Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under United States Joint Forces Command in mid-2002, running from 24 July to 15 August. The exercise involved both live exercises and computer simulations, costing (equivalent to about $M in ), the most expensive war game in US military history. 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.
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." resulting in a Blue victory. Van Riper later criticized the cost of the exercise as "wasted".
Exercise suspension and restart
At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed. The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."
Aftermath
The rule changes following the restart led to accusations that the war game had turned from an honest, open, free playtest of U.S. war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise intended to end in an overwhelming U.S. victory,
Van Riper was extremely critical of the scripted nature of the new exercise and resigned from the exercise in the middle of the war game. Van Riper later said that Vice Admiral
Marty Mayer altered the exercise's purpose to reinforce existing doctrine and notions within the U.S. military rather than serving as a learning experience.
Van Riper also stated that the war game was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing. as saying that what he saw in MC02 echoed the same view promoted by the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara before and during the Vietnam War, namely that the U.S. military could not and would not be defeated.
Responding to Van Riper's criticism, Vice Admiral Mayer, who ran the war game and who was charged with developing the military's joint concepts and requirements, stated the following: