Результаты амовских учений: большие потери и победа (ну ещё бы).
WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 ? American forces recently completed the largest joint war-fighting exercise they have ever held, a three-week, $250 million operation that involved 13,500 military and civilian personnel battling in nine live exercise ranges across the United States and in double that many computer simulations.
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 farflung fighting forces as never before, even while in transcontinental flight to the battlefield. They also emphasized the importance of combining their destructive power with attacks on computer networks as well as with diplomacy.
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, said 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 said.
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 ? or 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 (прим. — но у Ирака их нет!) conducted innocent-looking maneuvers for several days in a row, establishing a pattern that did not appear threatening. But the maneuvers 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.
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 counterterrorism director.
The American forces "saile into the gulf assuming they could establish superiority, and disrupt the enemy's command, control and communications with technology," Mr. Oakley said. "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."
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