Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States armed forces in mid-2002, likely the largest such exercise in history. The exercise … cost $250 million, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military “transformation”—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more powerful weaponry and tactics.
The problem is that after re-floating the ships, restrictions were placed on the red team to prevent them from using strategies that the US forces couldn't handle
If you have a country to lose, you wouldn't dare do anything like that. That's why the biggest attack on the U.S. in recent history was by a non-state actor (granted, with state backing from the Taliban) obsessed with achieving martyrdom.
Having read the account, I think it makes a big difference that this was a large-scale, "live" training exercise rather than a tabletop kriegsspiel.
Quite simply, part of the purpose of a live exercise is to let troops rehearse under conditions similar to combat. Which means that "sunken" ships can be reactivated just to give their crews a chance to do stuff.
Planners can learn from the exercise and still let "dead" forces get some training.
I agree wholly with the criticism. Many wargames are scripted to ensure a blue win, either directly scripted or with unrealistic rules and initial assumptions that forces Red to play "stupid". And when that fails, there's always "cheating", as illustrated. The reasons are pretty much as Robin puts out; to protect/affirm the orthodoxy and its advocates. Showing the orthodoxy to be flawed is a seriously career-shortening move.
To be fair, sometimes scripting is permissable; perhaps one wishes to test a concept or technology in isolation, or see how well procedures and a team work. But a lot of the time it is quite inappropriate to the test. The UK only even started "red teaming" parts of its COEIAs in recent years, and still changes the analysis set-up if they come back with the wrong answer...
As others have posted, there are severe limits to how a war can be simulated effectively, so the best idea might actually be to use it instill confidence in the troops, because troop morale is a really powerful factor in warfare.
Also, if the United States, or any other country, developed a repeatable method for actually finding out how wars would go, wouldn't that method be ultimately copied by potential violent enemies? The study of military history includes as a major sub-field the question of how much of an overlap there was at a given moment in time between the class defined as "military insiders" and the class defined as those who understood the range of potential threats (i.e. competent war-gamers)., That overlap generally gets larger (due to the aggregate of individual motivations of potential new "miliitary insiders" and their supporters) when a oountry or civilization feels more threatened, and smaller when a country feels reasonably secure in the flow of time. Since the ability to feel threatened is a universal trait, consistent comparative advantage as to the quantiity of overlap is difficult. Thus fake war game planning is not so much (at least if we limit ourselves to wars between humans)a sign of a dysfunctional military as a sign of an overall low feeling of apprehension as to the particular threats envisioned by the wargaming country.
From most autobiographies I've read, LTs who bend the rules are congratulated. Of course, those are squad level exercises. But I've never read anything saying "and their career was over", usually the opposite, and usually when the exercise was designed for the squad to lose (like ambushes)
Link for the source, yours is broken? Drift by Rachel Maddow calls the us military out for a lot of things including suicide but I think most people agree its competent compared to the rest of the world. Britain is one of the only militaries other than the US/Mexico with troops currently dieing in large quantities to suicide and the wars themselves so its misleading compared to a lot of standing armies.
I think MW hits the nail on the head. The military has political and propaganda reasons to hide the failures of current policy. But the ugly lessons might have already been learned by the time they scuttled the simulation. I don't know from reading Robin's post whether the Navy privately altered its doctrine and planning after Van Riper schooled them. That seems to be the most important question. Maybe they didn't. But maybe they did.
I could also imagine that the Navy considered Van Riper to be an unrealistic opponent. Real world enemies might not be as clever or as well informed about the vulnerabilities of the US military. I don't think I see any kind of strategic genius in al quaeda, or Saddam's Iraq, or the Taliban. Yes, they caused us a lot of tactical problems. But the first two were easily defeated strategically, and while the last might end up winning, that's largely because there is nothing in Afganistan worth the investment that defeating them would require.
Apparently there is a lot of evidence to suggest that WWI started in large part because every European power's war game/pre-planned strategy (which was a relatively new concept) depended on being the first to mobilize their huge armies and get them to the front. This can be argued to explain why Austria-Hungary's beef with tiny Serbia over a political assasination somehow ended up in a war being fought across all of Euroe and the wider world.
While tactically true, these pre-WWI war games failed, I suppose, to take into account whether a strategy for avoiding war, or at least a wider war, was the best strategy.
