Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [40]
In late July, both sides came to Suffolk and set up shop in the huge, windowless rooms known as test bays on the first floor of the main JFCOM building. Marine Corps, air force, army, and navy units at various military bases around the country stood by to enact the commands of Red and Blue Team brass. Sometimes when Blue Team fired a missile or launched a 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 the future would be diffuse. It would take place in cities as often as on battlefields, be fueled by ideas as much as by weapons, and engage cultures and economies as much as armies. As one JFCOM analyst puts it: “The next war is not just going to be military on military. The deciding factor is not going to be how many tanks you kill, how many ships you sink, and how many planes you shoot down. The decisive factor is how you take apart your adversary’s system. Instead of going after war-fighting capability, we have to go after war-making capability. The military is connected to the economic system, which is connected to their cultural system, to their personal relationships. We have to understand the links between all those systems.”
With Millennium Challenge, then, Blue Team was given greater intellectual resources than perhaps any army in history. JFCOM devised something called the Operational Net Assessment, which was a formal decision-making tool that broke the enemy down into a series of systems — military, economic, social, political — and created a matrix showing how all those systems were interrelated and which of the links among the systems were the most vulnerable. Blue Team’s commanders were also given a tool called Effects-Based Operations, which directed them to think beyond the conventional military method of targeting and destroying an adversary’s military assets. They were given a comprehensive, real-time map of the combat situation called the Common Relevant Operational Picture (CROP). They were given a tool for joint interactive planning. They were given an unprecedented amount of information and intelligence from every corner of the U.S. government and a methodology that was logical and systematic and rational and rigorous. They had every toy in the Pentagon’s arsenal.
“We looked at the full array of what we could do to affect our adversary’s environment — political, military, economic, societal, cultural, institutional. All those things we looked at very comprehensively,” the commander of JFCOM, General William F. Kernan, told reporters in a Pentagon press