an entire training exercise intended to test the ruggedness, the reliability, the ease of maintenance in a tactical environment, the ability of end users to change the tires in the field and while on missions, and whatever other logistical training objectives they might deem necessary.
So they put together this huge, complicated training scenario that’s going to put these tires through a gauntlet of tests. Of little importance is control of the opposing force, so they get some retired general to be in charge of the “enemy” force. But they don’t realize that this guy is old school and doesn’t like technology. In fact, he hates motorized and mechanized infantry. He thinks that all soldiers should walk everywhere because vehicles can break down, but feet are reliable. He’s going to prove this point to everyone. So during the scenario, he puts all of his forces in swamps, dense vegitation and other places that wheeled vehicles can’t travel. So, these wheels can’t even be tested, since the vehicles cannot get to the enemy locations.
The general thinks he’s proved a point. He goes on to write a book about how his genius command ability humiliated the military and he should have “won” the exercise, but the military forced him to put his troops where they could be easily reached by the vehicles. So unfair! He complains to everyone who will listen. He says we need to stop being so reliant on vehicles and new tire technology because an enemy on foot will be able to go into places where the vehicles can’t. He thinks he was treated unfairly and he thinks his brilliance is unappreciated.
But the training exercise had specific things that needed to be tested, and they all revolved (no pun intended) around this new tire technology. The fact that wheeled vehicles can’t go everywhere is not a revolutionary (shit! no pun intended again) idea. These facts are not “unbelievable”. They are well known, but they’re not relevant to this particular exercise.
If Millennium Challenge wanted to test some new concepts and technologies, that’s not going to benefit from an OPFOR using smoke signals and messengers. That would be like trying to test advanced body armor, and the enemy shows up with swords. Yes, in fact a sword can penetrate body armor. Bullet resistant vests are not necessarily stab resistant. So, new technology can be appear to be bested by old technology. But that isn’t helping anything. That’s just axe grinding. It certainly doesn’t prove that soldiers shouldn’t have vests because they would be useless in old-style warfare. I bet Riper would have complained that the EXCON took away his swords and forced him to use guns in order to ensure a US victory. :rolleyes:
In that case, Riper highlighted just how woefully inadequate the systems used to produce the simulations were. Which was also a lesson which needed to be learned.