Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  Von Reisswitz himself did not live to see the outcome. In 1827, having been transferred to a remote garrison town, he shot himself. Later, though, his game spread like wildfire among Prussian soldiers and civilians alike. One indication of this is the fact that the colors he used to mark friendly and hostile troops, i.e. blue and red, were taken over by the military and still remain in use. Numerous Vereine, or clubs, were set up to bring enthusiasts together and enable them to play regular matches. The Militair-Wochenblatt, as the most prestigious publication of its kind in Germany, provided its readers with at least one new scenario each week. Helmut von Moltke himself is said to have taken up wargaming in 1828, when he was a lieutenant working for the Topographical Bureau of the General Staff.41 Yet Prussia still remained the least of the great powers. Only after the spectacular victories of 1866 and 1870 did its army acquire an international reputation. The outcome was to turn the kind of Kriegspiel practiced by the Prussian General Staff into an export commodity which it still remains. Both in Germany and abroad, a vast number of variations made their appearance. Some applied the principles involved to specific fields such as tactics, strategy, supply, fortress warfare, naval games, and the medical service.42 Others tried to improve on the original. Here I shall focus on two versions in particular: namely so-called “free” wargames on the one hand and the hexed ones that were popular in the US during the 1970s and 1980s on the other.

  “Free” wargames were pioneered by one of Moltke’s own officers, Colonel Julius Verdy du Vernois, who in 1876 published a book on the subject.43 He argued that von Reisswitz’s Kriegspiel was too complicated. As originally presented by its author, it required a sixty-page booklet of rules and statistical tables. Subsequent modifications, many of which aimed at increasing realism by updating and adding more and more details, made the game more complex still. Play tended to last forever and was often abandoned before it could be brought to a conclusion. In other words, realism – the great advantage of von Reisswitz-type games – and playability – so characteristic of older ones such as chess – had gone their separate ways. The more highly developed the game and the more detailed the rules, the more serious the problem.

  The solution, Vernois argued, was to make greater use of the players’ professional knowledge. The players he had in mind were not rank amateurs but young officers in various stages of training and education. If only one assumed that such players knew how much space a battalion occupied, how fast it could march over certain kinds of terrain, what the range and rate of fire of various weapons were, and so on, many tables and calculations could be done away with. The same would happen if, instead of using dice and then carefully calculating the losses each side would suffer after each kind of engagement, such losses would simply be classified as light, medium, or heavy. After all, the commanders of large formations, such as divisions, army corps, and armies, were not interested in counting every individual casualty either. In maneuvers conducted by real bodies of troops over real terrain, the outcomes were never determined by throwing dice, so why do so in Kriegspiel? Playability, in other words, was to be restored by making use of experience and expertise.

  To compensate for the “soft” rules Vernois suggested relying on the umpire, whose role in the game was greatly enhanced in this way. Unless the umpire kept things under fairly tight control, deciding when each round had ended and providing new scenarios, the game would either peter out or degenerate into a shouting match. It might even end with participants hitting each other on the head. Yet, paradoxically, of all the numerous factors that separate wargames from the reality they are supposed to simulate, the presence of umpires is perhaps the most important of all: which, of course, is just why many real-life confrontations do peter out or do end with people hitting each other on the head. As Vernois admitted it would, introducing an umpire also carried the risk of injecting the game with a considerable measure of arbitrariness. Assuming a capable and honest umpire, though, play would become much easier.

  Games could be played either with one participant on each side or by opposing teams. The equipment needed for the purpose was fairly minimal – counters representing various kinds of units and troops, and two rooms with the copies of the relevant maps spread out in each. Orders could be delivered in writing, but it was also possible to save time and effort by simply moving counters on the map. Distances were measured with the aid of dividers. The umpire, or exercise leader (Leiter) as Vernois, indicating the importance of his role, called him, was supposed to move from one room to another. First he would present a general scenario to each side separately and ask them to formulate their campaign plan as well as their initial moves. Those moves having been made, he would provide the other side with as much information about them as they could expect to receive in reality. In case each side was represented by a team, it was also possible to take account of the time it would take the commander-in-chief to communicate with his subordinates, whose units were stationed at various points on the map, and vice versa. All this, Vernois claimed, would make for a game much more fluid and lively than anything von Reisswitz had been able to provide. To the extent that fluidity and liveliness are characteristic of war, it was also more realistic.

