America Lost An Infamous Wargame To Iran. That’s Why We’re Winning Now.

The most significant threat to the United States military is the strategic divide between the citizen and the soldier, a distance that has only increased in recent decades as more and more Americans live removed from military life. A peek under the hood at the military planning apparatus can create an eye-opening experience for many otherwise well-informed citizens. Such is the case with a controversy that has spread like wildfire through the pages of Reddit and posts on X since the current Iran Operation began, focused on the infamous Millennium Challenge wargame, and particularly the approach of Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

During peacetime, the military professionals of this country conduct serious and deliberate research in an attempt to understand “What is the American way of war? What are its strengths and weaknesses?” Far from an academic exercise, this self-understanding is vital to winning our nation’s wars. As American bombs fall on Tehran and our Navy dismantles what remains of Iran’s fleet, most Americans are watching the explosions without understanding the decades of quiet work that made this moment possible.

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon conducted a $250 million exercise called Millennium Challenge, the most expensive war game in American history. A retired Marine Lieutenant General named Paul Van Riper was chosen to command the opposing force (a thinly veiled Iran). Van Riper was brilliant, aggressive, and innovative. He used motorcycle couriers instead of radios and signaled attacks from mosque loudspeakers. He launched swarms of suicide boats and a massive cruise missile salvo against a carrier battle group inside the Persian Gulf. In the first hours of the exercise, he sank sixteen warships and killed over twenty thousand Americans on paper. 

This was an astounding result. The exercise was halted, the ships “refloated,” and the game restarted with a script guaranteeing an American victory. Van Riper struggled under increasing “control mechanisms,” which he viewed as unfair, and then stepped down as the OPFOR commander mid-exercise.