That Time the U.S. Military Played a War Game Against "Iran" — and Lost

The Russian navy test-fires a Moskit P-270 antiship cruise missile in February of 2015. The P-270 Moskit is a Russian supersonic ramjet powered cruise missile (source). To view full-size, click here.

by Thomas Neuburger

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
     –Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at AEI

Iran is not Iraq.
     –Lawrence Wilkerson

Call it the Kobayashi Maru in reverse.

In the fictional Star Trek universe, Captain Kirk, as a cadet, was able to win an unwinnable war game simulation. In command of a starship that received a distress call from a damaged and failing ship in the Neutral Zone, the choices facing the cadet are stark — attempt a dangerous rescue and risk galaxy-wide war with the Klingons, or do nothing and watch as the ship and all lives aboard are lost. Unbeknownst to the cadets who took the test, the simulator was programmed to make sure any rescue attempt ended in their destruction.

The training officers who ran the simulation later explained that its purpose was not for the cadets to win or lose, but to put them in an impossible situation and observe their character through their reaction. Kirk's reaction was to try to win. On the third try, he defeated the game by secretly reprogramming the simulator.

In the Kobayashi Maru story, the "system" stacks the cards against the "hero" — here, the cadet — and one of the cadets unstacks them.

But what if the story happens in reverse? What if the cadet defeats an unbiased simulation, causing the system — here, the training staff — to reprogram the simulator, adding bias that prevents a win on the next try?

In 2002, the U. S. military ran a war game (including live action and simulations) in which the enemy was very much like Iran. The goal of the "U.S. side" was to issue "Iran" an ultimatum, let the enemy respond, then defeat it.

The U.S. side failed — the officer commanding the "Iranian side" won the simulation, sinking an aircraft carrier and 10 cruisers in the process. So the game was suspended, the rules rewritten to forbid tactics that worked, and the simulation restarted. Needless to say, the U.S. side was successful the second time around, and the commander of the "Iranian" forces quit the game in disgust.

In Star Trek terms, he'd been "Kobayashi Maru"-ed — the game had been reprogrammed to force his defeat.

Can the U.S. Military Defeat Iran?

This is the U.S. military that John Bolton and Mike Pompeo want to take to war against the real Iran, a military that refused to learn from its own war game because the outcome produced the wrong answer, an American loss. (You can read how big a loss below.)

Can this U.S. military be successful against Iran in a real encounter? Or will the world watch as a bunch of very good Russian missiles sink an aircraft carrier in under an hour?

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, agrees with the second assessment: "I think aircraft carriers are anything but an instrument of national power except against countries like Panama or someone who really can’t shoot back very well because aircraft carriers are extraordinarily vulnerable and we’re going to find that out when one of them with 5,000 hands and $14 billion worth of taxpayer money is sunk in less than 30 minutes, whenever we get engaged in something real."

For an example of how vulnerable U.S. warships are to these new-generation missiles, watch the video at the top. These missiles can also be launched from land (modified trucks), underwater, and the air. 

Millennium Challenge 2002

Here's the full story of the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game courtesy of Wikipedia (emphasis added):

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002. The exercise, which ran from July 24 to August 15 and cost $250 million, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and an unknown adversary in the Middle East, "Red", with many lines of evidence pointing at Iran being the Red side.

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

At this point, the exercise was suspended ... After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory....

So much for the best bloated military money can buy. Wilkerson may be right. In a real fight that may be all it proves to be — a swollen, badly run excuse to extract masses of government cash for its patrons and clients, and not much good at fighting a country large enough to resist being thrown against a wall, like Iran.

In the same interview quoted above, Wilkerson added, "The military just hooks up, like it’s hooking up to an intravenous I.V. system and the money just pours out— slush fund money, appropriated money, and everything else. This [war talk] is all about money and it’s all about keeping the complex alive..." The war talk Wilkerson was referring to was about China, but no matter; the point is the same.

If Pompeo and Bolton talk Trump into launching an attack against Iran, a nation four times the size of Iraq, do you like his odds? I don't.

Even so, the military loss would not be the worst of the outcomes. More than 20% of world oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day. A disruption there would be catastrophic — first, for everyone in the region, which would explode in violence; and later for much or most of the rest of the world, including, perhaps, the shopping malls of America.