By THOM SHANKER
NEW YORK TIMES
Courtesy Of: PressDemocrat.com
WASHINGTON -- It was a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a U.S. Navy convoy and left 16 major warships -- an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels -- sunk on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
But that August 2002 war game has given reason for U.S. military officers to express grim concern over last weekend's encounter between several U.S. ships and five Iranian patrol boats.
In the days since the incident in the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officers acknowledged they have been studying anew the lessons from the startling war game.
The sheer numbers of attackers overloaded the ability of the ships and their crews, "both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack," said Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force simulating an unnamed Persian Gulf military. "The whole thing was over in five, maybe 10 minutes.
"If the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, proved how terrorists could transform hijacked airliners into hostage-filled cruise missiles, then the "Millennium Challenge 2002" war game was a warning to the military as to how an adversary could apply similar, asymmetrical thinking to conflict at sea.
Van Riper said he complained at the time that important lessons of his simulated victory were not adequately acknowledged across the military. But other senior officers say the war game and subsequent analysis and exercises helped to focus attention on the threat posed by the small, fast Iranian boats and helped to prepare commanders for last weekend's encounter.
"It's clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone," said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we've been very focused on that."
In the simulation, Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside U.S. warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, but on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired.
According to Pentagon and Navy officials, the five small patrol boats belonging to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps charged a three-ship Navy convoy, maneuvering around and among a destroyer, cruiser and frigate during a tense half-hour encounter. The location was where the narrow Strait of Hormuz meets the open waters of the Persian Gulf -- the same choke point chosen by Van Riper for his attack.
In the Sunday incident, the commander of one U.S. warship trained an M240 machine gun, which fires upward of 10 armor-piercing slugs a second, on an Iranian boat that pulled within 200 yards of the ship. But the Iranians turned away before the commander gave the order to fire.
That was not the case in the simulation, sponsored by the military's Joint Forces Command.
The victory of the force modeled after a Persian Gulf state -- a composite of Iran and Iraq -- astounded sponsors of what was then the largest joint war-fighting exercise ever, involving 13,500 military and civilian personnel battling in nine live exercise ranges in the United States, and double that many computer simulations to replicate a number of different battles.
Van Riper's attack was much more complex and sophisticated than anything that could have involved the Iranian boats last weekend.
The broad outline of the 2002 war game was reported at the time, but since last weekend's episode, Van Riper and other officers have provided new details about the simulation.
In the war game, scores of adversary speedboats and larger naval vessels had been shadowing and hectoring the Blue Team fleet for days. The Blue Team defenses also faced cruise missiles fired simultaneously from land and from warplanes, as well as the swarm of speedboats firing heavy machine guns and rockets -- and pulling alongside to detonate explosives on board.
When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy's firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.
Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine studies of the natural world, where insects and animals -- from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs -- move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.
"It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time," he said.
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