Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  To quote a well-known cliché, in war short moments of the greatest excitement alternate with long periods of boredom. In this respect it differs from wargames which, if well planned, can deliberately combine excitement with relaxation. Most of the time wargames tended to make use of the normal weapons of war, more or less. Where the most common weapon was the bow, bowmen engaged bowmen; where it was the sword, swordsmen fought swordsmen; where mounted knights wore armor and wielded lances in war they did the same in tournaments. Provided proper precautions were taken this fact allowed them to be used for training, as several were. As firearms took over from about 1500 on, the situation underwent a fundamental change. Firearms, whether muskets or cannon, were much too powerful and much too dangerous to be used in two-sided wargames of any kind. Those “firing” blanks apart, the only ones ever used for that purpose were pistols: even so it was necessary to install all sorts of precautions to prevent bystanders from being hurt. When rifled barrels took the place of smooth ones during the last decades of the nineteenth century the game was up. Duels fought with such deadly weapons had more to do with Russian roulette than with strategy. Under such circumstances it was all that duelists were able to do to provide a demonstration of raw courage by squarely facing their opponents without flinching. It was an exercise in futility, and it soon ceased.

  The fact that most wargames no longer involved any kind of physical fighting with weapons led to a very great reduction in their value as spectator sports. At the same time it caused their value for training purposes, and indeed the very meaning of training, to be reassessed. The outcome was a shift towards more symbolic representations of war, such as chess. Chess, of course, seems to have antedated the period of which we are speaking here by about a millennium. There is no evidence that it ever served any purpose except entertainment. What makes it unique is its ability, which it shares with a few other games such as Go, to combine a small number of simple rules with an almost infinite number of extremely sophisticated strategies. Like many other board games similar to it or derived from it, though, chess was much better at portraying battle than at representing war. It is therefore interesting to observe that Weickmann’s efforts to develop it in such a way as to make it more like real-life armed conflict date to the very year when Hobbes published his great book.

  Whether or not this was a coincidence, from then on efforts in this direction, made either by professional soldiers in order to improve training or by amateurs more interested in entertainment, have been unceasing. Seeing that the best training is also the one that keeps those who engage in it motivated, and that one very good way to motivate people is to entertain them by providing them with a game that is playable, demanding, and varied, quite often the two things went together. The efforts to make commanders take an interest in the games in question, adopt them, and put them to military use also depended, at least in part, on the entertainment value that they offered.

  Weickmann’s efforts mark the starting point of a fairly straight line of development. It led through the various eighteenth-century men who hoped to provide a more realistic wargame to the Reisswitzes, father and son, early in the nineteenth. It was in keeping with the military thought of the age that these attempts should be based on mathematics, and especially plain geometry of the kind that theorists such as von Buelow and Jomini also tried to use. In particular, the Reisswitzes were professional soldiers who sought to combine serious training for war with entertainment. Their objective was to represent tactics, though not the fighting proper, which board games could not incorporate in any form, as realistically as possible. They and their successors also factored in additional elements such as topography, logistics, intelligence, command and control, and friction. In doing all this they kept pace with the growing scale of war and the emergence of a clear distinction between the various levels of its conduct. Their efforts had much to commend them: particularly important was the introduction of scenarios and of turns based on real time, as well as dice to represent the role of chance. All three continue to play a major role in many kinds of present-day games. As the Reisswitzes and others ought to have known and almost certainly did know, however, was that anything even approaching absolute realism was impossible. The more efforts were made in this direction, the more numerous and complicated the rules and the harder the games became to learn and to play.

  After 1870 attempts to escape from this dilemma led to the introduction of so-called “free” games. Compared to the “rigid” ones they were supposed to replace, free games were much easier to learn and to play. Another advantage was that they made it easier to ignore all sorts of ancillary issues and focus on the main points. Dice were still often used to decide the outcome of combat; however, participants, normally officers, no longer had to constantly consult the rulebook over such questions as the distance a battalion could march in the course of a day or how many bullets a company could fire per minute. Instead they had to use their professional knowledge and make their moves accordingly. Disputes were resolved by an umpire who also made himself useful by providing, or not providing, each side with information about the other.

  The absence of detailed rules and the heavy dependence on professional knowledge, that of the umpire in particular, meant that playing wargames of this kind was more of an art than a science. As the games spread from Prussia, where they originated, to other countries, dozens of different variations appeared. Each armed force and service seems to have developed its own methods. Some, especially those used by navies (which tended to operate in relatively simple environments and were heavily depended on technology) were more rigid, others less so. Fun apart, all were used for two main purposes: namely, training on the one hand and planning for the future on the other.

