Myth Of US Invincibility Floats In The Persian Gulf

[archerships]

Myth of U.S. Invincibility Floats in the Persian Gulf

The war game was described as “free play,” meaning that both sides were unconstrained, free to pursue any tactic in the book of war in the service of victory. As Gen. Kernan put it: “The OPFOR (Force Red) has the ability to win here.” Much of the action was computer-generated. But representative military units in the field also acted out the various moves and countermoves. The comparison to a chess match is not inaccurate. The vastly superior US armada consisted of the standard carrier battle group with its full supporting cast of ships and planes. Van Riper had at his disposal a much weaker flotilla of smaller vessels, many of them civilian craft, and numerous assets typical of a Third World country.

But Van Riper made the most of weakness. Instead of trying to compete directly with Force Blue, he utilized ingenious low-tech alternatives. Crucially, he prevented the stronger US force from eavesdropping on his communications by foregoing the use of radio transmissions. Van Riper relied on couriers instead to stay in touch with his field officers. He also employed novel tactics such as coded signals broadcast from the minarets of mosques during the Muslim call to prayer, a tactic weirdly reminiscent of Paul Revere and the shot heard round the world. At every turn, the wily Van Riper did the unexpected. And in the process he managed to achieve an asymmetric advantage: the new buzzword in military parlance.

Astutely and very covertly, Van Riper armed his civilian marine craft and deployed them near the US fleet, which never expected an attack from small pleasure boats. Faced with a blunt US ultimatum to surrender, Force Red suddenly went on the offensive: and achieved complete tactical surprise. Force Red’s prop-driven aircraft suddenly were swarming around the US warships, making Kamikaze dives. Some of the pleasure boats made suicide attacks. Others fired Silkworm cruise missiles from close range, and sunk a carrier, the largest ship in the US fleet, along with two helicopter-carriers loaded with marines. The sudden strike was reminiscent of the Al Qaeda sneak attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Yet, the Navy was unprepared. When it was over, most of the US fleet had been destroyed. Sixteen US warships lay on the bottom, and the rest were in disarray. Thousands of American sailors were dead, dying, or wounded.

If the games had been real, it would have been the worst US naval defeat since Pearl Harbor.

What happened next became controversial. Instead of declaring Force Red the victor, JOINTFOR Command raised the sunken ships from the muck, brought the dead sailors back to life, and resumed the games as if nothing unusual had happened. The US invasion of the rogue state proceeded according to schedule. Force Red continued to harass Force Blue, until an increasingly frustrated Gen. Van Riper discovered that his orders to his troops were being countermanded, at which point he withdrew in disgust. In his after-action report, the general charged that the games had been scripted to produce the desired outcome.

Original: craschworks - comments

Comments

[crabbyolbastard.livejournal.com]

"There will be no insurgency in Iraq"

Famous last words...

[greendalek.livejournal.com]

A relative participated in this mockery and mentioned the outcome to me and some of the rest of the family --apparently some of the enlisted ranks were threatened with courts-martial if they ever shared this outcome with anyone (i.e., the press). At the time I couldn't decide what outraged me more: the idea that our "invincible" navy could be so easily defeated or that this fact was being so obviously squelched.

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

i'm almost sure I've read this somewhere. What book is this from? I'm thinking the Ingenuity Gap, but I could be wrong.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

I found it in Blink from Malcolm Gladwell, but the q&a in the linked article is more extensive.

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

That's the one.

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Nobody who knows anything ever believed in any sort of "myth" of US naval invincibility. We built carriers and battlegroups to supply Europe, the Soviets built cruise missiles and long-range supersonic bombers to sink the carriers. Losses were expected, it's no secret that capital ships are not-infrequently sunk during exercises, and nothing in the actual events that occurred justifies the breathless tone of the article, his notions of "unstoppable" cruise missiles notwithstanding.

There's very little detail about the exercise itself, no metamodel analysis of the sort that would take effort and research, probably because "OMGLOL Cessnas sink US Navy!" is both an easier and more gripping story to write. But there is a lot of stuff left out.

First, wargames and simulations have a lot of variety in purpose. What was this one for? Was it to test command and control systems? Or was it actually trying to produce detailed combat results? If the point is to give the crews on the ships large-scale drill time, then it's defeating to say "Okay, your ship's sunk, you guys all go back to your bunks and wait for this to be over." If part of the point of the exercise is to practice an amphibious landing, then sure, OPFOR can sink the transports, but then just keeping them sunk doesn't give the Marines a chance to...practice an amphibious landing.

For that matter, how does a Cessna "sink" a carrier in the first place? What sort of damage modeling was there? Was it one hit, one kill? Some guy in a 190 simulates flying into the tower, and that's a sunk carrier? Heck, even details models like the Ship Air Defense Model don't bother with damage-modeling threat weapons in any real terms, it's all stuff like "if hit, switch off all systems in 30 seconds." The author talks a lot about cruise missiles, but the big honking ship-killer ones he talks about look like this and weigh 3 tons; you can't hang many of those off a Cessna. The author also poo-poohs a very good point on the part of the Navy; they're in shipping lanes, so they can't very well go cruising around the way they would in wartime. And this has nothing to do with over-the-horizon and the confines of the Gulf; CIWS doesn't care about that, and while it's marginal against modern cruise missiles it'd serve quite well against any "pleasure craft" and Cessnas that tried to violate the CVBG's exclusion zone in wartime.

The author's general point is nuts: "Cruise missiles can kill carriers, therefore carriers will all be destroyed in a shooting war." Feh, Battle of Latakia, 1973. Over 50 ASMs fired at Israeli ships, for no hits, all were soft-killed by countermeasures and then their launching ships were sunk. Battle of Bubiyan, 1991, 7 Iraqi missile boats crippled without being able to get off a single shot.

Van Riper was clever, apparently, but seeing how quickly OPFOR could sink the carriers wasn't the point to the wargame. Scripts have problems, but there's also a reason for them to exist, and for the OPFOR commander to take his ball and go home because his orders start getting sidetracked by the commanders because he's not following it isn't the right thing, either.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Thanks! If you have a link to coverage of the simulation that you think is more fair, let me know and I'll post it.

[bigleeh.livejournal.com]

I was going to make a similar comment. Unexpected outcomes in training exercises are more likely to reflect problems with the simulation rules of the exercise than a problem with the weapon systems or procedures being used in the exercise. My son was in a Bradley company during the Iraq war and he tells a similar story, although on a much smaller scale, from one of his training activities.

They were out in the field in an exercise that pitted M1 Abrams tanks against Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The exercise was basically heavy-armor laser tag and the expectation was that the tanks would prevail. A Bradley is a decent anti-tank platform but an M1 Abrams is an excellent anti-Bradley platform and the end-game for the exercise was scripted for the tankers to win. Due to a number of factors including a fair degree of luck, a distribution of muddy areas that favored the Bradleys, and the fact that winning when you aren't expected to is fun, the Bradley crew won several iterations. The instructors were determined to keep re-running the exercise until the tankers pulled it out. The sun went down and they kept restarting into the evening. Before it was over there was considerable complaint from the tankers, some of it consisting of tankers asking the Bradley crew to go ahead and lose so everyone could go to bed.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

I would call this good training for the tank crews, because in real life, you don't get to keep doing it over until you get it right . . . you burn to death.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

You sink a carrier by setting it on fire. I haven't seen a good carrier fire-fighting simulation, and have no doubts that such a thing would be highly classified if it did exist.

One good hit would do it, especially on the hangar deck, but a carrier could also shrug off several hits. Too many variables.

However, if we accept that a carrier has to operate over the horizon, that's a strategic limitation.