Hurrah!

so Ex Forging Sabre validated the complete transformation of our military forces into a 3G SAF allowing us to fight NCW instead of being constrained to platform-centric warfare. we can now levarage on IKC2 as a force multiplier. how exciting!

except that... reading all the exuberence in the Straits Times, i can't help but think of Millenium Challenge 02.

Millenium Challenge 02 was a major wargaming exercise for the Pentagon to test a set of new and quite radical ideas about how to go into battle. the Blue Team (i.e. the 'good guys', i.e. the damn Yanks) were given greater intellectual resources than perahps any army in history. the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) devised something called the Operational Net Assessment, which was a formal decision making tool that broke the enemy down into a series of systems - military, economic, social, political - and created a matrix showing how all those systems were interrelated and which of the links among the systems were the most vulnerable. Blue Team's commanders were also given a tool called Effects-Based Operations, which directed them to think beyond the conventional military method of targeting and destroying an adversary's military assets. They were given a comprehensive, real-time map of the combat situation called the Common Relevant Operational Picture (CROP). They were given a tool for joint interactive planning. They were given an unprecedented amount of information and intelligence from every corner of the U.S. government and a methodology that was logical and systematic and rigourous and rational. they had every toy in the Pentagon's arsenal.

the Opposition Force (aka Opfor, aka Red Team) was commanded by a retired 3 star general, Paul van Riper. he commanded a force that was in every way outnumbered and outgunned by the Blue Team.

so on the opening day of the war game, Blue Team poured tens of thousands of troops into the theatre of combat, parked an aircraft carrier battle group just offshore of Red Team's home country and issued Red Team with an eight point ultimatum, with the eighth point being to surrender. they then went on to knock out Red Team's microwave towers and cut Red Team's fibre optics lines on the assumption that Red Team would then have to use satellite communications and cell phones which the Blue Team can monitor.

then everything went wrong for the Blue Team. Van Riper used couriers on motorcycles, messages hidden inside prayers, Morse codes via lights. on the second day, Van Riper put small boats in the sea around the theatre to track the ships of the invading Blue Team. and without warning, bombarded the Blue Team navy with an hour-long assualt with a fusillade of cruise missles. When that surprise attack was over, 16 of Blue Team's ships lay at the bottom of the sea. if it were a real war, over 20,000 American servicemen and women would be dead before they fired a single shot. Red Team also assasinated leaders of pro-US countries in the region, leading to further inability of Blue Team forces to mobilize.

all this lead to a catastrophic defeat of the Blue Team. but what happened?

JFCOM ordered all 16 ships to be magically refloated, all the dead marines to be miraculously brought back to life. they then told Van Riper that all his missles were mysteriously destroyed and that he can't use couriers, prayers nor Morse code to communicate. JFCOM then issued scripted the entire wargaming exercise from then on, dictating what Red Team does.

obviously, Blue Team won spectacularly after that. they then used the results of that wargame to validate their 'revolutionary' set of war fighting doctrines, claiming to have lifted the fog of war and gotten rid of the friction of battle.

so what is the moral of the story? if they had to come up with someone as devious and cunning as Van Riper, would the 3G SAF survive?