  Criticizing the use of such wargames for training military personnel has always been easy and remains so today. Particularly important in this respect is, first, the frequent lack of realism that may lead to the wrong actions being taken and the wrong lessons learnt; second, the danger, which a perceived lack of realism can only enhance, that players will become more interested in winning the game than in using it to gain a better understanding of real war; and, third, the near impossibility of simulating the full stress that participating in real-life war involves. Last but not least, participants in wargames are inevitably confined by the rules. Not so in war, where, as the story about Moshe Dayan illustrates very nicely indeed, it is often the side that surprises the opponent by breaking those rules which emerges victorious. Above all, one should keep in mind that two-sided games are not just a method to instruct commanders in the practical conduct of strategy: they are the only method. Without them, peacetime commanders would be like chess players who, though they may be thoroughly familiar with the rules and have analyzed countless old masters’ games, have never actually played a match. That is why they keep being utilized in spite of all the difficulties: as Galileo might have said, “eppure si muove” (“but nevertheless it moves”).

  Lack of detailed information often hampers attempts to assess the usefulness of wargaming for looking into the future and planning for it. On the whole, though, it appears to be quite uneven. Having pioneered the field, during the early years of the twentieth century the Germans claimed greater expertise in it than anybody else. While there is no evidence that the Schlieffen Plan was ever gamed, they were justifiably proud of the contribution that games made to the great victory at the great battle of Tannenberg. In early 1940 a large number of wargames held at many levels from the top down helped the Wehrmacht prepare for the very successful campaign in the west. They also played an important role in the decision, which was undoubtedly correct, not to risk an invasion of the British Isles. In the next year, however, wargaming Operation “Barbarossa” did not save it from committing what in retrospect was perhaps the greatest blunder in the whole of military history.

  On the other side of the hill, more is known about US Navy wargaming than about similar activities by any other military service.
Apparently it was useful in helping shape strategy in the form of a gradual advance across the Pacific. It also provided training for a large number of contingencies. However, there is no record of senior officers using it to plan and test any specific campaign. Finally, Japanese wargaming in 1941–2 resembled what was practiced by the Germans. It provides a fascinating tale of how complex the interaction between games and reality can be. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not: in both cases, often for the wrong reasons.

  The first recorded attempts to game not only war but the politics of which it forms a continuation got under way in Germany between the wars. Perhaps this is another proof that there is nothing like defeat to make people think. At least one game, organized on the initiative of Kurt von Schleicher, may have played an important part in shaping real-life politics. It helped convince the right-wing establishment that it could not forever rule against the will of the parties and the people. Others, set afoot by the Army General Staff to persuade Hitler not to risk another world war, were simply put aside: in dealing with such matters, Hitler preferred to rely on his intuition alone.

  During the 1950s political-military games crossed the Atlantic to the US, multiplying until no self-respecting think tank, academic institution, or military college was without them. In crisis games or BOGSATs, as they were sometimes known, participants pretended to be officials in their own countries and others that were allied with them or opposed them. They resembled “free” wargames in that there were few rules. The role of the umpire, now often known as “control,” was critical in proportion. As with all wargames, the greatest advantage of BOGSATs was that players were obliged to make choices. Furthermore, each view expressed and each move made was countered by an immediate, and often bruising, critique. Here and there games proved remarkably prescient – but of course they were only a handful out of the huge number played. No one could tell ahead of time which ones would or would not hit the mark. As with many other kinds of games, moreover, BOGSATs were normally considered too time-consuming to allow senior decision-makers to take a serious interest in them. That is probably why, in the US as in Nazi Germany, there is little evidence that even the best-organized ones had a real impact on the course of events.

  Nor was wargaming limited to soldiers and defense officials. Playing with miniatures seems to have originated during the Renaissance. Its popularity increased during the eighteenth century when cheap figures made of tin began to be manufactured in large numbers. During the years immediately before World War I even some very well-known public figures engaged in miniature wargaming. Then as later, play led to charges of “militarism” and warmongering. One very refreshing exception to the rule was the indefatigable H. G. Wells. His Little Wars, he wrote, were “a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist.” “Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster – and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings, nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties.” If he had had his way, he would have put “this prancing monarch and that silly scare-monger, and these excitable ‘patriots’, and those adventurers, and all the practitioners of Weltpolitik [the more chauvinist type of German professors, whom he absolutely detested]” into a cork-lined room and let them fight it out to their heart’s content.3

  Too often, miniatures had the disadvantage that they diverted attention from strategy to producing the most exact replicas possible. That is a fascinating activity, no doubt, but since there is no opposition it has hardly anything to do with war. Another disadvantage was that, if anything like correct proportions were to be maintained, miniature games took up lots of room. This made them most suitable for simulating small-scale engagements: since modern tactics require soldiers to spread out and disperse, the more recent the engagement being simulated the worse the problem, which cheap plastic models did not solve. To play out campaigns, let alone wars, the tokens used by professional soldiers, each of which could be made to represent as large a unit as one desired, were much superior. The amateurs’ motives differed from those of the professionals. Often they cared less about training and planning, more about entertainment. Often entertainment centered less on imparting specific skills than on acquiring an in-depth understanding and the sense of power it brings in its wake. As a result, historical games seeking to simulate campaigns of all times and places abounded. The introduction of hexed maps during the 1950s did wonders for amateur wargaming and ultimately led to two million sets being sold in a single year. Considering the games’ highly intellectual character, not to mention the numerous tedious calculations they required, this popularity is surprising. Perhaps it could serve as proof that some people want more than bread and circuses alone. There were also some contacts between those who designed, produced, and sold the wargames and the military. However, the latter never warmed to the games in question.

