Here’s What You Need to Remember: If Iran actually were to deploy Van Riper’s brutally effective tactics, it just might inflict even more damage than Van Riper’s own hamstrung forces did in their simulated, and rigged, war.
NOVA: You don’t think that transformation and network-centric warfare are powerful ideas?
Van Riper: My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science, tend towards sloganeering. There’s very little intellectual content to what they say, and they use slogans in place of this intellectual content. It does a great disservice to the American military, the American defense establishment. “Information dominance,” “network-centric warfare,” “focused logistics”—you could fill a book with all of these slogans.
“If you lead with the technology, I think you’re bound to make mistakes.”
What I see are slogans masquerading as ideas. In a sense, they make war more antiseptic. They make it more like a machine. They don’t understand it’s a terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business. So they can lead us the wrong way. They can cause people not to understand this terrible, terrible phenomenon.
…
Van Riper: There were accusations that Millennium Challenge was rigged. I can tell you it was not. It started out as a free-play exercise, in which both Red and Blue had the opportunity to win the game. However, about the third or fourth day, when the concepts that the command was testing failed to live up to their expectations, the command then began to script the exercise in order to prove these concepts.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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