It is depressing to think that the military can be just like any other huge organization when it comes to incompetence, cover-ups, and waste in resources, including lives. Empirically, however, there are certainly enough examples of just that happening. Not sure anything can really be done about it though.
That's a pretty remarkable document, Randaly. This is a particularly striking quote:
"Black Fleet’s land-based counterparts had anticipated a surprise landing rather than a Sunday-morning air assault, and had sent most of their 20,000 men to patrol Oahu’s coast. Caught unawares, their air stations claimed that the attack had been successful only because the raid had been launched at dawn on a Sunday, which placed it 'on the dirty side' of tactics."
I think you have a little confusion in the last point Robin. Your argument seems to be "When the costs of being wrong are potentially huge, we should expect more accurate planning." However there are a couple of points that would lead me to expect poor planning in the military.
The first is the separation of ownership and control. Generals may chose to ignore huge long term costs, after all they benefit now and the losers for poor choices are the enlisted men and the public. It's the same reason business executives may benefit themselves causing costs for their employees and stockholders.
The second is that there is mainly simulated feedback which can be faked. No real world feedback, which can not. If the US military has huge errors in its doctrine, these may never be revealed without a war, and a war that leads to the surprise sinking of aircraft carriers is dangerously close to going nuclear or bringing back strategic bombing. Businesses get real world feedback all the time. If there is bad doctrine, they can quickly observe losses of profits, which is tough to hide.
You don't have to use real artillery ammunition for reasons of ballistics - they could easily manufacture a ballistically similar inert round. You have to use real rounds because without an explosion you can't spot the rounds and judge your accuracy.
daedalus2u, a cold war is more profitable for the defense industry than a hot one. Most of the cost of wars like Iraq comes from "boots on the ground". And when Cheney was still with Halliburton, he was saying it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. The part of Halliburton which was taking military contracts is K.B.R, and it has spun off so Halliburton could focus on its core competencies (the stock price for both companies rose following the split).The Iraq war was very badly planned, but that's not an explanation for IEDs. They've been effective in Afghanistan & Chechnya as well.
Salem, I hadn't before heard that.
Ryan Cousineau, this didn't seem to be the case of simulating being "hard", but of the military deliberately limiting the game.
The problem is that after re-floating the ships, restrictions were placed on the red team to prevent them from using strategies that the US forces couldn't handle
If you have a country to lose, you wouldn't dare do anything like that. That's why the biggest attack on the U.S. in recent history was by a non-state actor (granted, with state backing from the Taliban) obsessed with achieving martyrdom.
Nor have I. For that matter, I haven't noticed any positive press in the U.S. about the British military either.
Having read the account, I think it makes a big difference that this was a large-scale, "live" training exercise rather than a tabletop kriegsspiel.
Quite simply, part of the purpose of a live exercise is to let troops rehearse under conditions similar to combat. Which means that "sunken" ships can be reactivated just to give their crews a chance to do stuff.
Planners can learn from the exercise and still let "dead" forces get some training.
I have personal expertise in this area.
I agree wholly with the criticism. Many wargames are scripted to ensure a blue win, either directly scripted or with unrealistic rules and initial assumptions that forces Red to play "stupid". And when that fails, there's always "cheating", as illustrated. The reasons are pretty much as Robin puts out; to protect/affirm the orthodoxy and its advocates. Showing the orthodoxy to be flawed is a seriously career-shortening move.
To be fair, sometimes scripting is permissable; perhaps one wishes to test a concept or technology in isolation, or see how well procedures and a team work. But a lot of the time it is quite inappropriate to the test. The UK only even started "red teaming" parts of its COEIAs in recent years, and still changes the analysis set-up if they come back with the wrong answer...
As others have posted, there are severe limits to how a war can be simulated effectively, so the best idea might actually be to use it instill confidence in the troops, because troop morale is a really powerful factor in warfare.
Also, if the United States, or any other country, developed a repeatable method for actually finding out how wars would go, wouldn't that method be ultimately copied by potential violent enemies? The study of military history includes as a major sub-field the question of how much of an overlap there was at a given moment in time between the class defined as "military insiders" and the class defined as those who understood the range of potential threats (i.e. competent war-gamers)., That overlap generally gets larger (due to the aggregate of individual motivations of potential new "miliitary insiders" and their supporters) when a oountry or civilization feels more threatened, and smaller when a country feels reasonably secure in the flow of time. Since the ability to feel threatened is a universal trait, consistent comparative advantage as to the quantiity of overlap is difficult. Thus fake war game planning is not so much (at least if we limit ourselves to wars between humans)a sign of a dysfunctional military as a sign of an overall low feeling of apprehension as to the particular threats envisioned by the wargaming country.
