Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

In the case of hexed games, incomplete rules do not necessarily spoil or invalidate a game. This is because players can make them up as they go, proceeding on their own steam. Some, in fact, prefer it that way. They match their ingenuity against that of the designers in an attempt to improve the game – their game – and derive more out of it. By contrast, computerized games do not allow such liberties to be taken but require that every problem be perfectly comprehended and solved in advance. Scant wonder perfection is seldom achieved at the outset so that de-bugging can be a difficult and prolonged process. Even so, few are the games incorporating artificial intelligence of this kind that clever humans cannot outwit if they really want to.

  As with all games, the greatest advantage that computerized ones have over conventional learning is the interactive nature of the learning process. So is the opportunity to experiment and discover which factors (within the limits of the program) are most important, how they change over time, and so on. Another option often brought up by players who have bought the games is to incorporate hypertext that will allow them to learn more about what they are doing. Returning to Forge of Freedom, some players have volunteered to research and write biographies of the 1,000 generals whom players may call out of limbo, so to speak. Thus study reinforces play, and play reinforces study So much for the often-heard claim that wargaming is a waste of time. Looking back on the days when my own son engaged in it, I believe that it is teachers, many of whom are unfamiliar with the field, who do not understand.

  In principle the value of this kind of game not merely for amateurs interested in entertainment or in studying history but for the professional military should be obvious. Provided only the necessary programs are written, commanders can practice their jobs, handling such matters as intelligence, planning, operations, manpower, logistics, medical services, and much more. A well-constructed game, with players working in groups instead of as individuals, may also teach the members of those groups to work together and help mold them into a cohesive, smooth-functioning team. It can certainly help identify troublemakers who may then be weeded out. Provided sufficient intelligence is available before each campaign, a model may be constructed and run, allowing different force mixes, strategies, and outcomes to be tested.

  In practice doing all this can be very problematic. First, culling the necessary detailed information and then programming a computer with the necessary algorithms is very time-consuming. One can, of course, use peacetime in order to create a large number of games and keep them in reserve. However, doing so is wasteful and in any case it is impossible to foresee every eventuality. Second, a wide gap usually separates the needs of amateurs from those of professional soldiers. As Eastern Front illustrates very well, the former normally demand no more than that a game be up to date – in other words, that it incorporate whatever technology is considered reasonably advanced for the time – that it be sufficiently playable, and that the price will be one they can afford. Realism is certainly a factor, but as the availability on the market of any number of fantasy games shows, not necessarily the most important one.

  By contrast, military professionals have no use for games that are clearly and unambiguously disconnected from the “real” world. For them wargames are a much more serious business on which their own lives, and those of others, may eventually depend. While price may be less of a factor, they must demand a much higher level of both realism and of detail. Regardless of whether the objective is training or planning, if that realism and that detail are lacking they may well end up with the wrong lessons. To make the problem more serious still, officers in particular are a competitive lot. After all, that is the way they are selected, trained, and promoted. This entails the danger that, in their eagerness to score a victory either over human opponents or the computer, they will learn how to play the game rather than wage or fight a war.

  Focusing once again on the US military as the most important of the lot, and also as the one about which most is known, it would seem that they were slow to get off the mark. Conservatism apart, possibly one reason for this was precisely that early games were not sufficiently realistic and did not simulate war in sufficient detail to meet their needs. According to James Dunnigan, who in many ways is to the world of commercial wargaming what Andy Marshall is to the military one, and who, besides having written a book on it, has worked for the military, they only got in on the act during the mid 1980s. Even then they did so only because the growing numbers of commercial games being produced and sold all around them could no longer be ignored. What information is available points to the conclusion that the field remains split among the services, each with its own training organizations, schools, academies, colleges, and planning agencies. Though the subject is obviously of enormous importance, a coherent picture of what goes on is all but impossible to obtain.

  A list of games, drawn up by Dunnigan and dating to the end of the 1990s, does at least provide some idea of the stuff that the military have been interested in.58 Many seem to have had something to do with Andy Marshall, who for several decades has funded efforts to create them and sponsored conferences dedicated to them. Apparently some were never completed, having fallen victim to interservice friction, or to budget cuts, or to technical difficulties. At the top of the pyramid were the so-called Title Ten (or Title X) games. With a genealogy going back to 1961, they were operated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the service chiefs who used them to determine future military needs, as well as testing scenarios, equipment, and methods: examples are the Global Engagement games.59 Next in importance came the strategic-level games that the theater commanders-in-chief, or CINCs, used to plan, and sometimes fight, campaigns. Further down still were operational- and tactical-level wargames. A good example was Warfighter’s Simulation 2000 (WarSim), aimed at training army commanders from theater level all the way to that of battalion headquarters.

  Naturally, the lower the level in the hierarchy that any game represented, the smaller the impact it had on the forces as a whole. The lower the level, too, the more it tended to overlap or merge with the kind of simulators, or shooters, which will preoccupy us in the next section. Many games were designed to be played by widely dispersed personnel, a proposition that, though cheap in relation to bringing them together at a single spot, can still be very expensive indeed. The cost ran into many hundreds of millions of dollars and is said to have reached $8.6 billion in 2007.60 If the figure is correct then it amounts to over 1 percent of the defense budget, trend rising.

