positively where he is.” War was shrouded in fog. The point of
Millennium Challenge was to show that, with the full benefit of
high-powered satellites and sensors and supercomputers, that
fog could be lifted.
This is why, in many ways, the choice of Paul Van Riper to
head the opposing Red Team was so inspired, because if Van
Riper stood for anything, it was the antithesis of that position.
Van Riper didn’t believe you could lift the fog of war. His
library on the second floor of his house in Virginia is lined with
rows upon rows of works on complexity theory and military
strategy. From his own experiences in Vietnam and his reading
of the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Van Riper
became convinced that war was inherently unpredictable and
messy and nonlinear. In the 1980s, Van Riper would often take
part in training exercises, and, according to military doctrine,
he would be required to perform versions of the kind of
analytical, systematic decision making that JFCOM was testing
in Millennium Challenge. He hated it. It took far too long. “I
remember once,” he says, “we were in the middle of the
exercise. The division commander said, ‘Stop. Let’s see where
the enemy is.’ We’d been at it for eight or nine hours, and they
were already behind us. The thing we were planning for had