Alexander Cockburn has a passage from his Rumsfeld book posted on Counter Punch. The Counter Punch positng outlines Rumsfleds attempts to change the military. Enamored by some Air Force types who continue to believe that a country can be bombed into submission, Rumsfeld embraced the notion of “jointness” which in practice meant to Rummy and his sycophants in DoD and the Pentagon that they would be able to predict the future. In doing so they forgot the universal truth of war; that plans look complete only until the first shot is fired.
In plain English, they believed that it was possible not only to know everything about the other side’s society in all its ramifications and connections, but also to forecast the enemy’s reaction to any action against any component of that society, and how that would affect all the other components.
This, in itself, is complete and utter hubris. What is more damaging is how Rumsfled and his cronies would not allow reality to upset their arrogant self-satisfaction. An exercise called Millenium Challenge 2002 was dreamt up to show how well this new approach was going to work. In actuality what happened illuminates the Stalinistic approach to reality that defines the Bush Administration in every one of its endeavors.
Toward the end of the following July, Rumsfeld made a special trip down to Suffolk. He was there to survey preparations for Millennium Challenge 2002, an enormously elaborate war game that its designers the JFCOM commanders confidently expected would fully vindicate the arcane theology of EBO, RDO, ONA and PMESII that they preached so enthusiastically. It would also give Rumsfeld something to show, as he said during his visit, “the progress that we have made this far in transforming to produce the combat capability necessary to meet deep threats and the challenges of the 21st Century”. Viewing the arrays of computer terminals and esoteric communications equipment, he may well have been reminded of happy times in the COG exercises, waging nuclear war. (COG is the acronym for Continuity of Government, a top secret series of exercises to test the ability of the government to continue to function during and after a nuclear attack.
What actually happened in Millenium Challenge was a preview of the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld catastrophe in Iraq. A true American General Paul Van Riper was the leader of the American enemy in this war game. This is a long passage, but it perfectly described the arrogance and denial of reality that is the soul of the destroyers of our Republic Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld.
In the scenario designed by the exercise planners, Van Riper was playing the role of a rogue military commander somewhere in the Persian Gulf who was willfully confronting the United States. Though there were more than 13,000 troops, as well as planes and ships taking part in the game across the country, much of the action was to occur in computers and be displayed on monitors, the ultimate video game. Thanks to their enormous operational net assessment databases, the Blue Team thought they knew all they needed to know about their enemy, and how he would behave. But they were wrong. For a start, they did not know what he looked like. The Blue commander, a three-star Army general, worked in full uniform, surrounded by his extensive staff. Van Riper, dressed in casual civilian clothes, took a stroll, unrecognized, through the Blue Team headquarters area to get the measure of his opponent. With his own staff, he was informal, though he forbade the use of acronyms. “We’ll all speak English here,” he told them.
In the first hours of the war, the Blue Team knocked out Van Riper’s fiber-optic communications, confidently expecting that he would now be forced to use radio links that could be easily intercepted. He refused to cooperate, quickly turning to motorcycle couriers and coded messages in the calls to prayer from the mosques in preparing his own attack. He was no longer performing an assigned part in a scripted play; Van Riper had become a real, bloody-minded, Middle Eastern enemy who had no intention of playing by the rules and was determined to win.
Just a month earlier, the Bush administration had announced a new national security policy of pre-emptive attacks “in exercising our inherent right of self-defense”. So, when a Blue Team carrier task force loaded with troops steamed into the Gulf (at least on the computer simulation) and took up station off the coast of his territory, Van Riper assumed that they were going to follow the new policy and attack him without warning. “I decided to pre-empt the pre-empter,” he recalled later with satisfaction. Oddly enough, the Blue general sensed this, saying, “I have a feeling that Red is going to strike,” but his staff was quick to assure him that their ONA made it clear that this could not happen.
Van Riper was well aware of the U.S. Navy’s “Aegis” anti-missile capabilities, and how many missiles it would take to overwhelm them. “Usually Red hoards its missiles, letting them out in dribs and drabs”, he told me in retracing the battle. “That’s foolish, I did a salvo launch, used up pretty much all my inventory at once.” The defenses were overwhelmed. Sixteen American ships sank to the bottom of the Gulf, along with twenty thousand servicemen. Only a few days in, the war was over, and the “transformed” military had been beaten hands down.
So how did the politicians who are now whining that we must listen to the military and not “micro-manage” the war effort do? They changed the rules of the game, rigged it to make it look like their new transformed military of fantasy would win. In other words, they acted like petty dictators living in a world of of the mind of their own creation.
Van Riper was informed that the sunken ships had magically re-floated themselves, the dead had come back to life, and the war was on again. But this time there would be no surprises. He was not allowed to shoot down Blue Team V-22 troop transports, though these are highly vulnerable planes. The Red Team was ordered to switch on their radars so that they could be more easily destroyed. The umpires announced that his missile strikes had been intercepted. In short, the game was now unashamedly rigged to ensure that the U.S. won and all the new theories proven correct. Van Riper resigned as Red leader, but stayed on to monitor the predictable rout of his forces under these new conditions. Afterwards he wrote a scathing report, documenting how the exercise had been rigged and by whom , but no outsider could read it because it was classified secret. Asked when Van Riper’s report would be declassified and released, an embarrassed Gen. Kerner said that it would remain under wraps “until I’ve had a chance to brief my boss”.
His boss, of course, was Donald Rumsfeld, who showed no interest in the report, still less of releasing it to the public.
And these idiots don’t understand why no one believes a word they say.
