Sink an aircraft carrier, if you’re smart about it.

Back in 2002, the U.S. Navy ran the “Millennium Challenge” to simulate war in the Persian Gulf. As anyone who has been involved in these things can tell you, the ultimate conclusion is that BLUEFOR (the good guys) will emerge grandly victorious, decimate the OPFOR (the bad guys) and prove once again that nothing can stand in the way of the U.S. military, least of all, the U.S. military.

But to play the role of Bad Guy in Charge (BGIC) for the Millennium Challenge, the Navy hauled up a crusty, retired leatherneck by the name of Paul Van Riper. Van Riper wasn’t even given the benefit of a proper military for the simulation — No real navy, no real air force, just some old boats, propeller planes and archaic surface-to-surface missiles. The general plan was that Van Riper would put up a token resistance before Johnny came marchin’ right on through, haroo, haroo.

At what should have been the end of the exercise, 2/3 of the big, fancy U.S. Navy fleet was nestled cozily along the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Since defeat deviated from the script - the Navy simply refloated the fleet and continued along the simulation as if nothing ever happened. Van Riper, refusing to play the sucker, stumped out of the exercise. Gary Brecher, was the first to point out what a huge freaking deal (warning this site is a goldmine of information mixed in with big boy language and occasional human anatomy) this is for U.S. operations. The War Nerd reprises his assessment of the whole thing (and takes a sharp jab at the big media (which caught on about six years too late) here.

Naval theorist who are not posed to make money on ship construction have been claiming the days of the surface navies are well-past. William Lind recount’s Admiral Hyman Rickover’s forecast in his column, “Davy Jones’ Locker.” (This Web site is safe for all audiences.)

About thirty years ago, my first boss, Senator Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, asked Admiral Hyman Rickover how long he thought the U.S. aircraft carriers would last in the war with the Soviet navy, which was largely a submarine navy. Rickover’s answer, on the record in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was, “About two days.” The Committee, needless to say, went on to approve buying more carriers.

Barring modern U-Boat warfare, bad guys the world over are learning that the best way to beat high-technology, is to go for technology so low as to be almost primitive. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers found out that the government’s high-performance jet fighters are great against other jet fighters but lousy against dinky propeller planes that can fly slow enough to make tracking a pain and low enough that shooting them out of the sky might pose more of a threat than letting them toss homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails out of the window. (This too, courtesy of Brecher.)

When we’re staring at one of the largest defense budgets since world war 2, it’s sobering to to realize that our enemies are very capable of doing more with less. The U.S. public has a very strong opinion about the invulnerability of its military. It’s hard to tell what effect the USS Coral Reef might have.

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