In the summer of 2002, a US carrier battle group sailed into the Persian Gulf. Around it, small boats and propeller planes, many of them civilian, circled aimlessly. Then the signal came. It did not go out by radio, which the Americans could have intercepted. As the Guardian told it weeks later, it went out as a coded message from the minarets at the call to prayer.
Missiles flew from commercial ships. Planes that had flown in radio silence joined the attack. The fleet’s missile defenses were overwhelmed. By the Washington Post’s count, 19 American ships were destroyed within ten minutes, the aircraft carrier among them. (The Guardian, reporting at the time, counted 16.)
None of it was real.
This was Millennium Challenge 2002, a war game run by US Joint Forces Command in Norfolk: two years in the planning, $250 million, more than 13,500 participants, part live forces and part computer simulation. Its job was to put a new concept, “rapid decisive operations,” through a hard test before it became doctrine. Joint Forces Command’s chief, Gen. Buck Kernan, called it “free play” and said the enemy had “the opportunity to win.”
The enemy was Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine lieutenant general, 64, with a Purple Heart from Vietnam. He expected the Americans to strike first, “so I decided I would attack first.” He kept his orders off the airwaves: couriers for anything sensitive, flashing lights from the control towers instead of radio calls, and commanders he trusted to act on his intent.
Kernan had promised the enemy a chance to win. When the enemy took it, the game was stopped. “A phrase I heard over and over was: ‘That would never have happened,’” Van Riper told the Guardian. An adjudicator ruled that the attack would not have happened in real warfare, and all but four of the ships were refloated. In his report, Van Riper wrote that the official losses had been set at the “minimal ships needed to enable Blue JTF to continue the exercise.”
From the start, his forces could not launch a significant attack at night unless responding to the Americans. On 28 and 29 July the night rules were rewritten twice, the second time saying his side would not initiate combat, but the Americans might. He was barred from using chemical weapons, on the grounds that it did not fit his character’s mindset. On 29 July, the exercise director began passing guidance straight to Van Riper’s chief of staff, over his head. Van Riper stepped back. “I stayed on to give advice, but I stopped giving orders,” he said. In early August, his side was told to surrender two islands so the Americans would only have to assault the other two. On 15 August, the game ended in an American victory.
The Pentagon did not deny refloating the fleet. Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, argued that bringing the dead back to life got 13 more days of experiment out of a game that would otherwise have ended on day one. Van Riper agreed that scripting has its uses. His complaint was that this game had been sold as free play, to test whether the concepts were sound.
His report ran to 21 pages. The result, it concluded, “was preordained from at least 31 July.” It stayed classified for more than 20 years, until a researcher’s request, filed in 2013, got it declassified in part in 2024.
“The real sad thing,” Van Riper told the Washington Post, “is some of the things that we learned were never shared.”