IRAN WARWhat A War Game Already Told Us About Iran
Two months after the war began, the Iranian regime is intact. The Strait of Hormuz is under Iranian control. The regime has not been forced to make any additional concessions regarding its nuclear program. Iranian proxies are damaged but operational. In the summer of 2002, the U.S. military spent $250 million, after two years of planning, to answer a question: what happens if America goes to war with an Iran-like power in the Persian Gulf. Trump’s Pentagon should have paid more attention to the 2002 Millenium Challenge war game and its conclusions.
In the summer of 2002, the U.S. military spent $250 million, after two years of planning, to answer a question it had already decided. The question was: what happens if America goes to war with an Iran-like power in the Persian Gulf? The answer it had decided on was: America wins. What it got instead was a retired Marine general sinking the fleet in ten minutes and then filing a 21-page classified critique that received no response, forcing him to walk out in disgust.
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Paul Van Riper served 41 years in the Corps and was twice decorated with the Silver Star in Vietnam. The Pentagon chose him to command the Red Force, the Iran-like adversary opposite the U.S. Blue Force. In his commanding officer’s words, he was “a devious sort of guy” and “a no-nonsense, solid professional warfighter” – in other words, perfect to play the adversary in the Pentagon’s Millennium Challenge war game.
When Blue Force delivered its eight-point ultimatum (the final point of which was unconditional surrender), Van Riper understood immediately what the exercise was really testing. He preempted the preemptors, launching cruise missiles from ground-based launchers, commercial ships, and low-flying aircraft running without radio communications to reduce their radar signature. Simultaneously, swarms of speedboats loaded with explosives ran kamikaze attacks directly at the hulls of America’s ships. The carrier battle group’s Aegis radar system, designed to track missiles and aircraft, had no answer for a boat running at the waterline. It was overwhelmed within minutes. Sixteen warships sank: an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, five amphibious ships. Had it been real, 20,000 American sailors and Marines would have died.
The Pentagon reset the exercise. The ships Van Riper had sunk were simply declared raised. The number of vessels adjudicated destroyed was, in Van Riper’s own words, “a re-engineered product,” based on “the minimal ships needed to enable Blue JTF to continue the exercise.” This was not based on an assessment of what the modelling showed. It was a backward calculation from what Blue needed to still be in the game. The fleet was re-floated because the results were inconvenient.
