This was the backup, they re-floated the ships and reduced the enemy capabilities for the rest of the war-game, to ensure that the personnel got the desired tra

This was the backup, they re-floated the ships and reduced the enemy capabilities for the rest of the war-game, to ensure that the personnel got the desired training. You don't train sailors and soldiers to successfully die, or even to kill the enemy, you train them to successfully perform a series of steps under pressure. Goal achieved in 2002. Since then, they took the lessons learned from the first part and figured out how to fight small boats better. I know when I was in the Navy in the decade after 2002 that there was much more focus on small boat defense and a bunch of new weapons and tactics to fight against small boat swarms. That was the purpose of the war-game, and to all accounts it was wildly successful since we learned a big lesson! Don't be an armchair Admiral if you aren't sure why things are done in a certain way in the Navy. This was very publicized as a "failure", but the whole purpose of war-games is to learn new lessons. I would be embarrassed that you mistook this as a failure, and claimed we lost wars because of failures such as this one. The reason we lost recent wars is because there was no goal for those wars, so there was no way to win it. It was a political failure most of all. Vietnam, too. Without a goal, the most well trained militaries can't claim victory.