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.