Colin Brennan

In 2002, the US conducted Millennium Challenge, the largest war games in its history. They split soldiers into two teams: 🔵Blue, which was America, and 🔴Red, an unnamed generic Middle Eastern country. The 🔴Red team was led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper. The idea behind the games was to see how, not if, the 🔵Blue team would win. In other words, the 🔴Red team was supposed to lose, but General Van Riper didn’t want to lose. So he played to win. He used asymmetric tactics by doing things like using civilian boats instead of military ones, motorcycle couriers and coded messages in mosque towers because their cell phone networks had been hacked. He launched a massive preemptive strike using a swarm of small boats and cruise missiles, which overwhelmed the 🔵Blue Team’s Aegis defense system. In the simulation, this resulted in the “sinking” of 16 American warships, including an aircraft carrier. The exercise was supposed to take 14 days. Vin Riper and his team won after day one. Understandably, the US military was embarrassed because this was supposed to show off all its superior tactics and cutting edge technologies. So, they restarted the exercise and changed the rules to force everyone to follow a script so that the 🔴red team could not win. The exercise controllers brought the sunken ships back to life, and forced Van Riper to follow a scripted path that ensured a 🔵Blue Team victory. 🔴Red was ordered to turn off certain air defense systems and use regular cellular communications to allow 🔵Blue to destroy them. 🔴Red was also told exactly where to move certain units so 🔵Blue could pretend to find them and neutralise them according to a pre-planned timeline. Most crucially, Van Riper was forbidden from using the swarming tactics that had been so effective in the opening hours. The controllers argued that the reset was necessary because the goal of Millennium Challenge 2002 wasn’t just to see who would win, but to test new Network-Centric Warfare concepts. They felt that if the game ended on Day 2, they wouldn’t get to test the rest of their expensive toys. Van Riper, however, argued that testing those toys in a rigged environment provided a false sense of security. General Van Riper was so angry, he quit the exercise midway and wrote a 21-page recommendation on changes the military had to make to, get around his asymmetric tactics. They ignored the report and said the exercises were a huge success that proved the military doctrine was good. “It was no longer a free-play exercise... it was a scripted exercise. They had a desired outcome, and they were going to get it.” — Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper 24 years later, maybe Von Riper was onto something.

I need people to understand that about 60% of homeless people are employed but just don’t make enough to afford housing and that’s the real issue

Why do rich people always fundraise by asking poorer people to donate to charity? Perhaps if you paid your taxes and paid workers a real living wage there would be less need for charity.

At first, I thought each square represented one child killed in Gaza. But each square actually represents TEN children.

After 36 years she realized she’d been filming birthdays from the wrong side :))

hot take: sexual education should include pleasure, consent, and hygiene for everyone, not just “don’t get pregnant.”

Pete Hegseth: The problem with Iran is it spends money on weapons and missiles instead of improving life for their people. Self awareness of a potato

“I am too smart to read books.” - Andrew Tate “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury

If you want demonstrable proof that you’re immersed in the most powerful propaganda system in human history, just realize literally nobody can afford anything, which in previous eras woulda created revolutionary conditions but in this era is barely a topic of public conversation.

We can't have clean energy because it will destroy the oil industry. We can't have healthcare because it will destroy the health insurance industry. We can't have peace because it will destroy the weapon industry. Capitalism built a system we can't afford to do the right thing.

Democracy does not exist 👎🏼 Hassan.ihssan

When James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read," and "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up," and "It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here," and "You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all."