After the war game was restarted...

>After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#Exercise_action

Salty railroading am I right?

>Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.
>Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel.
>Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

I'd be pretty salty if I was Blue tbqhwyf.

>assholes forcing their subordinates to do stupid shit to validate the assholes' ideas
Yep, this is the military, all right.

So how exactly do they expect to defend against an enemy employing the same tactics?

What if... we built a wall!

...

that is the purpose of a wargame, to make sure these questions are answered long before you actually see something resembling it on a real battlefield.

How you would defend? No idea, I'm only here for the memes

Well, in the wargame they defeated them in the end.

Essentially by forbidding them from doing anything that could stand in the way of Blue sides victory, but they won.

truly the blue team commanders are the Napoleons of our time

Are you familiar with the controversy of what the Red team did? Namely, cheating? Salty bastard wanted nothing but to win, not do the purposes of the exercise.

Pretty simple. Intercept small boats a ways away from the main fleet. Run strikes hitting important assets. If the guy doesn't want to turn on his SAMs, he'll get ruined. Look at Serbia. They did the same thing, and their forces were completely shut down, as Coalition airpower interdicted any possible movement. Yes, they didn't take significant casualties, but by being stuck in place, they can be maneuvered upon by ground forces and defeated in detail. That's exactly what happened to Iraq.

>not mentioning that the simulated motorcycle messengers traveled at the speed of light

Maybe your infidel messengers can't travel at light speed, but with Allah's blessing the faithful can do the impossible.

I'd be pissed. When our GM called a do-over because he TPK'd us i was pissed. Not that we could redo, but that he was metagaming to ensure our deaths because we went off the tracks.

I was just as pissed when he realized a mistake (granting the barbarian godlike powers) and invented a deity to kill him. After letting the barbarian re-do without what granted him powers, he still mind controlled the barbarian to kill himself a few sessions later. We do not play with him as GM again.

Except Serbia didn't so much decided not to turn on their AA, they didn't really have any to begin with. Weapons 50+ years old don't count, unless they are Kalashnikov.

You forget the part where the boats materialized out of nowhere, the motorcycle messengers moved at the speed of light, the fleet was stationary because what Van Ripen did there was not the point of that part of the exercise, and that it's somehow unusual for a wargame to be restarted when it costs millions of dollars to get all of these units in a particular place on a particular time table.

Fuck off back to War is Boring, you disingenuous cunt

I remember reading a similar thing to this about a different war game on land.This seems like a common theme for war games.

proofs?

Not Red's fault that Blue didn't think to employ tactical wizards

>Except Serbia didn't so much decided not to turn on their AA, they didn't really have any to begin with.
That's blatantly incorrect. Serbia had AA. Even shot down an F-117.

Those damn dirty blues.

I experienced a couple of exercises like that. Basically, our company was pitted against a village occupied by insurgents, but the Colonel in charge of the operation had given explicit orders for OPFOR not to move from positions we knew they were in from the briefing. This quite simply because the Colonel had invited friends and dignitaries to see how good we were, since he was thirsty for a promotion like a Veeky Forumsfag is for pussy. This went on for a whole week, every day repeating the same exercise in front of a different set of officers so that he could milk our 'performance' as much as he could.
Just a shame.

After it made multiple passes and got tagged with a lucky lock on.

nonetheless, it did get shot down.

As strange as the circumstances surrounding it were, it was still a shootdown, showing quite clearly that Serbia did in fact have a number of capable SAMs.

>Look at Serbia. They did the same thing, and their forces were completely shut down, as Coalition airpower interdicted any possible movement. Yes, they didn't take significant casualties, but by being stuck in place, they can be maneuvered upon by ground forces and defeated in detail. That's exactly what happened to Iraq.

I don't think that this is really the example you want to invoke.

They got a miraculous shootdown, so what? Such things happen in war. However, they completely failed to prevent the bombing campaign from doing its job.

Actually the guy who was organizing serbian AA wasn't trying to, all of the shootdowns they achieved were on aircraft making their return trip.

>Actually the guy who was organizing serbian AA wasn't trying to
I literally made that point. He didn't even try, and thus never denied the airspace to the Coalition. They continued their mission, and Serbian forces continued to be unable to move. T

The purpose of the wargame was to test out Command and Control processes between the different branches of the Armed Forces. Weapons and physical "things" were all simulated, lacking in verisimilitude somewhat too.

The aim wasn't to win by gaming the system, it was to roleplay so as to practice the command and control aspects of large-scale joint operations.

It means nothing in the context of the air campaign as a whole.

