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Ellyllions
09-12-2007, 10:37 AM
This is a book by a man named "Malcom Gladwell" about trusting your intuition. This is a very interesting piece in the book about the "Millenium Challenge" which was a war game that was "played" in Summer of 2000. It had been in the preparation stages since 1998 or so...

...In the spring of 200, Paul Van Riper (you can research him yourself, I'd be typing all day if I had to explain who he is) was approached by a group of senior Pentagon officials. He was retired at that point, after a long and distinguished career. The pentagon was in the earliest stages of planning for a war game that they were calling Millennium Challenge '02. It was the largest and most expensive war game thus far in history. By the time the exercise was finally staged--in July and early August of 2002, two and a half years later--it would end up costing a quarter of a billion dollars, which is more than some countries spend on their entire defense budget. According to the Millennium Challenge scenerio, a rogue military commander had broken away from his government somewhere in the Persian Gulf and was threatening to engulf the entire region in war. He had a considerable power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties, and the was harboring and sponsoring four different terrorist organizations. He was virulently anti-American. It Millennium Challenge--in what would turn out to be inspired (or, depending on your perspective, disastrous) piece of casting--Paul Van Riper was asked to play the rogue commander.

1.One morning in the Gulf

The group that runs the war games for the U.S. Military is called the Joint Forces Command, or, as it's better known, JFCOM....Planning for the war game began in earnest in the summer of 2000. JFCOM brought together hundreds of military analysts and specialists and software experts. In war game parlance, the United States and its allies are always known as Blue Team, and the enemy is always known as Red Team, and JFCOM generated comprehensive portfolios for each team, covering everything they would be expected to know about their own forces and their adversary's forces. For several weeks leading up to the game, the Red and Blue forces took part in a series of "spiral" exercises that set the stage for the showdown. The rogue commander was getting more and more belligerent, the United States more and more concerned.

In late July, both sides came to Suffolk and set up shop in the huge, windowless rooms known as test bays on the first floor of the main JFCOM building. Marine Corps, air force, army, and navy units at various military bases around the country stood by to enact the commands of Red and Blue Team brass. Sometimes when a Blue Team fired a misscle or launched a plane, a missile actually fired or a plane actually took off, and whenever it didn't, one of forty-two seperate computer models simulated each of those actions so precisely that the people in the war room often couldn't tell it wasn't real. The game lasted for two and a half weeks. For future analysis, a team of JFCOM specialists monitored and recorded every conversation, and a computer kept track of every bullet fired and missle launged and tank deployed. This was more than an experiment. As it became clear less than a year later--when the United States invaded a Middle Eastern state with a rogue commander who had a strong ethnic power base and was thought to be harboring terrorists--this was a full dress rehearsal for war.

The stated purpose of Millennium Challenge was for the Pentagon to test a set of new and quite radical ideas about how to go to battle. In Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the United States had routed the forces of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. But that was an utterly conventional meeting and fighting in an open battlefield. In the wake of Desert Storm, the Pentagon became convinced that kind of warfare would soon be an anachronism: no one would be foolish enough to challenge the United States head-to-head in pure military combat. Conflict in the future would be diffuse. It would take place in cities as often as on battlefields, be fueled by ideas as much as by weapons, and engage cultures and economies as much as armies. As one JFCOM analyst put it: "The next war is not just going to be military on military. The deciding factor is not going to be how many tanks you kill, how many ships you sink, and how many planes you shoot down. The decisive factor is how you take apart your adversary's system. Instead of going after war-fighting capabiltiy, we have to go after war-making capability. The military is connected to the economic system, which is connected to their cultural system, to their personal relationships. We have to understand the links between all those systems." pages 102-105

Ellyllions
09-12-2007, 10:50 AM
Millennium Challenge, in other words, was not just a battle between two armies. It was a battle between two perfectly opposed military philosophies. Blue Team had their databases and matrixes and methodologies for systematically understanding the intentions and capabilities of the enemy. Red Team was commanded by a man who looked at a long-haired, unkempt, seat-of-the-pants commodities trader yelling and pushing and making a thousand instant decisions an hour and saw in him a soul mate.

On the opening day of the war game, Blue Team poured tens of thousands of troops into the Persian Gulf. They parked an aircraft carrier battle group just offshore of Red Team's home country. There, with the full weight of it's military power in evidence, Blue Team issued an eight-point ultimatum to Van Riper, the eighth point being the demand to surrender. They acted with utter confidence, because their Operational Net Assessment matrixes told them where Red Team's vulnerabilities were, what Red Team's next move was likely to be, and what Red Team's range of options was. But Paul Van Riper did not behave as the computers predicted.

Blue Team knocked out his microwave towers and cut his fiber-optics lines on the ssumption that Red Team would now have to use satellite communications and cell phones and they could monitor his communications.

"They said that Red Team would be surprised by that, "Van Riper remembers. "Surprised? Any moderately informed person would know enough not to count on those technologies. That's a Blue Team mind-set. Who would use cell phone and satellites after what happened to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? We communicated with couriers on motorcycles, and messages hidden inside prayers. They said, 'How did you get your airplanes off the airfield without the normal chatter between pilots and the tower?' I said, 'Does anyone remember World War Two? We'll use the lighting systems."

