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“The first thing to understand is that a big exercise is not the military equivalent of a sports game. You don’t throw a bunch of men and equipment into an exer
by cwillu 3y ago
“The first thing to understand is that a big exercise is not the military equivalent of a sports game. You don’t throw a bunch of men and equipment into an exercise area, then say “right, let’s see who’s best”. Millennium Challenge 2002 was intended primarily to test a set of operational concepts that the Rumsfeld DoD was pushing.1 Other exercises are intended more as full-scale training for the relevant forces, to teach people how the whole system works together at the same time. This is also a secondary goal of exercises like MC02. In no case are we simply trying to see who wins, so if one side does something unexpected that would bring a real operation to a premature end, as Van Riper did, it makes sense to learn lessons from it, reset, and continue on.”
https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002 https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002
- mjhay 3y agoSo in other words, the US military stand-in failed the first iteration of a war game. In real life, there's really going to be only one iteration, and you don't get do-overs because the the enemy does something "unexpected." The US military doesn't have a monopoly on doing unexpected things. I would fully expect the Houthis to do things that are very unexpected; it has very much been their track record.
- cwillu 3y agoIt's not a “do over”, it's a “do the rest, because maybe there are other lessons we need to learn as well”.
- tomjen3 3y agoThe US military has run 2 exercises back in the day, seeing how vulnerable Pearl Harbour was to an air attack. The answer was very. The US wrote the reports both times as “well done guys but this is not realistic for the following reasons”. The Japanese proved them wrong some years later. It’s not possible for the US to lose a conventional war they are ready for, just as it wasn’t possible for hamas to invade Israel. But if either party takes their eyes of the ball and starts to listen to only what they want to hear, then anything is possible.