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
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