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> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.

> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.

Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.

This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.

Nothing he did was really 'glitching' the game. Yes there were unexpected circumstances, but that's exactly what happens in war as well. As the old saying goes - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The weapons defenses were turned off because they were having difficulty distinguishing between civilian and hostile targets, which is a completely viable scenario in an asymmetric conflict.

The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.

And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.

Some of what you're saying is fair. The simulation did have known issues, including glitches with point-defense systems and ships being placed unrealistically close to Red assets due to peacetime constraints on the exercise. The Wikipedia article on MC2002 acknowledges these shortfalls directly.

But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.

More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."

Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.

Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.

MC2002 was not primarily a wargame to develop operational plans. You can do that much easier and cheaper with a bunch of generals around a map. MC2002 was a training exercise with an element of competitiveness to pressure people under unexpected situations. As a training exercise its prime goal was not to figure out what plans were best but to just exercise plans and get people to do the plan, period. Given that, events that stopped the training exercise, like missileing all the ships, were retcon'd in order to do what the exercise was supposed to do, train people

Wargames have repeatedly been used to align strategic initiatives because they are designed to as closely replicate an adversary's actions and resources as closely as possible. So for instance in better times there was Proud Prophet [1], another wargame, played out in 1983. Its goal was to simulate outcomes of various scenarios involving hot conflict with the USSR. Up to the point of that wargame, the US position towards the USSR had been this sort of 'peace through strength', 'escalate to deescalate' nonsense.

The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet

Yes, wargames can be used to evaluate strategic and operational plans. However, notice how many boots on the ground were involved in Proud Prophet. My point was that MC2002 was not primarily a wargame for evaluating plans, it was primarily a training exercise where lessons learned from executing the existing plans might be used to wargame out future changes

The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.

Well shit, we should have paid attention when Iran developed light speed motorcycles evidently.

After being restarted, the red (opposing) force general resigned due to the restarted game having what amounted to a scripted end, with little to no latitude for the red force to exercise creativity in strategy or tactics. Among the highlights, the red force were required to turn on and leave on their AA radars so that blue force HARMs could take them out, and the red force was prohibited from attempting to shoot down any of the 82nd airborne / marine air assault forces during the assault.

Gen. Van Riper's tactics were apparently discredited in 2002 because they were unfair, but Iran seems not to have received the memo since their moves bear more than a passing resemblance to his.

We have not gotten quite to the "VDV tries air assault, gets wiped out" stage of Iran war yet, as far as I know.

But the US seems to be committed on repeating the Russian experience.

Similar complaints from Trump the other day

“So, it’s it’s uh little unfair. You know, you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.”

https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/2033768757688934424

In fighting games, this is exactly the way "scrubs" think. They lose and appeal to some vague notion of fairness to avoid confronting the reality - they lost!

Would be funny if it wasn't real.

I feel the comparison is too apples-to-oranges, games are designed things with goals like the enjoyment of participants and—on at least some level—a fair playing field.

It’s all the VAR referee’s fault.

Wow! He is saying: we said that we won, but they are winning... how are they allowed to be winning when we said that we won... so unfair...

And with him saying that, millions of his followers instantly started believing it with no second thought.

> The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.

This is not what Wikipedia's summary describes. Now, maybe Wikipedia has the wrong summary, but according to it the challenge wasn't "discredited". By that point the exercise was over, but 13 more days were budgeted for, so the analysts requested their forces to be resurrected so they could play out the rest of the days, with artificial restrictions so that the rest of the challenge was effectively scripted and left no room for the OPFOR to try novel tactics.

One of the generals (of the blue team) is quoted as saying: "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?"

Also:

> The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."

From Wikipedia:"Such defeat can be attributed to various shortfalls in simulation capabilities and design that significantly hindered Blue Force fighting and command capabilities. Examples include: a time lag in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information being forwarded to the Blue Force by the simulation master, various glitches that limited Blue ships point-defense capabilities and error in the simulation which placed ships unrealistically close to Red assets."

It definitely seems like there were issues with RedFors achievments. But the response is still ridiculous. I would have also resigned in ReFor's shoes.

Implementation details aside, explosive speed boats have decimated Russia's black sea fleet.

The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.

Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.

The reset isn't the problem, the entirely nerfing the Red team is the problem. The US took steps to fail to learn from the exercise before it had even finished.

what exactly does one learn from hypothetical light-speed motorcycles?

Does the enemy nation have internet? If so, there's your light-speed couriers.

motorcycles can navigate bombed terrain, your fiber optics cables will be torn...

I can see the following technology replacing motorcycles for communication:

(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)

a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)

b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)

Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...

Wouldn’t a WiFi mesh network be more reliable in war-torn areas? If you just need communication then actual “internet” is incidental and probably a security risk - just having a fairly secure local mesh network, with nodes covering hot-spot areas, seems like a good idea - it can cross areas where fiber isn’t reliable because of all the war, and it can potentially remove the need for some by-hand communication.

Wifi mesh makes sense in a densely populated area, not over mostly desert.

Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.

Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.

Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:

quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).

Right, but those are realistic engineering considerations.

Nowhere in your message do you describe light-speed motorcycles.

