Gen. Van Riper's tactics were apparently discredited in 2002 because they were unfair, but Iran seems not to have received the memo since their moves bear more than a passing resemblance to his.
“So, it’s it’s uh little unfair. You know, you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.”
Would be funny if it wasn't real.
But the US seems to be committed on repeating the Russian experience.
This is not what Wikipedia's summary describes. Now, maybe Wikipedia has the wrong summary, but according to it the challenge wasn't "discredited". By that point the exercise was over, but 13 more days were budgeted for, so the analysts requested their forces to be resurrected so they could play out the rest of the days, with artificial restrictions so that the rest of the challenge was effectively scripted and left no room for the OPFOR to try novel tactics.
One of the generals (of the blue team) is quoted as saying: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?"
Also:
> The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."
Wikipedia has a lot wrong...
if it's a topic sensitive to particular country's interests in the language of that country you can be 190% sure someone did
they don't even allow to use wikipedia as a source for children in school but in this case it's just sad.
It definitely seems like there were issues with RedFors achievments. But the response is still ridiculous. I would have also resigned in ReFor's shoes.
Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.
(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)
a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)
b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)
Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...
Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.
Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.
Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:
quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).
Nowhere in your message do you describe light-speed motorcycles.
You didn't arrive at this conclusion thanks to a light-speed motorcycle thought exercise...
The relevant concept is undetectable (by electronic surveilance) communication usable for tactical warfighting. Real life motorcycle messengers are a partial (detectable, high-latency) solutions for which there are currently (not at the time of that war exercise) better options (e.g. the one I presented).
You can nitpick that due to imperfection of the exercise (allowing red team to use light-speed motorcycles) the whole result of the wargame was compromised. To which my answer is: That is a nitpick, real-life offers the red team enough options to achieve the same results without relying on physically impossible feats.
Most recent example: Isrealis are learning to cope with fiber optics drones in the southern Lebanon, to great detriment to their Merkavas.
shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?:
flash/flood the scene with appropriate stimulation wavelength for suitable fluorescent center, take a picture (and observe the emission wavelength), then take the same picture without the flash, repeat this N times and add all the ones with the flash present and subtract all the frames without so one can observe the exact paths of the optic cables...
It seems one could mass produce a cheap detection and imaging platform that can aid cutting all the umbilical cords cost-effectively.
"shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?"
In Ukraine, there are areas densely covered with fiber optic lines, almost all of them old. How would you detect and cut only the active ones?
A brightly flashing drone examining and cutting fiber optics lines would a) be slow and very obvious, easy to disable b) need a lot of battery power for all those flashes, and risk getting tangled in branches when cutting
On the other hand, if you can easily remotely detect the fiber optic cables, it might be useful for quickly detecting them and tracing them back to the operator.
> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.
This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.
The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.
And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.
But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.
More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."
Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.
Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.
Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?
I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.
Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?
This was by design via the mosaic defense tactic.
They know the US prides itself on decapitation strikes, "taking out the leader of x" was a monthly headline during our time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and during the events of ISIS/syrian civil war. It's how the special forces operated, taking out a "leader", collecting all the names they could find in their possession, and taking those guys out. In the later days of Afghanistan, they stopped even trying to find out who the names were. If you were some mid-level Taliban member's dentist, you'd be fair game.
So Iran built a defense for that, a military that does not need a central command to continue fighting. They have their orders and they'll continue to carry them out. Completely bypass the benefits of highly accurate munitions, cyber intelligence, etc.
That's the same reason the first round of the Millennium challenge won outright. The red-team leadership knew to not expect last year's war today, and used their brains to exploit the weaknesses of a highly mechanized and sophisticated military.
Basically sounds like the military from Imperial Japan during the end of WW2, with scattered units continuing to fight, surrender not believed an option, not aware, or in disbelief that Japan has surrendered...
Let's hope it doesn't have to lead to the same conclusion?
Iran doesn't have to conventionally defeat the US military and can't: so they're just not doing that, and instead going after valuable economic targets which are politically sensitive to Americans and impossible to defend since they're risk sensitive.
There is no reason to believe that
They have been training for decades for exactly this sort of war, and have experienced veterans at all levels
One has to abandon the view that what represents to the media as a modern state, with modern institution is actually a state. What you have is several, small states, city-kingdoms basically, ruled by one clan. Connected to one another in a tangle of agreements and contracts. Once you come to this point, you start to understand the structure of the thing and also why it is hard to decapitate.
who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).
Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).
It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.
Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
In modern times we increasingly seem to have entered into an era where people are willing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what they know to be true. And while it's easy to mock politicians and the military for this, this is also a mainstay of contemporary political discourse among regular people, including those who fancy themselves as well educated, on a variety of controversial issues.
I don't know what started this trend, but it should die. At least in terms of war it's self correcting. The US can't handle many more botched invasions or interventions, and I suspect we're already beyond the point of no return in terms of consequences of these errors.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002