  Wargames played on floors, tables, and boards of every kind are one thing. Having two real units take the field and fight one another as part of their training is a very different one. The idea goes back to ancient Rome, if not before. It may have been realized in some way by the medieval behourd, though we do not really know. However that may be, the introduction of effective firearms around 1500 made its realization impossible. Nineteenth-century armies often held two-sided maneuvers, even very large ones. The method reached its peak during the first decades of the twentieth century when hundreds of thousands of troops, complete with all their equipment, sometimes participated. It continued to be used after 1945, though only on a sharply reduced scale. The great advantage of maneuvers was, and is, that they can go a considerable way to capture not just the intellectual part of war but the physical one, including not least the friction it involves. On the other hand, they were always hampered by the fact that the forces could not fire at one another. This fact in turn necessitated other, often highly arbitrary, methods to decide what worked and what did not.

  It took almost five centuries to restore real-life weapons to the wargames from which they had been banished. What made this development possible were two games: paintball and laser tag. On the face of it paintball appears somewhat childish, as two groups of people tumble about a court or in the open in an effort to “kill” each other for no reason except fun – but that is something they share with many other wargames. What made it useful to the military, though, was the latter’s growing interest in urban warfare. Reversing an age-old trend, such warfare was mostly fought at very short range for which paintball and its close relative, airsoft, could provide very good training. Laser tag also had the additional advantage that the equipment could be added to many kinds of “real” weapons. Like the other two, provided proper precautions were taken they could be fired at live opponents without any adverse results. To be sure, there were limits. Lasers could not simulate projectiles traveling along curved trajectories or else munitions with an explosive effect such as artillery shells. Still, compared with blanks they represented a very great improvement indeed. Moreover, provided proper instrumentation was available, every move in a “battle” could be observed and recorded for subsequent analysis. In many cases, so abundant was the resulting information that it could hardly be used.

  As the billions invested in the National Training Center and similar installations around the world show, training of this kind is anything but cheap. For those unable to play at the taxpayer’s expense, a substitute of sorts is available in the form of reenactments. While two-sided in principle, most reenactments have more to do with play-acting, which is sometimes taken to ridiculous lengths, than with strategy. The fact that the outcome of the larger engagements in particular is known in advance works in the same direction. Still, in some of the smaller and less farby reenactments sufficient room is often left for something like real strategy, real intelligence (or at any rate reconnaissance), and real command and control to be practiced. Like maneuvers large or small, they also do much better than most computerized games in simulating the physical experience
of many kinds of war. Finally, while aimed at fun rather than at any other purpose, reenactments, if properly prepared, organized, and led, provide participants with an entry into military history that is as good as, if very different from, any other method. Perhaps it is for that very reason that service personnel, who do not like competition, tend to look down on them.

  In the 1950s computers started making their mark. Inside and outside the military, computers appealed to those who considered themselves progressive in ways that hexed maps and little cardboard counters with all sorts of numbers printed on them could not. At a time when few understood just how they worked they seemed to provide the illusion, though not always the reality, of accuracy and precision. They were also very expensive: to some people, eager to obtain funding, that may have represented an advantage. The first field to which computerized wargames, or simulations as they were often known, were applied was nuclear warfare as conducted with the aid of bombers or, later, various kinds of missiles. Thousands of games were held in an effort to find out which were the best weapons, how many of them were needed, how they should be deployed and defended, what their first targets should be, how many casualties they would cause, what the consequences of using them might be, and so on. A growing number of attempts were also made to apply similar methods to conventional and even sub-conventional (guerrilla and terrorism) warfare: the more complex the environment in which the latter was waged, however, the more difficult the task.

  As the advent of microchips caused the price of computers to come down from the late 1970s on, computerized wargaming developed along two parallel paths. The first was represented by increasingly sophisticated versions of the earlier Reisswitz-type games. Here computers, with their vast capacity for making quick calculations, made it possible not only to produce much larger and more sophisticated games but to speed them up very considerably. Games could be played either by humans against each other or, using artificial intelligence, by humans against the computer itself. They were played both by professionals, who used them for the standard twin purposes of training on the one hand and preparation for the future on the other, and by amateurs primarily interested in entertainment and study. Even chess, as one of the oldest wargames of all, was increasingly being played onscreen with the computer as the opponent.