General Van Riper

Of those generals who have stepped forward to criticize Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his conduct of the Iraq War, none has pointed out the mistakes of a man who admits no error with more specificity than retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper.

Van Riper is widely respected as a military thinker who emerged from combat in Vietnam determined to help get to the bottom of what went wrong there and why and how it should be fixed.

Van Riper, who commanded both the Marine War College at Quantico, Va., and the prestigious National War College in Washington before retiring in 1997, told an interviewer in October 2004 that the military got the lessons all wrong after World War II and that mistake resulted in two disasters -- Korea and Vietnam.

"My great fear is we're off to something very similar to what happened after World War II, that is getting it completely wrong again," the general said of the course in Iraq.

The general made it clear he is no anti-war crusader. "We have to stay," he said of Iraq this week. "We have to finish it, but let's do it right."

Van Riper told Knight Ridder that in looking at Rumsfeld's leadership he found three particular areas of inability and incompetence.

First, he said, if any battalion commander under him had created so "poor a climate of leadership" and the "bullying" that goes on in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld he would order an investigation and relieve that commander.

"Even more than that I focus on (his) incompetence when it comes to preparing American military forces for the future," Van Riper said. "His idea of transformation turns on empty buzz words. There's none of the Scholarship and doctrinal examination that has to go on before you begin changing the force."

Third, he said, under Rumsfeld there's been no oversight of military acquisition.

"Mr. Rumsfeld has failed 360 degrees in the job. He is incompetent," Van Riper concluded. "Any military man who made the mistakes he has made, tactically and strategically, would be relieved on the spot."

One event that shocked Van Riper occurred in 2002 when he was asked, as he had been before, to play the commander of an enemy Red Force in a huge $250 million three-week war game titled Millennium Challenge 2002. It was widely advertised as the best kind of such exercises -- a free-play unscripted test of some of the Pentagon's and Rumsfeld's fondest ideas and theories.

Though fictional names were applied, it involved a crisis moving toward war in the Persian Gulf and in actuality was a barely veiled test of an invasion of Iran.

In the computer-controlled game, a flotilla of Navy warships and Marine amphibious warfare ships steamed into the Persian Gulf for what Van Riper assumed would be a pre-emptive strike against the country he was defending.

Van Riper resolved to strike first and unconventionally using fast patrol boats and converted pleasure boats fitted with ship-to-ship missiles as well as first generation shore-launched anti-ship cruise missiles. He packed small boats and small propeller aircraft with explosives for one mass wave of suicide attacks against the Blue fleet. Last, the general shut down all radio traffic and sent commands by motorcycle messengers, beyond the reach of the code-breakers.

At the appointed hour he sent hundreds of missiles screaming into the fleet, and dozens of kamikaze boats and planes plunging into the Navy ships in a simultaneous sneak attack that overwhelmed the Navy's much-vaunted defenses based on its Aegis cruisers and their radar controlled Gatling guns.

When the figurative smoke cleared it was found that the Red Forces had sunk 16 Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Thousands of Marines and sailors were dead.

The referees stopped the game, which is normal when a victory is won so early. Van Riper assumed that the Blue Force would draw new, better plans and the free play war games would resume.

Instead he learned that the war game was now following a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory: He was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed and he was told his forces would not be allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.

The Pentagon has never explained. It classified Van Riper's 21-page report criticizing the results and conduct of the rest of the exercise, along with the report of another DOD observer. Pentagon officials have not released Joint Forces Command's own report on the exercise.

Van Riper walked out and didn't come back. He was furious that the war game had turned from an honest, open free play test of America's war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise meant to end in an overwhelming American victory.
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http://zfacts.com/p/357.html | 01/18/12 07:26 GMT
Modified: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 01:19:29 GMT