"Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel.

Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."

"The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes by an enemy that launched its attacks from commercial ships and using other unconventional means.

The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."

We reacted to this late. But it isn’t a coïncidence that low-cost munitions are now receiving, in the U.S., other countries’ decadeslong weapons budgets.

Cool. Gives hope to Greenland, Canada, and other places threatened by the USA.

The US has started investing in low cost cruise missiles and drones https://www.twz.com/sea/10000-low-cost-cruise-missiles-in-th...

For ex $300k antiship missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_Affordable_Capac...

This war game has been discussed many times.

One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.

He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.

There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.