In the summer of 2002, the U.S. military spent $250 million, after two years of planning, to answer a question it had already decided. The question was: what happens if America goes to war with an Iran-like power in the Persian Gulf? The answer it had decided on was: America wins. What it got instead was a retired Marine general sinking the fleet in ten minutes and then filing a 21-page classified critique that received no response, forcing him to walk out in disgust.
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Paul Van Riper served 41 years in the Corps and was twice decorated with the Silver Star in Vietnam. The Pentagon chose him to command the Red Force, the Iran-like adversary opposite the U.S. Blue Force. In his commanding officer’s words, he was “a devious sort of guy” and “a no-nonsense, solid professional warfighter” – in other words, perfect to play the adversary in the Pentagon’s Millennium Challenge war game.
When Blue Force delivered its eight-point ultimatum (the final point of which was unconditional surrender), Van Riper understood immediately what the exercise was really testing. He preempted the preemptors, launching cruise missiles from ground-based launchers, commercial ships, and low-flying aircraft running without radio communications to reduce their radar signature. Simultaneously, swarms of speedboats loaded with explosives ran kamikaze attacks directly at the hulls of America’s ships. The carrier battle group’s Aegis radar system, designed to track missiles and aircraft, had no answer for a boat running at the waterline. It was overwhelmed within minutes. Sixteen warships sank: an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, five amphibious ships. Had it been real, 20,000 American sailors and Marines would have died.
The Pentagon reset the exercise. The ships Van Riper had sunk were simply declared raised. The number of vessels adjudicated destroyed was, in Van Riper’s own words, “a re-engineered product,” based on “the minimal ships needed to enable Blue JTF to continue the exercise.” This was not based on an assessment of what the modelling showed. It was a backward calculation from what Blue needed to still be in the game. The fleet was re-floated because the results were inconvenient.
Van Riper was then told to turn on his anti-aircraft radar so it could be targeted. His troops were forbidden to shoot down incoming aircraft. The location of his units was to be shared with the opposing force on demand. He stepped down, filed his critique, and received no response. Three years later, the 700-page final report had still not been published; it sat in draft. The new commander said he wanted to “disavow the term” effects-based operations and keep the approach. In the executive summary, Van Riper’s tactics were attributed to “a renegade element within the red leadership.” A general with 41 years of service, specifically chosen to test the system, had been converted into a character flaw.
His conclusion was filed twelve days after the exercise: “The Blue JTF did not arrive at that end-state by engaging a thinking and adaptive enemy. The result was preordained. Any suggestion otherwise is not credible.”
As Van Riper told The Guardian: “Nothing was learned from this. A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future.”
Throughout the exercise, every attempt by Van Riper’s forces to open negotiations was refused. He offered to discuss the removal of his forces from the disputed islands. Blue declined to respond. Van Riper asked in his own report: why, if Blue had every instrument of power available, did it not open a single channel for dialogue before committing to military action?
The answer was in the official 700-page report, buried in a sub-bullet: “If an enemy is diplomatically backed into a corner where his best and only viable alternative is a pre-emptive attack, the friendly forces in the area should be aware and prepared for that possibility before the enemy attacks.” The report’s authors knew. The preemptive attack that sank the fleet was noted as “a controversial event” that “provides insight.” The experiment was declared a success.
Twenty-four years later, the sequence repeated. On Feb. 27, 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, announced that a breakthrough had been reached: Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification. Peace was within reach. Talks were expected to resume on March 2.
The war began on February 28.
The United States and Israel struck first. They issued an ultimatum, with a military option already in motion. Dialogue between the two sides quickly closed before it could constrain the outcome. In 2002, the simulation ran this sequence. In 2026, it ran again, with real aircraft and real targets.
Operation Epic Fury opened with over a thousand strike sorties in the first 24 hours. Iran’s conventional naval fleet was largely destroyed before it could sortie. By any conventional measure of firepower applied, the opening was a success. However, Iran does not fight conventionally.
