Comment by ixacto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ixacto | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We already saw the US navy get dominated by unconventional warfare in the Millennium Challenge

"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." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

So yeah lots of the big ships might not be that useful in a present-day conflict if they can get destroyed by suicide-attack boats. Of course that puts the whole need for the amount of military funding/pork into question and that makes the military-industrial-congressional complex very nervous.

I honestly wouldn't put too much stock in that wikipedia article. Military training exercises are more like sparring matches, not a free-for-all with no rules. The constraints section also says that the ships were closer to shore than they would normally have been in order to not interfere with civilian ships that weren't part of the exercise.

Interesting, all of the training exercises I took part in were scripted and essentially just "training" without any real counters.

Prior Air Force here (not Navy). A couple of things to remember when thinking about the 2k2 challenge:

- It was 18 years ago. Deployments, new technologies, RCA's and congressional studies have impacted the current military force in substantial ways. A lot has happened since then.

- US FoF exercises are largely augmented during runtime to simulate "unforseen" battlefield conditions. The purpose of these rules/scripts/interjections is to artificially insert some degree of randomness into the scenario that demonstrates the individual/leadership's ability to react.

- A large component of US FoF exercises, plans, and results and analysis are classified. Though admirable, the Wikipedia article pulls its sources from secondary sources at best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com