When he was taking questions I inquired if the US Navy is still not accepting simulations that allow their carriers to be sunk.
If you want the answer, it's pretty simple – You don't understand what happened in MC2002.
Von Riper used weapons that were in the system, but not validated for use against aircraft carriers. The interactions that sunk the carriers were based on random numbers in the lethality tables.
If you actually look at the combat interaction in detail, those types of OTS weapon would not damage, let alone sink an aircraft carrier.
Why weren't they validated? Simple. They weren't supposed to be used like that. There are on the order of 10K weapon types and 10K unit types in that type of exercise. That's over 100,000,000 interactions to validate. Over 95% aren't in the scenario to be used.
Should the DoD spend the money to validate 9mm pistol fire against an aircraft carrier hull? Also .45 ammo? And so on … And against a concrete building? A brick building?
If you want them to validate every possible interaction among every possible entity, you think they have way more money than they do.
On the tabletop, you have probably seen some huge (bloated) rulesets, but nothing that approaches evaluating every possible interaction case. And you probably wouldn't want to play it.
Now, why wasn't that an option? Because the actual commander of the forces in the exercise – not the retired contractor consultant – had determined that the best value would be a denied C2 exercise for over the horizon support, not a kinetic engagement at sea.
If you pay me $50 USD for a set of WWII Eastern Front division level combat rules, how happy are you to open them and find a set of swashbuckling adventure individual swordfight rules?
How happy are you that your government wasted the money on about three days of that exercise on an invalid result for something they weren't supposed to do.
As a Marine, von Riper should have acknowledged that while he disagreed with the commanders' objectives for the exercise, it wasn't his call to change them. As a wargaming consultant, he should have realized that any outcome that wasn't in the system was worthless.
If he had actual integrity he would have said, "I cannot in good conscience support this exercise because I disagree with the declared focus." and withdrawn. Instead, he took the paycheck.
And he knew the approved objectives many months before the exercise. He should have known (I don't know if he did) that you can't just whip that type of event to a different focus like that at the last minute.
BTW, I actually professionally agree with the validity of many his arguments about what were important focuses for analysis. I was a warfighter and am now a cyber SME. I am greatly attuned to the concept of "Death Star Syndrome" with respect to advanced technology. I would have professionally preferred to see those objectives either (1) integrated into MC2002 (at the expense of something less important; zero sum game, you know) or (2) added on to other series of wargames later. Fat chance of that, after what happened.
So, are you really upset about the Navy rejecting an invalid analytical result?
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