War Games seem to be common these days. The CIA just conducted such a "secretive War Game" - called "Silent Horizon" - this week to practice defending against an electronic assault on the same scale as the Sept. 11 "terrorism" attacks.
"...The simulated attacks were carried out five years in the future by a fictional alliance of anti-American organizations, including anti-globalization hackers..." See Yahoo-News:
Yeah, "anti-globalizationists" are indeed rogue elements...
But let's have a look, what happened way back in 2002, when one of the biggest "War-Games" was conducted by the U.S.-forces - obviousely to check the results of an attack on the country of...
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Iran.
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In 2002 the Defense Department did spend more than $250 million for staging Millennium Challenge 02, a three-week, "all-service-War-Game-exercise" that concluded Aug.15 of that year. The experiment involved 13,500 participants waging a mock war in 17 simulation locations and including nine live-force training sites.
The classified scenario was set in 2007, and it was said that the experiment's "main purpose" was to test a handful of key war-fighting concepts that U.S. Joint Forces Command had developed over the last years.
Naturally, it wasn't covered very much in the MSM-medea. Especially not, when some "strange things" started to happen:
Gen. William “Buck” Kernan - "playing" the head of Joint Forces Command - told Pentagon reporters that Millennium Challenge 2002 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 (aka Blue Force) would be fighting a determined and relatively unconstrained Opposing Force (otherwise known as the OPFOR aka Red Force).
Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is well known as a frequent player in military war games and was invented to lead the OPFOR.
General Van Riper's is an old fox whose' personal decorations include: the Silver Star Medal with gold star; Legion of Merit; Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V”; Purple Heart; Meritorious Service Medal; Joint Service Commendation Medal; Army Commendation Medal; Navy Achievement Medal; and the Combat Action Ribbon with gold star. http://hqinet001.hqmc.usmc.mil/HD/Historical/Whos_Who/Van_Ripper_PK.htm
"This is free play," as the leader of the "blue Force" - Kernan said before the game started off, "The OPFOR has the ability to win here...."
Spoiling the blue bubbles Van Riper told that "it wasn't so. 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..."
It began, key participants say, with the Americans confidently assuming that they could intercept enemy communications and predict enemy movements.
But the enemy didn't cooperate. Riper used motorcycle couriers instead of radio and electronic messages, and sent orders as code words inserted into the muezzins' call to prayer — and this went right by the American intelligence analysts.
"Intelligence", as usual...
Van Riper is regarded as a "Red team specialist". He said later that the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly "free-play experiment".
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! We were simply directed to turn them [the air-defense systems] off or move them. ... So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be."
Retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, who participated in the experiment as well playing a Red civilian leader, said Van Riper was outthinking the Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.
When the Blue fleet sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes sailing and flying in apparently innocuous circles.
As the Blue commander issued an ultimatum to Red to surrender or face destruction, Van Riper took the initiative, issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets. His force's small boats and aircraft sped immediately into action and...
"...By that time there wasn't enough time left to intercept them," Oakley stated further. So the outcome of this "wicked" action was that the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. All at sudden the Joint Forces Command officials stopped the exercise and "refloated" the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.
OK, this was only a simulation. So the Pentagon could reconstitute its sunken fleet and attack again with those "magically" evoked ships....
Let's not forget - that's a standard for War Games, where the main idea behind is not just to win but also to test equipment and try out new concepts.
But the absurdism got worse. The people running the war games ordered the enemy to pull its forces back in order to allow American units to reach the enemy's land safely, according to Van Riper.
"Then I asked to use chemical weapons," General Van Riper recalled. "That was refused."
The people running the War Games even ordered the enemy to disclose some of its troop locations so that the Americans could find them, General Van Riper said. And when the enemy figured out how to move its chemical weapons around so that the Americans could not find them, which caused "biiig problems" for the simulation — the control of the chemical weapons was handed over to the Americans, who then managed to destroy them.
How convinient.
By preventing the Opposing Force from employing their full range of capabilities, Van Riper said, Joint Forces Command sacrificed intellectual rigor on the altar of expedience. In an E-mail he sent to "professional friends" from the U.S. military he expressed bitter frustration with what he viewed as the experiment's failure to challenge the command's future war-fighting concepts, of which he acknowledged he had been "a vocal critic."
Van Riper said he became so frustrated during the game that he quit his position as Opposing Force commander halfway through.
He said he did so, 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 OPEOR 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 boss at the Joint Forces Command....
General Van Riper - later asked "if the war games should make us nervous" - answered: "There's an unfortunate culture developing in the American military that maybe should make you nervous. I don't see the rich intellectual discussions that we had after Vietnam. I see mostly slogans, clichés and unreadable materials."
General Van Riper said the mood reminded him of the mindset in Vietnam: excessive faith in technology, inadequate appreciation of the fog of war, lack of understanding of the enemy, and simple hubris.
Nothing new under the sun. Leaders misleading and deliberately cheating on "their" troups on ground and poly-tickians in the towers of Ivory - or better say - in their towers made of green paper - cheating on the military high ranks.
Sometimes those "upper echolons" are even working hand in hand. Thinking they may even gain higher profits and more benefits by finding that very point - when they can skip their "agreements" made before. The price for all this the "normal people" have to pay "out there". Always. As those civilians who are inhabiting the areas of these "War Games" - that become real-life wars some day. As well as the boyz and the girlz fighting that war on the ground. Whether in the U.S. military or in those - similarly large armies - that did go down in history before....
War on Error, Part 1964:"You are not allowed to fight in here! As this is the War-Room!"
Far Sight 3
