One of the best aspects of wargaming as a hobby is that you can deal with it on all kinds of levels. You can treat it as a good excuse for a few beers and an escape from day to day life or you can delve deeper and deeper into your favorite period by examining areas of tactics, uniform detail, unit histories and generals’ careers. Even right up to the point where your friends smile gently at you as you ramble on and you remain quite oblivious of the amount of time your wife is spending with her tennis coach!
Dick Bryant’s Command figure for Franco-Prussian Wargames. Note the beer bottle. The Tri-color which cannot be well discerned in this B&W photo is made up of Red, White and Blue “unmentionables”. Trophies of his time in the rear areas. No matter how close he is to his troops on the table they seem to ignore his orders!
I say this by way of caution as I intend here to take readers a little further toward the termination of whatever relationship they are in or indeed the prevention establishing one in the first place! So prepare yourself for a choice. Do you really want to continue pushing little toy soldiers around with less thought than you would give to a night spent channel surfing in front of the TV, or do you want to look a little further?
“My great talent, the one that distinguished me the most, is to see the entire picture distinctly.”
[1] Assuming you are still here, let me start with a question. How many of you out there have, or God forbid, still do, play with a set of rules that operate with a Command Radius as the sole method of simulating the difficulties of controlling a battle? That is to say, either the figures representing your generals have to be within a certain distance of the units in their command and/or their figures have to be within a certain distance of the next level of command in order for units to move, or orders to be transmitted. This distance might give a +/- effect on dice rolls or time penalties, whatever.
OK, now how many of you have ever asked why? Well apart from the fact the rules say so, what is this device supposed to represent and does it have a condition to line of sight, for instance? If it does, well that at least is a start. One thing I suspect is that very few will have any acknowledgement as to the real difficulties involved in maintaining that line of sight or the conditions under which the decisions transmitted through this tethered command network were actually made.
I also doubt Dear Reader that you, or any of your opponents, keep to the written letter of the rules for more than the first two moves in any case! Or maybe there’s a hasty little adjustment somewhere along the line just before that key move or order gets challenged. Go on, we all do it!
Now having lost a good few of the potential readership, those who have left us to see just how many appointments in the last month their partners have had with Sergio or Troy, and those I’ve just accused of cheating during a game I’ll move on to citing Napoleon’s Battles as the worst offender in the CR area and no doubt upset a few more. Just one question before you leave, guys. What do you really think is the basis for the five pages of Command Span detail in the Scenario Book?
No idea? Well to tell the truth, neither have I but it’s a heck of a lot of work in support of this particular principal that’s for sure! So if you don’t like it or you want a different approach how do you go about changing it or, for that matter, any of the other simple command representations that populate most rule sets? As, to be fair, I’ve picked on Command Radius as the one I like least and not only Napoleon’s Battles does it this way.
Let me start with a disclaimer. I’m not going to offer a complete, all singing, all dancing solution. There are as many possibilities as there are problems to represent and the range of complexity is a mile wide. What I do want to discuss is one way of looking at the problems involved.
Now I need to be clear here, I’m referring to those orders coming from an army commander down through corps and divisional levels to the brigade, where the actual conduct of a battle was performed. Below that level the internal drill of the battalion was formal and, within national variation, well known to all concerned (with a few odd ball exceptions).
The planning of a battle and its conduct varied greatly. In the French army there was the formal control of Berthier and the Imperial Staff to put Napoleon’s ideas into action. In the British army things were on a lot smaller scale and a lot of activity was embodied in Wellington himself.
Orders also varied greatly in depth and construction. Some of you may recall the famous tale of the Austrian General Weyrother’s plans for the allied army at Austerlitz, which were so complicated that people fell asleep during the briefing! On the other hand, Napoleon’s initial instructions for Waterloo (in translation) run to less than one hundred and fifty words. [2]
So how can we examine what ties these elements together and, more importantly from a gaming point of view, what is conditional for the actual progress of the battle/game itself? One method is the concept of Situational Awareness. This is used to examine a number of areas of high stress human activity such as pilot training and performance, military command operation and civil emergency planning. It sets out a number of aspects or conditions under which decisions are made and looks at what is needed to make good decisions and those areas likely to produce bad ones. It can be defined as having four main elements: [3]
Let me give you an example from our period to illustrate what could go wrong.
