Tensions between the U.S. and Iran are rising fast, and many are now guessing both countries have planted themselves squarely on an inexorable path to war.
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After unverified reports surfaced that Iranian forces and proxies are staging attacks against U.S. allies and the U.S.’ embassy in Baghdad, and planning kidnappings of U.S. troops, the U.S. ordered 1,500 more troops to deploy to the Middle East. Currently, a plan is being floated to send 10,000 more soon.
Most major media coverage of the tensions revolve around various plans for massive troop deployments, U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatening tweets and retorts by Iranian officials.
But it is worth stepping back from the breaking news cycle and remembering that the U.S. once simulated a war against an Iran-like country. Taking place in 2002, the simulation was the biggest and most expensive of its kind at the time: it cost over $250 million and involved over 13,000 troops.
But it is worth stepping back from the breaking news cycle and remembering that the U.S. once simulated a war against an Iran-like country. Taking place in 2002, the simulation was the biggest and most expensive of its kind at the time: it cost over $250 million and involved over 13,000 troops.
Though it took two years to plan and was scheduled to take place over three weeks, it only took ten minutes for it to end. Within those ten minutes, the backbone of the U.S. forces had been broken, and the Iran-like country emerged victorious.
The details of the military exercise, called the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC’02), exposed how utterly unprepared the U.S. military was for an opponent like Iran, which engages in asymmetric warfare.
These lessons may be applied again to the security dilemma the U.S and Iran finds itself in now. As the MC’02 showed the U.S.’ top military commanders at the time, a war against Iran could be disastrous.
The Millennium Challenge
“The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes,”
USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier, leaving port (Shutterstock)
In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to prepare the U.S. military for the emergent technology predicted to reshape battlefields in the 21st century. A massive military simulation was formulated between the U.S. and a comparatively weaker adversary seeking to expand its regional footprint.
The enemy was named only the ‘Red Team,’ but it mirrored Iraq or Iran.
Across three weeks, 17 simulation locations and nine “live-force training sites,” Blue and Red were pitted to fight over a strategic shipping lane, and then move onto a simulated invasion of Red’s land.
Blue was to secure the shipping lane, which closely approximated the Strait of Hormuz separating Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. from Iran, and then land paratroopers onto Red soil. Red’s mission was to beat back the Blue navy and then defend itself against the invasion.
The U.S.’ Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), who led the simulation, picked retired Marine Corps three-star general Paul Van Riper, to lead the Red forces. JFCOM’s commander, Gen. Buck Kernan, called Van Riper a “devious sort of guy” and “a no-nonsense solid professional warfighter.”
To begin the simulation, Blue sent a navy convoy including an aircraft carrier and dozens of other, smaller ships including cruisers and amphibious ships.
The Blue Forces, with their mounds of data and projections, had evidently not predicted the Red Team to use asymmetric and terror tactics.
Knowing the U.S. was following a ‘preemptive strike’ stance under Rumsfeld and then-president George Bush, Riper pre-empted the pre-emptive navy strike he saw off the coast of his country. His forces quickly calculated how many missiles the convoy’s ships could take, and then simply launched more.
The ship’s radars were overwhelmed by the sheer number of registered missiles. At the same time, small, civilian-size speedboats carrying explosives raced toward the convoy. The convoy was paralyzed. Cruise missiles rained down onto the ships as the suicide speedboats nailed into their sides.
Nineteen ships in the convoy were destroyed, including the carrier. If the attack were real, it would have killed an estimated 20,000 soldiers.
“The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes,” Van Riper said of the attack.
The Blue Forces, with their mounds of data and projections, had evidently not predicted the Red Team to use asymmetric and terror tactics.
Rigging the War to Win
“War-gaming is not normally corrupted, but this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove,”
Confounded by the tactics used against them, JFCOM ordered a do-over and refloated the ships. Van Riper tried the same line of attack but his forces were fended off.
Then the simulation proceeded to the invasion. Van Riper protected his forces by instituting unconventional defenses: using motorcycle couriers instead of traceable radio or satellite signals and broadcasting codes from mosque minarets and runway lights.
He then set his sights on the Blue’s incoming airforce, which comprised of V-22 Ospreys that were easily detectable on even crude, outdated radars. But before he could shoot them down, he was told he could not fire upon the aircraft. Van Riper then requested to deploy his chemical weapons reserves, but was told he could not. He also learned that the team mediating the simulation was giving orders to Red’s forces that conflicted with Van Riper’s own.
According an in-depth account of the simulation by Micah Zenko, a military analyst, Van Riper was furious.
The most salient lesson from MC’02 is that the U.S. military can be quick to underestimate a lesser powered foe, even if that miscalculation costs thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
When he approached JFCOM with concerns that the simulation was rigged in favor of the Blue Team, Kernan told Van Riper “You are playing out of character. The OPFOR [red team] would never have done what you did.”
Van Riper quit the exercise before it had finished an authored a scathing, 20-page critique of the U.S.’ approach to the simulation.
U.S. Marines search for victims after a suicide attack hit orchestrated by proto-Hezbollah forces their barracks in Lebanon, 1983 (AFP/FILE)
“War-gaming is not normally corrupted, but this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove,” he argued.
In his eyes, though the simulation was meant to acclimate the U.S. to the changing nature of war in the 21st century, it actually demonstrated the hubris of the military and its stubbornness in adapting to asymmetric threats.
“A concept-development exercise that was intended to socialize the military around the inevitability of a leap-ahead, futuristic transformation ultimately left precisely the opposite impression,” Micah Zenko wrote on piece analyzing the impact of the MC’02.
“A concept-development exercise that was intended to socialize the military around the inevitability of a leap-ahead, futuristic transformation ultimately left precisely the opposite impression,” Micah Zenko wrote on piece analyzing the impact of the MC’02.
The most salient lesson from MC’02 is that the U.S. military can be quick to underestimate a lesser powered foe, even if that miscalculation costs thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
Knowing that Van Riper’s Red Team deployed a range of tactics that Iran and its proxy forces perfected, the gravity of this lesson is more apparent in 2019, as the U.S. deploys forces to build pressure on Iran.
