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However, officials involved in the futuristic Millennium Challenge exercises, which ended in August, acknowledged the experiment showed human judgment still trumps cutting-edge technology.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper nearly scuttled the all-service, $250 million war game’s credibility when he fired off an e-mail accusing the Joint Forces Command of scripting the outcome after his maneuver moves were overruled.

Van Riper commanded the enemy forces, or red team, and used a variety of unorthodox maneuvers that often overwhelmed the 13,500 troops of the friendly, or blue, forces taking part. He stepped aside as commander of the red team after four days, but remained involved as an adviser.

Army Gen. William Kernan, chief of Joint Forces Command, said he hired Van Riper as an opponent specifically because of the retired Marine’s unusual style. Kernan, who is in charge of developing ways for the services to fight together, addressed the issue at a Sept. 17 Pentagon news conference that ostensibly was called to discuss lessons learned from the experiment. “He’s a very controversial individual. … I brought him in because he is controversial,” Kernan said of Van Riper, who is considered to be one of the military’s best war gamers because of his flair for unconventional thinking.

“He’s a good war fighter,” Kernan said. “I admire and respect him very much.”

But when Van Riper did things such as sink the Navy’s battle fleet or order unanticipated chemical attacks, Kernan said he sometimes was taking advantage of loopholes caused by the exercise itself. For example, the logistics of the exercise required the Navy to mass its ships close to shore near civilian shipping lanes, instead of deploying them in a more scattered fashion. Van Riper seized the moment and sank the fleet.

Other times, military planners were hemmed in by timetables that required a specific sequence of actions. For instance, Kernan said, participants had the use of C-17 cargo planes for just 36 hours before they had to resume real-world missions.

The war game tested concepts to be used by fighting forces in 2007 and beyond. It was billed as the most important event of its kind in decades, developing new, decisive ways to use battlefield information to leverage the capabilities of next-generation, multiservice combat formations.

Kernan was careful to point out that Millennium Challenge was an “experiment” designed to test cutting-edge concepts and technologies — not a classic win-or-lose military exercise.

Van Riper played a rogue commander in the Middle East who controlled more than half his nation’s territory but was not following the orders of his civilian government, which was on lukewarm terms with the United States.

Army Maj. Gen. Dean Cash, director of Joint Concept Development for Joint Forces Command, acknowledged the war game shed light on the shortcomings of technology.

Cash said a seasoned Navy commander had a “gut feeling” he was about to get snookered when Van Riper started exploiting loopholes in the rules.

The unorthodox tactics didn’t register on the commander’s staff officers, who were testing high-tech combat systems designed to outguess an opponent’s moves, Cash said.

For now, the experts are at a loss for how to program “gut feel” into computers and sensors. “Gut feel doesn’t work real well for an experimenter,” Cash said. “I mean, I need something more quantifiable than that.”

The experiment was looking for something called a “collaborative information environment” — pooling dispersed data from a variety of sources.

“We realized the technological shortfall of fusing all these intelligence stovepipes together right now,” Cash said. “But we could see the value five years from now. Extraordinary value.”

In many instances, human intuition outclassed sophisticated attempts to gather and process megabytes of data. “The wisdom and judgment our commanders and senior leaders bring cannot be underestimated,” Cash said.

On the other hand, human judgment also can lead to battlefield disasters. Kernan described an instance in which a warplane was sent to attack a suspected chemical or biological weapons storage site. The command staff was running the numbers when the pilot decided to open fire.