"Nice to know things like that in advance."
"Tell me about it." He made a sour face. "It's important that you understand something here. This wasn't just posturing or saber-rattling — trying to be the big, tough kid on the block — and it wasn't intended to send a message to the Iraqi regime… at least, not solely. The commanding officer of the Joint Forces Command— under whose auspices the games were held — announced to the press before things got under way that the war games would test a whole series of new war-fighting techniques and concepts."
Stewart cocked his head to the side. "Like what? Nathan Bedford Forrest was supposed to have said the important thing in war was to get there 'fustest with the mostest,' or something of the sort. That's still pretty much what warfare comes down to."
"This is modern warfare, Captain Stewart. We're dealing with really key concepts here… like 'rapid decisive operations,' 'effects-based operations,' 'operational net assessments,' crap like that."
"Uh. Is this war-fighting, sir? Or marketing department buzz words like some major corporation?"
"Sometimes, Captain, it's damned hard to tell. In any case, at the conclusion of the operation, JOINT-FOR drafted a set of recommendations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisting that all points and concepts had been demonstrated successfully.
"That, Captain, is on the public record. Millennium Challenge was a huge success. We proved what we wanted to prove, and we've implemented key changes in our training, procurement, and war-fighting strategy based on that success."
"Uh-huh. Sounds good. What's the catch?"
"The catch is that it didn't happen the way we told the reporters, or the Joint Chiefs."
"Go on."
"The commander of Force Red was Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, an old-school Marine. They actually brought him out of retirement to play the role of the shrewd but crazy Middle Eastern dictator who headed up OPFOR's hypothetical country. Most of the details still aren't public. Some of the story, though, was leaked to the Army Times. Millennium Challenge was described as 'free play,' meaning both sides were unrestrained in their tactics, free to implement any strategy they pleased to secure victory. The emphasis, remember, was on a realistic analysis of a potential war in the Gulf. Force Blue was built around a standard U.S. naval carrier battle group. Force Red was much weaker, clearly inferior in strength and technology, with smaller vessels, including numerous civilian small craft and air assets. The sort of thing you'd be likely to find with a typical third world power in the region.
"General Van Riper protested the official assessment of the games. He called the new war-fighting techniques — the 'effects-based operations' and all the rest of that bullshit—'empty sloganeering.' And he should know. In the first three days of the 'war,' in simulation, General Van Riper and his vastly inferior Force Red managed to send most of the U.S. fleet — including one of our supercarriers — to the bottom."
"Jesus Christ!.. "
Vintner chuckled. "It's been called 'the worst U.S. naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.' General Van Riper was brilliant, absolutely brilliant! Perhaps his best stroke was in not using any radio communications at all. You know, of course, that we scored some of our best intelligence coups in Afghanistan by listening in on al-Qaeda's cell phone conversations. Well, Van Riper didn't use cell phones, and he didn't use radios. Nothing to give Force Blue's SIGINT boys anything to work with. The man employed couriers to get orders to his field commanders… and he also employed coded messages delivered from the minarets of local mosques."
"God. Like Paul Revere and his lanterns in the Old
North Church."
"Exactly. Low-tech all the way. The important thing was, he never tried to confront the U.S. armada directly. He armed his small craft and pleasure boats, maneuvered them in close, and waited. When Force Blue gave him an ultimatum to surrender, he delivered a coded signal… and the entire carrier battle group found itself under attack by swarms of pleasure boats and prop-driven civilian light aircraft. Some of the boats and light planes made suicide attacks, kamikaze style. Other pleasure boats were carrying Silkworm antiship missiles. One of those sank the supercarrier. Got it at damned near point-blank range, before its Phalanx defensive batteries could be powered up. Two more sank a couple of helicopter carriers with several thousand sailors and Marines on board. In fact, most of the U.S. ship losses were to cruise missiles that had been jury-rigged to fire off of yachts, barges, fishing boats, and that sort of thing.
"The really scary part was, as brilliant as the attack was, there was nothing in Van Riper's tactics that was new or startling. It was essentially just a larger scale repeat of al-Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen back in 2000. Remember that? A small civilian barge comes alongside while the ship is in port, and… bam! One of our destroyers crippled, seventeen American sailors dead, and thirty more injured.
"This time around, though, in simulation, sixteen U.S. warships had been sunk, and I don't know how many thousands of sailors, Marines, and soldiers were 'dead.' The rest of the American fleet was scattered and in complete disarray."
"You said, though, that the operation was a success."
"Uh-huh. It was. JOINTFOR Command simply resumed the game. The sunken ships were brought back to the surface, the dead sailors brought back to life, and the invasion continued as originally scheduled. Force Red continued to harass the U.S. fleet, but then General Van Riper discovered that his orders to his field commanders were actually being countermanded." Vintner shrugged. "At that point he quit. Resigned in disgust. In his after-action report, he charged that the whole exercise had been scripted so it would turn out the way it was supposed to. With a resounding Force Blue victory."
"Sounds like that's exactly what happened."
"Actually, no. Millennium Challenge started off as a genuine free-play exercise. I'm convinced of that. Only after day three, when Force Blue realized it didn't have a fleet any longer, did JOINTFOR step in and begin rewriting things."
"I don't get it! How could they justify a thing like that?"
"Easy. By backpedaling and by throwing out smoke screens. When the press questioned the JOINTFOR commander, he admitted the fleet had been 'sunk'… but said that the nature of the war game was such that we were operating in a heavily traveled international shipping lane — true — and that we were constrained by that in what defenses we could employ. Partly true… but misleading. He said we had to deploy our ships close to shore, and that in a real war, they would have been over the horizon and safe from that type of attack.
"What he didn't add, though, was that the Gulf is essentially a large lake. It's shallow, it's narrow, there's only one way in or out, and there's no room for maneuver. And there is no over-the-horizon where the fleet could be safe. Our potential enemies over there have very good radar coverage — and that means missile coverage — of the entire Gulf. Most of the sinkings in our little war-game exercise were carried out by cruise missiles launched at close range.
"Basically, what Millennium Challenge proved was that the U.S. Fifth Fleet is in a very tiny, very narrow trap… kind of like the box canyons that figured so large in the TV westerns we watched as kids. Perfect place for an ambush, and damned hard to get out of if things turn sour."
"And so what the hell did it all prove, anyway?" Just hearing Vintner's description made Stewart angry. It was the protect-your-turf ass-covering that had been prominent during Vietnam, and forty years later it clearly was still business-as-fucking-usual.
Vintner shrugged. "JOINTFOR got its victory. The rest was pretty much covered up, except for the bit that got leaked."