Yorkers in their twenties and thirties, and I looked at the room
and there were groups of two and three, and there was not a
single group that did not include members of both sides. They
weren’t just being polite. They were animatedly talking to each
other. They were comparing notes and connecting. I said to
myself, These guys are soul mates. They were treating each
other with total respect.”
Millennium Challenge, in other words, was not just a battle
between two armies. It was a battle between two perfectly
opposed military philosophies. Blue Team had their databases
and matrixes and methodologies for systematically
understanding the intentions and capabilities of the enemy. Red
Team was commanded by a man who looked at a long-haired,
unkempt, seat-of-the pants commodities trader yelling and
pushing and making a thousand instant decisions an hour and
saw in him a soul mate.
On the opening day of the war game, Blue Team poured tens
of thousands of troops into the Persian Gulf. They parked an
aircraft carrier battle group just offshore of Red Team’s home
country. There, with the full weight of its military power in
evidence, Blue Team issued an eight-point ultimatum to Van
Riper, the eighth point being the demand to surrender. They