In August, the Defense Department completed a major war game, Millennium Challenge 2002. Although details of the game were not revealed officially, some interesting ones leaked. The object of the game was to test new concepts of network-centric warfare. The venue was Iran, but the opposing regime was acting, apparently, more like that of Iraq. The choice of venue hardly reflected current political thinking, because the game had been in preparation for at least two years. Iran probably was chosen because, unlike Iraq, it stressed naval as well as ground forces. The opposing commander was retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper. The major leaks about the game were about how well General van Riper was able to use his conventional forces to defeat the futuristic forces he faced. Although General Van Riper was said to have out-thought his opponents, ultimately the U.S. force won. It is a matter of contention whether the game was scripted to make this outcome inevitable. According to some reports, General Van Riper withdrew as opposition commander in protest against what he saw as a determination to rig the game.
Historically, rigged war games sometimes have had disastrous results. For example, the Japanese gained the Battle of Midway before they fought it. The game was eerily prescient: several Japanese carriers were sunk. That offended the egos of the officers who had planned the battle. The umpires did not want to offend their betters, so they canceled the sinkings. Reality was less respectful.
Millennium Challenge was largely a command-post exercise, involving 13,500 personnel scattered over the United States and foreign posts. There were claims that full-scale forces were involved in some of the scenarios. For example, at one point General Van Riper apparently wanted to use chemical weapons against a U.S. force, and that was impossible because it would have involved actually attacking live U.S. troops. Given the relatively small number of personnel involved, it is difficult to imagine that many of them were live troops. After all, a single headquarters probably would employ several hundred operating personnel, and in that case 13,500 personnel would equate to only about ten full headquarters.
The stakes in such a game were high. The current administration espouses a revolution in military affairs which emphasizes agility and intelligence over mass. It argues that the wars of the future are likely to be much smaller than those for which the military has been designed, and that sheer speed of operations often can be decisive. That may well have been the case in Afghanistan, where it seems that the theater commander, General Tommy Franks, fully expected to deploy massive U.S. Army forces for a spring offensive—only to see rapid operations by relatively small air and ground forces (largely Marines) defeat the Taliban in weeks. Thus the administration canceled the Army's heavy Crusader howitzer on the ground that it would never get to a war in time to be effective. The Army sullenly resisted, which is probably why the Secretary of Defense announced both that the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe would be the current Marine Corps Commandant (rather than an Army officer) and named the next Army Chief of Staff well before the term of the current one expired.
The main target of the revolution is ground force numbers. The revolution requires much higher investment per individual soldier. For example, current Army thinking envisages supplying each soldier with a computer to act as a terminal in a platoon-level network. Experiments have shown that a squad so equipped is vastly more effective in tasks such as fighting through a town. Given a more or less fixed budget, however, raising the cost per soldier generally means cutting the number of soldiers. That has certainly been the case in the past. One effect of World War II was widespread mechanization, which meant vastly increasing the number of vehicles—hence the cost—per soldier. The result was that post-1945 Western armies fielded vastly fewer formations than their predecessors.
The countervailing view is that the new kind of warfare is an affront to the central fact of military reality, Murphy's Law. Speed and firepower may not be enough to deal with intelligently handled mass armies. Dispensing with existing U.S. mass formations, such as armored divisions, may be a recipe for future disaster. There is not enough money, however, to pay for a combination of the new kind of army and the existing kind. That is not a new dilemma. We have been through other revolutions in military affairs, and the options generally divide into retaining a legacy force and concentrating on some kind of developmental force. In each case, the best option would be a combination of the two, but finite resources kill that option.
Only two of General Van Riper's tactical moves have been leaked. One was his use of motorcycle-borne messengers to circumvent U.S. electronic surveillance. The other was a series of naval operations, presumably by small boats, to convince approaching U.S. warships that a particular operational pattern was normal. One day, however, a code word was included in the daily call to prayer over the government-controlled radio. The boats suddenly attacked, destroying all or much of the U.S. amphibious force operating in the Straits of Hormuz. The game was salvaged by reversing this disaster, as otherwise it would have stopped immediately.
General Van Riper presumably was making the point that those lacking modern information technology are by no means fools. Those who believe such technology automatically will give them decisive advantages actually are the fools, because they open themselves to deception by subtler minds.
As described, General Van Riper's naval operation was a version of a classic strategy. All through the latter years of the Cold War, it was assumed that a Soviet ground offensive, if it came, would begin with an exercise. Those running the exercise would hold sealed orders. A single code word would tell them to open those orders, and to move West. The Soviets actually used this pattern when they invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and Western intelligence was surprised by their ploy.
What made the Straits of Hormuz particularly propitious for a surprise attack was that distances were very short. Large numbers of small boats could circulate without making their objective obvious. Presumably they quickly could envelop the separate U.S. ships when given the appropriate code word. That would, however, have involved considerable coordination. Maneuvering by the U.S. ships might have made it more difficult for the ships to hit all the major units simultaneously. If only one ship was hit initially, the others might have been able to defend themselves effectively.
The motorcycle messengers also merit comment. They can be used to set up a set-piece offensive, handing out precut orders and if they survive, they can provide additional orders. The Taliban used such messengers in Afghanistan once they realized their radios were insecure. It is true that such practices preclude U.S. exploitation of enemy signal traffic. A wise enemy commander might even use his radios for deception while following only messenger-delivered orders. A U.S. commander concentrating on radio intercepts could find the results devastating.
U.S. forces, however, would still retain their agility. Their enemies would still find themselves reacting very slowly, simply because radio messages travel so much more quickly than despatch riders. Exploiting that difference in reaction times—if it were understood—should have a devastating impact. For years, U.S. military thinkers have described warfare as the interaction of decision cycles, ours and an enemy's. Each cycle goes through the stages of observation, orientation (understanding what was observed), decision, and action. The opponent with the slower cycle finds himself reacting to decisions and actions several cycles behind. New enemy actions are surprising, because the opponent is still thinking about actions in the past. That may well be what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan. If agility did not reap this kind of benefit in Millennium Challenge, then that may be testimony more to General Van Riper's superiority as a tactician than to a deeper failure of the new concepts. The riposte may be that unless the actions have sufficient weight, the enemy may not even care to react to them. That would be like a heavyweight fighter confronted by a very agile lightweight: the lightweight fighter jabs again and again, and the heavyweight simply punches once, decisively, while enduring the jabs.
Perhaps the lesson of Millennium Challenge is that massive forces are a useful hedge against an enemy's tactical brilliance. That would leave exponents of the new kind of war in an uncomfortable position, since no one can guarantee that our commanders always will outthink the enemy's. On the other hand, it is comforting to remember that in most dictatorships, which means in most of the enemies we face, tactical brilliance is not welcome, as the dictators fear that their brightest commanders will seek to overthrow their own governments rather than to win foreign wars.
Several defense publications have demanded that details of Millennium Challenge be made public. It is unlikely that they will be. The game was reportedly set in 2007, so it involved a wide range of new weapons and tactics. They ought not to become public property, particularly if some of them are being reserved as surprises for a campaign in, say, Iraq.