Then I remembered that some time back the Navy was plotting war games in the eastern Mediterranean, brought back a retired officer as the opponent, and he upset the game by taking everything he had and firing it all at once at an aircraft carrier, some got through and totally disabled it or sank it.

You might be thinking of Marine Corps General Van Riper. The exercise was "Millennium Challenge 2002". He played the enemy, with a considerably inferior force. Sank an entire US carrier group in the first two days of the exercise. He avoided US signals intercepts by using motorcycle messengers and light signals, instead of radios. His massive volley of cruise missiles "sank" 16 USN ships by saturating their defensive systems.

With some controversy, the game was restarted, and heavily scripted, to ensure a US "victory".

Millennium Challenge 2002

en.wikipedia.org - Millennium Challenge

The USN's reaction to Van Riper's success sounds like the management of some of the companies I worked for, where management was "always right", regardless of the facts on the ground.

Can you make fake aircraft carriers to draw fire?

"Chaff": strips of aluminum that are shot into the air, to confuse the homing radar of the missile. In the Falklands, one RN ship saw an Exocet coming, and fired a cloud of chaff. The Exocet missed the ship, and fell into the sea when it ran out of fuel. After the Falklands, the Brits were experimenting with a round they called "Siren", after the Sirens in "The Odyssey", that transmit radar signals to lure the missiles toward them, decoying them away from the ship.

Steve