Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 90 - Millennium Challenge 2002 Ft. Francis Horton

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Joe is joined by Francis Horton from the Hell of a Way to Die Podcast to talk about the greatest self own in American Military history: MC02 Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Sources: https://taskandpurpose.com/millenium-challenge-2002-stacked-deck https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/

Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. With me today is returning champion Francis Horton, host of the Hell of a Way to Die podcast. How you doing, Francis? Oh, it is. I know that you said that this is going to be coming out well after the Winter War series, so it's going to be a while. But Joe and I are both two weeks deep on dry January or dry-nuary. And so this is a sober evening podcast. This is weird. I'm sitting here with, like, a bottle of water, and, like, I'm not.

My head isn't swimming slightly, so it's a weird feeling for me. I have a blackberry-flavored sparkling water, and I have to say, seeing how I came up with this podcast while solidly shit-faced with Nick, it's been jarring for him, who is not taking part in Dry January, because he's over there getting torn up. He's solidly always four to five beers deep when we record. So having me over here with like a pile of notes and completely sober,

which I have to point out has made for much better episodes and easier research. But yeah, it's weird that not only is there a presidential debate on which we're both ignoring, because I don't need any help hating like the world that we live in right now, but we are both sober at the same time, which means I definitely cannot handle a presidential debate.

You know, my podcast is very political, but I'm glad that it's not so political that people expect me to live tweet a debate and be mad about stuff. It's like, look, guys, vote Sanders. That's it. That's all I've got. I don't have anything else for you.

That's my politics. All the rest of them, i don't give a fuck they all suck sanders sucks the leads so there you go you want me to sit down and like slowly have my brains leak out of my ears while i watch wolf blitzer like try to try to you know trick these guys into you know being horny for war no i don't need that goodbye personally i really like uh a whole bunch of old saggy marionettes to come out and be like yes i voted for the iraq war but and you know i just don't fucking care anymore you know i maybe it's because uh you know we were both in the military you still are um or that i spend like 10 to 15 hours a week researching like millions of people dying because of shitty fucking leaders for this show i'm like you know if you voted for shit like that uh maybe you should be banned from politics forever yeah yeah i keep i

keep hearing the uh like oh we shouldn't you shouldn't bring up the iraq war vote you know that was so long ago and it's like well i mean first off it's that war is still kind of going uh and and secondly it's like like i mean i when when when the iraq war started uh march of 2003 i was in the army for about two and a half years at that point um and i was i guess i was just like, oh, well, I mean, I, I, how old am I? I wasn't even on my first deployment at that point. So I was under the age of 21. I was probably 20 years old, 19 or 20. And just being like, well, I mean, I guess, I guess we're bombing these people for a reason,

right? I mean, we wouldn't be bombing them for no reason because I was 20 and stupid and didn't understand how the world worked. i was 20 and stupid and didn't understand how the world worked now if you were a politician at that time and you got duped by fucking the president who you know let who let a couple of fucking airplanes slam into the world trade center and then sit there like a dipshit while my pet goat was being read and then i knew who's like you know some connect Connecticut dumbass who moved to Texas and was like, I'm a Texan, y'all. I'm a cowboy. And just like, no, he's a fucking rich asshole.

And if you're a politician, if you're a senator. He cleared brush on camera. If you got duped by that, if like you believed that guy and you were somebody who was like supposed to be in charge. Like, look, I fully don't believe in meritocrity anymore. If anything, politicians today prove to me that meritocrity is bullshit. But back then, I'm sorry, if you fell for that, either you're stupid

or you really wanted to do that dumbass war. And either way, no, you're out for me. So there's only one guy, it's bernie and uh bernie hasn't done anything to get anybody here blown up so kudos to kudos to him i guess i mean i i believe a wise man once said as every once in a while the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of a million iraqi civilians they don't count i mean you know it's uh it's to kill a mockingbird but with uh with war yeah that's something that we we talk about a lot on this show is like they i consider them uh it could kind of it's a horrible thing to say but the less than dead um because people

just don't care like when you saw the uh the the rocket strikes on uh bulat air base um not that long ago at first you know there's incredibly confusing reports come out because that's generally what happens all people are actively being hit with fucking rockets uh that like oh don't worry only like 10 iraqis died like what it's still it's still 10 fucking people man i mean obviously thankfully that as apparently not true but you know the first thing's coming out and you know i follow a lot of uh iraqi journalists on twitter and they're like guys 10 people die like come on uh speaking of really bad military decisions and also apparently when you enlisted in the military, we're talking about Millennium Challenge 2002.

And there's a good reason for that. I had actually never heard of this training exercise before you brought it up to me. And we were going to research it for an episode. And then I think I got lost in the middle of a seven-hour series about the Soviet-Afghan War. And you wrote an article about it for Task and Purpose you're now the subject matter expert yeah so millennium challenge 2002 has has always been fascinating to me and you know the on the surface when when somebody talks about it the uh you know they'll say oh it's that war game that you that we did and the United States had to cheat to win against this op for oppositional force general, General Ripper. That's a fucking badass name, by the way.

He looks fucking severe, too. He looks like a guy who's going to come out of nowhere, like a velociraptor out of the bush and yell at you because your hand is like too close to your pocket like i see your hand about ready to go in that fucking pocket private so so you know millennium challenge mc mco2 um took place in between uh after the afghan war started but before uh iraq started um and it was so millennium challenge has always been at that time it was a a lot of big uh war gaming exercises um and this is like the bit this is some big shit too this you know like we talk about going to uh ntc national training center right you go like you're a tanker so what'd you do you guys put your tanks on the railhead you take your tanks out there you drive your tanks around you shoot at stuff

um you would have opposition yeah you have oppositional forces out there right you do war games out there drive around of course guns play play with your play uh what what's that uh what's the shit um the what is that that fake you put

it on the miles system miles gear yeah the miles shit sucks the shit that never works, yeah. You go out and you play all your war game stuff, but Millennium Challenge was massive. It was involving ships. They were out in the Persian Gulf

area. There were airplanes. There were paratroopers. They had a lot going on. There's a huge operation. This is very reminiscent of last time we talked, which was Operation Tiger, where the...

