I looked this up. This is the reddit post, and this is the interview that it links to. I’d recommend reading the actual interview even though it’s a little technical, instead of getting it through 3-4 layers of telephone-game from people who may or may not know what they’re talking about or how to spell Van Riper’s name.
I, honestly, couldn’t completely make sense of the interview because of how deep into the details Kernan goes. I do note that he strongly disagrees with the thing I said that the second run of the simulation was railroading a certain particular result, and goes into some details of problems in the simulation that Van Riper then exploited, but he also says this:
I’ll be straight up with you. I was the reason why Paul Van Riper was at Joint Forces Command. He’s a very controversial individual. He is a good warfighter. I admire and respect him very much. I brought him in because he is controversial.
We were looking at it from an experimental concept perspective. He was looking at it from an exercise perspective. So I think if you – you know, if you neck it down and look at it just from his perspective, an awful lot of what he had to say was valid. But if you look at it from what we were trying to accomplish in the way of setting conditions to ensure that the right objectives were satisfied, the experimental objectives, it’s a much bigger picture, broader picture.
Now maybe that’s just him being diplomatic and supportive not wanting to throw the guy under the bus. And like I say, I don’t know enough about the details to really talk about what he’s saying in terms of picking out details of what I was saying that’s wrong. But to me it sounds like on the overall point, he’s saying the same thing that me and @[email protected] were saying: Van Riper was trying to win, blue team was trying to run a productive simulation, and those aren’t exactly the same thing and they had to override him on some things to make the exercise into the second one of those things. But that doesn’t mean he’s completely wrong with everything he did.
I looked this up. This is the reddit post, and this is the interview that it links to. I’d recommend reading the actual interview even though it’s a little technical, instead of getting it through 3-4 layers of telephone-game from people who may or may not know what they’re talking about or how to spell Van Riper’s name.
I, honestly, couldn’t completely make sense of the interview because of how deep into the details Kernan goes. I do note that he strongly disagrees with the thing I said that the second run of the simulation was railroading a certain particular result, and goes into some details of problems in the simulation that Van Riper then exploited, but he also says this:
Now maybe that’s just him being diplomatic and supportive not wanting to throw the guy under the bus. And like I say, I don’t know enough about the details to really talk about what he’s saying in terms of picking out details of what I was saying that’s wrong. But to me it sounds like on the overall point, he’s saying the same thing that me and @[email protected] were saying: Van Riper was trying to win, blue team was trying to run a productive simulation, and those aren’t exactly the same thing and they had to override him on some things to make the exercise into the second one of those things. But that doesn’t mean he’s completely wrong with everything he did.
Sounds like the dude played to the rules of the exercise and not the intent. He’s a d&d power gamer that ruined the campaign.