  In trying to increase playability by doing away with many kinds of calculations as well as the dice, Vernois was aiming primarily at the military. The same was true of other Wilhelmine authors, most of whom were officers.44 American designers during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Nicholas Palmer, Peter Perla, and above all James Dunnigan, took exactly the opposite tack. While aiming their work at civilians, they sought to increase realism by providing more rules, not fewer. The decisive change was made when squares were replaced by hexagons, or hexes, as they are commonly called. Dating back to the 1950s, when the navy experimented with them, superficially they were a simple invention. Looking back, one is surprised they had not been introduced much earlier. Hexes had two important advantages. First, they enabled players to move their pieces in six directions rather than four, vastly increasing flexibility. Second, when superimposed on a map they enabled frontiers, roads, rivers, coasts, and the like to be drawn much more realistically. Depending on the scale on which the map was drawn, anything from minor topographical features to continents could be represented. As with many wargames from the time of Helwig on, different types of terrain could be shown by printing hexes in different colors. Hexed maps, in other words, represented a cross between the hoary checkered boards and traditional maps, incorporating some of the advantages of both. Last but not least, each hex could be provided with a number, as in chess. This allowed the games to be played by persons or teams geographically far removed from one another, with the aid of the mail.

  In other respects the wargames in question started where the younger von Reisswitz had stopped. Games were played on maps, albeit highly stylized ones. Troops, units, and formations were represented by small cardboard counters on which their most important characteristics such as offensive and defensive power, ability to move, and so on were printed. Each player started by arranging his pieces on the map either as he pleased, or, in case a historical campaign was being simulated, by following a scenario. Movements were governed by terrain, which either accelerated them or slowed them down. Recognizing the effect of modern weapons, artillery in particular, many games introduced zones of control which enemy units could only enter at some cost, such as reduced speed or offensive power. In some games several counters could be stacked in a single hex, reinforcing their combat power but also creating logistical problems which had to be solved by frequent replenishment. Some games simulated the friction of war by using wild cards, as in Monopoly. Others tried to factor in the fog of war as well as problems of command and control such as orders that were issued but not received, understood, or obeyed. A handful of games, notably one called Atlantic Wall, even required that Allies, Germans, and referees use three different maps; understandably, many amateurs, found them too complex for their tastes.

  As in ot
her board games, players took turns. As in other board games, combat could not really be simulated so that its outcome had to be determined with the aid of statistics. Since statistics only works where numbers are fairly large, the smaller the operations being simulated the worse the problem. Normally the method used was to cast dice – some with as many as twenty sides – and weighing the outcome against so-called combat results tables (CRTs). The latter factored in the effect of weather, different forms of combat such as attack and defense (often, in fact, various kinds of both), movement, and even morale. Particularly in the larger games, all this required an immense amount of record-keeping and calculation. Perhaps it is no accident that the years in question also saw the introduction of pocket calculators and adhesive note pads! Notwithstanding these aids, some of the larger games could stretch over weeks, even months. The larger the number of pieces that had to be moved at each turn, the slower the play. This in turn meant that a special table set up in a special room was required.

  Games were devised to simulate every kind of engagement, starting with the purely tactical and ending with the grand strategic. Land, sea, air, and space warfare could all be simulated. However, air and space strategy, considered in isolation, tended to be rather simple: hence not many players were interested in spending their money on them. Armored combat, infantry combat, the operations of Special Forces, and an almost infinite number of battles and campaigns were all simulated. Some of the larger games even brought in economic factors, i.e. the ability of the belligerent countries to produce the sinews of war and provide their armed forces with them. For example, a player might be asked to decide whether defeating an enemy army should receive priority over capturing his manufacturing district – a dilemma that has often presented itself in reality as well – or the other way around. Or else it was a question of a blockade imposed by one side causing hunger among the population of the other, leading to a lowering of national morale and perhaps to difficulties in recruiting manpower.

  As titles such as Starforce Alpha Centauri and Vengeance Crusaders v. the Monads show, many scenarios were purely imaginary. Others attempted to provide as accurate a simulation of historical campaigns as the available historical data, and the designers’ skills, allowed. As with some miniature games, not the least merit of those who produced the games was the immensely detailed historical research in which they often engaged. For example, not only was it necessary to know even the smallest details, such as the caliber of every anti-tank gun used by the Wehrmacht and the range at which they could penetrate the armor of various kinds of allied tanks, but one also had to find mathematical ways of relating their respective values to each other in the same way as a chess queen, for example, is considered to be worth so many pawns. Designers did this by trial and error, repeatedly playing the games and juggling the figures until they felt, on the basis of the outcome, that they got it right.45 The ability to do that, incidentally, is one very great advantage those concerned with simulating the past enjoy over those who try to peer into the future. All in all, devising a game to simulate warfare as it had been waged at a certain time and place, as one of my students once did, is certainly not the worst way of studying that subject.46 Indeed it could be argued that, in this kind of game, as well as some others, designers regularly learn more than players do. As in other board games, far too much emphasis was put on intellectual factors as opposed to the players’ physical skill, stamina, and morale. In many ways what was being simulated were staff officers at work – the counters wargamers used were modeled on military ones – not troops who fought, suffered, and died.

  Starting in 1958, the year when Avalon Hill, the first company that manufactured and distributed them, was founded, demand for this kind of wargame exploded. The main market was in the United States, but other countries such as Canada, Britain and Germany followed. Clubs were founded, magazines with such titles as The General and Strategy and Tactics published. Reaching a readership numbering in the tens of thousands, they not only turned into a useful publicity tool but enabled manufacturers to conduct public opinion surveys among readers and adjust their products accordingly. Most of those who purchased and played the games were thirty-four or younger. They were also overeducated in the sense that, drawing on published literature, they had learnt a lot about war without being able to apply their knowledge to their professional lives.47 From my experience most were single which, given that the hobby attracted very few women and was extremely time-consuming, is not surprising. The more thoughtful among them saw the games, provided they were well designed, as a means not only of mastering the details but of familiarizing themselves with the fog of war, the friction of war, and, above all, the two-sided nature of strategy in ways that no narrative accounts, historical or fictional, could match.48

  Occasionally attempts were made to adapt the games so that real-life armed forces could use them. Generals visited game designers, and game designers were invited to give talks at military colleges. However, perhaps because the equipment required was very cheap, the marriage did not work too well. Civilian designers of wargames tended to be young and self-taught. Some may even have committed the ultimate crime of those years − wearing their hair long! Their products, instead of being esoteric and costing millions, were available in the shops and could be had by anyone for a few dollars. In 1987, I myself heard James Dunnigan say that he would probably take no more than forty-eight hours to design a wargame that would simulate a war between the US and some country in the Persian Gulf. What if these outsiders proved better than the brass at simulating future warfare and predicting its outcome, as at least some Pentagon officials believed they might? In a culture so committed to the Protestant ethos that physical exercise is known as a “workout,” would not the spectacle of officers playing games give rise to negative reactions? In the event, some military colleges did use the games in question for teaching purposes. Worried they might be ridiculed, they tried to keep the matter secret – not always successfully, as it turned out.49

  Even today, with computers all around us, such games still retain some of their advantages.50 Above all else, hexed games provide players with excellent insight into their own mechanics. To be sure, their rules can be quite complicated. Often they take up dozens of closely printed pages and require a considerable period of time to master. Even so the designers sometimes find it hard to cover all the possibilities and answer all the questions that playing the games may lead to. To that extent, most games have a certain amount of freedom built into them, if not deliberately then accidentally. On the other hand, since the rules are written in plain language and printed, they are easily accessible. The reasoning of those who designed them can readily be understood; without the rules being understood, of course, the games cannot be played at all.51 Attempting to make the games more realistic or more playable, many players proceeded to experiment with them and to modify them as they saw fit.

  All of this cannot be done with the hexed games’ computerized successors, most of which are specifically written in such a way as to conceal their programs and make them tamper-proof. Even when that is not the case and attempts are made to use more English-like artificial intelligence languages, doing so only goes so far towards solving the problem.52 Before we can consider those successors, though, it is first of all necessary to see how defense establishments have used and are using the games in question.

  By a throw of the dice

  From Weickmann to von Reisswitz Jr., those who designed wargames and tried to sell them to the armies of their time hoped to use them for the purpose of military training and education. Accordingly, they made great efforts to reproduce the movements of various troops, the effects of terrain on those moves, and the outcome of combat as accurately as the available technical means allowed. Players were often told that, in playing a game, they should write down their orders exactly as they would on campaign. Late nineteenth-century works on the subject do in fact bristle with such orders, written and delivered according to
the relevant regulations; to that extent, what took place was not simulated command and control but command and control, tout court. Above all, wargames were, and still remain, not just a very good method of introducing students to the paradoxical – to speak with Edward Luttwak – world of strategy but the only one. The rest, not being two-sided, are simply not in the running.

  Training apart, wargames can also be used to prepare for future war in a different, and perhaps even more important, sense. Scenarios can be set up and an officer or team of officers made to represent the enemy. Next, the game can be played in such a way as to examine whether one’s plans are sound, what changes may be necessary, and what the outcome of the engagement, or battle, or campaign, or war, is likely to be. Obviously this applies both to offensive wars and to defensive ones. The influence of operational techniques, the impact of new technologies, and so on can also be simulated, if necessary by repeating the games time after time while varying the factors involved.

  Preparing to fight France in 1870, Moltke did not game the campaign. Whether this was because he was a bad commander, as one of his critics has claimed, is a little doubtful.53 However that may be, two decades later wargames had become much more firmly established. Unfortunately little is known concerning the precise methods by which the various general staffs went to work in this respect. Partly this must have been due to the desire to keep their methods secret; partly, perhaps, to the well-founded fear that outsiders might ridicule the proceedings. Scenarios, of course, were always among the best-kept secrets of all. Then as now, armed forces did not like to divulge the kind of campaigns they were planning to fight and the methods they were preparing to apply. However, since we are interested primarily in the changing nature of wargames and the way they were played that fact need not concern us too much.