Red leader

Marine Gen. (ret.) Paul Van Riper has joined the chorus of retired generals calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

You may remember Gen. Van Riper from "Millennium Challenge 02" — the largest war game ever staged by the U.S. military. The game, involving some 13,500 troops at a cost of around $250 million, was essentially a dress-rehearsal for the invasion of Iraq. Van Riper led the "Red," enemy, team.

And he won.

Or he would have won, if the game hadn't been rigged. For instance, he outfoxed the "Blue" (American) generals, sinking much of the American fleet in the Persian Gulf. So they called a time-out and a do-over to refloat the fleet. Just like in a real war.

The Army Times reported in 2002 on Van Riper's complaints that the game was rigged:

Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is a frequent player in military war games and is regarded as a Red team specialist. He said the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly free-play experiment.

Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed the Opposing Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units, he said

“We were directed … to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land,” he said. “We were simply directed to turn [the air-defense systems] off or move them. … So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be.”

Retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, who participated in the experiment as Red civilian leader, said Van Riper was outthinking the Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.

Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue’s high-tech eavesdropping capabilities, Oakley said. Then, when the Blue fleet sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper’s forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes sailing and flying in apparently innocuous circles.

When the Blue commander issued an ultimatum to Red to surrender or face destruction, Van Riper took the initiative, issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country’s mosques. His force’s small boats and aircraft sped into action

“By that time there wasn’t enough time left to intercept them,” Oakley said. As a result of Van Riper’s cunning, much of the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and “refloat” the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.

By all accounts, Van Riper is a wily general, but his approach to the Millennium Challenge shouldn't have been all that surprising to people in Washington — a city that is, after all, named after a general who defeated a superpower by fighting asymmetrically. ("Asymmetric" is the current buzzword for the no-duh realization, as old at least as the Book of Judges, that it doesn't make much sense to go toe-to-toe in open battle with an obviously superior army.) But not only was the Pentagon braintrust flummoxed by Van Riper in the war game, they were just as surprised, months later during the actual invasion, when Iraqi insurgents began employing many of these same tactics. This was, they said, just another one of those calamities that "no one could have predicted." Except that everybody had.

(More on the Millennium Challenge rigging from Slate's Fred Kaplan and from Julian Borger in The Guardian.)

According to Fox News (in the C&L video linked above), the Bush administration is responding to Gen. Van Riper's comments by trying to identify who he has been talking to among active members of the military so that those officers can be punished and silenced. That's Bush 101: if a problem has been identified don't try to fix it, just retaliate against whoever identifies it.