Case study: Millennium Challenge 2002 (Part One)

4 Dec

Outline:

In 2002, the US military conducted a large-scale exercise called Millennium Challenge (MC ‘02).
The exercise was intended to test a set of ideas about how the US military should fight future wars.
During the exercise, tensions arose between the team co-ordinating the exercise and the team controlling the simulated adversary (the red team).
The red team leader argued that the exercise was fixed to deliver the result expected by the exercise’s sponsors.
Leaks to the media ensured that the exercise rapidly gained widespread attention, and it has remained a widely used example of how not to conduct an exercise.
More balanced accounts have suggested that the exercise may have been more useful than initially suggested, although not in the ways its sponsors intended.

Introduction - the controversial case of MC ‘02

Millennium Challenge 2002 was a large-scale exercise conducted by the US military to test ideas about the employment of emerging military capabilities. Unlike most military exercises, MC ‘02 was the subject of media controversy and it has become a staple of discussions about how not to conduct exercises. Perhaps the most balanced account is provided in an article by the analyst Micah Zenko - available here.

The scenario MC ‘02 describes is interesting in part because it is simultaneously timely and historical. A US military intervention against a state on the Persian Gulf is highly contemporary in October 2024. Yet the story of MC ‘02 is also bound up in the debates and politics of the George W Bush administration, and US military thinking before the invasion of Iraq, in a way that now seems to speak to a different era.

At the time, MC ‘02 was seen as failing to anticipate key developments in military thinking. In the years that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military would increasingly focus its attention on counterinsurgency theory and practice, deprioritising the kind of questions that MC ‘02 sought to address. Now, however, the pendulum has now swung back fully in favour of the exercise’s focus on the use of technological overmatch to defeat conventional military forces.

A case study in how not to run an exercise?

The initial media reports about problems with MC ‘02 emerged days after the exercise concluded, based on a leaked email written by the commander of the exercise red team. Examples of the way the exercise was supposedly fixed or scripted have been recounted across multiple articles. Examples include:

Early in the exercise, the Red force launched a pre-emptive strike using a combination of fast attack and disguised civilian vessels that sank most of the Blue team fleet. The fleet was subsequently ‘refloated’ by the team running the exercise.
The Red team was told that it could not use microwave and fibre-optic communications links and must instead use mobile and satellite communications, the latter being generally more susceptible to interception and jamming.
The Blue team at one point in the exercise attempted an aerial landing. The Red team were told that they were not allowed to fire upon the aircraft as they were landing.

Assessing the impact of MC ‘02

Early reporting and comment on MC ‘02 expressed frustration at the conduct of the exercise, suggesting that it showed that the military was ‘fixing’ the exercise to give the appearance of validating its preferred concepts.

Perhaps more seriously, this approach was seen to downplay or ignore the lessons that could be identified from the Red team’s actions. This criticism became more pointed as the US-led intervention in Iraq appeared to demonstrate the efficacy of the ‘low-tech’, asymmetric tactics adopted by the Red team in MC ‘02. As one article on MC ‘02 noted, the Red team

“employed some of the very techniques the Iraqi insurgency would begin to use all-too-successfully a year or two later.”

Zenko’s account is more balanced, arguing that the controversy around MC ‘02 suggests that it is questionable whether the exercise ‘validated’ its sponsor’s concepts. He notes that MC ‘02 has “become a shorthand reference for denigrating the cutting-edge and unrealistic notions of military transformation that characterized the Rumsfeld era”. Rather than converting participants to the organisers’ desired view of the world, the exercise “ultimately left precisely the opposite impression”.

Drawing lessons on exercise planning

MC ‘02 was in many ways an unusual exercise, and its form and content a world away from most cyber incident exercises. There are obvious differences in terms of the scale of the exercise and its focus on military conflict. However, at the level of planning and execution, these differences are less important than they initially appear. For all its idiosyncrasies, MC ‘02 can provide some widely applicable lessons on the planning of exercises.

In an earlier series of articles (“Part 1: What and Why”), we argued that an exercise should be conducted in line with a clearly defined objective or set of objectives. Much of the controversy that emerged around MC ‘02 reflected misunderstandings or disagreements about the exercise’s purpose.

The exercise’s stated goal was to explore how the US military could conduct joint operations in the future, drawing on technological advancements. This tension is summed up by Zenko in an anecdote from an exercise conducted the year before MC ‘02:

“At one crucial engagement during Unified Vision 2001, Van Riper [the commander of the ‘Red’ force in this exercise and in MC ‘02] was informed by the white cell, or “control,” overseeing the game that the United States had destroyed all 21 of the red team’s deeply buried ballistic missiles, even though the blue team commander never actually knew where they were located. It was simply assumed that in the future the United States would have the real-time radar and sensor capabilities to eliminate them.”

