When US operators don't have a huge air superiority advantage, they usually just fold lmao.
https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1455637159453601797
That was the Millennium challenge, a big expensive war game simulating war with Iran
I keep hearing that the enemy was using tactics in physically impossible ways, something about bike messengers traveling at extreme speeds and shit like that.If I'm dumb someone please tell me, but if the war game was dumb then it's good to know the full story.
EDIT: sounds like it was the former so read below , it's interesting
So i've linked stuff that says the story of the millenium challenge is bullshit but i keep getting told it's military cope without further explanation. basically the navy was not used in a way that would not actually occur in an actual war and the opfor took advantage of that as well as maybe defying the laws of physics
While yes, some of the tactics used were not practical, the general gist of "US Navy is horribly vulnerable to swarm attacks, non-radio coms and logistics, and large scale asymmetric approaches in general" is hard to ignore.
vulnerable to attacks that would never occur because they'd never be in that situation in actual warfare
So the main critiques as I remember are
a) No time delay on the motorcycles. Fair, but this would have delayed action by maybe an hour, less for the first wave. I can't see a workable way of the battle group exploiting the slower communications, though it might have allowed more prep for the second wave, simple timing could have achieved the same result
b) A computing error enabled the second wave to be closer than anticipated to the fleet, enabling engagement at point black range. Yes, that's an error but not one anticipated by OPFOR. Just exploited. Any number of actual occurrences in a real littoral environment could achieve the same opportunity.
c) The boats can't carry the missiles. Yeah, this is probably the strongest. But it's not too hard to imagine purpose-built light FACs that could achieve the same purpose at low cost.
Even if we remove all three of these and put more reasonable restrictions in, I can't see the exercise going much better for the USA.
The accusations are made up nonsense by amateur forum users, the interviews and the primary sources like the after action report and the major book on the subject disprove or make no mention of anything to do with "warp speed bike messengers", "cruise missiles on speed boats", or "computing errors that endanger entire fleets"
Many of the accusers seem to miss the point that none of Ripers opponents in the exercise or his superiors disputed his results but simply deemed them "irrelevant" to the larger projects, and openly acknowledged the results in the official action-report
“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.” - JFCOM report
basically the navy was not used in a way that would not actually occur in an actual war
What is this referring too, cause there's no mention of improper use of naval forces anywhere in the interviews or the after action report?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/4qfoiw/millennium_challenge_2002_setting_the_record/
this has excerpts from an interview from the blueforce commander. particularly the part about how the navy should normally be over the horizon and not right at the shore
That ignores the fact that amphibious landing operations was the primary goal of blue team’s combat strategy as stated in the after action report and the fact the majority of the ships Riper sunk were amphibious landers or fire support ships, ironically the critique isn’t about Ripers tactics but the literal war strategy by US command in the event of a war with Iran which requires shoreline marine assaults along the Persian gulf
It wasn’t a glitch it’s was US commanders unironically believing they could breach Iranian operational depth along the shore
It's a common myth spread around American military forums, in what I believe to have been an early example of cope, it made its way into reddit a couple of years ago
I did a deep dive on this two years to find whether Paul K. Van Riper did anything physically or strategically impossible, couldn't find a thing, in fact many of the accusations get major details of the simulation completely wrong, like claiming he placed cruise missiles on speed boats [he fired the cruise missiles from the coast while he used smaller missile cutters and speed boats jammed with explosives] and I couldn't find any complaints in official documentation from the opposing team about faster than light bike messengers so that appears to have just been made up by forum users
Some industrial essay writer could do a nice little piece on 'misinformation in the service of military reputation laundering' but that person isn't me
Edit: I found some things, it appears the warp speed bike messenger claim originated from a misunderstood quote by Riper referring to the missile barrage “The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes,” this quote was taken to have meant the whole simulation instead of literally just the missiles launching and hitting
I vaguely recall from an article that I read years ago that the enemy commander used messengers on motorcycles instead of phone calls because phonecalls could be tapped. Idk more than that, maybe someone forgot to figure out how fast you could reasonably drive on a dirt road in the middle of the night and they ended up using an unreasonably high number?
