Ender's World

by Orson Scott Card

  Ender’s Game also played no small role in helping to produce the changes that occurred, while reflecting perfectly the zeitgeist of the Marine Corps at that time. Let me assert this: Ender’s Game, that brash little first novel about children by an author with no military experience, is an important work of military thought with much to offer the serious military professional. It is militarily significant because of what it has to say about three related subjects. First and foremost, Ender’s Game is a book about the development of skilled military leaders, a topic critical to the successful implementation of Maneuver Warfare, as I said. It has insightful things to say about how to develop those leaders and the kinds of traits desirable in tacticians and strategists. Second, it is a thoughtful treatise on the nature of leadership, providing numerous examples both good and bad. Third, it offers the most compelling and accessible illustration of the theory and practice of Maneuver Warfare that exists—though, for reasons that will become clear, it pains me to say so.

  Any Marine officer today would instantly recognize Ender Wiggin as a fellow Marine, a product of the Marine Corps training and education system (almost certainly an honor graduate) that grew out of the Quantico Renaissance. Any Marine would appreciate his leadership style and would intuitively recognize his tactics. Simply said, Ender Wiggin was a master practitioner of Maneuver Warfare. For myself, I felt like he was a brother in arms.

  I received my commission as an officer of Marines, a brand-new second lieutenant, in 1981. I joined the service in the middle of an intense institutional debate, mostly played out on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette, our professional journal, over how the post-Vietnam Marine Corps would approach the business of war. The Marine Corps had split into two opposing camps: the Maneuverists (who would eventually prove successful) and the Attritionists. The Maneuverists argued that the Attritionists favored mindlessly wearing the enemy down through firepower—the Vietnam “body count” mentality reborn. The Attritionists argued that the Maneuverists wanted to confuse the enemy to death, without actually fighting him.

  After attending The Basic School and the Infantry Officers Course, I arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in 1982 as a rifle platoon commander. Maj. Gen. Alfred M. Gray had just taken command of Second Marine Division there. Gray was a colorful, tobacco-chewing, gruff-talking, unconventional former enlisted Marine. He was also the leader of the Maneuver Warfare movement, which in the eyes of many made him a threat to the institution. Gray immediately pronounced Maneuver Warfare the official doctrine of Second Marine Division. I became an instant true believer, not only because Maneuver Warfare, with its emphasis on initiative at the lower echelons, was empowering to junior officers but also because everything I had read about the chaotic, uncertain, fluid, and temporal nature of war argued that Maneuver Warfare was the best approach.

  I progressed from second lieutenant to captain in Second Marine Division. After about four years, I was assigned in 1986 to the Marine Corps Doctrine Center in Quantico, a sleepy little command that, to my eyes, at least was better than recruiting duty. I was the only captain in a building filled with unpromotable majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels on their sunset tours. The debate over Maneuver Warfare was still raging, and I thought of myself as a Maneuver Warfare insurgent—I consciously did—within the belly of the beast, doing everything within my very limited power to reform the Marine Corps from the inside.

  Then everything changed: in 1987, Al Gray—the outsider, the iconoclast, the threat to the institution—somehow got himself selected as the next Commandant of the Marine Corps. He immediately announced that Maneuver Warfare was the official doctrine of the Marine Corps and everybody had better get on board. Suddenly, everyone was a Maneuverist, and had been all along. Gray decided that he wanted a new manual to lay out his Maneuver Warfare philosophy. From my position of obscurity well down in the pecking order, I watched with amusement as colonels lined up around the block for a chance to audition for that gig.

  For reasons I still don’t understand—given that he didn’t know my name—Gray picked me. I was going to work closely with the Commandant to capture his thoughts. Only it didn’t happen that way. I never got any actual guidance. I met with Gray only twice, and each time he refused to talk about the book. Instead, he told sea stories. If I asked him a direct question, he’d tell me another sea story. He worked in parables. “Let me tell you a story about little Al Gray…,” he’d growl. It was later that I realized he was actually practicing Maneuver Warfare: he was explaining his intent through those stories, but he was leaving it up to me—and expecting me—to figure out how to accomplish the mission. He was using what we called trust tactics, much as Ender did with Bean and other trusted subordinates.

