alt Hacker NewsI think the big lesson of the Millennium Challenge is that a smart, motivated adversary will always go for the weak link in your victory conditions. And that is usually your blind spots, by definition. They won't attack you where you've prepared; they'll look for the areas where you are not expecting vulnerability and attack there.
All stuff Sun Tzu wrote 2500 years ago, but very hard for a bureaucracy to internalize, because by definition bureaucracies are formed to solve known problems and are blind to their blind spots.
Replies
One thing I thought when I read this is that if you only train for the competent adversary you may be unprepared for the one who is different. Could you lose if your theory of mind was wrong? But when I made a rudimentary search for this (Google is so hard to phrase, but I also used LLMs) it seems that in practice every victory is through the commander's skill in navigating their constraints. Surely, some commander out there did a stupid thing and attacked when the rational thing would have been to retreat and it worked, or surely someone didn't keep reserves just out of sheer incompetence and it paid off. But I can't find an example.
Either battles are uniquely unforgiving for bad strategy (entirely possible, they are usually long, which has a law of large numbers effect to it) or military historians back-form rationalizations for the victors or some other third thing I can't think of right away.
I was hoping there'd be some crystal clear example of the equivalent of not folding on an off-suit 2/7 and having it play off. But I found none. Interesting.
I would add:
… and generally antagonistic towards the identification of them.
There is a bigger underlying point, which is there is no trump weapon that defeats everything in war [1]. Everything has a counter, and if you're basing your entire strategy on saying that this weapon doesn't have a counter that we know of yet, well, you'll find that counters quickly get developed (see, e.g., the evolution of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War).
Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.
[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.