  Still following Dunnigan, who has extensive experience in working both in the commercial world and with the military, wargames used by the military tend to suffer from several problems. One is the need to satisfy the requirements of many different user organizations each of which does not wish to buy the game off the shelf but actively attempts to pull it in its own direction. Often the outcome is great complexity and compromises that end up, like the famous camel that was created by a committee, by satisfying nobody. Adding more and more features in the name of “realism” also causes the cost to go up, ultimately leading to diminishing returns. Much of the data that goes into the programs is classified: as a result, checking on whether it is correct is difficult, and errors, once they have crept in, tend to stay.61 Secrecy also makes it hard to update the games as needed. Finally, those who design, manufacture, and market games in the commercial world are obliged to pay attention to users’ demands, such as ease of play and creating a good interface between player and game. Their counterparts working in, or for, the military, are not nearly as affected by these concerns. On occasion this can lead to bad games that people simply do not want to play.

  Since much of the work is oriented towards the future rather than the past, validation, i.e. making sure that the game represents something “real” and is not simply a figment of somebody’s imagination, presents a serious challenge. Too often, too, the adage that the military always plans for the last war it fought comes true. Last but not least, the games played at the Pentag
on and similar buildings around the world are anything but independent of the “real” world. To the contrary, they are funded by, and held on behalf of, enormously powerful organizations. The outcomes are often used to advance very concrete goals. The national interest, not to mention billions of dollars as well as many lives, may be at stake. Under such circumstances, inevitably there is a motive for pushing the results in this direction or that or ignoring them if they do not fit one’s interests.

  As with all other military-type games from Reisswitz on, there is no way to ensure that the games will reflect future reality or that future reality will be reflected in the games. Regardless of how sophisticated and how detailed they are, in the end whether this does or does not happen is almost entirely a question of luck. One way to narrow the gap, as well as motivating participants in the game, is to use real data provided by real intelligence assets. The following story, told by General Norman Schwarzkopf of Gulf War fame in his autobiography, gives some impression of what wargaming at its best can do.62 In July 1990 Central Command in Florida, of which Schwarzkopf was the commander, was busy preparing its annual wargame, code-named Internal Look. The computerized game, which Schwarzkopf describes as the headquarters equivalent of a flight simulator, was scheduled to stretch over eight sessions lasting twenty hours each. The objective was to enable the participants to practice many of the things they would be doing in war, including sorting out battlefield reports, issuing orders, directing logistic flows, and coordinating the movements of land, air, and sea forces. The scenario, which was first devised in the early 1980s, and was in fact hopelessly outdated, was a Soviet invasion of Iran heading towards the Persian Gulf that had to be stopped.

  As the first rumblings of upcoming problems started to be heard, it was decided to change the scenario so as to represent a war with Iraq instead. While some of the data in the computer had to be changed, the fact that the theater of war was roughly the same one must have come in handy. A stream of intelligence coming from the Gulf countries had to be simulated. Where things became really interesting was when real reports coming out of the Middle East started being incorporated, to the point where game and reality became hard to keep apart. So great was the potential for confusion that messages forming part of the game had to be clearly stamped with the word, “exercise.” When the decision to send US troops to the Gulf was made, at least the preliminary work, involving the mechanics of assembling a huge force, sending it to the Gulf, and deploying and sustaining it there, had already been done.

  Lost in virtual reality

  The computerized strategy games described in the previous section go back to hexed games, Reisswitz-type games, and ultimately to chess and its equivalents. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that, in them as well as BOGSAT-type political-military games, players, instead of directly interacting with each other in real time (which itself may be either “real” time or game time), have to take turns. The turns are both cause and consequence of the fact that the actual fighting, or perhaps I should say violence, is left out. Either the figures capture one another, as in chess, or else they surround each other, as in Go. In other games the outcome of combat is determined with the aid of special tables and random numbers which are generated either by dice or a computer. However it is done, since the nitty-gritty of fighting is absent games of this kind are usually better at simulating the higher levels of war than the lower ones.

  The shooting games discussed in the present section have a very different genealogy. Just as the Mississippi and the Missouri meet to form a single river, so the shooters owe their generation to two separate devices, i.e. flight simulators on the one hand and certain amusement machines on the other. To start with flight simulators: the earliest pilots were self-trained. They and their immediate successors used real machines even for the initial stages of training, leading to heavy casualties. During World War I training pilots was turned into a mass enterprise. Many air corps (there were no air forces yet), or branches, or services, or whatever they were called, started using simulators to familiarize trainees with the basic skills that flying an airplane requires. For example, the French, who produced more pilots than anybody else, had a clipped-wing contraption known as the Bleriot roulant. Mounted atop a swivel, it gave trainees a rudimentary feel of how the controls worked.63

  Starting in the late 1920s the firm most associated with simulators was Link, of Binghamton, New York. At first, demand was slow, but it picked up in 1934 following a training disaster during which a dozen army pilots lost their lives in a single week. Later, so much did it dominate the field that for several decades the machines were known simply as Links.64 With their twelve-foot wingspan, they stood to real aircraft as hobbyhorses stand to real horses and were designed to simulate an aircraft’s interior and controls. The latter were attached to hydraulic or pneumatic devices that went some way toward simulating the aircraft’s movements, i.e. yawing, rolling, and pitching. Later additional controls such as a throttle were also added. Other companies followed.

