"The art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute."

"The art of applying military forces to achieve ends set by political policy."

Tactics: The art of using weapons in battle.

Logistics: A science of supply and movement.

The strategist generally works in a far more abstract environment than the field commander. In the real world, the strategist must have a good appreciation of what his forces can accomplish; when he doesn't the result is disaster. But in the real world the strategist is part of a team which will include operations experts, and if the team is working properly he won't be allowed to form a plan calling for the impossible.

Moreover, a properly organized General Staff will have troop commanders involved in the strategic plan at another point: to see that the strategy makes full use of the unusual capabilities of the army.

In a game, all that is assumed. The strategist can't order the impossible: the rules won't allow it. He can't be unaware of his capabilities, since those are spelled out clearly in advance. He may be unfamiliar with them, but since he can play the game over and over again, he will leam them. Eventually he becomes an expert operations commander -- for cardboard squares. He becomes a good strategistin conflicts with rules like his game. But has he reamed much about the art of strategy itself?

He has a better chance of becoming a strategist through gaming than he does of learning to lead troops that way. This is obvious: and so is the next point, that he understands the strategy of the period no better than the game simulates strategic reality.

We have come, in my judgment, to the heart of the controversy between the "Simulators" and the "Gamesmen." The simulation school wants to understand the art of war, and is willing to sacrifice playability and fun to gain it. The gamer is also interested in this understanding, but above all he plays games for recreation and fun; he isn't going to work so hard for his education.

There remains the vital question: has the simulator really got anything for his sacrifice? It is all right to say that you'll put up with complexities and hard work in order to gain expertise, but if the game is not a strategic simulation, the hard work is for nothing. Our inquiry has done this much: we know what we want to simulate. We want the strategic factors.

What is Strategy?

In his monumental work, Introduction to Strategy, (Praeger: 1965, Preface by B.H. Lidell Hart) General d'armee Andre Beaufre defines strategy as "the art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute." He also gives us the useful corollary definitions: tactics, the art of using weapons in battle in such a way that they make the maximum impact; and logistics, the science of supply and movement. He considers both logistics and tactics as concerned with material factors, and thus they are akin to sciences or engineering.

Liddell Hart, following Clausewitz, makes strategy the art of applying military forces to achieve the ends set by political policy. Beaufre rejects this definition as too restrictive, but war-gainers should keep it in mind, since it is military strategy we try to learn.

Note that neither one talks about the destruction of enemy forces or anything like that. Strategy may employ those means and it may not. Strategy is concerned with a psychological phenomenon: a resolution of opposing wills, not forces. If your enemy has the means to destroy you, but hasn't the will to use them -- like the cat subjected to psycho-timetic war gasses who becomes afraid of a mouse -- the conflict is ended.

Most war games require that the conflict of wills be resolved by battles. These battles have rather predictable outcomes. The result may be uncertain (we've all thrown "exchange" at 3-1 odds and cursed) but the range of outcomes and the probability of each is either known or knowable. It must be in order to define a game.

The point is important, because in the real world the strategist has no right to be certain of the capabilities of either his own troops or the enemy's. His strategy can be no better than his estimate of these uital factors: and a war game simulation can be no better simulation than the designer's knowledge of them.

Now, for much of history, real world commanders have known the probable outcomes of battles. Given so much of this and so many of that, engaged in a certain place with such and so supply capabilities, they can come up with a probabilistic estimate that makes sense. When commanders' predictions of battle outcomes have had something to do with reality -- and when this knowledge was properly communicated to the strategist -- wars and campaigns have had features in common with war games.

However, commanders have sometimes been very, very wrong in their predictions: not that they didn't know that a 3-1 attack doesn't always result in Defender eliminated, or that a 2-1 attack can yield Attacker eliminated, but that they had no idea of the enemy's capabilities at all. Those are the times that make for the most spectacular and interesting wars. We tend to spend a lot of time studying them.

AND THEY CANNOT BE GAMED BY THE VERY NATURE OF THE GAMING PROCESS.

We can only simulate campaigns in which both sides understood the capabilities of their forces. We can design one-player simulations of other eras, but they won't be playable games: and they can never simulate anything but the campaign that actually took place, so even as simulations they aren't too useful.

Let me illustrate: in 1940 the Allied commanders did not understand armored warfare. They improperly organized armor within their divisions, they had no concept of the new tempo of war -- what Liddell Hart calls tank time -- in a word, they did not know what either their own or the enemy's forces were capable of.

Some designers call this "stupidity" and "idiocy." Whatever we call it, we cannot reproduce it. Given present hindsight, we see what we might have done then knowing what we know now; but it is almost impossible for us to see what they might have done in "what-if,' situations, because we can't think as they did.

Whether they were "idiotic" or we are wise, we do know something they didn't. Were we Grant the night before Cold Harbor we would not, knowing what we now know about Lee's rifle pits, order the assult that cost more American lives per minute than any other time in history. And so forth. We shouldn't confuse hindsight with wisdom, for having the one is not necessarily to have the other; but we can't abandon the hindsight either.

We cannot create a basic misunderstanding on the gaming table. Since we also can never give a player a sense of the importance of decisions that send men, not pieces of cardboard, to the dead pile, we have reached two limits of simulation. The most interesting eras of strategy are beyond our reach, as is the battlefield itself.

More Simulation and Psychology

Introduction
What Are We Trying to Simulate?
Strategy
What Can We Simulate?
A History of Operations
Panzerblitz and Jutland