August 21, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Saani 11,1423

NEW YORK, Aug 20: In a simulation of a World War scenario, the American forces recently completed the largest joint war-fighting exercise they have ever held.

In a special report, the New York Times reported that the three-week, $250 million operation, involved 13,500 military and civilian personnel battling in nine live exercise ranges across the United States and in double that many computer simulations.

The paper said that the results from the mock combat, planned for two years, are expected to shape planning against future adversaries.

As they compiled lessons from the exercise, called Millennium Challenge 2002, officers praised new airborne communications that allowed commanders to stay in touch with far-flung fighting forces as never before, even while in trans-continental flight to the battlefield. They also emphasized the importance of combining their destructive power with attacks on computer networks as well as with diplomacy, the paper said.

Military officials said the troops were also reminded that a wily foe with little to lose retains the historic advantage of the attacker.

Gen. William F. Kernan, head of the United States Joint Forces Command that organized and operated the war game, told the paper the exercise showed the importance of a Standing Joint Force Headquarters to coordinate the efforts of all the armed services during wartime.

The idea, he said, is to avoid “the ad hoc nature” of past wartime command headquarters, thrown together in time of emergency. The standing headquarters would “provide future commanders with a skill set of people with military specialties and a solid appreciation for the complexities of the region,” he added.

In the simulation of a Persian Gulf conflict with a foe that might have been Iran or Iraq, but was called merely Red, American forces — Blue — suffered unexpected losses from a sneak attack early in the fighting, but then emerged victorious.

In the opening hours of the conflict, the enemy commander was able to deceive American forces by protecting his messages from electronic snooping: he communicated with field officers via motorcycle messengers.

Enemy planes and ships conducted innocent-looking manoeuvres for several days in a row, establishing a pattern that did not appear threatening. But the manoeuvres left the forces well positioned for a surprise attack, which was initiated using code words during the morning call to prayer from the nation’s minarets, the paper said.

In the computer simulation, an aircraft carrier battle group and ships of a marine Amphibious Ready Group suffered severe damage, according to the enemy chief of state, played by Robert B. Oakley, a former ambassador to Pakistan, who also served as the State Department’s counter-terrorism director, the paper said.

The American forces “sailed into the gulf assuming they could establish superiority, and disrupt the enemy’s command, control and communications with technology,” Oakley told the Times. “But Red decided to surprise them by going first, and used some time- tested techniques for sending messages in ways that can’t be picked up electronically or jammed. Red sank a lot of the fleet.”

Senior military officers told the paper that the value of the exercise was that it required completing a range of missions to test 51 separate military initiatives.

However, the paper said that because many aspects of the war game remain classified, officers would not detail the extent of simulated damage to the fleet, nor say whether the exercise was restarted after the fleet was theoretically hit. Analysis from the enemy commander, played by Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, will be incorporated into a final report.

“Both Red and Blue were constrained during the exercise,” said one military officer. “You can’t stop the entire game when one side gets too clever.”

Officials told the paper that the joint American forces — Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy and Special Operations — were declared victorious.