plane, a missile actually fired or a plane actually took off, and
whenever it didn’t, one of forty-two separate computer models
simulated each of those actions so precisely that the people in
the war room often couldn’t tell it wasn’t real. The game lasted
for two and a half weeks. For future analysis, a team of JFCOM
specialists monitored and recorded every conversation, and a
computer kept track of every bullet fired and missile launched
and tank deployed. This was more than an experiment. As
became clear less than a year later — when the United States
invaded a Middle Eastern state with a rogue commander who
had a strong ethnic power base and was thought to be harboring
terrorists — this was a full dress rehearsal for war.
The stated purpose of Millennium Challenge was for the
Pentagon to test a set of new and quite radical ideas about how
to go to battle. In Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the United
States had routed the forces of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. But
that was an utterly conventional kind of war: two heavily
armed and organized forces meeting and fighting in an open
battlefield. In the wake of Desert Storm, the Pentagon became
convinced that that kind of warfare would soon be an
anachronism: no one would be foolish enough to challenge the
United States head-to-head in pure military combat. Conflict in