Wargames
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Last but not least, recall Wilkinson’s warning concerning the things that wargames of the kind discussed in this chapter cannot do. Normally the games are scheduled days, even weeks, in advance. Their location and duration are known: on one occasion, when I suggested to a Norwegian group that, to introduce realism and increase uncertainty, participants in a game should be told neither when it would start nor how long it would last, one could hear the protests all the way from Trondheim to Oslo. While some games last for more than one day, rare is the one that does not allow the players a good night’s rest. Evenings are often used for socializing. In one pre-1914 German caricature the location of “headquarters” is marked by a heap of empty bottles; in another, a young officer quartered upon a family during an exercise tells his hosts that whereas wargaming itself is not too exhausting, entertaining a different family every evening is.100 The games are played in comfortable, well-lit, and if necessary heated or air-conditioned rooms. There are regular breaks for meals – as Napoleon might have said, wargames march on their stomachs. While some of the friction of real war may be simulated, the suffering, the pain, the death, and the bereavement are nowhere in sight.
It is true that in real life everything possible is done to insulate senior commanders from those factors so as to enable them to make the cool, rational decisions they are supposed to make. Even so, the crushing weight of responsibility can only be simulated to a very limited extent, especially, as is normally the case, when the players are relatively junior. It cannot be repeated too often that all this tends to overemphasize the intellectual qualities needed for the conduct of war as opposed to the physical and moral ones. That may be even more true of the next class of games we are now about to consider.
The hilt of the knife
In all pre-1914 wargames, only military factors were simulated. This was as true of tribal mock warfare and of tournaments as of the most sophisticated games conducted by early twentieth-century general staffs. In some of the latter, the forces being simulated numbered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men. True, the underlying assumption was that a large part of the male population had been mobilized and was wearing uniform. All the more remarkable was the fact that those forces seemed to glide along like magic, so to speak. Obeying their masters, who drew up the schedules and issued the orders, they made their way on foot, by road, and by railroad. Taking geographical and topographical conditions into account they advanced, retreated, clashed, penetrated, outflanked and encircled one another, and “fired” at one another with such and such results. Naval wargames were similarly organized. To the extent that the underlying economic realities were ignored, once again we see the principle of Kishon’s grandson at work: the games gave a better impression of the way commanders thought about war than war itself did. At best, what they simulated were campaigns – without exception, brief ones lasting no more than a few weeks – rather than wars.
The experience of 1914–18 changed all that. The idea that economics mattered was hardly new – those in charge of royal and national treasuries had always known it, and it had been raised to the level of theory by Frederick Engels in 1878.101 Now the rise of “total war” compelled even the most conservative commanders, such as the Frenchman Ferdinand Foch and the German Erich Ludendorff, to admit that military operations were merely the knife that economics, forming the hilt, empowered.102 Not accidentally, the interwar period saw the opening in several countries of colleges and research institutes specifically charged with investigating and teaching the links between war and the economic infrastructure on which it rests, the best known of which was the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces. World War II, which in terms of the resources mobilized to wage it probably dwarfed all previous ones combined, provided an even stronger push in the same direction. If the war showed anything, it was that even the best army (the Wehrmacht) with the most brilliant operational commanders could not prevail against a crushing material superiority combined with the kind of political leadership needed to form and maintain a global coalition.103 Nor did the end of that conflict in August 1945 lead to a change of heart. By the late 1940s the idea that any future wars would be “total” had hardened into dogma − wrongly, as it turned out, for this was just the time when spreading nuclear weapons were making such conflicts between powerful states impossible.104
Helwig, Venturini, the two Reisswitzes, and many of their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century successors had all based their work on the belief that the conduct of war is rooted, at least in large part, in the laws of mathematics and physics. Such laws governed rates of advance, fronts, the amount of lead such and such formations might deliver in such and such a time, the number of casualties, and much more. Accordingly, what they really did was to try and find a better way to incorporate those laws into wargames than chess did. Unsurprisingly, that belief was shared by many well-known contemporary experts. They included, besides eccentrics such as Heinrich von Buelow, Antoine-Henri de Jomini. In fact Jomini, who during the first half of the nineteenth century was considered the world’s most important military theoretician, often used the chessboard to explain the principles behind the operational movements he recommended.105 Even Clausewitz, who traced the obsession with mathematics back to eighteenth-century siege warfare and logistics, did not completely reject this approach.106
Though it took time, from this it was a relatively small step to including economic factors such as each country’s manpower potential, raw material situation, productive capacity, transport network, and the like. In theory, and increasingly in practice too, as the available statistical information improved all of these could be assigned numerical values. All could be related to each other: as in calculating, for example, by how much the mobilization of manpower would affect production or what the economic cost of losing an industrial province would be. Military−economic games helped those who played them to determine what resources would be needed, identify bottlenecks, and tackle such problems as the need to create stores, find substitutes for scarce materials, and the like. Compared with this, the operations that earlier wargamers had tried to portray were of secondary importance. What mattered was not so much what military moves each party made but what resources he possessed and the manner in which he used them. To be sure, the resulting models were enormously complex. Often they required that the games be played not by individuals but by entire teams of experts. In principle, though, the need to use mathematics to simulate the factors in question was sufficiently well understood for at least some of them to be incorporated even in some games that amateurs designed and played.
