[A-List] US imperialism: military dissent

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

War game was fixed to ensure American victory, claims general

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday August 21, 2002
The Guardian

The biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost
of £165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans
beat their "Middle Eastern" adversaries, according to one of the main
participants.

General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the
Army Times that the sprawling three-week millennium challenge exercises,
were "almost entirely scripted to ensure a [US] win".

He protested by quitting his role as commander of enemy forces, and
warning that the Pentagon might wrongly conclude that its experimental
tactics were working.

When Gen Van Riper agreed to command the forces of an unnamed Middle
Eastern state - which bore a strong re semblance to Iraq, but could have
been Iran - he thought he would be given a free rein to probe US
weaknesses. But when the game began, he was told to deploy his forces to
make life easier for US forces.

"We were directed... to move air defences so that the army and marine
units could successfully land," he said. "We were simply directed to
turn [air defence systems] off or move them... So it was scripted to be
whatever the control group wanted it to be."

The Army Times reported that, as commander of a low-tech, third-world
army, Gen Van Riper appeared to have repeatedly outwitted US forces.

He sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated
electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the
Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in
apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank
a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and
the American ships "refloated" so that the US forces stood a chance.

"Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the joint forces commander
advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise.
They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that
end," Gen Van Riper said. He said he quit when he found out his orders
were being over ruled by the military coordinators of the game.

Vice-Admiral Marty Mayer, one of the coordinators, denied claims of
fixing. "I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books
were cooked," he said.

The games were designed to test experimental new tactics and doctrines
advocated by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and were referred
to in Pentagon-speak as "military transformation".

The transformation is aimed at making US forces more mobile and daring,
but Gen Van Riper said that the "concepts" the game were supposed to
test, with names such as "effects-based operations" and "rapid, decisive
operations", were little more than "slogans", which had not been
properly put to the test by the exercise.