It was Iran. They also noticed that due to all of Iran's missiles (that America gave them) Iran had the capacity to take out all the water/oil processing equipment in Saudi Arabia effectively turning the country into a broke desert
read this great book called "dreadnought" about the role of naval buildup from the battle of trafalgar leading up to wwi (i may be getting details wrong here), and stuff like this always reminds me of it
after trafalgar, the british were basically unchallenged rulers of the sea and after that there was a long period of the major powers not fucking with each other at sea. it was also a period where there was a lot of technological development of warships, both in propulsion, hull armour, and gunnery - and outside of things like the monitor/merrimack battle, there was very little in-battle testing of them. so nobody knew which ship designs would work or not work (to the point where they all started adding ramming spikes for a while cos they thought that might be a thing again) and there were whole generations of incredibly weird ships that were built and scrapped without seeing action or anyone knowing if they were actually any good.
and the british got high on their own farts and complacent with training but also things got weird - the captains were all fighting for promotions but they couldnt do feats of derring-do in battle, so they practiced increasingly more elaborate sail-changing parade drills (on ships where the masts and sails were more and more vestigial), and huge amounts of sailors fell to their deaths doing them. simultaneously they were all painting their ships white on their own dime to look good on parade (again for promotions), and actually firing guns would get the paint dirty so they avoided actual gunnery practice, and then when they needed to turn up at the colonies to shell some uppity natives into submission they couldnt fucking hit anything.
and they measured everything in terms of number of guns of a given calibre as their key indicator of naval power, and then when they had to fight a real battle at jutland, it turned out that the important stuff was shit they hadnt even thought of (mostly cos it was the boring shit and wasnt as cool as big guns go bang) - vulnerability of ammunition magazines was way more important than how many guns of how large a calibre, and it turned out their signalling/communications systems were dogshit because they hadnt bothered training that in battle conditions cos it wasnt cool and macho so nobody knew what the fuck they were doing (especially when they were at full speed and the smoke obscured the signals anyway), and the captains all wanted glory (and their institutional culture would brand them a coward for not always charging in suicidally) so they ignored the signals anyway.
anyway whenever i hear about stuff like this and the millennium challenge and how long its been since america fought a conventional war where this sort of shit could be tested against real opponents, it always reminds me of this
I wonder what the American equivalent of “there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today” will be.
Some independent actor with a drone swarm blows up an aircraft carrier by overwhelming it with $100 dollar drones.
When the entirety of the US falls apart simultaneously. The whole this is what’s wrong with our bloody ships
are you implying that there is more to the us armed forces than dodge chargers, military base Burger King, and calling for air support when you see a child?
that and the navy is infamous for promoting people for aristocratic connections.
no proper aristocrats the kind that are like racehorses in that past 30 they are essentially put on a shelf. A good example is prince Andrew all the British state ever wanted from him was to serve out his navy career after which point he was done and started to make his own decisions, which as it turns out he was too evil and stupid to do properly
anyway whenever i hear about stuff like this and the millennium challenge and how long its been since america fought a conventional war where this sort of shit could be tested against real opponents, it always reminds me of this
We did conventional war back in the 90s during Desert Storm, and we basically mopped the floor with the Iraqi Army - then the 5th largest in the world. But yes, a lot of those battles really did boil down to "My tank can shoot twice as far and drive twice as fast as your tank and can actually hit what its aiming at" conflicts, wherein a dozen American vehicles just backpeddled and decimated an Iraqi tank battalion.
The modern US military still does periodically have to deal with quasi-combat situations, particularly in air defense. But the theory is that our tech so vastly outstrips the competition that there really isn't a countermeasure you can deploy against it. The Millennial Challenge was a shock, because Americans assumed you could just roll through the Iranian military unimpeded. But the real "defeat" in that scenario was in expected American casualties (which officers predicted would be near-zero, but opposition commanders proved would be far higher). America still "won" the conflict with overwhelming force.
These scenarios definitely illustrate how American military units are under-trained and unprepared for a full-scale conflict. But anyone who thinks the US couldn't wipe the UK off the map in a serious conflict is crazy. There's a huge gulf between believing the US units are invincible and inexhaustible, and that they can't do horrific damage in a stand-up battle.
Destroying your oponent isn't winnning a war. We can brake shit. We can drop more nukes. However, we don't realy have the logistical lower to pick an objective and do it.