This example highlights the tension between the dynamics of the exercise itself - the blue team not actually knowing where the missiles were located - and the goals of an exercise focused on exploring a hypothesised set of future conditions.

Oft-cited examples of problems with the exercise, such as the refloating of the Blue fleet or the enforced success of the aerial landing, are not in themselves problematic. An exercise of the scale of MC ‘02 involved a vast expenditure of resources and time, as well as intricate scheduling. To stop the exercise early on because of the sinking of the fleet would have been a huge waste of resources. Similarly, the live-fire aspects of the exercise such as the landing were conducted under a tight, inflexible schedule. This was a reasonable compromise given the cost of diverting units from their regular activities to participate in the exercise. Such abstractions are inevitable in any exercise and are not in themselves problematic.

MC ‘02 nonetheless underlines the importance of conducting programmes of exercises, rather than one-offs. Doing so allows for individual exercises in the series to address different requirements, rather than stacking multiple requirements into a single exercise. Taking this approach reduces the likelihood that unrealistic abstractions (‘refloating the Blue fleet’) will be required to ensure that the exercise can progress through its objectives.

The art of setting exercise objectives

The conduct of the exercise was understandable given its objectives. It was the way those objectives were determined and communicated across the organisation that led to the controversy around the exercise. There is a real art to setting the objectives the exercise is intended to achieve, and to socialising these goals within an organisation. Getting it wrong can undermine those goals. As Zenko argues, MC ‘02 may have been counterproductive from its sponsors’ perspective, serving to generate internal opposition and public criticism of the concepts it was intended to ‘validate’.

There is a fine line to walk when navigating internal bureaucratic politics and incentives within any organisation conducting exercises. It is a truism that no exercise will go ahead without sponsors and supporters within an organisation - someone has to commit to the expenditure of time and resources inevitable to the conduct of any exercise. The challenge is to ensure that the exercise meets its sponsors’ requirements without being dictated by their preferences. Working with an external partner to conduct exercises can provide a degree of independence - and just as importantly, a perception of independence - from day-to-day organisational competitions and tensions.

It is crucial to the planning and running of an exercise to identify key internal stakeholders, ensure they understand the goals of the exercise, and manage these participants during the exercise itself. The success or failure of an exercise is to a large extent a matter of perception among stakeholders. A well-planned and facilitated exercise that meets the original requirements could become known as ‘a failed exercise’ if that is the perception taken away by a persuasive group of participants.

There is also a lesson here about managing participants and other stakeholders around and during an exercise. In the case of MC ‘02, the conduct of the exercise prompted considerable anger from the red team. This led to the leak of the critical email, generating the controversy that may have rendered the exercise counterproductive. This underlines the importance of ensuring shared understanding of exercise goals, but also of managing conflicts and tensions that inevitably emerge during any exercise.

Conclusion

These lessons resonate with our experience at Tyburn of facilitating or participating in exercises. A typical problem with planning and running an exercise for an organisation would be the enthusiastic senior sponsor who has not fully discussed the exercise with their direct reports, or the wider organisation. This creates challenges in the conduct of the exercise, with participants not knowing what to expect, or what is expected of them. People turn up ‘because the CEO said they had to be involved’. Moreover, this lack of internal stakeholder engagement can create resentment among participants who feel they should have been consulted. Participants either will not see the value of the exercise, or they may actively attempt to de-value the exercise.

As the example of MC ‘02 illustrates, the success or failure of an exercise should not be judged on the outcome of the exercise scenario. If the exercise addressed the sponsors’ objectives and was credibly conducted, a poor performance might be more instructive for the participants than smooth sailing. Zenko argues that the exercise “had a positive effect on many of the key participants”. He notes the subsequent promotion of the officer commanding the Blue Team and quotes him as linking this to the exercise: “The military and civilian leadership must have figured out that, after the significant butt-kicking I had experienced, I must have learned something.”

Learning points:

The outcome of an exercise should not be judged on the outcome of the exercise scenario; ‘failure’ in a simulated exercise can be more instructive than success.
Abstractions from reality are not in themselves problematic in exercising and may be required for the exercise to address its objectives.
Conducting exercises as programmes rather than one-offs can reduce the pressure to address multiple objectives in a single exercise.
This case underlines the importance of ensuring that an exercise’ objectives are well defined and communicated to internal stakeholders.
Ensuring that an exercise meets the sponsor’s objectives without being beholden to their preferences is an art that exercise facilitators must learn.
Managing participant engagement is crucial to the conduct of an exercise; dissatisfied participants can undermine an exercise.