If you missed that one, that was the war games, the gaming that they were doing before they did D-Day, in which just massive incompetence on the US side got like 700 people killed before... No, 1,000 people, right? Before they did D-Day. In which just massive incompetence. On the US side. Got like 700 people killed before. No a thousand people right?

Around there yeah. Yeah I got like a thousand American and allied troops killed. Through like sheer incompetence. Before they could get you know cut up on the. On the beach along. Withering Nazi gunfire. It did. Achieve its goals.

Of breaking soldiers mentally. To the point where they didn't find d-day scary anymore because they watched a thousand of their friends get drowned you know i hey uh one thing that that's funny because when we talked about that we talked about how like their uh other stuff was like really censored you couldn't write home during it you couldn't because they would have no information about this getting out. Cause they didn't want the access forces to find out about it. And, you know, recently,

um, the, with, with everything happening in Iran, they, uh, we sent a whole bunch of the 82nd airborne over and basically just took all their phones and really,

you can't take your phones over there with you. And they're like, well, you know, cause, and, and, and,

and there's, there's, you know know reasoning for that um you know of course you you know your dipshit private will absolutely fucking you know snapchat his dick to some rando girl back in like you know fucking bloomberg bloomington indiana and fucking al-qaeda will drop a bomb on you because of that yeah we, we all like to giggle how ISIS accidentally got themselves drone-striked by Snapchat. Like, we would definitely fucking do that. Like, we're going to be trying to dunk on somebody in the comments and Twitter and catch a fucking Hezbollah rocket to the face. That would be how I die the last thing that i uh that i press tweet on is sending a pig poop balls to to fucking uh duncan hunter and then suddenly my entire squad gets whacked so that's how you

truly achieve paradise ship posters paradise so the millennium challenge 2002, again, like we said, big, big, big war games. And I'll read from a little bit from what I wrote here. So Lieutenant General B.B. Bell led the American Blue Force team against the enemy Reds, conveniently left unnamed, bearing a striking resemblance to Iraqi and Iranian defense forces. bearing a striking resemblance to Iraqi and Iranian defense forces. The Reds were led by retired now Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Ripper, known at the time as a controversial yet effective Op 4 commander. Van Ripper knew his side was going to suffer technological disadvantages and adopted asymmetrical strategies to use against American forces with devastating results.

Asymmetrical is an army buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. Basically what it means is a symmetrical war is like tank on tank. You and your Abrams goes up against what's the

current good Russian tank? Like the t-90 92s or something or something like that yeah well there's that t-14 armada but that actually broke down on the fucking parade field and they brought it out like everybody come check out our tank oh fuck which is exactly how that would happen too it's like when you go to bring your trade your car in or something immediately it fucking breaks down yeah my my house is on the market and like every time somebody comes in i'm like this person is going to walk in and a fucking wall is going to fall out of here or something never own never own a house that was uh that was made like in in a century before uh indoor plumbing that's all i'm going to say anyway so the blue team had an eight-point ultimatum for the red team.

And it's basically unconditional surrender, right? Who would have thought our plan to make them surrender without a fight wouldn't work? Shocking. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, when we talk about these wars, right, when we talk about, you know, what's the win for World War II, right? The Nazis surrender, the Japanese surrender. When we're talking about what we're doing here in Iraq, you know, you have various mission goals and mission statements, right?

Where you want to be able to establish local military forces. You want to build up not only a centralized government, but decentralized smaller local governments. You have all these different things that you want to do. You have various goals to get to your end state. So the eight-point ultimatum basically had a a bunch of different things that they're like you know these this this this this but basically unconditional surrender at the end well i mean fucking does anybody do that do you think that if we went to the iranians right now and said we're gonna knock on your doorstep and we want unconditional surrender so lay down your arm fucking of course not absolutely not um no nobody would do that we wouldn't do that either

no i mean that's not what we got in iraq either i mean the war has been a complete fucking failure but uh we did destroy the iraqi government but it didn't surrender it just kind of fell apart right so and and this is you know when we talk about asymmetrical warfare when you are faced with um a a fight against a technologically superior army, like the United States, obviously, we joke about our ship breaking down all the time, but if you're me, I can't fight against an F-35. I can't go against a tank.

against an F-35. I can't go against a tank. I can't even go against a well-equipped squad of Marines with MRAPs and whatever, Mark-19s, machine guns, shit like that. So what you do is you have to do the

asymmetrical, where you're just like, okay, I'm going to do guerrilla warfare. I'm going to make bombs out of just the shit that I can find around here. I'm going to you know make bombs out of just the shit that i can find around here um i'm gonna do i'm gonna do basically things that you know you that is not force on force um it's not you know i'm gonna line my guys up on that side you're gonna line your guys up on this side and then we're all gonna shoot each other until we all fall down um you know which is which is how the the revolutionary war was fought um To be fair, I think a Revolutionary War soldier is more combat capable than an F-35.

