In 2002, the US military lost a $250 million war game in 10 minutes. A newly declassified report “warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
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Discussion 2 comments
I feel like I read about this exercise years ago, possibly in a Malcolm Gladwell book? The "enemy" commander used suicide attacks by small powerboats to disable or destroy much larger US navy vessels, and I remember reading the war-games were paused and restarted with US assets restored. The thing is, I read that assessment at least a decade ago.
Any one else getting old echoes from reading this account?
Yeah, the “new” here is that they got the actual 20-page report that the commander of the red team wrote immediately after the exercise. But the gist of that report was already widely known (including from congressional testimony from that commander), and the document itself is still heavily redacted, so this is a pretty thin story.
Still a super fascinating event, though, and worth reading about.
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