This gets a lot of press along with the Millennium Challenge 2002 thing where Lt. Gen. Van Riper pissed off a lot of people by breaking rules. But the counter-

This gets a lot of press along with the Millennium Challenge 2002 thing where Lt. Gen. Van Riper pissed off a lot of people by breaking rules. But the counter-point is that it wasn't testing rule breaking, it was trying to test that these new network-centric concepts worked as intended. It's like trying to fix edge and corner cases when you haven't even gotten it working at scale in prod. Likewise, exercises are often designed to teach concepts or serve as an rough exam / test for personnel. Trick questions are great, but sometimes you have to see if they can do the fundamentals, and going off-script doesn't help.