So again, they decided, no, we're not going to do it. And so Van Ripper pulled his first stunt, which was the battlecruisers were fitted with this, um, uh, a GS radar. Now radar is, we,

we say the word radar, nobody uses radar anymore. Um, we, there, there's all kinds of different there. There radar is a thing that was, you know,

created back in like, you know, the forties and, you know, during world war two, it was a huge thing then it's a lot more sophisticated now but basically it's this

radar-like system. It's supposed to be able to ping and see everything that's out there. What Van Ripper did was confuse the sophisticated GS radar system which I'm also going to point out did not technically exist at this time yeah they seem to really like that whole uh we have these notional

weapons we're gonna we're gonna certainly get to that um when we when we talk when we get a little further into it but i just want to point out the ultra i wrote in here the ultra sophisticated aegis radar system of the looming navy fleet so they basically shot a barrage of missiles at at them now the aegis was supposed to be able to say okay here here they all are we're going to shoot our guns boom boom boom we're going to shoot all these missiles out of the air right but underneath all of that you basically had a bunch of speed boats packed with uh explosives doing suicide runs on the uh on all on the fleet and it sunk basically the fleet in about 20 minutes so yeah the time like if you ordered a pizza right now van ripper would sink a fleet of navy ships before that pizza would get to

your door. Basically. I think the best part about this is I found an article, um, that now I have to be completely open. War on the rocks in this podcast do not have a great relationship. Uh, uh,

since they attempted to attack us for calling the article is fucking stupid. They have an article on this as well. And I have a quote from Van Ripper, who was in the command cell when this is all going on. I guess it's called the white cell. He said, quote, it was after I did this, there was an eerie silence like nobody knew what to do next. I like this.

Received an urgent phone call from uh from commander luck sir van ripper just slimed all of the ships that sounds so bad like is is slime some kind of navy term for destroying a ship? I guess. I don't know. But he fucked them up. He got them all down. With basically what we see now. I mean, VBIDs, Vehicle Born IEDs, suicide bombers and stuff like that.

That's not hard. It's not even new. I mean, the Japanese Imperial Navy planned to do virtually the same thing to us if we invaded the Japanese homeland. Right. Just strap everybody. Obviously, they had no problems strapping people

inside of things and being like, just fucking run into that real hard. Don't worry, we won't teach you how to land, kid. We're not. I especially like when they're just like, how much less a plane can we make this and more like a they're just like how much how much less like a bomb a plane can we make this and more like a bomb that we still have to put a person into for some reason so uh they they're just like well shit i mean this was a two week long um exercise and in like

10 minutes uh van ripper just fucking smoked everybody caused 20 000 uh casualties in 10 minutes uh and yeah nobody nobody knew what the fuck to do so they had to refloat it they're like okay that doesn't count um now i'm gonna point out a couple of things here because first off people people like to you know like oh they had to, no, they had two weeks that they were doing this. You're supposed to learn. Oh, shit. Van Ripper did this thing that we were not planning. So we are going to now plan for that.

They might do that. And they did. They planned, like, hey, keep some of the guns pointed down. You know, one of the funniest things I've always seen was like an aircraft like a um um uh an aircraft carrier that they're like well we have to worry about like literally this thing speed boats with uh with explosives on it because they get close enough they can you know fuck up a whole uh a hole really easy and like once and like when a small boat gets to a certain point close like you can't do anything like it's it's too close for you to be able to

shoot it now aircraft carriers are generally like you know um protected by destroyers there's always like a fleet around it some kind um of protector and ships but you know if you bomb those ones you know the fucking open yourself up to uh to get somebody else in so the the marines just took to like parking in uh an lav vehicle like out on the flight deck and just pointing just like all right if anybody gets close just fucking shoot them um rather which which like is dumb like you think of it as dumb but also it's like we already have a thing that can do this just park an lav out there put the shock blocks down so it doesn't roll into the ocean and point it at the ocean in case anybody gets too close and the big guns can't handle it. Now y'all shoot it.

I'm willing to bet that the LAV was the Marines idea, but the chalk blocks were the Navy's idea. Well, and what's really stupid about this whole thing, and I know it's, it's different, but it's, it's not is two years before the coal bombing happened.

So like they should have known like little boats can fuck us up like that has shown that it could it didn't sink the coal but it it absolutely made it combat ineffective and it almost sank which is which is really one of the blind spots that american um military planning has like for the longest time they really thought and i think that they're probably better at it now because we've just never done you know a real force on force war of attrition war in forever um and all the wars that we've been doing is you know fighting uh dudes with ak-47s and pajamas uh and you know and flip-flops out in the caves or something. They were chill about guys in black

pajamas and flip-flops, but they're like 2-0 against us now. Yeah, for a country that... The reason Americans must hate communism so much is because communists keep kicking our asses at everything. Yeah, maybe one day... Not the Latin American ones, unfortunately.

Those ones we're still able to hire death squads for. But all the ones that are any further away, it's like they have an ideology that's way far in advance of ours. Yeah, I'm willing to say that the United States military, I keep saying army because I like to shit on the army as much as I can for obvious reasons, but the United States military kind of sucks at learning lessons because you think they would have learned... I mean, because Van Ritt, I don't know their service records, but all the generals involved in this were old enough to have served

in Vietnam. I don't know if they did, but they had a mix of irregular attrition warfare and conventional warfare when they fought the armies of north vietnam combined with the vietcong so you would they they suffered from a very serious lack of imagination is that as i think what somebody called uh this kind of thing before is like they they lack imagining terrible shit to happen right and that's why that's why van ripper is is great during all of this because he's the guy who you who's just like no i'll i'll come on i will fuck you up somehow like i will find a way

and you know i've never been up for um i always wanted to be because i thought it'd be fun to just oh it's great yeah to just fuck up american soldiers constantly but you guys suck i killed you all but you know oppositional forces like you know i i figure like sometimes they they will put um i guess uh what's the word i'm looking for um they'll put stop gaps on you like as op force like you can't do this you can't oh do that. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah. But I can, and shouldn't I? Like, shouldn't I, you know, as the Oppositional Force, be able to do the, like, now I get it, if I'm, you know,

if the people, if the soldiers or the Marines or whoever that's training are, like, some real pokey unit, and I say that with love to all of my pogues. Yeah, you know, go a little easy on them because they're probably, but I'm sorry,

if you got some infantry guys or MPs or tankers or any like, you know, actual combat arms dudes out there, I should be able to go full force against you and whatever fucking crazy idea I have. Because I would, I would absolutely go out and think like a guerrilla soldier and just be

like, all right, look, first off, I'm going to, uh, lure them into, uh,

blowing up this mosque. And that's going to radicalize this entire city against them. All right. Number one. And, and you know, nobody like, I guess in a two week war game,

you're really not going to go that in depth with it, but also I should be able to because francis solomoni horton i'm just saying i'm not saying that that i want to go up against american forces uh as a war uh warlord myself i'm just saying i think I could give them a real good run for their money. I can say that I do because it's a lot of fun. It was my main job when I was stationed at Fort Knox was to be Op 4 for the Armor Basic

