Talk:Paul Van Riper

WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008
Article reassessed and graded as start class. --dashiellx (talk) 20:04, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Mr. van Riper is referenced extensively in the Book Blink (book) by Malcom Gladwell, concerning his role as "Red Force" commander in the Millennium Challenge 2002. Also features some anecdotes about him as officer in Vietnam. BjornVDM (talk) 13:31, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Layout Issue
Under See Also, there is a link to the "United States Marine Corps portal", but it's aligned to the right, so this looks strange. --82.171.13.139 (talk) 17:35, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 02:27, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Articles for deletion/Paul Van Riper
You are invited to participate in Articles for deletion/Paul Van Riper to discuss proposed changes to the disambiguation arrangements between Paul K. Van Riper and Paul P. Van Riper. Deryck C. 17:34, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Millennium Challenge
According to the Blue Force Commander General William F. "Buck" Kernan:


 * "I'll tell you one of the things it taught us with a blinding flash of the obvious after the fact. But we had the battle fleet. And of course, it goes back to live versus simulation and what we were doing. There are very prescriptive lanes in which we are able to conduct sea training and amphibious operations, and those are very -- obviously, because of commercial shipping and a lot of other things, just like our air lanes. The ships that we used for the amphibious operations, we brought them in because they had to comply with those lanes. Didn't even think about it.


 * What it did was it immediately juxtaposed all the simulation icons over to where the live ships were. Now you've got basically, instead of being over the horizon like the Navy would normally fight, and at stand-off ranges that would enable their protective systems to be employed, now they're right sitting off the shore where you're looking at them. I mean, the models and simulation that we put together, it couldn't make a distinction. And we didn't either until all of a sudden, whoops, there they are. And that's about the time he attacked. You know?


 * Of course, the Navy was just bludgeoning me dearly because, of course, they would say, "We never fight this way." Fair enough. Okay. We didn't mean to do it. We didn't put you in harms way purposely. I mean, it just -- it happened. And it's unfortunate. So those are one of the things that we learned in modeling and simulation.


 * The simulation systems were designed for the services. Another one, for instance, is the defensive mechanisms, the self-defense systems that are on board all the ships. The JSAF [Joint Semi-Automated Forces] model, which was designed for conventional warfare out on the seas for the Navy, didn't allow for an environment much like we subjected it to, where you had commercial air, commercial shipping, friendly and everything else. And guess what was happening as soon as we turned it on? All the defensive systems were, you know, were attacking the commercial systems and everything else. Well, that wouldn't happen. So we had to shut that piece of it off."

TL:DR: Because the USN wanted to practice amphibious landing within the allotted time period for the massive exercise, the only possible place to do so was right on the shoreline in a tiny strip. However, because of a modelling error, the computer thought the ships had been teleported feet away from a massive armada of small boats and civilian planes that IRL could not have supported the weight alone (never mind the guidance and support systems) of the missiles they were firing point blank range into this fleet (the computer modelled the weapons as 5,700-pound, 19-foot P-15 Termit anti-ship missiles which were somehow being fired from from 25-foot, 5,200-lb displacement fibreglass speedboats, which Van Riper used because they were being ignored for purposes of the exercise, which is not done in real life). On top of that, the simulator that ran the ship's defences wasn't functioning properly due to the fact that the engagement was happening in the wrong area so it was turned off. Whoops. Oh, and the Blue Force had no idea this had happened until after the fact.

That section of the testing was scrapped for the very simple reason that the results were unusable. Bones Jones (talk) 19:25, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

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