Millennium Challenge 2002
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Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major wargame exercise conducted by the United States armed forces in mid-2002, likely the largest such exercise in history. The exercise, which ran from July 24 to August 15 and cost several hundred million dollars, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more powerful weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States and an initially unknown adversary in the Middle East. Most of the people on the U.S. side assumed that the adversary in the game would be Iraq, but it turned out that the other side was simulating the military forces of Israel, the only Middle Eastern state that most observers feel has a strong ability to counter an American military engagement.
In the early days of the exercise, the adversary overwhelmed the simulated U.S. forces. Many U.S. ships were "sunk," and other significant losses were incurred. The rules of the exercise were essentially changed shortly thereafter, with the different sides following predetermined plans of action much more closely. This led to the challenge being criticized by many, although it still provided an important real-world test of many of the systems used by the current U.S. military.
External links
- USJFCOM: Millennium Challenge 2002 (http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/mc02.htm)
- Nova: Battle Plan Under Fire (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wartech/)