Officer Leadership course. Oh my god, that just made me hard a little bit. You get to just fuck up officers constantly. I used to be able to kidnap officers and drag them off into the city and make execution videos oh it was the only time about the army yeah yeah is the only and then they sent me to four hood and deployed me constantly as payback but yeah i mean when you're

up for you generally have parameters you have to follow like we were never able to just like annihilate an entire troop we were able to surround and destroy platoons occasionally like but that was only if the lane guys I can't remember what they're what they're called but the instructors the OC observer controllers is what I always know them as the OCs

only when like a unit was absolutely not learning not listening not doing what they should and not like learning not taking the cues from the instructor where they give us the go ahead like you know what just fucking annihilate but it was super rare but i mean this situation but you should be able to do that and and that's the thing is that like i agree it's it's hard like asymmetrical war is hard to prepare for like it's it's not like you know if if we want you know uh if if we're gonna roll across russia you know from uh one from one from moscow to the uh siberian uh

plains or whatever into the black forest you know that's that is kind of a force on force you know that's they would have jets they would have tanks they have uh the su 400 surface to airs you know like that would be that would be a hell of a fight um we would we would win um i certainly believe but it would be it would be a hell of a fight but you can plan for that like all right we're gonna take our tanks and we're gonna go shoot their tanks with it it's very easy to plan for that because there's doctrine involved you know right and it's like the most basic soldier skill available is you dig a hole and you shoot people from it it doesn't really work in a situation um like this i mean were we you know and i went to basic training in 2006 um and so you know we were already quite a few years deep into the now forever war.

They weren't teaching us about suicide bombers or anything. You were still sitting in a foxhole and shooting at things. I think that's what happened here in MC 2002. You have aircraft carriers, destroyers, missile destroyers, whatever the fuck you want to call them, and they're big, shiny computers, and they're like, we're going to fight a navy. You did, kind of, but you didn't. It's one of those things that I

think the military is so large and slow-moving that it generally doesn't happen very quickly unless you foster that kind of thing. Normally, it's when you're on the defense, you can move that quickly, which is why Van Ripper did so well.

Also, it certainly helped that he knew all the doctrine he'd be fighting. But I think you have an unwillingness to change, which we've seen constantly forever. I think that's something that just bred into military is once you have tradition, nobody wants to change it. And then generations pass and nobody even knows

why you do it anymore. Yeah, and there's also a certain morale to it. You don't want to go out and do three weeks of a training mission that costs a quarter of a billion dollars and

just constantly every day oh how how's van ripper gonna fuck us up today um you know because eventually like you know you you need the wind to feel good uh about at the end but like you know so so after the uh the speedboat incident then there was uh bringing um the v-22 ospreys in, which is the tilt rotor aircraft, the thing that falls out of the sky about as much as the F-35 does. I think the Ospreys killed like a dozen people too over the years, just during development.

And this was five years before it even got to the field. Yeah, this was? Yeah. Yeah, the Osprey was another one of those like not really not really but it was i mean we had them in hold on let me when when was these 89 was when they're oh jesus christ first flight 19 march 1989 introduction introduction 13 June 2007 so it's a helicopter guys like I get that the I get

even the F-35 didn't take this long Jesus Christ yeah the Osprey I was one years old when this development started and I had been in the army for a year and a half by the time it got to the field love the fucking turnaround, guys.

Good fucking job. Okay, so the F-35, I'm sorry, the V-22 has two giant propellers. It's incredibly loud, incredibly identifiable on any radar scanners. So they said,

well, okay, here they come. Get out our surface stairs and shoot them out of the sky. White Cell said, well, okay, here they come. Get out our surface stairs and shoot them out of the sky. White Cell said, no, not doing that. Weren't allowed to shoot the C-130 troop transports and also were not allowed to deploy chemical weapons,

which is what we were so worried about, because we were all told there was weapons of mass destruction. Was not able to drop chemical weapons on the uh the drop zone for the soldiers so so basically like it's not even like doctrine right like sure van ripper knows the doctrine but also it's like okay they're here they're probably going to come at us with some helicopters and some airplanes so get out the c-130 or get out the surface to airs and start shooting them and then he was told no and not only was he told no but he wasn't allowed to hide any

of his stuff that's the part that gets me i don't understand why like i can i can kind of get that don't shoot all the v-22s out of the air because like you 13,500 soldiers that took part in this shit. They're going to get some kind of training out of it. 80 seconds got to jump. That's why they're here. These dudes in the fucking V-22, whoever they are, they got to go run around like idiots. They're going to get training out of it, so don't shoot them.

