When US operators don't have a huge air superiority advantage, they usually just fold lmao.
https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1455637159453601797
When US operators don't have a huge air superiority advantage, they usually just fold lmao.
https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1455637159453601797
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
deleted by creator
true :inshallah:
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
RIP torpedo dingies
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?