Economics aside, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Historically many wargames were linked to politics in one way or another. In Rome, the repeated attempts to prevent members of the higher classes from fighting as gladiators probably reflected the need to maintain the social and political order on which the Empire rested. The organizers of tournaments tried not to include political enemies in the same team. Many a nineteenth-century politician dueled not because he wanted to but because doing so was essential for maintaining “face” in front of his adversaries. In the military, considerations concerning power and rank often made it impossible for top-level commanders to participate because there was nobody they could fairly play against. A famous story has the German chief of the General Staff, Helmut von Moltke the Younger, gently asking William II to stay away from wargames for that very reason.107 During the Cold War even chess, the most strictly neutral of all games, was used as a weapon. The Soviets in particular were accused of constructing a “chess machine.” It consisted of teams of coaches and advisers who analyzed every move and tried to rig the setting in which championships were held so as to favor their own side.108 Still, even in this case, once the game got underway politics was put aside. On the board, in the arena, and in the field what counted were the players’ skill, strength, and nerve, as well as the quality of the weapons, real or symbolic, they were allowed to use.
Strangely enough, in view of its reputation – asked where the Reichswehr stood, its chief of staff, General Hans von Seeckt, is reported to have said that “the Reichswehr stands behind me”109 – the first to try and make wargames reflect this fact were the Germans during the Weimar Republic. Seeckt himself, in his critique of the 1923 staff ride, took care to inform the participants that (foreign) policy always impacted on war. Indeed the tools of policy, such as diplomatic notes, ultimatums, and economic measures, were themselves a form of war, with the result that the similarities between the two were at least as important as the differences.110 To modern ears Seeckt’s words sound militaristic if not actually warmongering. Yet they represented a radical departure from Moltke and Schlieffen, both of whom had not only insisted on a strict separation between politics and war but had even questioned the right of the former to direct the latter.111 In so far as adversarial diplomacy too obeys the laws of strategy, moreover, there is no doubt that Seeckt had right on his side.
Six years later the Ministry of War, in a most unusual move for the time, joined the Foreign Ministry to organize what may well be the earliest political−military game of which some trace has survived. Possibly this reflected the often heard charge that, before 1914, the General Staff had failed to coordinate with the Foreign Ministry or anybody else, producing its plans in a vacuum and ignoring the fact that the invasion of Belgium would very probably bring Britain into the war.112 If only to escape criticism, this was an error they did not want to repeat. Specifically, the objective was to simulate a conflict with Poland in which Polish irregulars operated on German soil, as had in fact happened in 1919–20. For the first time, representatives of the Foreign Ministry were invited. In the event, “the Polish foreign minister” and “the President of the League of Nations” played their respective roles to perfection. The former went on inventing German provocations and the latter kept throwing about empty phrases. Between them they left the German “foreign minister” speechless.113
Early in December 1932 the Minister of Defense, General Kurt von Schleicher, personally presented the Chancellor, Franz von Papen, with the results of another game. The objective was to assess the possibility of dispersing the Reichstag, declaring martial law, and using the Reichswehr to rule the country against the wishes of both the parties and the trade unions. The game showed that the chance of success was very slim. It may well have helped convince President Hindenburg that he had no choice but to dismiss von Papen, thus setting in movement the train of events that led directly to Hitler’s assumption of power.114 Finally, in 1938 the newly founded Wehrmachtakademie in Berlin held a large political−military game. Participants included officers from all branches of the Wehrmacht as well as government officials, businessmen, and industrialists, and representatives of Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.115
Probably other countries held similar exercises, but few details are known. What we do know is that, in the summer of 1941, the Total War Research Institute in Tokyo held a series of political−military games in preparation for the conflict to come. Represented were Japan, the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and other countries. In addition, different players represented divergent views and interests inside the Japanese establishment.116 The games assumed that Germany would defeat the Soviet Union, a scenario which seemed likely at the time but which turned out to be grossly mistaken. While the conclusion that Japan would defeat Britain in the Far East proved correct, the decision to treat the US almost as a nonentity did not. Having helped lead Japan into a situation where it ultimately had to fight all the above countries plus China simultaneously, the games were not exactly a success. To adapt a phrase, hubris in, hubris out.