Okay, fine. Tracking that. But now you have to let them destroy your weapons. That doesn't track to me. And another thing that's really dumb is the, the chemical weapons thing is okay. If, if,

if I'm going to play devil's advocate, I would say don't use chemical weapons in the LZ just so they can land. And then you can use chemical weapons because there'll be on the ground. The jump has already happened. They've gotten their training in. Now they can, you know, do NBC shit or CBR,

whatever it's called now. But they said they said no absolutely no chemical weapons at any time now we are also going to point out because the after action review because van ripper was very mad about all of this but also general bell uh and his after action you know the part of there there's an interview that's uh that's linked in here he talks about that he's like look we we couldn't deploy chemical weapons like in chemical weapons means tear gas for for the army like we we throw um tear gas out as a notional chemical weapon environment um because it's like you're gonna feel it when when you're there so you know to throw your shit on it sucks it sucks so bad. But they said, don't,

you know, don't do that because the wind's going to blow it probably into a populated area. Like, you got to understand, like, while this is all going on,

like, they still have, like, the Navy still has to watch out for shipping lanes because there's still commerce happening. The 82nd is,

drop is air jumping into an area where, like where like look there is still population around here there are still like actual cities and people um and towns and whatnot and we don't want to you know put out these this this tear gas it's going to blow all over the place you know god knows where it's going to go so don't do that now they could have done hey notional right when you hit or you need to jump in seaburn or you need to you know in mop 4 which like i can't imagine making a jump suck even more other than be like yep you got to put on your your fucking jailer suit and your mask and then jump uh but you know there's things that they could have done but you know they had to work within time constraints

they had to work within the parameters of like not just like doctrine but like we can't we can't fuck up the day of the people around us too much like so I get I kind of get it I kind of get like where they're coming from with some of that but I'm with you on the don't hide

your shit yeah also like this it's been a while since the u.s military is accidentally on purpose gassed a whole bunch of civilians so they're kind of rusty so and at one point like during all of this um van ripper goes to like the uh the colonel who's kind of in charge of watching everything you know watching over making sure the the red team the blue team are fighting fair or whatever and uh he wants to complain about you know all this and uh you know can't even you know can't even deploy my chemical weapons and uh colonel kernan uh basically said you aren't you were playing out of character the op 4 would never have done what you did which is like just

mind-blowing to me i'm the general of the OP4. I know this is what I would do. Right. The enemy won't do that is one of the dumbest things. I can see that if the OP4 all came out wearing in full clown regalia with giant squeaky shoes. Hey, they're going to be looking for soldiers.

Right. Having rubber chickens instead of guns. You know, like, instead of having rubber chickens instead of guns and be like, look, Van Ripper, they would never do that. Oh, I guess you're right.

However, like, you know, blowing up the invading people coming in with my surface-to-air missiles, deploying chemical weapons against drop zones where the soldiers are going to jump into, hiding my shit shit yes like i'm not even up for and i would do that because of course i would like why wouldn't you very basic

right this is an invasion force like you're going to repel them as best you can and so that's how you do it so you know like this whole thing there's so much back and forth to it because like i see where van ripper is coming from and i see where the blue team and bell and kernan are coming from but overall like my my very final takeaway from this is that the ego of the united states military still had to be stated and that was the most important thing that could be done here is that everybody has to go home with

their chest puffed out and say look we did it and we could you know if it was real we could do it and we obviously see that we couldn't yeah that's kind of what I've gotten out of this too and I would be more on Kiernan's side and Bell's side and everything else if Van Ripper wasn't hired with the sole promise that it was open play

and he could win. Right, that is, he was told like you could win this game. And he did. I mean, technically. And he absolutely did win. And after what, like a week? He resigned because he's like, well, you guys aren't't gonna let me fucking do anything

I don't know why I'm here so they just plugged in some random guy I can't remember his name I don't have it up and they still were kicking the United States military's ass without Van Ripper that's when all these guys should have got together like man we fucked up

like they did with the kamikaze boat attacks they're like okay we're gonna keep you know that they learned a lesson it's not like they didn't go through that again the navy got refloated um that the the attack happened again and it was repulsed because they learned a lesson and they moved on and it was like the white cell just decided to not do that anymore or something. So Van Ripper, as you say, just went and said, fuck all this, I'm out. And he shot off an email and the email leaked to the Army Times and saying it was scripted.

The whole war games were fixed. So Kernan was like, I was wrong to say the word free play, and he wished that he hadn't used it. And then Kernan's deputy, Vice Admiral Martin Mayer, said, I want to disabuse anyone of the notion that somehow the books were cooked. Then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

General Peter Pace, declared flatly, I absolutely believe that it was not rigged. And yet, a couple of years later, about 10 years later, there was a 752-page long report on MC-02 released by the Joint

Forces Command that basically detailed how they had caught the blue Joint Forces Command, that basically detailed how they had caught the blue team off guard and that basically everything was fucked up. The final explicit acknowledgement in it, as the exercise progressed, the OP4

free play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. The scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for uh transition operations so yeah they uh uh they they scripted it um and they they went for the the win in the end which again i i understand stating the the ego of the united states military but but if you do that, what's the point? You didn't learn anything. At the end of the day, all you learned was we can win if these specific conditions are

matched. And then we go over there and we find out those fucking conditions don't exist. Yeah. And I think Van Ripper had a really good point. And this is from the War on the Rocks article. Again. He said that. I was hired. To do this. Or picked to do this. I don't know if hired is the right word. Because of the free play situation.

And the fact of what the whole purpose was. Is that. And all these weapons. Obviously the V-22 had been designed. Since I was born. But all these other. Weapons and shit they were designing had a very specific purpose, and it all went into Unified Vision 2001, which was the doctrinal changes that the army was making to everything. So MCO2 was supposed to prove those concepts. to prove those concepts. And, uh,

Van Ripper said, quote, war gaming is not normally corrupted, but this whole thing was prostituted and it was a sham intending to prove what they wanted to prove. Um, and he says, um,

it was, this whole thing was planned and done after the previous year's unified vision, 2001 and quote, validating a concept that had failed. Uh, because like, I think he, what he's trying to explain is that the army doesn't like admitting that's wrong so you know and especially like i

mean we just went over how long this process was for the v22 to exist um by accepting that a lot of these things had problems um that weapon amongst others radar problems deep seated doctrinal institutional problems that led to this they they they're like they could be like we need to fix this or at least start rectifying things that need to be fixed or they could be like nope we were right we spent all this money and

everything worked out yeah I think he has a good point on that and then fucking moon walked into into Iraq, like doing force on force. We're all just going to push and push and push with our tanks and our Humvees, and we're going to take over all this stuff.

