US 'Gets Its Ass Handed To It' In Wargames: Here's A $24 Billion Fix

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https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Breaking Defense
March 07, 2019

WASHINGTON: The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. 
Bases burn. Warships sink. But we could fix the problem for about $24 billion a 
year, one well-connected expert said, less than four percent of the Pentagon 
budget.

"In our games, when we fight Russia and China," RAND analyst David Ochmanek 
said this afternoon, "blue gets its ass handed to it." In other words, in 
RAND's wargames, which are often sponsored by the Pentagon, the US forces -- 
colored blue on wargame maps -- suffer heavy losses in one scenario after 
another and still can’t stop Russia or China -- red -- from achieving their 
objectives, like overrunning US allies.

No, it's not a Red Dawn nightmare scenario where the Commies conquer Colorado. 
But losing the Baltics or Taiwan would shatter American alliances, shock the 
global economy, and topple the world order the US has led since World War II.

.....

Worst of all, Work and Ochmanek said, the US doesn't just take body blows, it 
takes a hard hit to the head as well. Its communications satellites, wireless 
networks, and other command-and-control systems suffer such heavy hacking and 
jamming that they are, in Ochmanek’s words, "suppressed, if not shattered."

The US has wargamed cyber and electronic warfare in field exercises, Work said, 
but the simulated enemy forces tend to shut down US networks so effectively 
that nothing works and nobody else gets any training done. "Whenever we have an 
exercise and the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the 
exercise," Work said, instead of trying to figure out how to keep fighting when 
your command post gives you nothing but blank screens and radio static.

The Chinese call this "system destruction warfare," Work said: They plan to 
"attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they 
practice it all the time."

[...]

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