“Rigged” War Game Exposed U.S. Vulnerability to Low-Tech Warfare

Washington, D.C., November 1, 2024 - A recently declassified “after-action” report from a 2002 war game “triggered internal warnings that the U.S. military was vulnerable to low-tech warfare,” according to an article in this week’s Washington Post written by National Security Archive fellow Nate Jones.

The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes by an enemy that launched its attacks from commercial ships and using other unconventional means. The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post.

Jones requested the document while working at the National Security Archive in 2013 and after coming across a 2002 article in the Army Times that quoted Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who led anti-U.S. forces during the simulation. Van Riper was highly critical of Millennium Challenge, calling the exercise “rigged.” After eleven years and review by five different agencies, the Pentagon finally responded to the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request, agreeing to declassify the document in part.

Follow the links below to read the document and the article, or follow this link to view the report as it appears in The Washington Post.