And the Iraqi, the Republican Guard obviously collapsed, but then we went in and cut the head off the lion and we cut the head off the lion and uh found and we we cut the head off the lion and then for the next 10 years the body of the lion thrashed around scratching and you know killing and still managing to to fuck up everything and it's and and like you know nobody how about that how about we do a seven, like, okay, we did it. We got here.

Now we need to war game 10 years of occupation while we try to rebuild this and lose shitload of money down the drain. And Dick Cheney gets a lot of money for owning Halliburton. The system works. What's really impressive, and I know the army really didn't have a whole lot of planning uh for

iraq uh obviously uh but it it's it's kind of impressive it speaks a lot to the system and the problems that i think are that you see in most imperial armies um i mean obviously this is a history podcast we're talking about very very recent history but you see like the end state of the british empire uh had a lot of things where like well the military will handle it and they'd go and do things that didn't really involve a lot of planning generals are doing things without really any kind of command staff ideas um it's just like a giant gun-shaped hubris maybe but like they did they were one of the few armies I think that had the abilities

of being you know the new millennium to war game a war that was literally months away and failed they failed miserably and they're like yeah fuck it we're gonna do the war anyway like it's like some Star trek shit if they have like uh you know a simulation room to run through scenarios like this only has a 30 chance of

functioning sir and like fuck it let's do it anyway like that's really dumb don't do it they actually did it and it killed like a million people well they they were always going to do the iraq war um is probably the problem. This was, this was, this was simply and, and I read a really interesting book called Operation Hotel, California about how we just like how, you know, the state department,

the CIA, you know, in Iraq pre or sorry, in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, pre Iraq invasion and working with the Kurds and saying, and calling back, like, hey, we see, like, a fucking training camp here. Fucking send some JDAM, send, you know, artillery, something,

on these coordinates, we'll hit it. You'll kill, like, a thousand bad guys, it'll be great. And they're like, nah, we're not going to do that. Like, and just the frustration building, you know, of, like, of seeing this, like, no gonna they're just gonna march us into war for for no reason other than a show of force like there's no there's no reason for we could we could end this a lot quieter and quicker um but we're just not gonna so it it really feels like this was supposed to be the the big you know the big dick swing parade, you know, military parade before we walk in

victorious into Iraq. And then we did for a minute, you know, we've got those great videos of pulling down the toppling Saddam statues and hitting Saddam statue on the head with the shoe and the mission accomplished. And then like, you know, as we know, it was a long and bloody and protracted occupation uh that was absolutely unnecessary but uh considering we broke it um we kept trying it's like we broke it and then we were trying to glue it back together and we just kept gluing our fingers to themselves and then to the curtains and then to the dog and then we're just like i

guess we got to do that keep doing this like nobody was like stop maybe get us more glue more glue yeah put more put glue on the dog there's only one way out of this we need more glue we're gonna glue our way out of it the united states military and for a a larger extent united states government is a lot like um like uh a single child with an overbearing overbearing parent that fails at everything they do but like they're just encouraged encouraged encouraged to keep doing it so they just kind of turn into a shithead and like you know uh actually uh you know they go off to college or whatever like well i've never done anything right or i've never i've never done anything wrong but clearly i can't do anything wrong my mom always tells me I'm right you know

and because you know things have been gamed for you for so long that when you actually have to do something you just fucking suck at it I mean like they had a golden opportunity to actually train and granted I know Afghanistan is already going on but you know that was almost like the phony war version of the Afghan war at that point

until we fucked that up too we just didn't do it it's it's impressive how bad this is it's the thing that i always find so funny about it is that like as you said we're it's like having a parent that tells you that you're doing well all the time but like we don't like we oh we constantly lose. We lose wars all the time. We won World War II, but when I say we, I mean a shitload of people from multiple other countries. The entire world, yeah. Right.

And also, we were there too. For everything that we love to talk, Tom Hanks on D-Day, it's like, well, why don't you go over to Dog Beach or any of the other ones that had the British or the Aussies on it who were also dying under withering machine gun fire. But we're very up our own asses, basically. Which is why every

other war movie, like every third war movie has to be a World War II movie of some kind. It has to make everybody feel better about themselves because that one time they put an Iraq or Afghanistan movie out and it made everybody sad. The only Iraq movie that made me sad was Stop Loss.

At the end of that movie, I wanted to kill myself. At some point in time, we're going to have to review that movie. Wasn't that an mtv movie too i hope so i don't know yeah america is america and uk have a lot in common and there's a reason you know um before that we're the only two people so oh so far up our own asses that will make movies about our soldiers going to your country and killing people and then feeling bad about it. God, Ryan Felipe was in this. Returns home to Brazos, Texas,

ready to re-enter civilian life, and then the army invokes a clause in his military contract. How does that even... That's not even stop-loss. Anyway. That's just irr yeah motherfucker shouldn't have uh shouldn't should have uh finished out your contract this is only this only happened he only got stop loss because he took a detour into cruel intentions and just really wanted to fuck his stepsister and he had to go back to the army because that's the only place that everybody would

give him a pass for doing well he's from he's from Texas so I assume that it's okay there it's actually just a sister yeah yeah so now Francis on this show yes on this show we do a little thing called the questions

from the legion and I made sure we got one coming into this from the discordion okay and um and i made sure we got one uh coming into this from the discord that we both share uh uh if that's a good plug uh donate a dollar and you can ask this question but uh so i i figured instead of being history based which is normally our thing uh we're we're gonna be uh dipping into the hell of a way to donkey vibe here and just go straight military and then what is the worst place uh in the united states military you can be stationed and like i mean like station not like deployed because obviously being deployed sucks uh but

like what's the where's the worst place you could be stationed you think uh so um uh hold on there's Hold on. There's a base in Alaska. What's the one? It's not Fort Richardson. No, that's Anchorage. Wainwright, yes. Is that the one that you guys just talked about? Everybody was killing themselves? Yes.

