Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships.
An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20, service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.
At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it? After the wargame was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory.
Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore. Handout Getty Images. In , the Pentagon ran a free-form exercise code-named Millennium Challenge. The exercise was designed to test U. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Jacob Wilson. Photo by Senior Airman Ericka Engblom. AFP Getty Images. Japanese hubris during prewar exercises created a false sense of superiority over potential adversaries--particularly the U.
Historical Getty Images. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. This entry was posted in Alignment , Ideation and tagged computer wargame , government , military , military wargame , millennium challenge , simulation.
Bookmark the permalink. Then again, that's not always a bad thing: It's good to fail completely and utterly in training because you can't snap your fingers and refloat a destroyer in real life. Indeed, the MC leadership replayed the scenario and dispensed with the speedboats, not because Blue Team 'knew' the Reds were coming, but because they treated suicide bombing by boat as a credible threat and were appropriately prepared.
This was the whole point of the war game in the first place; this is why you train. But the most embarrassing element of MC wasn't the Blue Team's failure, but the questionable constraints on Red Team.
The overseers of MC told Van Riper he wasn't allowed to shoot down the V Osprey tiltrotor aircraft or Cs incoming with ground forces; he was told their offensive weapons needed to be out in the open to be sighted and destroyed by offensive forces, and they were directed to not use chemical warfare against paratroopers dropping in.
In essence, Red Team was not allowed to do anything which would cause the Blues to lose so embarrassingly again. For the cynic or the veteran who has spent a lot of time around U. However, in war games, military planners must establish constraints due to unavoidable obstacles like time, environment, or even just regular shipping traffic. After all, you aren't conducting real combat operations, and no one wants to delay a cargo ship laden with only the finest of imported spatulas.
Consider that chemical weapons the whole excuse for an Iraq invasion in the first place were removed entirely from the equation. General William Kernan, commander at the time of the U. Joint Forces Command, explained in a interview that chemical weapons were banned during airborne operations because his forces a 36 hour window to do those operations. If there was a threat of chemical weapons being used on a drop zone, friendly forces would find somewhere else to land, but for the sake of conducting war games within the timetable and areas given, restrictions must be made or you end up wasting the time of the 82nd Airborne who came all this way to jump out of an airplane.
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