On Thursday Lt. General William Wallace, commander of US Army forces in the Persian Gulf, said “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against”….As Slate’s Fred Kaplan pointed out on Friday, however, Wallace’s statement simply isn’t true. “Militia fighters did play a crucial role in a major war game designed to simulate combat in Iraq,” Kaplan says, referring to Millenium Challenge 2002. The thing is that the Pentagon completely ignored the actions of the militia and repeatedly stopped the game and said “that didn’t happen” when Red (the side representing Iraqi forces) inflicted massive damage on Blue (Anglo-American) forces.

Right – in the run-up to Operation Dive Head-First Into Quicksand the Pentagon actually war-gamed Iraq. It put a really sharp guy in charge of the Iraqi side – retired Marine Corps general Paul Van Riper – and he responded by kicking American butt at every turn (he even sunk the “American invasion fleet before they had a chance to land an amphibious assault force” – what a badass, huh?)

Unfortunately, every time something went wrong, the boys running the game called a do-over.

Robert Oakley, a retired US ambassador who played Saddam Hussein, said that Van Riper was consistently “out-thinking” the Blue Force. Speaking of the exercise, Van Riper said “It was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to ensure a Blue ‘win.'”

As the Army Times reported about the exercise: “Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units.”

Eventually Van Riper quit the game in protest, insisting that he did not want to be associated with “misleading results.” “You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – it’s hard to imagine anybody out-thinking Rumsfeld, who’s Rommel, Marion, Patton, MacArthur, Washington, Jackson, Lee, and Alexander the Great all rolled up into one efficient, corporate package. But there it is.

It’s a shame we don’t have any functioning mechanisms for holding the stupid and corrupt accountable when they fuck up, you know?
[Thanks to Pit Boston Desk Chief Debby Levinson for pointing me to this article.]