Van Riper’s command philosophy was simple: he wanted his forces operating through long-term personal associations and implicit understanding rather than electronic communications that could be intercepted. Mission-type orders were conveyed in ways that evaded America’s superior electronic capabilities. Couriers were used for the most sensitive messages. Taxiing aircraft used flashing lights from towers instead of radio. Van Riper’s red team was decentralized, with each unit capable of acting without instruction from above.
In 2026, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) relied on this mosaic defense doctrine: Its 31 provincial commands each have pre-delegated launch authority. When Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi acknowledged that military units had become “independent and somewhat isolated, acting on pre-delegated orders,” he was not describing a command failure. He was describing Van Riper’s architecture, adopted wholesale and run for real.
Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was killed during the opening days of the war. His son, Mojtaba, a hardliner with close IRGC ties who has lost family to Israeli strikes, was confirmed as his replacement. Mojtaba inherited an institution whose decentralized command structure had already proved it could function without him or, in fact, anyone. That is not a failure of the mosaic doctrine. That is the mosaic doctrine working exactly as designed.
Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades. The Iran-Iraq War taught a generation of commanders that asymmetric tactics were the only viable doctrine against a conventionally superior adversary. The IRGC’s decentralized logistics networks and doctrinal flexibility, as well as its capacity to absorb strikes and reconstitute, were all refined during irregular conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. This is what has kept the IRGC functioning despite the systematic assassination of its senior commanders.
Iran is fighting this war with drones, geography, and patience. It is utilizing fast attack craft and unmanned surface vessels. Its Shahed drones are hitting radar installations, air bases, hotel lobbies, oil refineries. When its forces have closed the Strait of Hormuz, they’ve allowed only four to five vessels to cross per day, as compared to the hundreds that transited the strait prior to the war. On Day 29 of the war, the Houthis entered the conflict, threatening to close a second chokepoint simultaneously.
The Blue Force’s intelligence failures have repeated. In the 2002 war game, Blue convinced itself that once certain command nodes were destroyed, Van Riper’s Red Force units would have no choice but to use communications that could be intercepted. In 2026, the United States made the same assumption: degrade the command structure and the enemy becomes legible. The technical term for this is mirror imaging. The enemy did not become legible. The United States did not know its enemy.
U.S. forces have expended more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, the most in any single American campaign in history, as compared to an annual production capacity of a few hundred. The war is costing an estimated one to two billion dollars per day. Van Riper demonstrated in 2002 that a conventionally inferior adversary could keep fighting long enough to prevent the superior force from completing all its objectives. The mechanism was not matching firepower. It was outlasting it.
Iran’s strategic doctrine has a phrase at its center: “survive and exhaust.” The goal is not to defeat the United States in any conventional sense. It is to demonstrate that the cost of confrontation is militarily, economically, and politically unsustainable. The IRGC does not need to win the war. It needs to deny Washington a credible declaration of victory before the domestic political clock runs out. Tehran is willing to negotiate an end to the war, but on terms that make the next American military action politically untenable.
This too was in the simulation. Van Riper’s Red Force, even constrained and scripted, retained its regime at the end of hostilities and lived to reconstitute. The unacknowledged finding of Millennium Challenge, buried in the official report beneath a declaration of success, was that even with a stacked deck, Blue still could not complete all its objectives. Red maintained its government and lived to strengthen, rearm, and build again.
Two months after the war began, the regime is intact. The Strait of Hormuz is under Iranian control. The regime has not been forced to make any additional concessions regarding its nuclear program. Iranian proxies are damaged but operational, having adopted the same decentralized command-and-control apparatus as their IRGC masters. And the Houthis are engaged in the fight. The IRGC has lowered its recruitment age to 12-years-old, while the United States Army has raised its upper limit to 42. The most intensive American air campaign since the 2003 Iraq War has degraded the Iranian military capability but no credible political end state has emerged.
Van Riper filed his report on Aug. 12, 2002. The finding was recorded. The doctrine was renamed. The simulation was declared a success. On Feb. 28, 2026, an adversary diplomatically backed into a corner watched the bombers form up and calculated its options. More than two decades earlier, Van Riper’s report accurately predicted what an adversary in Iran’s position would do next.
