From Slate, War-Gamed: Why the Army shouldn’t be so surprised by Saddam’s moves by Fred Kaplan.
“Pentagon war games pit ‘Red Force’ (simulating the enemy) against ‘Blue Force’ (the United States). In this war game, as in many war games over the years, Van Riper played the Red Force commander. In his e-mail (which was promptly leaked to the Army Times then picked up, though in much less detail, by the Guardian and the Washington Post), Van Riper complained about Millennium Challenge 02, writing that, ‘Instead of a free-play, two-sided game … it simply became a scripted exercise.’ The conduct of the game did not allow ‘for the concepts of rapid decisive operations, effects-based operations, or operational net assessment to be properly assessed. … It was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to ensure a Blue ‘win.’ ‘
For instance—and here is where he displayed prescience—Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue’s super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue’s fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, ‘refloated’ the Blue fleet, and resumed play.) Robert Oakley, a retired U.S. ambassador who played the Red civilian leader, told the Army Times that Van Riper was ‘out-thinking’ Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.
Yet, Van Riper said in his e-mail, the game’s managers remanded some of his moves as improper and simply blocked others from being carried out. According to the Army Times summary, ‘Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units.’
Finally, Van Riper quit the game in protest, so as not to be associated with what would be misleading results. As he explained in his e-mail, ‘You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out.’ He added, somewhat ominously in retrospect, ‘My main concern was we’d see future forces trying to use these things when they’ve never been properly grounded in any sort of an experiment.’”
