Millennium Challenge 2002

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Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under JFCOM in mid-2002, running from 24 July to 15 August. The exercise involved both live exercises and computer simulations, costing US$250 million (equivalent to about $423M in 2023), the most expensive war game in US military history.^[1] MC02 was set in 2007, intended to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition towards new technologies that enabled network-centric warfare, and providing a more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and a fictitious state in the Persian Gulf, "Red", often characterized as Iran or Iraq.^[2][3]

MC02 was an experiment mandated by Congress in 2000 to "explore critical war fighting challenges at the operational level of war that will confront United States joint military forces after 2010."^[4] The simulation took two years of planning and involved 13,000 troops. The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force, resulting in initial major successes. Over the course of the simulation, constraints were placed on the Red force's ability to free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted",^[4] resulting in a Blue victory.