  The product was Warfighting, published in 1989. It described in seventy-seven pages the Marine Corps’ view of the nature and challenges of war and how to win it. It was more a philosophy book than a typical military manual. Warfighting synthesized the works of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and John Boyd. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, wrote The Art of War around 450 BC. Clausewitz, the Prussian high priest of military theory, wrote On War after the Napoleonic Wars. Those works remain the two most important works of military theory in history. John Boyd, who died in 1997, was the most important American military theorist of the twentieth century.

  Warfighting was well received. (It made my career and got me promoted to major two years ahead of schedule.) In his foreword to the 1991 edition of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card graciously called it “the most brilliant and concise book of military strategy ever written by an American.” It became a centerpiece of instruction in all Marine Corps schools. It was translated into numerous foreign languages, including Chinese, which I always found ironic, given that so much of it was inspired by Sun Tzu. It was taught in foreign military academies. It has been published commercially several times, including as a leadership guide for business managers. (Because there had never been any public interest before in Marine Corps doctrinal publications, the Marine Corps did not bother to copyright it, so it was in the public domain.) You can buy it on Amazon. (I don’t get a cent.)

  The similarities between Warfighting and Ender’s Game are manifold and uncanny: tempo, surprise, formlessness, ruthlessly attacking the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities, exploiting fleeting opportunities, trust and implicit understanding between senior and subordinates, acceptance of risk, decisiveness, boldness, seizing the initiative, decentralization of authority, understanding the enemy and learning from him, knowing and inspiring your people—they are all there in spades.

  Warfighting became probably the most lasting symbol of the Maneuver Warfare Revolution. The revised version (which I wrote in 1997) remains Marine Corps doctrine today. Looking back, I still feel pretty good about that book. I think it is a solid and readable description of Maneuver Warfare. In fact, I think there is only one book that captures Maneuver Warfare better: Ender’s Game.

  It was none other than John Boyd who turned me on to Ender’s Game. A man of brilliant and hyper-disciplined intellect, Boyd was the intellectual powerhouse behind the military reform movement, and his theory provided the conceptual foundation for Maneuver Warfare. Boyd was a frequent lecturer in Quantico in those days. Although he had been an Air Force officer, the Air Force never really got him, and it was in the Marine Corps that his ideas really took hold. (Boyd’s personal papers now reside in the archives at the Alfred M. Gray Research Center in Quantico.) Boyd’s ideas came from everywhere—from history, literature, mathematics, classical and postmodern philosophy, sports, business management, economics, thermodynamics, quantum physics, and information theory—and, importantly for our purposes, science fiction.

  So when John Boyd told me to read Ender’s Game, though I did not think much of space opera as a rule, I dutifully went out and bought a copy. (So did a lot of other Marine officers: the book was a cult classic in the Marine Corps long before it reached the universal popularity it enjoys today.) I can’t say
I began to read it with super-high expectations, however. Needless to say, that changed pretty quickly.

  This was 1989, shortly after I had written Warfighting. As soon as I started reading Ender’s Game, I realized it was brilliant—and absolutely relevant to what was happening in the Marine Corps at that time. I felt an instant connection, like Orson Scott Card had taken the ideas of Warfighting and converted them into a novel. About that time, Brig. Gen. P.K. Van Riper, one of Gray’s leading revolutionaries, was transforming the Marine Corps University (MCU) from a collection of staff training schools teaching planning procedures to a genuine university developing thinking leaders. One of the first steps was to offer a series of evening courses to anybody stationed at Quantico. I decided to teach “Introduction to Maneuver Warfare” or Maneuver Warfare 101. I targeted junior officers and enlisted Marines. I ran the course as a seminar, based on a lot of practical decision exercises rather than a lot of reading. I assigned only three books: Warfighting (of course), Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and Ender’s Game.

