Naval Gazing

If you just read the wiki article, you get a distorted view of the exercise. Gen Van Riper was more interested in "winning" than he was in following the requirements to actually have the exercise result in usable data.

Examples: the wiki article mentions small boats. As in about the size of your average fishing boat. No, not your commercial fishing boat, your weekend fisherman fishing boat (Boston Whaler). And it would be carrying a conventional Soviet era anti-ship missile, weighing some 3 tons. This is not only enough to swamp the boat, but launching the missile would result in the boat turning into shrapnel. Or it mentions motorcycle couriers. But the sim wasn't setup to include the latency they involved, so he got effectively instant, unjammable comms.

There were simulation issues, like the Blue Force navy showed up teleported into being next to the coast, due to model limitations. Due to the fact that the real life location of this was in fact a very busy set of air and sea lanes, Blue Force navy also started with no defensive capabilities.

And of course, the whole point isn't for the red team to sink the blue force, but to see how the blue force can adapt to the red team during an amphibious/airborne invasion. It doesn't do much good to have tens of thousands of guys sitting around doing nothing because their ship got "blown up" or their landing zone got covered in "chemical weapons". MC2002 wasn't just a couple guys in a room doing a war game. It involved real…

Here's a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion:

The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness

The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.

Radar-based counter-battery fire already exists and would be far more accurate, as radar tends to propagate more predictably (and faster) than sound.

Though yes, that's an option, it's called artillery sound ranging:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging>

A subset of acoustic location: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location>

Audio-based range-finders were used extensively in WWII:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=04F5osXK4vw> (Tom Scott: "Testing the sound mirrors that protected Britain")

Also: <https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/german-world-war-ii-aircraft-sound-detector-or-acoustic-news-photo/526929302>

Optical rangefinders were also used: <https://www.navalgazing.net/Rangefinding>

(I've tried but failed to find large audio/sound based naval rangefinders, which essentially consisted of gigantic ear trumpets, roughly the size of a human. Used in WWII by both US and Japanese navies as I recall.)

Always important to look critically at the person speaking (I mean to imply nothing about them, just sharing what I found):

It [the blog] grew out of my time as a tour guide on the battleship Iowa (BB-61) in Los Angeles, and although I now live halfway across the country, Iowa is still one of the mainstays of this blog. It also came from my frustration with existing sources, which tended to be either way too high-level or too technical, with very little to bring an interested general audience up to speed. ...

I've been a military geek since I was in grade school, although my affections didn't settle on matters naval until after I graduated college with a degree in aerospace engineering. ... Unfortunately, I didn't like my actual job, and ended up getting another job in Oklahoma, doing work on military aircraft.

https://www.navalgazing.net/About

Certainly they should understand how flying machines work. I dunno about their history. :)

> https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness

I'm a bit skeptical of this article, which seems excessively optimistic, since the estimation it does at the very beginning:

> Arms-control treaties limit both nations to 1,550 deployed warheads, although FAS estimates 1,588 for Russia and 1,644 for the US

seems to interpret numbers differently (deployed strategically/readily deployable).

Edit: the two articles complement each other in a very interesting way, for example: navalgazing.net assumes that nuclear weapons would target strategic targets, cornell.edu instead densely populated areas (I think reality would tend towards the first case).

The navalgazing.net article states that the soot research is from 80s/90s, while the reserch referenced by cornell.edu is from 2020 (I think in this specific case, the navalgazing.net is at fault).

“The first thing to understand is that a big exercise is not the military equivalent of a sports game. You don’t throw a bunch of men and equipment into an exercise area, then say “right, let’s see who’s best”. Millennium Challenge 2002 was intended primarily to test a set of operational concepts that the Rumsfeld DoD was pushing.1 Other exercises are intended more as full-scale training for the relevant forces, to teach people how the whole system works together at the same time. This is also a secondary goal of exercises like MC02. In no case are we simply trying to see who wins, so if one side does something unexpected that would bring a real operation to a premature end, as Van Riper did, it makes sense to learn lessons from it, reset, and continue on.”

https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002