NonCredibleDefense

Oh look a civilian airliner

I looked this up. This is the reddit post, and this is the interview that it links to. I'd recommend reading the actual interview even though it's a little technical, instead of getting it through 3-4 layers of telephone-game from people who may or may not know what they're talking about or how to spell Van Riper's name.

I, honestly, couldn't completely make sense of the interview because of how deep into the details Kernan goes. I do note that he strongly disagrees with the thing I said that the second run of the simulation was railroading a certain particular result, and goes into some details of problems in the simulation that Van Riper then exploited, but he also says this:

I'll be straight up with you. I was the reason why Paul Van Riper was at Joint Forces Command. He's a very controversial individual. He is a good warfighter. I admire and respect him very much. I brought him in because he is controversial.

We were looking at it from an experimental concept perspective. He was looking at it from an exercise perspective. So I think if you -- you know, if you neck it down and look at it just from his perspective, an awful lot of what he had to say was valid. But if you look at it from what we were trying to accomplish in the way of setting conditions to ensure that the right objectives were satisfied, the experimental objectives, it's a much bigger picture, broader picture.

Now maybe that's just him being diplomatic and supportive not wanting to throw the guy under the bus. And like I say, I don't know enough about the details to really talk about what he's saying in terms of picking out details of what I was saying that's wrong. But to me it sounds like on the overall point, he's saying the same thing that me and @[email protected] were saying: Van Riper was trying to win, blue team was trying to run a productive simulation, and those aren't exactly the same thing and they had to override him on some things to make the exercise into the second one of those things. But that doesn't mean he's completely wrong with everything he did.

I mean I get it

The guy got to make his point; I'm sure they're going to adjust some things in their strategy because of things he did. At the same time, you're gonna go talk to congress or the president or something and lay out what you want to do, and they're going to ask, okay what's the prediction for what'll happen? And you say well sir we actually did a little war game for it, and the Iraqis crippled most of our ships and the landing failed and we're still in the Persian Gulf for the most part but it's mostly a big clusterfuck at this point. So we're good to move forward, right?

Not really. They disallowed specific tactics that the red team had used to win, told them they had to turn on their radars at certain points (so that the fancy electronic countermeasures would work), told them they couldn't shoot down planes during a particular attack, things like that. For the most part the things that were different the second time around were artificial constraints on the red team.