"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: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 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."
"The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes by an enemy that launched its attacks from commercial ships and using other unconventional means.
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."
We reacted to this late. But it isn’t a coïncidence that low-cost munitions are now receiving, in the U.S., other countries’ decadeslong weapons budgets.
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
Feels like the title needs some sort of "2002" notice - the reporting is recent but the actual wargame was done in 2002 and only recently declassified.
So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
The after action report was only recently declassified. This war game has been pretty widely publicized. Especially after the retired marine general that ran the OPFOR complained about it being rigged.
This was the Millennium Challenge, which was leaked to the press in the early 2000s. I remember reading about it in 2006 in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, as an example of the power of intuition and rapidly-shifting command & control lines.
I totally agree with the rest of your post. The U.S. military now feels like the British Navy in the inter-war years, where they had massive battlecruisers like HMS Hood that were completely spotless, the pride of the British Navy, but also completely unsuited for combat and blew up the first time they saw it.
I don't think it's clearly established that 10,000 Shahed drones would actually be a threat to an aircraft carrier though.
Remember that 10k drones can't just be conjured into the air all at once or act with perfect coordination. There are operational limitations that prevent effectiveness from scaling up past a certain point.
How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.
Also the wargame was flawed because the computer simulations in 2002 allowed the enemy general to put anti-ship missiles bigger than speed boats on the speed boats, and basically 'spawn' the speed boats almost next to the blue fleet.
Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....
Even high tech drone and DF missiles also America will 100% lose. Why? No rare earth and magnets. Consistently dreaming of past glories like fighting Japanese in Midway and fighting Saddam. Remember USA lost to goat herders. I am 100% sure those Talebans have no J10C or Oreshnik missiles.
War game is not needed. The war with Iran has already proven that a relatively tiny but sophisticated opponent can have massive asymmetric impact on USA.
I think they know that the military is mostly a grift in spending at times of peace. It keeps the military and benefactors happy. the defense industry employs people , which helps with support for the military.
In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.
But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.
The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?
The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.
I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.
The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.
The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.
I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.
I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.
The American populace would probably support a war if the American homeland was attacked. But American leaders would much rather project force elsewhere, which makes it hard to get the average American to buy into their schemes.
> The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force; a pre-emptive cruise missile attack sank sixteen Blue warships and led to the exercise's suspension. The simulation was restarted with Blue forces fully restored, and Red forces heavily constrained from free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted"
More of a political exercise than anything else. But this has been cited as an indication of the effectiveness of modern drone-based warfare.
Because the point of the wargame is that it's a training exercise for everyone involved, right down to the crews of the ships involved, not an nfl game. If the free-play portion ends up not exercising a bunch of expected scenarios because of an unexpected tactic, it would be monumentally wasteful to not make a note of the lesson and then reset with a script.
We're still vulnerable to low tech warfare. We keep developing expensive systems that can't be manufactured quickly. One of the main reasons for success in WW2 was the fact that we could produce decent weapons in great volume. Japan had limited resources (draw a parallel to our rare earth situation). Germany had many advanced weapons, but couldn't produce enough (draw a parallel to our missiles).
We could because we had an industrial base that knew how to make stuff, not MBAs with delusions of grandeur who are belatedly discovering that they are easily dispensed with once the Chinese have acquired the manufacturing know-how.
The details may have been classified, but I had read about the conclusion of the exercise back then, shortly before the Iraq War. Fortunately, Saddam's generals were not as competent and resourceful as General Van Riper USMC.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadSoon 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."
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."
For ex $300k antiship missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_Affordable_Capac...
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
I totally agree with the rest of your post. The U.S. military now feels like the British Navy in the inter-war years, where they had massive battlecruisers like HMS Hood that were completely spotless, the pride of the British Navy, but also completely unsuited for combat and blew up the first time they saw it.
Remember that 10k drones can't just be conjured into the air all at once or act with perfect coordination. There are operational limitations that prevent effectiveness from scaling up past a certain point.
Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.
But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.
The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?
The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.
I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.
The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.
The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.
I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.
I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.
This is a systematic issue which very few people care about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force; a pre-emptive cruise missile attack sank sixteen Blue warships and led to the exercise's suspension. The simulation was restarted with Blue forces fully restored, and Red forces heavily constrained from free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted"
More of a political exercise than anything else. But this has been cited as an indication of the effectiveness of modern drone-based warfare.