And so would the enemy bromeister. What he did is pretty much standard (Insert country Red was alleged to represent) TTPs.

>What he did is pretty much standard (Insert country Red was alleged to represent) TTPs.
So Red can break the laws of physics?

Similar thing happened to me and a friend. Our unit was running a wargame for the active duty units when the Stryker was brand new. Me and another specialist were given control of 'Orangelands' airforce. A whopping 4 MiG-17's and a fleet of 25 Hinds and like 10 Hips. Mostly because it was so small and ineffectual that all the officers couldn't be bothered with it.

Silly officers Learned that day that you don't place two computer game loving specialists in control of a shitty airfiorce. We, deeming the Hips expendable because we had no troops to transport. Proceeded to send them out one at a time on circuitous routes and took look for targets of opportunity and took note of where they took groundfire. In addition we got with he guy running the guerrilla insurgent SF troops and kept them feeding us unit locations as well. Around 7 Hips later we had the Blueforce air defense coverage pretty well mapped out along with a route that was undefended. Then, rather than sending some puny attack( mostly because we knew we were only going to get one shot at this before they shut us down) we sent the entire remaining airgroup into the fray. after about an half hour of flying out to sea and looping around to fly outside of ground based radar range and the the air defense line (they had foolishly only deployed to cover the advancing tanks. we swept around from behind and attacked the Stryker brigade we had found. we were able to actually fly back and rearm and do it all over again before they caught on. We ended up annihilating the Stryker brigade at no loss. (at least until they magicked in some air defense units that miraculously teleported to just where we were.)

Either way they ended up reconstituting the destroyed units, resetting everything back to pre-our attack. And we got a talking to about , "How OpFor air forces don't act that way. And that we should only send out Hinds in 2 vehicle groupings and only against the front lines"

>American Military Officers are literally tweener 40k players.
I like that they have to cheat to win, that's hilarious.

I know Tuchman isn't terribly well liked on Veeky Forums, but this sort of willful ignorance is a major theme of one of her books.

Once Vietnam was declared to be vital to American interests, it could not be declared non-vital, no matter what the facts were. Once committed to a strategy, defence of that strategy becomes more important than the sucess of the strategy.

It's how you lose wars. It's how you lose countries.

If you plan around "heavy bombing is effective" or "Hinds only move in 2 vehicle groupings against the front lines" or "the enemy will not use small boats or suicide tactics" then yes, your results will confirm the strategy you already had. Changing strategies is /hard/. Admitting you were wrong is /hard/.

But to do anything else is folly.

>And we got a talking to about , "How OpFor air forces don't act that way.

If their job wasn't hard they wouldn't get paid the big bucks.

But it's a perverse incentive. Don't rock the boat; if you rock the boat, you might get fired, and your fat pension and trips to Maui might vanish. Don't be principled because your boss doesn't like a stickler. Don't worry about truth or honesty; WWIII won't happen on your watch.

Well, life is hard and organizing humans is harder. Nobody's made a system yet that you can't game.

I've seen the opposite happen. Ten day wargame. Command post exercise. Purely the brigade commander and his staff in a tent complex in an empty field out behind the PX. Including us, lowly PSYOP command staff, in our own crappy tent annex.

So we're there talking about dropping simulated leaflets on North Korea, while the brigade commander is talking about rolling simulated tanks over the DMZ.

Seven days in, all the game objectives have been met. The brigade commander has satisfactorily demonstrated his ability to command a brigade and its supporting assets according to US combat doctrine.

But there's still three days left, so the folks running the game amp things up to the next level. The road to Pyonyang is wide open.

> Teleporting Nork Air Assault Battalions
> Thousands of Nork Infantry emerging from magic ninja tunnels to our rear.
> Every kind of bullshit, just to see what would happen.

There's a time and a place for everything, user.

>But there's still three days left, so the folks running the game amp things up to the next level. The road to Pyonyang is wide open.
Ah, how I loved the last half hour of Model UN. Shit like this happened.

Actually the perfect analogy for PC behavior.being corrected for metagame nonsense and rules lawyering. The entire controversy was just a Marine officer willfully interpreting the rules of the game in his favor (and at time knowingly breaking reality) to humiliate the Navy. The entire point of the wargame was to test C&C integration, not to humor OpFor's Yang Wengli impersonation.

I recall reading somewhere that those cruise missiles were all fired from boats which weighed less than the missile they were supposedly firing. I don't know if that's possible or not, but it seems a bit implausible.

Possible.

To float you just need to disperse water.

So you can have a shape that by area is light holding a more dense object like cruise missiles.