In the postwar world, the country that probably engaged in more wargaming, and certainly allowed more details about them to be made public, than any other was the US. The principal pioneer of political−military games during the 1950s was Herbert Goldhammer. Having served as the only civilian member of the US delegation to the Korean War armistice talks, he went on to write several works on the Soviet military, the psychology of deterrence, and gaming.117 As he saw it, the objective was to bring to light issues that had previously remained hidden and devise novel strategies for dealing with them. By requiring that the players take specific actions and explain them to the umpires, the games also provided an unrivalled educational experience.118 Later the field was taken over by Andy Marshall, a physicist and a former student of Goldhammer who, as of 2012, continued to head the Department of Net Assessment at the Pentagon. Others, including the political scientists Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter, and the economists Oskar Morgenstern, Paul Kecskemeti, and Thomas Schelling, also owed part of their reputation to their work in the field. Many of them spent at least part of their careers at RAND, the Research and Development institute set up by the Army Air Force in 1946.
A typical political-military game stood somewhere between a Reisswitz-type game and a university seminar. That is why it is sometimes known as BOGSAT, a bunch of guys sitting around a table.119 It differed from the former in that there were no detailed rules and no dice to determine results. It differed from the latter in that the objective was to produce a definite outcome, though a good game did not specify what that outcome should be. Each player or team represented a country and occupied as many separate rooms as there were countries and alliances. Two additional rooms housed the game controller and communications center. The widespread availability of modern means of communication such as the telephone enabled the rooms to be located far apart if doing so was considered convenient. Each player or team was provided with a scenario. They then proceeded by turns each of which represented so and so much real time. Often the time represented was not continuous but proceeded in leaps. Players were confronted with successive scenarios separated by days, weeks, or even months.
Players made their moves in writing (in those pre-word-processing days, it was recommended that each team be provided with a typist). The results were submitted to an umpire or team of umpires who passed the information from one “country” to another. Occasionally they withheld part of it or distorted it so as to simulate problems of communication and perception; others added acts of God or else floated rumors in an attempt to simulate the “noise” that, in real life, almost always accompanies “hard” intelligence. Some, notably Schelling, took a more active role still, questioning players concerning their motivations in order to force them to clarify to themselves what they were doing. As the game unfolded the umpires assessed the results of the various moves, developed new scenarios, and fed them to the players to cut their teeth on. A good umpire might also make players operate on partial information, garbled information, and misleading information. Umpires acted as data banks, providing the information players required. The need for data, which had to be collected and stored ahead of time, meant that a month of preparation might be needed for every day of play: a contingency might be over before it could ever be gamed.120
Though it is hard to question the role of politics as the factor that governs, or ought to govern, war, no rigorous methodology for doing so has ever been developed. This was not for lack of trying. In fact, building on foundations laid during the 1940s, an entire new discipline, known as game theory, was stamped out of the ground. It probably reached the peak of its popularity during the 1950s when it was touted as “America’s secret weapon . . . a perfect, fool-proof system for playing all cut-throat games including poker, business – and war.” Even as late as the early 1990s some blamed it for having fanned the rivalry between the superpowers.121 Compared to other methods, the great advantage of game theory consisted precisely in that it focused not on the objectives of this player or that but on the way they interacted and the payoff each one could expect by doing so. By this means the relevant factors in any given game had to be identified, quantified if possible, and related to each other by means of mathematical equations and matrices. The objective was to help policymakers on each side (and, in so-called non-zero-s
um games, on both) to “optimize” their decisions so as to obtain the greatest benefit for the least risk and at the smallest cost.
In fact, the impact of game theory on the conduct of international relations and strategy seems to have been negligible.122 The reason, to quote Nobel Prize-winning game theorist Robert Aumann, is that the vast majority of real-life situations requiring political-military decisions are far too “unstructured” and “amorphous” to be fitted into such a straitjacket.123 Game theory could not even deal with relatively simple games such as chess and football, let alone the vast number of contingencies, values, attitudes, choices, and alternatives policymakers face.124 Ignoring this fact is to risk obtaining outcomes that are nonsensical, dangerous, or both. Conversely, almost all scenarios capable of being handled with game-theoretical tools are far too simple to be of assistance to policymakers responsible for deciding on the conduct of war and the maintenance of peace. That is true even if they understand the relevant tables and equations which, along with the rest of us, 95 percent of them do not. Last but not least, game theory can only tell us what players, exercising pure logic within a rigidly defined framework, should do, not what, based on their hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, they actually will do. All this explains why a figure such as Henry Kissinger, developing from a young analyst into a master diplomat, is said to have lost any interest in it he may ever have had.125 Certainly it is not mentioned in any of his major publications.