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Comment by ern | Hacker News Reader

That night well be the point:

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

“The first thing to understand is that a big exercise is not the military equivalent of a sports game. You don’t throw a bunch of men and equipment into an exercise area, then say “right, let’s see who’s best”. Millennium Challenge 2002 was intended primarily to test a set of operational concepts that the Rumsfeld DoD was pushing.1 Other exercises are intended more as full-scale training for the relevant forces, to teach people how the whole system works together at the same time. This is also a secondary goal of exercises like MC02. In no case are we simply trying to see who wins, so if one side does something unexpected that would bring a real operation to a premature end, as Van Riper did, it makes sense to learn lessons from it, reset, and continue on.”

https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002

So in other words, the US military stand-in failed the first iteration of a war game. In real life, there's really going to be only one iteration, and you don't get do-overs because the the enemy does something "unexpected." The US military doesn't have a monopoly on doing unexpected things. I would fully expect the Houthis to do things that are very unexpected; it has very much been their track record.

It's not a “do over”, it's a “do the rest, because maybe there are other lessons we need to learn as well”.

The US military has run 2 exercises back in the day, seeing how vulnerable Pearl Harbour was to an air attack. The answer was very.

The US wrote the reports both times as “well done guys but this is not realistic for the following reasons”.

The Japanese proved them wrong some years later.

It’s not possible for the US to lose a conventional war they are ready for, just as it wasn’t possible for hamas to invade Israel.

But if either party takes their eyes of the ball and starts to listen to only what they want to hear, then anything is possible.

Why Johnny can't win wars: After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory.

Mostly, war games are scripted. When your strategy fails this badly in a less scripted event, you still want to get the personnel in the fleet their training. Do you think they should have just let half the fleet sit doing nothing for two weeks? That’d be a bad idea.

Sure, but restarting was adequate opportunity for that. Or one could have a backup plan.

This was the backup, they re-floated the ships and reduced the enemy capabilities for the rest of the war-game, to ensure that the personnel got the desired training. You don't train sailors and soldiers to successfully die, or even to kill the enemy, you train them to successfully perform a series of steps under pressure. Goal achieved in 2002. Since then, they took the lessons learned from the first part and figured out how to fight small boats better. I know when I was in the Navy in the decade after 2002 that there was much more focus on small boat defense and a bunch of new weapons and tactics to fight against small boat swarms. That was the purpose of the war-game, and to all accounts it was wildly successful since we learned a big lesson!

Don't be an armchair Admiral if you aren't sure why things are done in a certain way in the Navy. This was very publicized as a "failure", but the whole purpose of war-games is to learn new lessons. I would be embarrassed that you mistook this as a failure, and claimed we lost wars because of failures such as this one. The reason we lost recent wars is because there was no goal for those wars, so there was no way to win it. It was a political failure most of all. Vietnam, too. Without a goal, the most well trained militaries can't claim victory.

Because you don't arrange for a large force to perform training exercises, and then cancel that training because the force was destroyed before it could engage. You still do the training, and if you have to hand the red team a script to follow after they've made their point, you do it.

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