War games rigged? General says Millennium Challenge 02 ‘was almost entirely scripted’, By Sean D. Naylor in the Army Times (16 August 2002).
Vignettes like this illustrate the structural ills of our defense apparatus better than any theoretical analysis can.
The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game’s Opposing Force. …
What happened? The set up…
The Defense Department spent $250 million over the last two years to stage Millennium Challenge 02, a three-week, all-service exercise that concluded Aug. 15. The experiment involved 13,500 participants waging mock war in 17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites.
Such games, staged at vast cost, are powerful tools — a great competitive edge of conventional military forces. But only when conducted by officers with the courage to subject their doctrines to a fair test, in organizations that allow BOTH innovation and failure during testing without risk to the careers of the innovators.
Gen. William “Buck” Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command, told Pentagon reporters July 18 that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than “the key to military transformation.” Central to the success of the war game, Kernan said, was that the U.S. force (or Blue Force) would be fighting a determined and relatively unconstrained Opposing Force (otherwise known as the OPFOR or Red Force). “This is free play,” he said. “The OPFOR has the ability to win here.”
Sounds good so far…
“Not so,” Van Riper told Army Times. “Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the Joint Forces commander advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end.” … Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed the Opposing Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units, he said
“We were directed … to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land,” he said. “We were simply directed to turn [the air-defense systems] off or move them. … So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be.” …
{General Ripper quit}, he said, to avoid presenting one of his Opposing Force subordinates with a moral dilemma. That subordinate was retired Army Col. George Utter, a full-time Joint Forces Command employee who, as the Opposing Force chief of staff, was responsible for taking Van Riper’s commands and making them happen in the simulation. But several days into the exercise, Van Riper realized his orders weren’t being followed.
“I was giving him directions on how I thought the OPFOR ought to perform, and those directions were being countermanded by the exercise director,” Van Riper said. The exercise director was Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Smith, Utter’s real-life boss at Joint Forces Command.
Matters came to a head July 29. “That morning I’d given my guidance for what was to happen, and I found that [Utter] had assembled the staff and was giving them a different set [of instructions] based on the exercise director’s instructions to him.”
This kind of exercise might be worse than none at all, by giving false conclusions which become war-fighting doctrines. Like sending new fighter aircraft into combat without testing, the cost of failure increases. From a larger perspective, it short-circuits the testing process, potentially a powerful tool to drive innovation. Perhaps worst of all, incidents like this likely demoralize innovators.
Another perspective: could we have better spent this money?
The Defense Department spent $250 million over the last two years to stage Millennium Challenge 02, a three-week, all-service exercise that concluded Aug. 15. The experiment involved 13,500 participants waging mock war in 17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites.
What could we have done with that $250 million to prepare for other threats? We know so little about Global Warming and Peak Oil, despite the reams of reports published about both. For $250m we could have a detailed audit of the major global climate models, “third party” reviews by appropriate experts that could settle this aspect of the debate. As for Peak Oil, most of what we know results from inspired guessing and calculations done on the back of envelopes. For $250m we could have experts do data collection (i.e., buying private databases) and modeling that would tell us much more than we know today — and prepare a foundation on which to build a reliable national energy policy.
Updates
A follow-up article at the Army Times: “Millennium Challenge chief defends exercise’s integrity.”
Zenpundit’s note on this series is (as usual) worth a look. Esp. his comments on the nature and function of gaming, both military and in general.
For More Information
Hat tip to Abu Muqawama, whose article sparked this!
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.Also see these posts for more about this topic…
- Lessons Learned from the American Expedition to Iraq (note section about America’s senior generals)
- War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”
- Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?
- The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations
- During Millenium Challenge 2002, by Ed Beakley (Project White Horse blog), posted at the DNI blog
- What we should have learned from MC02, by Dag von Lubitz, posted at the DNI blog