The one, the suicide base, where the suicide rate is like quadruple that of the rest of the military because it's so at least like in Fort Richardson and Anchorage you're in Anchorage and it's like a normal city and it's nice but when you go when you go seven hour drive north to Fort Wainwright

in the middle of fucking nowhere where like it's dark you know for 20 hours a where like it's dark, you know, for, for 20 hours a day or it's light for 20 hours a day. That sounds just like absolute hell to me. Like I can't, I can't stand going into the Eastern time zone.

Like a one hour time change fucks me up. I cannot imagine like this whole, you know, anything up there but i will also say a terrible place to be uh stationed um is uh is being the the local what do they call it when you're stationed on the base um a training base like the uh trade doc yeah well no not well trade doc would suck too but um, um, no, uh, Fort Irwin being like somebody who's stationed on Irwin.

Like, cause, cause I, I went to Irwin in 2002, I believe. Yeah. 2002. Um,

and I spent a little, I like, we didn't get there and then go into the box. Like we were reporting on, there was like a, a big medical mission that was going on there we're covering some stuff there we're kind of in the box you know we go there we come back but we weren't staying in the box so we like interacted with like the actual atonement area like where people live and operate and holy fucking shit the saddest place i've ever seen there was look there was this kid okay i i i wish that one day i wish i could find this guy so there's like one nightclub on

the base you know how nightclubs go like on the army where um like on a saturday night they have to rotate between you know they have to do a hip hop song they have to do a rock song and then they have to do like a Hispanic you know kind of you know cholo you know something

going they gotta rotate between true equality yes they gotta rotate through the three military genders of you know white black and mexican but but this place the uh when we were there it was basically they would have nights for everything so they'd have like it's country western night it's hip-hop night or whatever um so because we had nothing really better to do other than drink um and i was underage at the time

so they made me the designated driver. But we'd go, we'd basically go, and also the bowling alley, because it's always a bowling alley attached to it too. So we'd go bowling every night to this place.

And there was like this one guy who would show up every night he was there. He was a goth dude and was not in the army. Obviously he had long hair and facial hair. I don't, he looked like he was probably like he was a when i say big i don't mean fat i mean like he looked

like he was probably like maybe in his late teens early 20s but i mean he was there just like hanging out so i don't know if he worked there like as a contractor or if he was just like hanging out so i don't know if he worked there like as a contractor or if he was just like somebody's kid that wouldn't move out or something he was the game designer from grandma's boy yeah probably but he showed up dude he showed up and cut but the thing is he was a goth kid but always in theme to whatever night it was so if it was country night he was country goth if it was hip-hop he was hip-hop goth it was phenomenal i loved him um country goth thank you for that he showed up in all black but like not like all black like cool johnny cash with my you know a black 10 gallon hat and you know night like no he'd like

black trench coat um but also a cowboy hat so he was he was themed into whatever night it was it was the most festive goth person i've ever heard of so uh so yeah i would say either of those how about you um erwin sounds terrible uh so does wainwright i remember listening to your episode about that and it's shocking because the army suicide rates are already so high but i'm a little biased when i say fort knox is the worst place I've ever been stationed. It was the first place I was ever stationed. It's a TRADOC post, so there's drill sergeants running around everywhere.

I was in 16th Cavalry, which is no longer there. I think they moved all that shit to Fenning now. What I'm saying now about Knox may not be true at all anymore because this is over a decade ago. But Fort Knox is in a dry county. And it's in the middle of nowhere.

You're about an hour away from Louisville. And Louisville is not a great place to hang out. Every military town sucks, but like Radcliffe and Elizabethtown, which are the two cities right outside there, almost every bar and club, because it's across the county line and it's like 40 minutes away,

is blacklisted because there's like multiple stabbings and shootings going on there. And this is before they did the huge revamp on Nox. All the buildings were older than I was. Well, than I am now. I was 17 then. But

they're 30, 40, 50 years old. The barracks are clouded with black mold and falling apart. There's just nothing there uh which is why uh everybody there is drunken on drugs and fighting one another uh that was the only place i've ever seen a braveheart style battle in the middle of a parking lot against the cops is when you say that is it because there was a claymore sword involved uh no but there was multiple cavalry sabers like we went so feral that an mp

car broke down in our parking lot because even their shit sucked uh they like they were driving like the stratuses or something which i've never seen before uh and like they broke down and just parked it like they put it in neutral and like rolled it into a parking spot and it got fucking stripped bare by soldiers. Where are you going to go with it? I think they would have just threw it in the dumpster. Yeah, I would too. Man, imagine people don't like the cops.