You didn't arrive at this conclusion thanks to a light-speed motorcycle thought exercise...

I was not talking about light-speed motorcycles. That was an artifact of imperfect war simulation.

The relevant concept is undetectable (by electronic surveilance) communication usable for tactical warfighting. Real life motorcycle messengers are a partial (detectable, high-latency) solutions for which there are currently (not at the time of that war exercise) better options (e.g. the one I presented).

You can nitpick that due to imperfection of the exercise (allowing red team to use light-speed motorcycles) the whole result of the wargame was compromised. To which my answer is: That is a nitpick, real-life offers the red team enough options to achieve the same results without relying on physically impossible feats.

Most recent example: Isrealis are learning to cope with fiber optics drones in the southern Lebanon, to great detriment to their Merkavas.

both in Ukraine and elsewhere there is the fiber optic challenge.

shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?:

flash/flood the scene with appropriate stimulation wavelength for suitable fluorescent center, take a picture (and observe the emission wavelength), then take the same picture without the flash, repeat this N times and add all the ones with the flash present and subtract all the frames without so one can observe the exact paths of the optic cables...

It seems one could mass produce a cheap detection and imaging platform that can aid cutting all the umbilical cords cost-effectively.

Can you point me to more information on:

"shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?"

In Ukraine, there are areas densely covered with fiber optic lines, almost all of them old. How would you detect and cut only the active ones?

A brightly flashing drone examining and cutting fiber optics lines would a) be slow and very obvious, easy to disable b) need a lot of battery power for all those flashes, and risk getting tangled in branches when cutting

On the other hand, if you can easily remotely detect the fiber optic cables, it might be useful for quickly detecting them and tracing them back to the operator.

I learnt something new - wow - we are truly led by idiots.

who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.

War games aren't useful for guessing the real course of the war. 'Iraq' was able to prevent a US invasion in pre 2003 wargames.

Except the US military DID learn from that war game. In the war game the US's fleet was utterly destroyed. In our real life, so far, the US navy has lost exactly zero ship against Iran.

It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.

I don’t think the air campaign against Iran and the campaign in the war game are similar at all.

This is an odd place to put a stake in the ground--there are a number of macro trends that have been going on for far longer (e.g. the military-industrial complex, the Cold War, Congress, American football), as well as a few others that have only really come to a head more recently (e.g. demographics, media spheres/tribalization). I would argue that our failure to learn lessons from the Millennium Challenge has a massive overlap with our failure to learn from Ukraine--not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam... The military is not monolithic--remember that the Millennium Challenge was more or less a sparring bout between two parts of the military with different philosophies--and it really takes something like an existential war for meritocracy and common sense to reassert themselves to a meaningful degree.

A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).

Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).

> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.

Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?

I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.

Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?

> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum

This was by design via the mosaic defense tactic.

They know the US prides itself on decapitation strikes, "taking out the leader of x" was a monthly headline during our time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and during the events of ISIS/syrian civil war. It's how the special forces operated, taking out a "leader", collecting all the names they could find in their possession, and taking those guys out. In the later days of Afghanistan, they stopped even trying to find out who the names were. If you were some mid-level Taliban member's dentist, you'd be fair game.

So Iran built a defense for that, a military that does not need a central command to continue fighting. They have their orders and they'll continue to carry them out. Completely bypass the benefits of highly accurate munitions, cyber intelligence, etc.

That's the same reason the first round of the Millennium challenge won outright. The red-team leadership knew to not expect last year's war today, and used their brains to exploit the weaknesses of a highly mechanized and sophisticated military.

What would such predelegated instructions look like, how large is the state space in that flowchart? How effective is control theory with a tiny state space? This doesn't sound like a survival plan, but a self-splintering plan: some military units will capitulate or defect while others fight on, when pushed till the edge, or is there some kind of direct-democracy-within-the-IRGC? that doesn't sound plausible...

Basically sounds like the military from Imperial Japan during the end of WW2, with scattered units continuing to fight, surrender not believed an option, not aware, or in disbelief that Japan has surrendered...

Let's hope it doesn't have to lead to the same conclusion?

The Swedish military famously works the same way (or at least used to) - they're trained to uphold the Swedish constitution themselves regardless of what their leadership says, with the result that they saved many lives in former Yugoslavia despite orders not to intervene: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/09/20/trigger... .

This isn't a complicated war. The US can't and won't do occupations, so the only thing you need to do is cause problems till they leave.

Iran doesn't have to conventionally defeat the US military and can't: so they're just not doing that, and instead going after valuable economic targets which are politically sensitive to Americans and impossible to defend since they're risk sensitive.

> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command

There is no reason to believe that

They have been training for decades for exactly this sort of war, and have experienced veterans at all levels

If anything islamic countries never lack, its hierarchy. Endless, suffocating hierarchy, with all levels frozen in fear of the higher echelons. Then there is the clan-element. Certain families, have certain generals, whos underlings are of the same family, all the way down.

One has to abandon the view that what represents to the media as a modern state, with modern institution is actually a state. What you have is several, small states, city-kingdoms basically, ruled by one clan. Connected to one another in a tangle of agreements and contracts. Once you come to this point, you start to understand the structure of the thing and also why it is hard to decapitate.