It’s just a short walk at MacDill Air Force Base from the headquarters of U.S. Special Operations Command to the headquarters of U.S. Central Command.
But sometime in the next few months, Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the Socom commander widely reported to be President Barack Obama’s choice to take over Centcom, will find out just how big a distance it really is between the two combatant commands.
Since the infamous Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC ’02) concept-development exercise, run by the now-defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), was leaked in the press 13 years ago, strong opinions have been expressed about its failure and lessons. When it was conducted, this exercise was the most ambitious and costly military simulation in American history. It pitted the U.S. military (with capabilities projected five years into the future) against a nameless potential adversary, with outcome intended to inform future strategy and procurement decisions. Controversy immediately arose when the opposition force, or red team, learned that the results were scripted to assure that the U.S. forces would win. Writing in September 2002, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof warned that it “should teach us one clear lesson relating to Iraq: Hubris kills.”
The three-day terror attack in Mumbai, India, that began on November 26, 2008, killed 174 people and injured six hundred more. The complex, coordinated operation conducted by ten operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist organization, struck a train station, luxury hotels, a café frequented by foreigners, and a Jewish community center. Due to the confusion and misinformation, it took twenty-eight hours for Indian security forces to trade fire with the terrorists, and thirty more before the terrorists were captured or killed. Just hours after the shooting stopped, senior New York Police Department (NYPD) officers were collecting information from the crime scenes. Within days, the NYPD Intelligence Division compiled a forty-nine page “Mumbai Attack Analysis,” consisting of a detailed timeline, the weapons and tactics used, and the terrorists.
Around midnight on Sept. 12, 2001, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet summoned his chief of staff, John Moseman, and the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence, Jami Miscik, to his seventh-floor office in the Original Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia. In the aftermath of the previous day’s unprecedented terrorist attacks, senior White House officials were confident that there were additional plots against the U.S. homeland — and that the CIA needed to better anticipate the range of threats that officials should be prepared for. Tenet decided to form a group of contrarian thinkers to challenge conventional wisdom in the intelligence community and mitigate the threat of additional surprises through “alternative analysis.” On that evening, his instructions were simple: “Tell me things others don’t and make [senior officials] feel uncomfortable.”