I know that it's fun to say, fuck the cops and fuck the troops. But the troops don't like the cops either. They're the cops. but like the troops don't like the cops either because they're the cops i mean and and there are more than more than a few people who are in the military because they're trying to get away from like that that world you know where the cops fuck with you because oh yeah you hang out with ne'er-do-wells uh but like on post cop soldiers like i can't imagine like how i i can't imagine like waking up every day and looking at yourself in the mirror and being like i gotta't imagine like how i i can't imagine like waking up every day and looking at yourself in the mirror and being like i gotta go do a thing where everybody fucking hates me it's got to be so

demoralizing and every mpi knew fucking hated himself uh because like every they always complain about their units having no morale and terrible leadership um and like i i remember one of them telling me like you remember the old tagline that's like you know there's 250 ways to be a soldier or something like that he's like the joke was 249 of those ways hate mps yeah i you know um i would probably also i've never been there but fort bragg sounds terrible um or just because it's not terrible just because it's full of 82nd airborne um i feel like going to fort bragg is like going to clearwater florida because it's not terrible just because it's full of 82nd airborne um i feel like going to fort bragg is like going to clearwater florida because it's like the headquarters of a cult you know i just don't want to hang out there it just doesn't seem fun yeah also it's kind of

funny you mentioned um going to you know fort knox being a trade dock base when the last time i had to go down to leonard wood was two years ago, I think. We actually stayed down there for a couple nights. But that's Fort Leonardwood. There's drill sergeants all over the place. And I was dropping somebody off at sick call in the morning, one of our soldiers, and dropping them off, taking them in, and walking past like all the privates that are at sick call and the like two drill sergeants that are always standing

there like angry that they have to i mean drill sergeant is just angry in general but like having that like you know that my my very first you know baby's first ptsd of seeing a brown round you know like jesus christ i'm gonna get fucking yelled at and then like fucking i i these guys are staff sergeants they can't do shit to me so i walk by this like sergeant i'm like joe sarton how you doing i'm i'm just here dropping this guy you look at all these privates look at him this is so cute like and then you start to kind of become like a bit of an asshole to him because you're just like you can't do shit to me I don't know I don't even go here I don't even work here motherfucker what are you gonna do

you can't fire me you can't yell at me drill sergeant uh so it was wild because like I got stationed on Knox and then one of the drill sergeants that was in my company uh left the trail got stationed at Knox made up in the same unit um I did not like that at all

and neither did he yeah did uh did i tell you that they uh a drill sergeant unit tried to get me to be a drill sergeant like like first off there's reserve drill sergeants i did not know that yeah and actually it's um i i've i've talked to them before um because they're there's because there's a pretty robust drill sergeant, reserve drill sergeant unit near us, and they like it. Their annual training is like sometimes they will rotate down and train soldiers. And they're drill sergeants, but for only small periods of time. So they still like it.

And they're just like, this is great. You get to go down. you get to mentor the soldiers. You get to be with the, you know, next, you know, the next generation of soldiers is really great. And it's like, you go and meet like, you know, an actual drill sergeant who's been doing it for, you know, 10 months and, you know, his wife is, you know, texting him screaming at him because he's never at home.

He's constantly got to deal with these dumb ass privates. he keeps catching privates like fucking or doing drugs or doing you know stupid shit and it's just like jesus christ is this work is it worth getting my next rocker for this um it's always no um but yeah they they emailed me and the funniest part of it was that they mentioned that I must have a, you know, be, be very concerned about, you know, keeping my, my fitness because I have a 200,

I got a two 17 on my last PT test. And I'm like, look, man. And, and for those of you, those of you who are not military, it's you 17 on your PT test.

I'm not going to say it's bad because I passed and I didn't pass bare minimum but it's not something that you brag about like right right it's just like okay i mean you're old and you're fat and you probably don't give that much of a fuck but you give enough of a fuck to pass the pt test so that the commander doesn't have to write a counseling statement about you so for that we appreciate it um you know but just be like dude i am there you're really barking up the wrong tree here and i don't know why i don't even know how you got my they they sent it to my um my civilian email address like how do you even have this go away we will never let you get i can imagine you sitting down your brown rally gather around privates i'm gonna teach you how to seize the means of production so anyway uh i'm going to go ahead and uh be in charge of you until uh at a certain time when you

are comfortable to be able to vote your own leaders in francis thank you so much um for joining us thank you for writing that article uh It's good to see that Task and Purpose still has a sense of humor every once in a while. I still have good graces with one person there. And that one person, God love them. All the rest of them, they probably kind of went, ugh, to me. I can't shit talk them too much

because they still host the review for my book which is like the best review i've ever received um not that it was written by anybody currently on this podcast or anything uh look i i and and just in case there's any task and purposers that that do that do listen um i do enjoy some of their stuff um but like any place that publishes things there's things that I like and things that I don't like and that's perfectly fine and the way that you make the way that you get better things for you to like

on them is you write for them so I do that occasionally yeah and I would write for them but I'm drowning under deadlines and a podcast you got your own shit I did this to myself. I'm not going to be writing for them much either

because I'm writing for myself because I told myself, I need to update the podcast website twice a week. It's like, shit, I actually need to produce content for that now. God damn it. It is a motherfucker. I signed a two-book deal to finish my sci-fi trilogy.

I was like, fuck yeah, I got contracts and everything. Oh shit, I have to write them now. It's been a motherfucker. Francis, thank you so much for coming on. Feel free. This is the plug zone. If anybody doesn't know about the hell of a way to die. Yeah, hell of a way to die.com.

It's another podcast. Go listen to it. Nate and I are not historical whatsoever, but we do yell about things a lot. So if you're into that, then we're for you. advertising again but if you want to support us you can throw us a dollar on patreon you get access to our discord where you can hear me and francis complain about being sober as well as ask questions to the legion we'll answer them on air um five dollars or more gets you uh two bonus episodes a month and access to books stickers and all sorts of other good stuff thank you so much for tuning in check out hell of a way to die and and check out the other cousin podcast that we, that is part of the hell of a way to die universe trash future, which Nate helps do.

Um, well, leftism in the United Kingdom. Yeah. Uh, at this point, our podcast world is becoming the Charlie day string graph, trying to figure out who Pepe Silva is.

Yeah. I fucking love it. It's not Pepe Silva. It's Nate Bethea and he's just producing all of our podcasts. He's that like, you know, a picture of he's in the middle as the octopus and all the arms are out holding different podcasts that he runs.

Somebody needs to make that, please. Until next time everybody, have a good one.