"In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.
At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "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?" After the reset, both sides were ordered to follow predetermined plans of action.
After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.
This led to accusations that the war game had turned from an honest, open, free playtest of U.S. war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise intended to end in an overwhelming U.S. victory, alleging that "$250 million was wasted".
Seems like a faked war exercise to me, seems more like a propaganda exercise.
I am having a difficult time understanding how you're taking the fact that they did a test and got an outcome, and concluding therefore that they "faked" the test.
Let me try an analogy to explain my viewpoint. Let's say I'm testing pre-alpha UI with some users. In the first phase, I give them no explicit training or instruction on the software because I want to see, as a whole, how the thing holds up holistically. Let's further say that, during that first phase, they struggle with the menu system or how to enter commands. Okay, noted. But I still need to check various wizards and dialogs, and I've already brought all these testers in. So instead of sending everyone home while I fix the main menu/command bar/whatever, I construct and direct situations so that all the aspects of the UI are exposed to the user for testing. "Go here and click the arrow-into-a-box button to save the file." "Oh, that's what that is? How come it isn't a normal save button?" "Sorry about that, but go ahead and do that and then see how it goes from there." "Okay!"
Would you similarly conclude that I "faked" the test? Do you think the better solution would be to send everyone home? Or just have them twiddle their thumbs for the entire length of the exercise?
It seems quite clear, to me, that the correct course of action is to keep testing. Continue to test and try various components of doctrine to see how they hold up. The fact that this Red Team didn't want to use anti-air radar doesn't mean we should waste the opportunity to test our doctrine on how to counter it.
Yes. That is how these things work. Anything less would be irresponsible.
I feel like we're talking past each other. I don't understand your point of view.
Let's say I'm doing a platoon-sized exercise over the course of two weeks. I've been training my platoon on some basic maneuvers like fixing and flanking, rushing machine gun nests, some patrolling, etc.
The first night, the Red platoon ambushes my Blue platoon while they're on patrol. Red platoon does a great job thinking on their feet, Blue assaulted through the ambush per doctrine and did a good job of it, but Red platoon knew the doctrine too and exploited a weakness.
Got it. Red won. However, we still need Blue to get some experience patrolling, and we definitely need them to have experience reacting to a linear ambush like they'll be facing in a couple months when we deploy. The fact that the Red team used a complex ambush with an IED and an extra machine gun oriented down the MSR is irrelevant. We still need to make sure the SOP works and that Blue can execute it. So I order Red team to use some linear ambushes to see how Blue does.
Explain to me how this is a fake test. Explain to me how this is somehow a waste of taxpayer money, or training time, or pro-Blue-platoon propaganda. Because to me it sure as heck looks exactly like what you should do in an exercise.
