intelligence, if we can see everything, we can’t lose,” Colonel
Van Riper said. “What my brother always says is, ‘Hey, say you
are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see?
No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you
can’t see what the other guy is thinking.’ More and more
commanders want to know everything, and they get imprisoned
by that idea. They get locked in. But you can never know
everything.” Did it really matter that Blue Team was many
times the size of Red Team? “It’s like Gulliver’s Travels,” Colonel
Van Riper says. “The big giant is tied down by those little rules
and regulations and procedures. And the little guy? He just runs
around and does what he wants.”
6. Millennium Challenge, Part Two
For a day and a half after Red Team’s surprise attack on Blue
Team in the Persian Gulf, an uncomfortable silence fell over the
JFCOM facility. Then the JFCOM staff stepped in. They turned
back the clock. Blue Team’s sixteen lost ships, which were lying
at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, were refloated. In the first
wave of his attack, Van Riper had fired twelve theater ballistic
missiles at various ports in the Gulf region where Blue Team