Why does all this matter? It confirms a lot of my thoughts
That may be, but that just makes it matter to you because
it confirms what appears to be a bias you are predisposed to have.
US military thinking is outdated,
Well, you've remarked upon a wargame from 2002. Military thinking, tactics and tech have without question advanced over the past 15 years.
I'm not saying the U.S. military doesn't make mistakes and have relative weaknesses. I'm saying
your commentary is woefully inadequate for the argument it attempts (badly) to make. (
Red Team:How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy)
(Unrelated: I don't really like to buy/keep Emmental cheese because while a pound of cheese is a pound of cheese, there's still less cheese in a slice of Emmental than there is is other Swiss cheeses I like -- e.g., Appenzeller, Gruyere, and Vacherin.)
Even considering below-requested levels of increased military spending over the past lustrum or so, to say nothing of that of the decade preceding that...
...the U.S. still outspends, by a huge margin, every other nation on the planet. From an equipment standpoint alone, recognizing that equipment is just one dimension of many as goes this topic, you'd need to at least show that the U.S. equipment is inferior in relation to both the quantity and quality of that of, in the case of your Iran example,
The entire game was rigged to give the US military good PR
Even as it's highly implausible, I suppose that is possible in some "universe," but
given the press the simulation garnered, it wouldn't appear that was an outcome....That said, it's highly unlikely that even the U.S. military would spend $250M on an exercise in order to get good PR when simply spending $250M on a PR campaign to get good PR would without question could yield no worse an outcome and not involve some 13K+ people. The extent of sheer idiocy it'd take to
orchestrate a simulation like MC02 for the purpose of generating "good PR," particularly only a decade or so after Gulf War I's successes, is beyond even the U.S. military's level of incompetence, but apparently not yours.
if the US were to ever go with Iran (which is far more powerful now than the pentagon ever projected it would be), it will face the same embarrassing defeats that they did in the 2002 Millennium Challenge
Jumping to Conclusions
That's an absurd and, as presented by you, empty assertion; however, it's an claim you may show to be accurate if you are willing and able to demonstrate that U.S. military doctrine and strategy has remained unchanged since 2002 and that its operational leaders have not learned from their mistakes. You may want to begin that process by analyzing the changes in U.S. asymmetric warfare doctrine over the past 20 years or so.
As one can tell from the links above, it's not at all hard to find content from the start of this millennium. Obtaining credible information that's vastly more recent is a totally different matter, unsurprisingly. That notwithstanding, the BLUFOR defeat in MC02 isn’t an embarrassment; it provided the opportunity to lean how to better handle multiple aspects of combatting non-linear, non-traditional/-conventional, asymmetric threats.
Look how many experiments it took to discover we dwell in a heliocentric system, or to determine that there is such a thing as gravity, or how many atoms were smashed to no avail while looking for the Higgs, or even just how to ride a bike or skate on ice. Sometimes experiments produce their desired outcomes and other times they do not. It happens, even with the military, and
MC02 is one of those experiments that failed in its primary objectives, yet it yielded other lessons learned.
