"Always Faithful" Topic

"The blacktop road in this picturesque neighborhood of Colonial Williamsburg is lined with Southern Magnolias, red maples, and flowering dogwoods, their leaves turned deep shades of red. Near the end of the road sits a red brick, colonial-style house, yellow and purple pansies bordering a path to the front door.

"Planting flowers is my exercise," says Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), 87.

For 23 years, Van Riper shared the house with Lillie Catherine, whom he called LC, his beloved wife of 53 years who passed away in 2021. He designed the house at the end of a decades-long career, which began with his enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve in the fall of 1956, continued with his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the fall of 1963, and culminated in his retirement as a three-star general after 41 years of service.

Van Riper, who earned two Silver Star medals for heroic action in the Vietnam War, is known as an independent thinker unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom. In the 2005 bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Van Riper and his performance in a military wargame called Millennium Challenge 2002 to illustrate how brilliant decision makers use intuition to break down complex situations…"

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Armand

Thanks for sharing the article.

A votre service mon ami…

Armand

He was so brilliant and ahead of his time he resigned from the Millennium Challenge 2002 war games because they were fixed for him (bad guy) to lose.

The low-tech and asymmetric tactics General Van Riper used in the 2002 Millennium Challenge war games—such as swarming speedboats, motorcycle couriers, and decentralized command—were highly prophetic.

These strategies have since been battle-tested in the Middle East and heavily defined modern warfare in Ukraine.

Key tactics from his exercise have manifested in recent real-world conflicts: Swarm Tactics & Uncrewed Vehicles: The Millennium Challenge Tactic: Van Riper used waves of low-cost, explosive-laden speedboats to overwhelm a high-tech, multi-billion-dollar U.S. aircraft carrier and its Aegis radar system.

The Middle East: Iran adopted "swarm" tactics in the Persian Gulf, using fleets of heavily armed fast-attack boats to harass U.S. Navy vessels and commercial oil tankers.

Ukraine: Ukrainian forces scaled this concept on both land and sea, utilizing swarms of cheap, explosive-laden uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) and first-person-view (FPV) drones to heavily damage and sink much larger, technologically superior Russian Black Sea warships.

The Millennium Challenge Tactic: Knowing his fictional country could not match the U.S. militarily, he struck first using shore-based, land-based, and ship-launched cruise missiles the moment the U.S. fleet entered the Persian Gulf.

Real-World Application: Both Houthi rebels in the Middle East (targeting Red Sea shipping) and state actors globally have heavily invested in mobile, land-based anti-ship cruise missiles and ballistic missiles to deny advanced navies safe access to regional waters.

General Paul Van Riper resigned in protest six days into the exercise. He walked away because military leadership "refloated" the sunken U.S. fleet and rigged the rules to ensure an American victory.

The specific breakdown that led to his resignation happened in stages:1. The Red Team's Devastating Victory. Playing the leader of a rogue Middle Eastern state (the Red Team), Van Riper used asymmetric swarm tactics to ambush the U.S. Navy (the Blue Team). His opening strike sunk 16 American warships, including an aircraft carrier. Instead of accepting the catastrophic loss as a learning experience, exercise officials paused the simulation, magically "resurrected" the dead U.S. ships, and restarted the game.

2. Heavy Scripting and Banned Tactics. To prevent the U.S. military from losing a $250 USD million exercise again, the control group imposed strict new rules that heavily hamstrung Van Riper's forces. He was forbidden from using his asymmetric tactics, such as chemical weapons. He was ordered to telegraph his moves and lookouts. He was forced to place his forces in specific, vulnerable positions so the Blue Team could easily destroy them. His forces were banned from initiating combat, giving the U.S. forces a pre-ordained right to strike first.

3. The Protest and Resignation: Van Riper grew furious when he realized his own chief of staff was being given conflicting deployment orders by exercise coordinators. He concluded that the war game had ceased to be an honest test of military capabilities, transforming instead into a scripted, rigged propaganda piece meant to validate flawed, tech-heavy Pentagon slogans. Refusing to fake a fight, he stepped down as commander, later warning the public that real-world enemies would never follow a controlled script.

Can you blame him? Did it turn out he was right?

Wolfhag

Sorta like "Heartbreak Ridge" with that idiot MC S3 major ?

Thanks

Armand