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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I think the big lesson of the Millennium Challenge is that a smart, motivated adversary will always go for the weak link in your victory conditions. And that is usually your blind spots, by definition. They won't attack you where you've prepared; they'll look for the areas where you are not expecting vulnerability and attack there.

All stuff Sun Tzu wrote 2500 years ago, but very hard for a bureaucracy to internalize, because by definition bureaucracies are formed to solve known problems and are blind to their blind spots.

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There is a bigger underlying point, which is there is no trump weapon that defeats everything in war [1]. Everything has a counter, and if you're basing your entire strategy on saying that this weapon doesn't have a counter that we know of yet, well, you'll find that counters quickly get developed (see, e.g., the evolution of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War).

Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.

[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.

> Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing

Aren’t ICBMs and submarine-launched warheads the other two parts of the US’s triad?

Missiles are functionally the same things as bombs in this scenario, since the thesis of strategic air bombing is that destroying civilian infrastructure will demoralize the populace and press them to end war, and the various kinds of cruise missiles are essentially just different kinetic means of deploying that same big boom to civilians.

My understanding is that the existence of the nuclear triad is entirely about maximizing the likelihood of maintaining a second strike capability in the event of a preemptive nuclear attack, thus providing mutually assured destruction even if the first strike succeeds.

Dark stuff.

That's exactly it, but it's also why submarines are probably the true deterrent - you might hit the airfields and you might get the silos but it's almost impossible to even coordinate the sort of strike you'd need to guarantee you got all the subs.

I do wonder how hard/expensive it would be to accompany every adversarial nuclear sub with your own underwater drone (perhaps itself nuclear powered) to track locations. Assuming you stay nearby after they leave port could you keep up?

Is this true? Nobody has a counter to ICBMs as far as I know.

Defending against strategic bombers is a different game from submarine-launched cruise missiles / hypersonics too. If you don’t spot the submarine 50 miles off your coast you can’t defend against the hypersonic. Whereas you apply a completely different set of detection and response systems for long-range bombers.

Sure the net intention of these capabilities may the same, but we are talking about whether there are counters to these weapon systems.

The difference is that it took 4000 tons of bombs to destroy Dresden, and 2 tons of bombs to destroy Hiroshima.

The other difference is that those 2 tons were the pinnacle of applied science at that time (heck in some way they are still pretty close to the _current_ pinnacle) and required the combined effort of hundreds of world-class scientists and engineers, unlike the 4000 tons of regular ordnance used in Dresden.

So why did the Blue Team lose the Millennium Challenge? Where were its destroyer-equivalents? Were they deliberately excluded from a massive $250M free-play wargame for operational reasons? If so, why wasn't Ripper explicitly told that this type of attack was out of scope?

Ripper's tactics probably did have a perfect destroyer-equivalent counter. The entire question is: why didn't the Blue Team bring it? You can't declare yourself victorious because a counter to their counter theoretically exists - you have to actually preemptively include it in your forces!

I think the idea is that a wargame is more like D&D, and less like the Olympics. It requires cooperation to keep the illusion intact, so there's a limit to how "sweaty" you can be trying to win. After a certain point, you're exploiting the limitations of the scenario rather than the weaknesses of your opponent.

The thing is, you could probably create something FAR more horrific by simply mixing spent nuclear fuel with TNT...

Not that I want to give anyone any ideas.

> The thing is, you could probably create something FAR more horrific by simply mixing spent nuclear fuel with TNT...

Nope. It turns out you need astronomical amounts of spent waste to noticeably impact a large population.

The trial of Jose Padilla (aka "the dirty bomber") has the best data on this. He went to Al Qaeda, offering to build and detonate a dirty bomb. Al Qaeda wasn't at all interested. They had run the actual numbers from an engineering standpoint (unlike everyone else who had just said "ooh scary bad!"), and demonstrated clearly that dirty bombs aren't actually a viable mass casualty weapon.

Before the Jose Padilla trial, we used to hear lots about dirty bombs. Since then, not at all. It's not that people forgot about them. They just aren't actually a credible engineering threat. It's too hard to get enough material distributed over a large enough area to measurably impact health outcomes for the impacted population. That was a surprise that came out of the trial.

There are lots of attack types to worry about. Dirty bombs are very far down that list.

One thing I thought when I read this is that if you only train for the competent adversary you may be unprepared for the one who is different. Could you lose if your theory of mind was wrong? But when I made a rudimentary search for this (Google is so hard to phrase, but I also used LLMs) it seems that in practice every victory is through the commander's skill in navigating their constraints. Surely, some commander out there did a stupid thing and attacked when the rational thing would have been to retreat and it worked, or surely someone didn't keep reserves just out of sheer incompetence and it paid off. But I can't find an example.

Either battles are uniquely unforgiving for bad strategy (entirely possible, they are usually long, which has a law of large numbers effect to it) or military historians back-form rationalizations for the victors or some other third thing I can't think of right away.

I was hoping there'd be some crystal clear example of the equivalent of not folding on an off-suit 2/7 and having it play off. But I found none. Interesting.

The Miracle of the House of Brandenburg is the closest example I can think of

Battle of Samar is the first one that comes to mind. Japanese fleet successfully sent a decoy carrier fleet to draw the American carriers northward, away from the transports at Leyte Gulf, while main battleship fleet went in to mop up. But they ran into 3 escort carrier groups. Americans managed to put up so much resistance, with lone destroyers steaming headlong into a group of 4 battleships and 6 heavy cruisers and planes making dry runs with no bullets or bombs, that they convinced the Japanese fleet that the American carrier groups had not left after all, even after the decoy carriers had been destroyed.

Midway also could be an example. Instead of a coordinated attack, the dive bombers got lost and couldn't find the Japanese carriers. This led to the torpedo bombers getting slaughtered by Japanese fighters. However, in the process of getting slaughtered, they brought the fighters down to low altitude - which meant the dive bombers could attack unmolested when they finally showed up late. Three carriers went up in flames within minutes.

Oh the Midway example is good. I like that one since it's hard to claim that was orchestrated. No one would juice their torpedo bombers for their dive bombers. It's just situational error that worked out. Thank you!

I would add:

… and generally antagonistic towards the identification of them.

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