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
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