Suddenly the enemy that Blue Team thought could be read like an open book was a bit more mysterious. What was Red Team doing? Van Riper was supposed to be cowed and overwhelmed in the face of a larger foe. But he was too much of a gunslinger for that. On the second day of the war, he put a fleet of small boats in the Persian Gulf to track the ships of the invading Blue Team navy. Then without warning, he bombarded them in an hour-long assault with a fusillade of cruise missles. When Red Team's attack was over, sixteen American ships lay at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Had Millennium Challenge been a real war instead of just an exercise, twenty thousand American servicemen and women would have been killed before their own army had even fired a shot. pages 108-110

Ellyllions
09-12-2007, 11:14 AM
6. Millennium Challenge, Part Two

For a day and a half after the Red Team's surprise attach on Blue Team in the Persian Gulf, and uncomfortable silence fell over the JFCOM facility. Then the JFCOM staff stepped in. They turned back the clock. Blue Team's sixteen lost ships, which were lying at the batoom of the Persian Gulf, were refloated. In the first wave of his attack Van Riper had fired twelve theater ballistic missles at various ports in the Gulf region where Blue Team troops were landing. Now, JFCOM told him, all twelve of those missles had been shot down, miraculously and mysteriously, with a new kind of missle defense. Van Riper had assassinated the leaders of the pro-US countries in the region. Now, he was told, those assassinations had no effect.

"The day after the attack, I walked into the command room and saw the gentleman who was my number two giving my team a completely different set of instruction," Van Riper said. "It was things like -- shut off the radar so blue force are not interfered with. Move ground forces so Marines can land without any interference. I asked, 'Can I shoot down one V-twenty-two?' and he said, 'No, you can't shoot down any V-twenty-two's.' I said, 'What the hell's going on in here?' He said, 'Sir, I've been given guidance by the program director to give completely different directions.' The second round was all scripted, and if they didn't get what they liked, they would just run it again."

Millennium Challenge, the sequel, wa won by the Blue Team in a rout. there were no surprises the second time around, no insight puzzles, no opportunities for the complexities and confusion of the real world to intrude on the Pentagon's experiment. and when the sequel was over the analysts at JFCOM and the Pentagon were jubiliant. The fog of war had been lifted. The military had been transofrmed, and with that the Pentagon confidently turned its attention to the real Persian Gulf. A rogue dictator was threatening the stability of the region. He was virulently Anti-American. He had a consderable power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties and was thought to be harboring terrorist organizations. He needed to be rplaced and his country restored to stability, and if they did it right-- if they had diplomatic, informational, miliary, and economic information (DIME); and political, military, ecomomic, social, infrastructure, and information instruments (PMESI); and the CROP- a huge screen showing the field of combat in real time--how hard could that be?"page 145 and 146

Blink
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell

Copyright 2005 by Malcolm Gladwell
Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group USA
237 Park Ave. New York, NY 10169

www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

bastardog
09-12-2007, 11:21 AM
Ok.....this is too long. but I promise to read it a chunk at a time......sounds interesting

Ellyllions
09-12-2007, 11:32 AM
Yeah, I warned that it would be long.

But I found it profoundly interesting...

Time magazine had an article about Saddam Hussein a while back and it stated basically that Saddam truly believed that he had WMD's and could "take" the US military when it came in. His advisors were afraid to tell him that they'd abandoned production for fear that a) he'd kill them; and b) the US military was coming.

Well, from this insert it appears that Bush was just as ill-informed by his advisers that the military strategy they were adopting was flawed because it overlooked the obvious. That all the massive electronics and information could be defeated with primative techniques.

knuckleboner
09-12-2007, 12:25 PM
(about a 5 minute read...not exactly that long...)

and definitely interesting.

but it seemed to me like they were talking more about iran than iraq. strong religious base? support of multiple terrorist groups? i'm thinking iran.

Nitro Express
09-12-2007, 12:58 PM
If you want to study how to defeat the US Military you only need to look at China. They are running a very successful financial and espiange war with us right now. It's hard to run a military when you have lost your steel mills, bearing manufactures, shipyards, and they can make your money worthless over night by dumping US Treasury bonds.

The North Vietmese already proved that a low tech enemy can run a high tech enemy out if they are willing to take large casualties and prolong the war past where the high tech enemy is willing to put up with.

Low tech is the way to go against a high tech enemy. Carrier pigeons, human runners, sun reflected signals and such can't be picked up on satelite monitoring equipement.

Everything our military uses is GPS based now and I doubt the average private is very good with a compass. Just take out the Global Positioning System and you handicap the US Military pretty darn good. One reason China is develping their own system and practicing taking ours out.

Electronic espianage and sabotage can bring not only the military but the whole countries infastructure down. In our globalized economy hurting one country financially usually hurts you back but maybe paper money will lose it's value or the enemy just doesn't give a damn because the altimate wealth is controlling real estate and what's produced on it. So let's crash the system with hacking or even a neutron bomb.

Nitro Express
09-12-2007, 01:05 PM
Everything Tsun Tsu wrote about war still applies. Know your environment and know your enemy. If you can't beat him, you avoid him. Our so called great military planners missed the basics. They had no objective to even determine whether the situation was winable or not. They all buckled to Rumsfeld and the President out of fear of ruining their military career.

Ellyllions
09-12-2007, 01:11 PM
I'm not so sure the President has anything to do with war planning anymore. I know my Political Science instructor tried his damndest to make us understand the President's role...and I think I'm settling more into that now.

From the 9/11 intel failures, to this obviously horribly planned war, I think our real security issues are and have been the Pentagon.

PlexiBrown
09-12-2007, 01:16 PM
I have the audiobook of Blink.