Consider china, we are never going to do a grownd war with them. But if we tried, we wouldn't be a le to get even a quarter of our sfuff there. And hhen there it wouldn't work half as well. We could burn it all down at the cost of most our stuff. Couldn't proper call it a voctory even though we'd be thr last ones standing. It be the opposite of ww2. Where we won by really not getting onvovled and looting the corpses of the combatents.
The big lesson of WW2 is that you don't need to control territory in order to establish a global economic hegemony. Breaking the opposition's industrial base is sufficient to consolidate power within your own.
We don't want to do an open war with China, but we absolutely do want to cut off their industrial capacity and chain them to our supply routes. So we cut deals with Australia and we foment revolts in Xinjiang and we destabilize the border with India. All in the hope that China's gangbusters growth will lag long enough for our own economy to finally get its shit together after a 40 year Volcker-Shock induced development lag.
i think i read that book too. the part about racing maggots was super gross lol
sorry for the late response. as you say, "the british got high on their own farts and complacent with training but also things got weird" lol... but yeah it just talked about how isolated sailors were and how disgusting their food got. so boring were their lives that, for entertainment, they would shake maggots out of old biscuits to see which would find its way back faster!
there's a fairly recent Dollop episode, "The Essex" that I highly recommend for similar vibes. Of course it's a story about American sailors but yeah! they're so good at making the worst situations hilarious
I remember as a kid being like "uh, isn't it kind of dumb to base everything on airplanes, because what if you have to fight without them?" and being told I don't understand the intricacies of US military superiority
US has not fought a war against a country that possessed a conventional airforce since WWII, they just take it for granted
There was arguably Korea, Vietnam, and First Gulf. But the US performance in the first two was far from stellar and the last one was against a badly out of date and undertrained opponent.
yank soldiers are widely considered to be shit at their jobs among soldiers of other countries
Our special operations detachments are just glorified assassins. They been rocked before in stand up fights, like Operation Red Wings, where seals kicked the hornets nest in Afghanistan and got got by the local militias.
whom amongst us wouldn't want to learn more?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Wings
US Strength: 12 Seals, 8 pilots, additional helo crew, 2 Apache Gunships, 2 Blackhawks, 2 Chinooks
Taliban strength: 8-10, or 70-100 (lmao wut)
Result: Insurgent Strategic victory
US casualties: 19 dead, 1 helo shot down
Taliban casualties: Unknown, highest estimate 35
Ok. Taking that on its face, how you gonna have two fucking gunships and a dozen SEALs, but ONLY maybe get around 35 and get everyone on the ground owned?
"military journalist Ed Darack cites a military intelligence report stating the strength of the Taliban force to be 8–10"
rekt
No amount of technology will ever be able to beat homefield advantage and anti-imperialist spirit.
I feel like the local militias actually have to know how to fight vs the US where the moment they start losing they just wait for an airstrike
All of the most popular American war movies are about troops running away lmao
It's so thinly veiled Martyrdom propaganda that is almost laughable that people fall for it.
The biggest problem with the US military is the people. All the tech in the world won't help if the people using it are idiots.
Addendum: just look dumbfuck generals and stuff in the news the past few years. like Michael Flynn. those people are the best the military has to offer. you do get some people like this https://www.purdue.edu/uns/html3month/2001/010726.Javorsek.exceptnal.htm, but they are rare exceptions.
They’re not the best the military has to offer, they’re just adept at telling the deciders that they’re the best.
Edit: find yourself an NCO who loves Lenin and reads about Bronze Age tactics.
A butterfly could flap it's wings in China and the US top brass would cry for more funding
yeah they don't need an excuse to cry for more funding the politicians have already been bribed by the arms manufacturers to give it to them
This makes me think of the Trashfuture Britainology on the Falklands, and how it was the most Dudes Rock war ever. Really entertaining episode, even if they (rather typically) get some details wrong (for instance, iirc, they don’t discuss that it’s widely believed amongst many forces types that H. Jones was killed by his own men as he was a complete piece of shit).
So many gammons in the UK literally doing the :so-true: face about this lmao
The Telegraph World News twitter account is giving me some really bad vibes with that profile picture's color scheme and layout.
... is it wrong that I feel bad our murderers lost to the British murderers?
I hate this place and wish every day for it to end, which makes it all the weirder to find out I apparently had some vestigial traces of imperial ego, because fuck this is embarrassing.
Aww shit, that little satellite dish plugged into the radio makes me nostalgic. Fuck SATCOM it sucks and I hate it.
