War Game, Minus the War

We've been told, over and over again, that insurgencies and irregular wars can't be solved by military force alone. Yet American armed forces' exercises usually focus on seizing territory, taking out targets, or capturing enemies. Things worked a little differently at the Army’s Unified Quest 2008 war game. The "blue," or friendly, team included "U.S. and foreign military officers, State De­partment officials, intelligence community rep­resentatives and Special
Operations forces," writes *Defense News' *Kris Osborn, who also participated in the exercise. Kicking ass wasn't the only option on the table.

“We all understand there is going to be an element of violence, but we are trying to min­imize the violence,” said wargame participant Dennis Bartow, a Special Operations Com­mand psychological operations officer at Fort
Bragg, N.C...

**

In [Unified Quest's] Nigeria scenario, a blue team repre­senting the U.S. military and its allies faced off against a red team representing rebel factions.
The blue team’s initial list of options ranged from diplomatic pressure to military action, with or without the aid of European and African nations. Some panelists, this reporter among them, suggested sending a request to South Africa or Ghana to commit forces in Nigeria.

U.S.
Marine Corps Lt. Col. Mark Stanovich helped develop a plan for sending thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days, although the group regarded this as the undesirable.“American intervention could send the wrong message: that we are backing a gov­ernment that we don’t intend to,” Stanovich said...

...As the game progressed, it became clear that the government of Nigeria had been a large part of the problem; they were repre­sented by a green team during the wargame.

“The normal military game is red versus blue. Now you have injected green, the host nation, which does not always accept what we want,”
said David Lyon, former U.S. De­partment of State ambassador. ”We have a cir­cle of elites [the government of Nigeria] who have seized resources and are trying to per­petuate themselves. Their interests are not ex­actly those of the people.” The game ended without U.S. military in­tervention. After one of the rebel factions ex­ecuted a coup, the new government sought stability.*

• “We no longer had tensions. Now what you had was a government interested in reconcil­iation between various tribal factions, NGOs and multinational organizations to build ca­pacity for humanitarian relief,” said U.S. Army Maj. Robert
  Thornton, an officer with the Joint Center for International Security
  Force Assistance, Fort Leavenworth.*

[Photo of Nigerian rebels: Der Speigel]