Large scale exercises like that are only ever half wargames. You can do wargames all day long in Newport, but it's a little harder to get a few dozen boats and

Large scale exercises like that are only ever half wargames. You can do wargames all day long in Newport, but it's a little harder to get a few dozen boats and a few thousand sailors together to practice their normal operations. If you do have an exercise and the OPFOR manages to win, then it switches from half wargame half training exercise to full training exercise, or switches to a different scenario. "Ok, we lost that scenario, we'll go home and come up with a different strategy later. While everyone's here, how about let's try this different scenario instead? no, we don't want to deal with chemical weapons right now, we need work on dealing with air defenses and adding in WMDs would complicate things too much right now"