  I also decided, as soon as I had read Ender’s Game, that I needed to bring Orson Scott Card to Quantico. The question was how to find him. Remember, this was in the days before people searches on the internet. I guess I could have written to his publisher, but I didn’t have that kind of patience. That was okay, though, because I knew where he lived. Recall that when Ender graduated from the Battle School after defeating Griffin and Tiger armies without a fight, they sent him to Greensboro, North Carolina, for rest and relaxation with his sister, Valentine. On page 133 of my copy, I have written “Greensboro!!!” in the margin. I looked up the area code, called directory assistance, asked for Orson Scott Card’s number, and, before I knew it, was being connected.

  I hadn’t figured out what I was going to say when he answered. I stammered out an introduction and launched into some spiel about the military virtues of Ender’s Game. Capt. John Kuntz, a colleague, walked in. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said: “I can’t believe I’m talking to Orson Scott Card about Ender’s Game.” Unbeknownst to me, Scott was on the other end telling his wife, Kristine: “I can’t believe I’m talking to a Marine captain about Ender’s Game.”

  It turned out Scott was teaching a writing workshop in the DC area soon and was able to extend his trip to drive down to Quantico for a day. The Marine Corps does pomp and ceremony like nobody’s business. We gave Scott quite the reception. First stop was a meet-and-greet with the faculty of the Command and Staff College, the senior school of the Marine Corps University—Gen. Van Riper and about fifteen to twenty lieutenant colonels and colonels, each with his own copy of the book to be signed. Imagine a bunch of tough-as-nails Marine officers gushing over a science fiction writer. We immediately launched into a discussion of the book, which I don’t think Scott was expecting. Speaker for the Dead had come out in paperback by that time, and a lot of the faculty had read that too, so we jumped into a discussion of it as well.

  We made the rounds of the other schools—the Amphibious Warfare School (AWS, for captains), The Basic School (TBS, for all lieutenants, where they learned how to be Marine officers before moving on to their specialty schools), and the Staff NCO Academy (for senior enlisted Marines). Each place we visited, it was the same: the Rock Star Treatment.

  The highlight of the visit was the seminar with my Introduction to Maneuver Warfare class that evening. The group was twice its normal size, as a lot of other faculty, including Gen. Van Riper again, sat in for an extremely animated discussion on Ender Wiggin as a military leader and tactician. We attacked that book like…well, like a platoon of Marines assaulting a hill. We took no prisoners. It was Scott’s first exposure to US Marines, and I don’t think he was quite prepared for what he got. He put up a good fight, but in the end, as I recall, he was just overrun.

  One of the fundamentally important ideas in Ender’s Game is the notion of games as an instrument for training military commanders. The soldiers in Ender’s Game are children, and children naturally play games, so this might seem like a trivial insight. But I think it is actually a profound thought. Play can be serious business, as Ender’s Game captures very well. This idea is also part of the Maneuver Warfare philosophy.

  The most important training tenet of Maneuver Warfare is that exercises (our name for war games) should be free-play—that is, neither side is constrained in what they can do—just as the war games at the Battle School were. This replicates the fundamental nature of war as a clash between two hostile and independent forces unconstrained by any rules. As Mazer Rackham tells Ender the first time they meet: “And the only rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you.” You would think this would be obvious, but it was not how the Marine Corps approached training Before Gray. Typically, a training exercise involved an exercise force, which was the unit being trained, and an OPFOR, which was there to serve as training aids for the exercise force. The OPFOR was always outnumbered. It was not allowed to do anything unpredictable but instead was expected to fall back—fall back and eventually die in place. In other words, the OPFOR was expected to cooperate in its own defeat, which meant that the exercise force did not need to think about tactics but could just focus on getting its own procedures right. This led to an inward focus, which was the opposite of Maneuver Warfare’s outward focus on the enemy.

