Center for Strategic Communication

[ by Charles Cameron — because the subtler games are more interesting ]
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van riper

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It’s the mind that plays the game that interests me.

Why? Because what little I know of van Riper has to do with the war game he more or less closed down by sending a flotilla of tiny “red team” craft up against a US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf:

Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal – not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet’s only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.

He may be a chess player, but that’s a whole lot subtler than chess.

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As is this:

That’s a chewable.