From most autobiographies I've read, LTs who bend the rules are congratulated. Of course, those are squad level exercises. But I've never read anything saying "and their career was over", usually the opposite, and usually when the exercise was designed for the squad to lose (like ambushes)
Link for the source, yours is broken? Drift by Rachel Maddow calls the us military out for a lot of things including suicide but I think most people agree its competent compared to the rest of the world. Britain is one of the only militaries other than the US/Mexico with troops currently dieing in large quantities to suicide and the wars themselves so its misleading compared to a lot of standing armies.
I think MW hits the nail on the head. The military has political and propaganda reasons to hide the failures of current policy. But the ugly lessons might have already been learned by the time they scuttled the simulation. I don't know from reading Robin's post whether the Navy privately altered its doctrine and planning after Van Riper schooled them. That seems to be the most important question. Maybe they didn't. But maybe they did.
I could also imagine that the Navy considered Van Riper to be an unrealistic opponent. Real world enemies might not be as clever or as well informed about the vulnerabilities of the US military. I don't think I see any kind of strategic genius in al quaeda, or Saddam's Iraq, or the Taliban. Yes, they caused us a lot of tactical problems. But the first two were easily defeated strategically, and while the last might end up winning, that's largely because there is nothing in Afganistan worth the investment that defeating them would require.
Any army that accuses its enemies of "cheating" or "fighting dirty" is probably losing.
Apparently there is a lot of evidence to suggest that WWI started in large part because every European power's war game/pre-planned strategy (which was a relatively new concept) depended on being the first to mobilize their huge armies and get them to the front. This can be argued to explain why Austria-Hungary's beef with tiny Serbia over a political assasination somehow ended up in a war being fought across all of Euroe and the wider world.
While tactically true, these pre-WWI war games failed, I suppose, to take into account whether a strategy for avoiding war, or at least a wider war, was the best strategy.
It is depressing to think that the military can be just like any other huge organization when it comes to incompetence, cover-ups, and waste in resources, including lives. Empirically, however, there are certainly enough examples of just that happening. Not sure anything can really be done about it though.
That's a pretty remarkable document, Randaly. This is a particularly striking quote:
"Black Fleet’s land-based counterparts had anticipated a surprise landing rather than a Sunday-morning air assault, and had sent most of their 20,000 men to patrol Oahu’s coast. Caught unawares, their air stations claimed that the attack had been successful only because the raid had been launched at dawn on a Sunday, which placed it 'on the dirty side' of tactics."
I think you have a little confusion in the last point Robin. Your argument seems to be "When the costs of being wrong are potentially huge, we should expect more accurate planning." However there are a couple of points that would lead me to expect poor planning in the military.
The first is the separation of ownership and control. Generals may chose to ignore huge long term costs, after all they benefit now and the losers for poor choices are the enlisted men and the public. It's the same reason business executives may benefit themselves causing costs for their employees and stockholders.
The second is that there is mainly simulated feedback which can be faked. No real world feedback, which can not. If the US military has huge errors in its doctrine, these may never be revealed without a war, and a war that leads to the surprise sinking of aircraft carriers is dangerously close to going nuclear or bringing back strategic bombing. Businesses get real world feedback all the time. If there is bad doctrine, they can quickly observe losses of profits, which is tough to hide.
You don't have to use real artillery ammunition for reasons of ballistics - they could easily manufacture a ballistically similar inert round. You have to use real rounds because without an explosion you can't spot the rounds and judge your accuracy.
Firepower, why "since the Truman '50s"?
daedalus2u, a cold war is more profitable for the defense industry than a hot one. Most of the cost of wars like Iraq comes from "boots on the ground". And when Cheney was still with Halliburton, he was saying it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. The part of Halliburton which was taking military contracts is K.B.R, and it has spun off so Halliburton could focus on its core competencies (the stock price for both companies rose following the split).The Iraq war was very badly planned, but that's not an explanation for IEDs. They've been effective in Afghanistan & Chechnya as well.
Salem, I hadn't before heard that.
Ryan Cousineau, this didn't seem to be the case of simulating being "hard", but of the military deliberately limiting the game.