Paul K. Van Riper is a badass, or, why the Pentagon is retarded

[ríomhaire]

Look how decorated this man is.

You know why that is? Because he's smarter than the entire US military. Reading a book called Blink (it's about split-second observations and decisions) and it has a story about Millennium Challenge 2002. Although it sounds like a B-movie name it was the most expensive wargame conducted in history (1/4 of a billion US dollars).

It was devised as a way of the Pentagon to test their new tactics for countering the effectiveness of an opposing force's military actions. Van Riper was put in charge of Red Team, the bad guys. The story being he was some sort of rogue dictator and the US (Blue Team) were invading to topple his regime. Just so you know a lot of what I'm about to describe is computer simulated in case you're confused as to why the US were blowing up their own stuff.

Blue Team had a pretty sizeable fleet off Red's territory and ordered a surrender. They took out Blue's high-tech communications thinking that Van Riper would be forced to use radios, phones and satellites which they could monitor. Van Riper wasn't an idiot so he couriered his orders by motorbike and by coded messages in calls to prayer from mosques instead. He used small boats to find the exact position of Blue's fleet and launched a gigantic cruise missile storm at them, sinking an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and four of the amphibious boats. Soon after he rammed the fleet with suicide boats and sunk some more.

Declaring that that could never have happened in real life the US military declared their boats weren't sunk after all and restarted the wargame. The officers in charge of the running of the wargame then ordered Red Team's troops out of places Blue Team wanted to land and declared their planes missile proof. They basically took all command away from Van Riper because he wasn't playing the game like they wanted him to. In the end Blue Team were victorious and the war game declared a successful simulation.

For a more some more details on the US military being dipshits read this.

 

[No Limit]

Very interesting read, thanks for posting.

 

[CptStern]

hey that's a scene right out of the Dirty Dozen ..sort of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRKVv4hY-I

except with less mosques and terr'ists


man, the Dirty Dozen is an awesome movie ..much better than reality. there's nio punching of superior officers in reality

 

[Acepilotf14]

YOU DIDN'T HIT ME
YES I DID
NO YOU DIDN'T

 

[Bad^Hat]

Declaring that that could never have happened in real life the US military declared their boats weren't sunk after all and restarted the wargame. The officers in charge of the running of the wargame then ordered Red Team's troops out of places Blue Team wanted to land and declared their planes missile proof. They basically took all command away from Van Riper because he wasn't playing the game like they wanted him to. In the end Blue Team were victorious and the war game declared a successful simulation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvAbGbFYAuk

 

[Wizard]

I was never any good at RTS games. I wonder if Paul Riper would dominate a game of Starcraft or Supreme Commander?

 

[Bad^Hat]

Dude has leet macro but his micro probably suxxors if he had to use cruise missiles lol.

 

[Rizzo]

declared their planes missile proof.

uh? There was alot of things that made me sigh, but that right there... Jesus. And to declare it a succses? What the **** was the point of the simulation if they where just gonna say they won? It seems as accurate as playing Battlefield 2.

 

[Wizard]

Hey man, don't diss BF2. That shit is HxC.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

uh? There was alot of things that made me sigh, but that right there... Jesus. And to declare it a succses? What the **** was the point of the simulation if they where just gonna say they won? It seems as accurate as playing Battlefield 2.

"Mr President, I'm happy to report that our new fighters totally decimated the enemy with zero friendly losses. Now if you'll just sign here on the order to build 1000 more..."

 

[Warped]

this guy eats lead for breakfast and probably wakes up at 4am without an alarm. if theres ever a WW3 I say we need him, hes like Capt Kirk

 

[Tyguy]

this guy eats lead for breakfast and probably wakes up at 4am without an alarm. if theres ever a WW3 I say we need him, hes like Capt Kirk

I disagree, whatever he is eating for breakfast must contain a fair amount of fiber.

 

[Warped]

I disagree, whatever he is eating for breakfast must contain a fair amount of fiber.

its probably like a whole pack of raw eggs tbh

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

Jesus f*cking christ what a bunch of dumbshits.

 

[Shyam]

Interesting, modern technology beaten by a mix of early 20th century communications and common sense.

 

[Danimal]

YOU DIDN'T HIT ME
YES I DID
NO YOU DIDN'T

"Mr President, I'm happy to report that our new fighters totally decimated the enemy with zero friendly losses. Now if you'll just sign here on the order to build 1000 more..."

­­­­­Sums up the thread.

 

[Bob_Marley]

Old news (I read about this years ago) but sadly still very relevent. The US military still thinks its going to fight the cold war. The US Navy still thinks its going to fight WWII.

They seem, by and large, to have neglected the lessons conflicts such as the Falklands and Kosovo (those are the examples that stick out in my mind, in any case).

In Kosovo, the Americans thought they were fighting a poorly commanded, centralized Soviet style force (which, to be fair, for the most part they were). What they didn't count on (and, it seems still don't) is people like this guy:

That guy shot down an F-117 stealth fighter and an F-16 in NATO's back yard (and may have damaged a couple of others, possibly including a B2 stealth bomber) with practically no losses.

He learned everything he could about stealth technology and studied how AA units had functioned best in past conflicts and put those into practice. His units communicated exclusivly via courrier and landline telephone (much like the tactics employed by Riper) so as to aviod interception, didn't activate thier radars until the very last moment to evade anti-radiation missiles (as well as employing decoy emitters to further confuse his foes and waste enemy ammunition), moved frequently (racking up more than 100,000 kilometers during the course of the campagin) and had an extensive network of observers to visually track NATO aircraft among other things.

The other major example, the Falklands, sticks out to me (along with most other post-WWII naval engaugements) is the use of anti-ship missiles. During the Falklands war the Argentines had a mere six air launched exocet missiles and never fired more than two at once. Despite this they managed to sink 2 British ships with them and damage a third (a further incident was only averted through blind luck when a missile was shot down by a round from a destroyer's main gun). This was against an entire carrier group. Anti-ship missile technology has improved substantially since '82 with faster, longer ranged missiles that are incredibly difficult to intercept, such as the Russian SS-N-22 and missiles with new attack profiles, such as the Chinese Dong Feng 21 ballistic missile while anti-missile technologies have lagged behind. Additionally, most of the interception equipment employed can be easily overwhelmed by multiple targets (as happened in the excercise).

Modern surface fleets are big, floating targets and little else. The only reason to maintain a carrier force is to allow force projection, but when your force projection capability gets hit with an ASM and rapidly finds all God knows how many millions of dollars worth of it at the bottom of the sea, its not even very useful for that.