Red Team Blue Team

The 2002 "Millennium Challenge" war games highlight two very different approaches to the network form and its application to warfare. The 2002 games were the ones that were halted after Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper's "Red Team" (the "enemy") surprised and overwhelmed the high tech, information-intensive "Blue Team". Van Riper was assigned to head the armed forces of Red Team, in the game a rogue, anti-American Persian Gulf leader. The Defense Department intended to test how new technologies could lift the "fog of war" and overwhelm a lower-tech enemy.

Van Riper, however, understood the technology of Blue Team, and its weaknesses. Blue Team expected to eavesdrop on Red Team's communications, so Van Riper used motorcycle couriers. Blue Team expected to pick up Red Team air traffic communication, so Van Riper used World War II-era light signals to communicate. Van Riper knew that Blue Team had a preemptive-strike doctrine, so he launched a surprise swarming attack on Blue Team's fleet, sinking half of their ships. The Blue Team disaster prompted the Department of Defense game planners to re-start the games with new rules, and Blue Team subsequently won. (For an interview with Van Riper and more on the "force transformation" debate in the military, see the links in an earlier blog post.

The Millennium Challenge fiasco is one of many anecdotes in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005, Little Brown) that explores "intuitive" thinking. The brain carries out various decision-making processes that lie outside of conscious, analytical thought processes. Gladwell reviews how intuitive thinking takes place, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to cultivate it.

The Blue Team planned for total information awareness of the battlefield, which could be analyzed to determine the best course of action. Van Riper holds that battlefield chaos is an inevitable part of warfare, and on the ground, the fog of war cannot be lifted. For him, it was more important to have commanders who could function within the chaos of the battle, without being tethered to, and slowed down by, the decision-making cycle (information collection, analysis, decision) at headquarters.

Gladwell quotes Van Riper: "The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control. By that I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn't depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward." (118)

This of course is a classic description of the "network form", after Arquilla and Ronfeldt. The network is bound together by a common vision and doctrine, and the nodes are free to implement the vision as appropriate. But such a form cannot just happen. As Gladwell writes, "How good people's decisions are under the fast moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal." (114)

But Blue Team's approach is also described as network-centric warfare. The high-bandwidth communication network allows for more effective collection and dispersal of information, better coordination of units, and in theory, a shorter decision-making cycle. Through better information technology, the deployment of resources can be more effective. Can both network forms be right?

Van Riper says that both analytical thinking and the intuitive thinking (or "rapid-fire cognition") have their place. The analysis phase though takes place before the battle. Once the trouble starts, too much information becomes a burden, and slows down decision-making. "I can understand how all the concepts that Blue was using translate into planning for an engagement. But does it make a difference in the moment? I don't believe it does. When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance." (141)

Van Riper's decentralized approach still requires the aggregation of information being collected by the nodes. But the aggregation process can be overwhelmed easily by too much information. "Once hostilities began, Van Riper was careful not to overload his team with irrelevant information. Meetings were brief. Communication between headquarters and the commanders on the field was limited. He wanted to create an environment where rapid cognition was possible. Blue Team, meanwhile, was gorging on information." (143)

An analytical approach to aggregation slows down as more information is available to be analyzed. As the tempo of the moment picks up, the intuitive approach -- guided by intent and sharpened by practice, practice, practice -- becomes the more effective approach.


jd