(2002-09-12) b

A variety of accounts of the summer's Millenium Challenge WarGames, centered around General Paul Van Riper.

• the official story
• long story in the Guardian. It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out. "A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Center... but nobody seemed interested." ... Within his ever narrowing constraints, Van Riper continued to make a nuisance of himself, harrying Blue forces with an arsenal of unorthodox tactics, until one day, on July 29, he thinks, he found his orders to his subordinate officers were not being listened to any more. They were being countermanded by the control group.
• Ny Times Nicholas Kristof http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/06/opinion/06KRIS.html |op-ed
• Douglas Turnbull blog entry with more links. Ultimately, it's impossible to know from the outside which side - Van Riper or the official Pentagon position - is the correct one concerning Millennium Dragon.