Banned for Haxxx
The US military committed the ultimate gamer crime during the Millennium Challenge 2002 wargames exercise. No, they didn’t have a minority character as the lead. No, they didn’t make a casual mobile game. They did the unthinkable: they used haxxx. They included an easy mode just for them, in what would become a decades-long pattern of arrogance and smug superiority.
The wargame was an open-ended land and sea conflict with an unnamed, militarily advanced Middle Eastern nation with a large body of water as the staging ground. You might it was against a country named Me Move Quickly. The US invasion force was codenamed Blue, the defending force codenamed Red. It combined a series of actual personnel and computer simulation (oh shit these graphics look tight) and involved around 13,500 elite gamers, including the 82nd Airborne and the 1st Marine Division. The largest wargame LAN party ever with a big Triple-A budget; the exercise cost around $250 million (approximately 1 Star Citizen).
General Paul Van Riper was a gamer at heart, whether he knew it or not. Instead of waiting on the shore with his thumb up his ass and lose, he went ahead and did the opposite of what Blue expected: he played to win and he played smart. He PTFO as hard as he could.
Van Riper knew the Blue team had all the sponsorships, so he went decidedly analog, CRT monitor style. He used motorcycle runners and physical lights to relay messages. He sent coded troop deployments during Muslim calls to player. He knew exactly when the enemy would attack, so he just jumped the gun and attacked the fleet waiting in the gulf. His rationale: war doesn’t start on time. The exercise was designed “free-play”, which is absolutely perfect, meaning there were no constraints to tactics or methods (just like actual war).
A cruise missile strike from Red forces rapidly overwhelmed the US detection systems. Van Riper sent his crap mobs at the fleet in little rubber boats armed with explosives (just like one year earlier with the USS Cole). 19 ships lay at the virtual bottom of the Not Persian Gulf, and estimated US KIA were 20,000, five times the casualties at the Normandy landings. It was all over in less than 30 minutes.
The US forces were stunned and kinda embarrassed. They were expecting a comp-stomp and ended up absolutely destroyed. They decided to respawn their fleet and restrict what tactics Van Riper could do. He had to reveal certain troops deployments, set his missile system out in the open so they could be detected, and even not use his previous maneuvers anymore. He wasn’t even allowed to use hypothetical chemical weapons. They nerfed him.
Blue team began an amphibious assault with their shiny new fleet, including the notoriously shit MV-22 Osprey with a giant radar signature. Van Riper started picking them out of the sky, until US command told him he couldn’t do that anymore.
Naturally, after they set it up so they could win, they claim they did. Van Riper ragequit less than a week into the exercise over the restrictions, and then went to the mods: United States Joint Forces Command. He spammed his colleagues about the scripted exercise and the news was leaked to Army Times. Van Riper never led another wargame again, and the dipshit who ran the debacle for Blue, General Burwell B. Bell III, was promoted to a 4 star general. Bell went onto endorse Trump in 2016, solidifying his idiocy into history.
This humiliating defeat of the US armed forces during this exercise should have been a humbling experience. But nope, they didn’t learn a goddamn thing. It taught us a valuable lesson about how the military operates: that they can only see victory when they set the rules, always assuming they not only can, but will win.
The invasion of Iraq in the next year is one of the worst military blunders in US history, resulting in the complete destabilization of the region, led to the creation of ISIS, and a mountain of bodies. Millennium Challenge 2002 and its delusional thinking was a forebearer of two decades of increasingly virtual war for a growing disconnected America.
We Got The Very Bad Man
Trump learned of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination while stuffing his face with meat loaf and ice cream at his golf resort. I imagine his face frozen, dessert smudged on his chin, his mouth slightly open. The military officials sitting near him can see a glimpse of the bottom row of his tiny shark teeth.
He stares at nothing, pretending to listen while the generals explain in hushed tones the severity of what has happened. Something about Quds or Kurds or Kermit. Whatever. He glances around, his mind a blank wall, a TV channel tuned to static.
No one’s home. He sniffs. He nods. This must be so boring for him. Fire and blood and bone and hair. A dead hand with a ring. Boring. Bored. Want to leave. Hungry still. Just little animal thoughts flickering, like watching an old shark swim with dull homicidal indifference.
Trump had a banal yet surreal take on Iran or Iraq or Agrabah or wherever he thinks this is happening. He snorted some fat Adderall rails and they rolled him out to do some game theory for us. Mike Pence then took to Twitter to bullshit us that Iran directly helped 10 of 12 (or was it 19? I dunno) 9/11 hijackers.
The President took a power nap and then went onto claim Iran was going to blow up the embassy or something, and I’d bet Joey Salad’s remaining testicle he made that shit up on the spot.
No one can even really work up the energy for pretend outrage. Yeah, they got to have their little RA RA RA as revenge for Benghazi a few weeks ago; as if anyone except online Delta 6 operators are still angry about that. The FP blob has rolled out the same playbook we’ve seen before in the countless drone strikes and interventions that have universally turned out to be disasters.
Many Americans, other than a blood-howling minority in the liberal foreign policy blob and the Trump base, have little appetite for another Middle East Fun Time Adventure. Democratic sociopaths arguing the attack on Qasem Soleimani was a good idea, but poorly executed without the right paperwork, is a special type of grotesque. For the rest of us, our taste for blood has been cooled, mainly because there’s not a major terrorist attack on US soil to tempt our palate. Iran is an abstraction, and conflict with these abstract ideas tends to attract fragmented minds.
This new Iran threat feels even more artificial, saccharine, and over-processed than ever. With these unhinged pathological liars in charge, this is a shit sandwich no one wants a bite of. Bush and Obama presented empire as a noble civilizational crusade and then a managerial responsibility, respectively. Trump doesn’t bother with either. We killed the bad man with our WHOOOOOSH missiles and OH BOY we got em! KABOOM!
Because now we’re living in a decaying empire that’s all for show, to entertain one deranged emperor so he doesn’t kill us all. There’s nothing there, no ideology except what makes the war cheerleaders feel powerful. Their lives are empty, and using the mechanized might of the US war machine to blow up a guy in a car is the nearest thing they can get to an orgasm. A type of superficial pleasure, a faint dopamine hit, something to give them control in all the chaos they experience. Just like Millennium Challenge, the narrative has to be crafted to it looks like we “won”, when though our fleet is at the bottom of the ocean, or very little happened at all.
Modern war is something even more abstract than a wargame; it’s pointless conflict without end, fought with robots and words, all about the appearance of victory, not victory itself. What are they fighting exactly? Our empire doesn’t fight anything tangible anymore. They fight nouns and feelings. The war on terror was a war on bad vibes. Now it’s a war on Presidential boredom; Trump gets bored, the generals offer something to bomb. These people want death, bloodlust for revenge against someone, anyone, because how else will they feel alive?
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.