  During the salad days of World War II the firm of Link alone produced and installed about 10,000 simulators in the US, Canada, and Britain. They served to teach the basics of flight as well as some specialized skills such as navigation, night flying, and instrument flying. After 1945 both the military and the airlines continued to use them while adding a steady stream of refinements. Chief among them were movies, later replaced by TV images, which simulated the outside environment and were coordinated with the controls. This enabled pilots to practice maneuvers, especially landing at unfamiliar airports, prior to executing them in reality. Emphasizing the connection between training and entertainment, occasionally the machines were stationed in exhibitions and amusement parks where the public could try them out.

  As early as World War I some air services also began experimenting with specialized devices to teach pilots how to fire their machine guns while taking into account the relative speed and angle at which their aircraft, and the ones at which they were aiming, were flying. The technique, which takes time and effort to master, is known as deflection shooting.65 However, firing at real aircraft was much too expensive and much too dangerous. Consequently flight simulators could not shoot, neither could the devices with which firing was taught fly. A way had to be found to build devices capable of simulated shooting at fast-flying, rapidly maneuvering targets. One widely used method was to attach movie cameras to the aircraft’s sights and firing button. Provided enough money was available, the moves of each aircraft, shell, or rocket could also be monitored by telemetry devices on the ground. The results could be fed into the all-knowing computer and used for training and post-action analysis.66 Even so, having pilots and aircraft spend so and so many hours in the air each year preparing for combat that would be over in seconds remained an expensive proposition.

  In the event, the initial stimulus toward a solution came from an altogether unexpected direction. From the 1930s on, visitors to arcades had been familiar with games such as pinball which enabled them to interact with machines. Originally these machines had been mechanically operated, but late in the 1950s electromagnetic versions of them started to be marketed. These were the years when television was spreading like wildfire. In principle, if not in practice, it was a comparatively minor step to get rid of the mechanical elements altogether, replacing them with blips on a screen.67

  The blips themselves could be made to represent practically anything from primeval monsters to futuristic flying saucers and from individual soldiers trying to bayonet their opponents to tanks firing at anything under the sun (or moon and stars). Depending on the game, the nature of the task that the onscreen images had to perform could vary widely. He, she, or it might be trying to avoid a crash while racing a motorcycle amidst traffic along a winding course. Alternatively the task might be to find a way towards a given goal while overcoming various obstacles, or else – of course – to shoot up virtual opponents. As the game progressed, along with the player’s skil
l, the obstacles with which the computer confronted him or her, or else the speed at which the action proceeded, or both, increased. The outcome was to make play more and more difficult. The game lasted until either time ran out, as in arcade-mounted, quarter-operated machines, or else when the limits of human performance were reached. To make up for the growing difficulty players, or rather the blips that represented them, were often granted multiple lives – an extremely unrealistic feature, or course, but one which, if a game was to be playable, was hard to avoid.

  Given that it literally consists of nothing, the environment that was easiest to model in the extremely limited memory of contemporary computers was outer space. Another reason why designers preferred it was because it was unfamiliar, thus appealing to players’ imagination and making it harder for them to criticize the game.68 Both lines of reasoning probably explain why the very first interactive “shooter”-type computer wargame was Spacewar (1961).69 Like many of its successors, Spacewar could be played either by one person against the computer or by two persons against one another. Either way, it was a question of maneuvering spaceships, each with a limited supply of missiles and fuel, against one another. Hits produced most satisfying explosions followed by a void. Subsequent versions of the game included a scrolling map of the stars as well as a sun that made its impact felt through the pull of gravity, swallowing up spaceships that came too close to it. These and other additions made the players’ task somewhat more complicated and more interesting.

  The factor that truly made Spacewar revolutionary, though, was that players, instead of taking turns, interacted in “real” time. To that extent it represented nothing less than a return to the kind of wargames, from single combat through gladiatorial fights and tournaments to the duel in some of its forms, described in Chapters 1 to 3 of the present volume. To restate the idea in an even more extreme form: whatever shortcomings Spacewar and its successors may have had, it reintroduced time – the very factor Napoleon once said was more precious than space, because having been lost it could never be regained70 – into wargaming. A greater step towards realism, though it was of a special and in some ways very limited kind, can hardly be imagined. The computer on which the game was designed and played, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, had the advantage that it was one of the first to sport a screen, or cathode ray tube, as it was known at the time. Small by contemporary standards, it only took seventeen square feet of floor space and cost a mere 120,000 1961 dollars. Scant wonder players were just a few students in first-class academic institutions, as the creator of Spacewar, Steve Russell, himself was. Indeed the entire thing was the outcome, not of some deadly serious, goal-oriented effort, but of playful interaction among the members of the MIT Student Tech Model Railway Club.71