overwhelmed in the face of a larger foe. But he was too much
of a gunslinger for that. On the second day of the war, he put a
fleet of small boats in the Persian Gulf to track the ships of the
invading Blue Team navy. Then, without warning, he
bombarded them in an hour-long assault with a fusillade of
cruise missiles. When Red Team’s surprise attack was over,
sixteen American ships lay at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
Had Millennium Challenge been a real war instead of just an
exercise, twenty thousand American servicemen and women
would have been killed before their own army had even fired a
shot.
“As the Red force commander, I’m sitting there and I realize
that Blue Team had said that they were going to adopt a
strategy of preemption,” Van Riper says. “So I struck first. We’d
done all the calculations on how many cruise missiles their
ships could handle, so we simply launched more than that, from
many different directions, from offshore and onshore, from air,
from sea. We probably got half of their ships. We picked the
ones we wanted. The aircraft carrier. The biggest cruisers.
There were six amphibious ships. We knocked out five of
them.”
In the weeks and months that followed, there were