  The other games connection between Ender’s Game and Maneuver Warfare is what the Marine Corps came to call Tactical Decision Games (TDGs for short, because everything in the military can be reduced to a three-letter abbreviation, including “three-letter abbreviation” or TLA). TDGs are concise (less than five hundred words), deceptively simple scenarios that build up to a tactical dilemma requiring an immediate command decision. They start with the words “You are the commander of…” to drive home the point that you and nobody else is responsible. (Moral, as well as physical, courage is a critical attribute of command.) TDGs include a simple map showing the terrain and where your forces are. You are given a mission. You are given some information about the enemy situation but never as much as you think you need. Then, usually, something unexpected happens, rendering your orders obsolete, so you have to come up with a new plan on the spot. A good TDG has built-in time pressure, usually severe—for example, if you do not act within two minutes, an approaching enemy patrol will spot your whole formation and you will lose the element of surprise. If a TDG is designed well, your instinctive reaction is a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and the thought: “What the heck do I do now?”

  Your solution has to take the form of the actual orders you would issue to your units, plus a sketch of your plan. In other words, there’s no academic discussion about this or that course of action; you have to take responsibility and act. The important thing is not the actual tactics you use, although some are better than others. The goal is to improve tactical decision-making, so the important thing is why you did what you did. TDGs are best done in a small-group setting, led by an experienced tactician, where you can discuss these things and benefit from other people’s decisions. We also developed “double-blind” TDGs, a more interactive, turn-based version in which two teams each solve the same tactical problem from opposing sides, with a controller moving between the two teams presenting each team with a new problem based on the other team’s last decision. We have since developed interactive, online versions.

  But back then we were still figuring out the basic uses and mechanisms of TDGs. Here, my own professional journey intersects the narrative. Before being assigned to Quantico, I had had the good fortune to command two different infantry companies in Second Marine Division. I was still a junior captain when I wrote Warfighting, and I fully expected to get another company when I returned to the operating forces. I thought of myself as a company commander, as a tactician. As I was writing Warfighting, I remember thinking: “With everything I’m learning, I’m going to be one hotshot company commander when I get back to the Fleet.” Only it didn’t wo
rk out that way. Don’t get me wrong; writing Warfighting was an unbelievable education. But I realized pretty quickly that none of it was making me a better company commander. The deeper I dug into the theory, the more abstract it got and the further away I got from actual application. From a very personal point of view, I needed something to make Maneuver Warfare more concrete. My circle of insurgents at MCU was dealing with a similar dilemma: how to make Maneuver Warfare theory more accessible to most Marines. We just hadn’t broken the code yet.

  There was another group of Maneuver Insurgents that used to meet in the evenings at the Marine Barracks in Washington, DC, and I sometimes made the drive up from Quantico. One night, Bill Lind, one of the leading civilians in the broader military reform movement on Capitol Hill, invited Brig. Gen. Hasso von Uslar, the military attaché from the West German Embassy, as a guest speaker. At one point during the evening, we were debating some tactical issue (I don’t recall what it was anymore). As a way to ground the discussion, von Uslar pulled out a map, indicated a couple of positions, and said: “How would you do it on this piece of terrain?” It was a revelation to me. It had instantly turned the abstract discussion concrete. It was a proto-TDG at best, still with the format and mechanics to be worked out, but I realized immediately we had found what we were looking for. I drove home that evening and worked into the night to draft what became the first TDG, “Enemy Over the Bridge.” It is reproduced in the adjacent sidebar.

  My cabal of insurgents back at MCU debated what to call this new invention. Normally, in the military such training activities are called “exercises.” There are field exercises (FEXes), map exercises (MAPEXes), and command post exercises (CPXes). But we decided we wanted a different vibe. We wanted to market these things as fun, so Marines would be encouraged to do them, to play them. So we very deliberately decided on Tactical Decision Games. (We all had read Ender’s Game by that time; I don’t recall that the book, and its title, actually entered into the discussion, but I have no doubt it influenced us subconsciously at least).