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Wake-up call
If the US and Iraq do go to war, there can only be one winner, can't there?
Maybe not. This summer, in a huge rehearsal of just such a conflict - and
with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam - the US lost.
Julian Borger asks the former marine how he did it
Julian Borger
Thursday September 05 2002
The Guardian
At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington
like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using
over 13,000 troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won
and a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator.
What really happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells
ringing throughout America's defence establishment and raised questions over
the US military's readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game
was won by Saddam Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the
Iraqi dictator's part, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.
In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox
tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US
expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.
What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in
the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most
expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon
top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered
their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they
instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed
amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this
cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines
making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled
Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15,
with a US "victory".
If the Pentagon thought it could keep its mishap quiet, it underestimated
Van Riper. A classic marine - straight-talking and fearless, with a purple
heart from Vietnam to prove it - his retirement means he no longer has to
put up with the bureaucratic niceties of the defence department. So he blew
the whistle.
His driving concern, he tells the Guardian, is that when the real fighting
starts, American troops will be sent into battle with a set of half-baked
tactics that have not been put to the test.
"Nothing was learned from this," he says. "A culture not willing to think
hard and test itself does not augur well for the future." The exercise, he
says, was rigged almost from the outset.
Millennium Challenge was the biggest war game of all time. It had been
planned for two years and involved integrated operations by the army, navy,
air force and marines. The exercises were part real, with 13,000 troops
spread across the United States, supported by actual planes and warships;
and part virtual, generated by sophisticated computer models. It was the
same technique used in Hollywood blockbusters such as Gladiator. The
soldiers in the foreground were real, the legions behind entirely digital.
The game was theoretically set in 2007 and pitted Blue forces (the US)
against a country called Red. Red was a militarily powerful Middle Eastern
nation on the Persian Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning
megalomaniac (Van Riper). Arguably, when the exercises were first planned
back in 2000, Red could have been Iran. But by July this year, when the game
kicked off, it is unlikely that anyone involved had any doubts as to which
country beginning with "I" Blue was up against.
"The game was described as free play. In other words, there were two sides
trying to win," Van Riper says.
Even when playing an evil dictator, the marine veteran clearly takes winning
very seriously. He reckoned Blue would try to launch a surprise strike, in
line with the administration's new pre-emptive doctrine, "so I decided I
would attack first."
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats
and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual
Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US
fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio
transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message
broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly
harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming
into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style
suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from
some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two
marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida
attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not
seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of
marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the wors
It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game
called time out.
"A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van
Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly
an airliner into the World Trade Centre... but nobody seemed interested."
In the end, it was ruled that the Blue forces had had the $250m equivalent
of their fingers crossed and were not really dead, while the ships were
similarly raised from watery graves.
Van Riper was pretty fed up by this point, but things were about to get
worse. The "control group", the officers refereeing the exercise, informed
him that US electronic warfare planes had zapped his expensive microwave
communications systems.
"You're going to have to use cellphones and satellite phones now, they told
me. I said no, no, no - we're going to use motorcycle messengers and make
announcements from the mosques," he says. "But they refused to accept that
we'd do anything they wouldn't do in the west."
Then Van Riper was told to turn his air defences off at certain times and
places where Blue forces were about to stage an attack, and to move his
forces away from beaches where the marines were scheduled to land. "The
whole thing was being scripted," he says.
Within his ever narrowing constraints, Van Riper continued to make a
nuisance of himself, harrying Blue forces with an arsenal of unorthodox
tactics, until one day, on July 29, he thinks, he found his orders to his
subordinate officers were not being listened to any more. They were being
countermanded by the control group. So Van Riper quit. "I stayed on to give
advice, but I stopped giving orders. There was no real point any more," he
says.
Van Riper's account of Millennium Challenge is not disputed by the Pentagon.
It does not deny "refloating" the Blue navy, for example. But that, it
argues, is the whole point of a war game.
Vice-Admiral Cutler Dawson, the commander of the ill-fated fleet, and
commander, in real life, of the US 2nd Fleet, says: "When you push the
envelope, some things work, some things don't. That's how you learn from the
experiment."
The whole issue rapidly became a cause celebre at the Pentagon press
briefing, where the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, got the
vice-chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff, General Peter Pace, to explain
why the mighty US forces had needed two lives in order to win.
"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?" General Pace asked.
Van Riper agrees with Pace in principle, but says the argument is beside the
point.
"Scripting is not a problem because you're trying to learn something," he
says. "The difference with this one was that it was advertised up front as
free play in order to validate the concepts they were trying to test, to see
if they were robust enough to put into doctrine."
It is these "concepts" that are at the core of a serious debate that
underlies what would otherwise be a silly row about who was playing fair and
who wasn't. The US armed forces are in the throes of what used to be called
a "Revolution in Military Affairs", and is now usually referred to simply as
"transformation". The general idea is to make the US military more flexible,
more mobile and more imaginative. It was this transformation that Rumsfeld
was obsessed with during his first nine months in office, until September 11
created other priorities.
The advocates of transformation argue that it requires a whole new mindset,
from the generals down to the ordinary infantryman. So military planners,
instead of drawing up new tactics, formulate more amorphous "concepts"
intended to change fundamentally the American soldier's view of the
battlefield.
The principal concept on trial in Millennium Challenge was called "rapid,
decisive operation" (RDO), and as far as Van Riper and many veteran officers
are concerned, it is gobbledegook. "As if anyone would want slow, indecisive
operations! These are just slogans," he snorts.
The question of transformation and the usefulness of concepts such as RDO
are the subject of an intense battle within the Pentagon, in which the
uniformed old guard are frequently at odds with radical civilian strategists
of the kind Rumsfeld brought into the Pentagon.
John Pike, the head of GlobalSecurity.org, a military thinktank in
Washington, believes the splits over transformation and the whole Van Riper
affair reflect fundamental differences of opinion on how to pursue the war
on Iraq.
"One way is to march straight to Baghdad, blowing up everything in your way
and then by shock and awe you cause the regime to collapse," Pike says.
"That is what Rumsfeld is complaining about when he talks about
unimaginative plodding. The alternative is to bypass the Iraqi forces and
deliver a decisive blow."
Van Riper denies being opposed to new military thinking. He just thinks it
should be written in plain English and put to the test. "My main concern was
that we'd see future forces trying to use these things when they've never
been properly grounded in an experiment," he says.
The name Van Riper draws either scowls or rolling eyes at the Pentagon these
days, but there are anecdotal signs that he has the quiet support of the
uniformed military, who, after all, will be the first to discover whether
the Iraq invasion plans work in real life.
"He can be a real pain in the ass, but that's good," a fellow retired
officer told the Army Times. "He's a great guy, and he's a great patriot,
and he's doing all those things for the right reasons."
