In Millennium Challenge 2002, DOD wrote out a check for a $250 million war game to test the new "data-linked U.S. forces" aka network-centric warfare— Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, was the CG of the bad guys aka the non-data linked troops. In the first days of the game battle, the Riper smoked the good guys and the "superior" tech got a new bunghole using off the shelf "unconventional" methods that sank 16 good guy ships.
In any other field, these results would have the pause to consider the implications for the future. In our military, these results only get in the ways of facts aka the good guys-U.S. must, by definition--Win.
So what happened? Why did tech lose? Why did robust creative,unappreciated, thinking win?
Critiquing a war game NOVA INTERVIEW pbs
NOVA: The U.S. military has learned some of its techniques in war games like Millennium Challenge 2002. What is the overall purpose of a war game?
Van Riper: War games are to learn a number of different things. Depending how they're designed, you could learn about a particular piece of equipment. You could learn about a new type of doctrine, the style that you want to incorporate some tactic or technique or procedure. Or you could have a new operating concept, a brand new idea of how you wanted to fight in the future. So war games can be for experimenting with new ideas, or they can be practicing current ideas to become more proficient or to gain greater insight into those ideas.
NOVA: What was your experience with Millennium Challenge?
Van Riper: I had a great deal of concern about the ideas that they were experimenting with in this particular exercise. I say that because I didn't think the ideas were intellectually worthy of being tested for that sort of money. Unfortunately, from where I sat, and I think I had a pretty good view, these ideas were never truly tested. Yet the conclusion drawn at the end of the exercise was that they had been and that they were worthy of adoption by our operating forces. I think they're very shallow. They are fundamentally flawed. They have no true intellectual content. And yet they're being, in my view, foisted on our operational commanders.
I believe there were lessons that could have been learned from Millennium Challenge and applied in Iraq that weren't. Some of them were lessons that in the actual fighting might not have been lessons we needed; we learned them but didn't need to use them. Others we could have used, particularly, for example, in what would be called the low-intensity phase. That's the phase of insurgency that we found ourselves in after the supposed end of major combat operations. There were some things we saw but not in finite detail in Millennium Challenge that might have helped if we'd have thought a little bit more about them before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
NOVA: Was the game rigged?
Van Riper: There were accusations that Millennium Challenge was rigged. I can tell you it was not. It started out as a free-play exercise, in which both Red and Blue had the opportunity to win the game. However, about the third or fourth day, when the concepts that the command was testing failed to live up to their expectations, the command then began to script the exercise in order to prove these concepts.
This was my critical complaint. You might say, "Well, why didn't these concepts live up to the expectations?" I think they were fundamentally flawed in that they leaned heavily on technology. They leaned heavily on systems analysis of decision-making.
NOVA: So do you think Millennium Challenge 2002 was a waste?
Van Riper: I'm angered that, in a sense, $250 million was wasted. But I'm even more angry that an idea that has never been truly validated, that never really went through the crucible of a real experiment, is being exported to our operational forces to use.
What I saw in this particular exercise and the results from it were very similar to what I saw as a young second lieutenant back in the 1960s, when we were taught the systems engineering techniques that Mr. [Robert] McNamara [Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson] had implemented in the American military. We took those systems, which had good if not great utility in the acquisition of weapon systems, to the battlefield, where they were totally inappropriate. The computers in Saigon said we were winning the war, while out there in the rice paddies we knew damn well we weren't winning the war. That's where we went astray, and I see these new concepts potentially being equally as ill-informed and equally dangerous.
NOVA: Part of your victory in Millennium Challenge was based on your knowledge that the U.S. had a preemptive doctrine. How did you take advantage of that?
Van Riper: My belief at the outset of Millennium Challenge was that Blue believed it had a monopoly on preemption, and it would strike first. And, of course, in any war game I was familiar with up to that point, that had never been the case. The U.S. had only gone to war as a result of some aggression by an enemy, and so always had to react. Now that it was announced policy that we reserved the right to do that, the Blue force was going to take full advantage of it and plan to strike first.
“If it was going to be a fight, I was going to get in the first blow.”
So I simply stepped back and said, "What advantage is there for Red to wait for Blue to strike?" There was none. And that lead to the natural conclusion that if they're coming, and we can't persuade them not to diplomatically, then we will strike.
As I looked at an ultimatum that gave me less than 24 hours to respond to what literally was a surrender document, it was clear to me that there was no advantage in any of this diplomacy. I was very surprised that the Joint Forces Command personnel who had argued for using all of the elements of national power—the economic, the diplomatic, the political information—in some sort of coherent fashion, really came at Red with a blunt military instrument. So it was clear to me that this was not going to be negotiated, this was going to be a fight. And if it was going to be a fight, I was going to get in the first blow.
No surrender
NOVA: How could the military have planned for Operation Iraqi Freedom differently?
Van Riper: I have not been surprised by the things that have occurred since late spring, early summer in Iraq. It's not because I have any unique insights or had a premonition or understood it better. But I think I'm an astute student of history, and if you look at history and understand how people resist, how wars play out, this is not an unusual occurrence.
If you have a war that doesn't come to a very definitive conclusion, there are people who don't believe they've been defeated. One thing that we saw in this war, there was no surrender. There was no point in time where someone in authority said, "The government of Iraq surrenders to the Coalition forces."
NOVA: There is the famous question of "boots on the ground"—the size of the force that captured Baghdad. Was the small force size a vindication of transformational concepts?
Van Riper: There were sufficient forces to capture Baghdad. But what we call follow-up forces—exploitation forces and reserves—were not available. Imagine on the day that we seized Baghdad, if we had follow-up armed forces, exploitation forces, continue up into what we now know as the Sunni Triangle, go into Tikrit, instead of having that long lag time. If there had been a lot of so-called boots on the ground at the beginning, you might have convinced a lot of people that the war was over at that time. If you'd have thought about how you surrounded Baghdad, perhaps you could have caught some of these officials and had somebody who could surrender to you. Other than the actual attack on Baghdad, it was not very well thought through. 
