The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.

Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.

The reset isn't the problem, the entirely nerfing the Red team is the problem. The US took steps to fail to learn from the exercise before it had even finished.

what exactly does one learn from hypothetical light-speed motorcycles?

Does the enemy nation have internet? If so, there's your light-speed couriers.

motorcycles can navigate bombed terrain, your fiber optics cables will be torn...

I can see the following technology replacing motorcycles for communication:

(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)

a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)

b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)

Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...

Wouldn’t a WiFi mesh network be more reliable in war-torn areas? If you just need communication then actual “internet” is incidental and probably a security risk - just having a fairly secure local mesh network, with nodes covering hot-spot areas, seems like a good idea - it can cross areas where fiber isn’t reliable because of all the war, and it can potentially remove the need for some by-hand communication.

Wifi mesh makes sense in a densely populated area, not over mostly desert.

Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.

Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.

Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:

quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).