Napoleon's orders mentioned above, dictated on or about 11:00 am on the 18th June, contained the following: “Count d’Erlon will begin the attack by sending forward his left division and supporting it, as circumstances dictate, by the other divisions of I Corps.” Not a lot to go on if you were a Corps commander was it?
Many of you will be aware of what followed. There was a massive but not particularly effective bombardment (reader’s attention is drawn to Adkin’s [4] recent work which covers this at some length, including reference to Dutch sources that claim Bylant’s Brigade was withdrawn prior to the bombardment and not broken by it.) The French infantry then advanced up the slope in a heavy formation. Where, compressed by the frontage adopted and the avoidance of La Haie Sainte, their columns, disrupted by casualties, were routed by the cavalry of the Union Brigade.
Several factors were active here. At the point of the original order, no one, from Napoleon on down, knew of the location of the Union Brigade and their possible intervention. They simply could not see them. The lack of effect of the Grand Battery faced by an enemy on higher ground or reverse slope seems to have been ignored, or not observed, by those in command of the assault. The assault formation adopted was probably due to a number of the senior commanders having fought in Spain and their expectation of not being able to deploy on the ridge line unmolested. The disorder caused by casualties was higher than might have been anticipated due to this formation and the additional time taken cross the wet ground. When the final position was reached, the infantry found themselves confronted by a hedge and a sunken road. The latter they could not have known about. Finally, Heavy Cavalry charged them while they were crossing these obstacles.
These various factors had a contribution to what was probably the key point of the battle. I would at this point invite readers to consider the above paragraph in the light of the brief Situational Awareness conditions that preceded it and ask themselves how well these criteria were applied by the French Command structure?
My own evaluation would be pretty poorly. Attacking an enemy known for deception tactics, up a blind slope, over wet ground in a compressed formation, while supported by badly sited artillery does not show a great deal of awareness of any kind as far as I can see. Perhaps its indicative of that age-old debate as to whether Napoleon should have fought at Mont St. Jean at all? However, I digress.
The point here is that at no time did Napoleon send an Aide–de–Camp to measure how far he was away from d’Erlon or indeed how far d’Erlon was from his Divisional/Brigade Commanders and their units! The relative position of the commanders was totally unimportant. What mattered was their level of situational awareness and its effect on the decisions made.
What we need to do is to try and reproduce some of the factors that degraded or enhanced SA for period commanders. Now distance was a contributor, but it needs to be portrayed in terms of observation, be that line of sight or absence from physical knowledge of an occurrence. It is harder to portray misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation of events, which are based on wishful thinking, or incorrectly applied experience. For example, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to invent a rule that directly reproduced Ney ordering the massed cavalry charges at Waterloo if one accepts the view that he did this in the belief that the Allies we running rather than withdrawing. Such interpretation can only truly happen in the mind of the player.
I should say at this point that, as we are all aware, there are limits to any device one can introduce to gaming where all players are present at the table. Artificially acquired knowledge from the physicality of standing above the action is impossible to eliminate, although an umpired game can reduce it way below the level that players can achieve for themselves.
Having said that there are ways to improve the situation. If you set standard distances for observation these can be modified by terrain, either in terms of LoS or designation of terrain type. It is then fairly easy to agree a percentage at which commanders will actually be able to identify units or events and introduce modifiers for dust, smoke etc. If this is then linked to the ability to assess the situation, we are making progress. So a commander who has just moved from A to B might have observed the incident at C providing conditions allowed and he had opportunity to look in that area while moving. Allowing for the fact that galloping across country is not the ideal way to observe in the first place.
You might also wish to restrict observation attempts per turn, if your rules system has turns that is. Within this you can allow for all the various distractions a commander faced from being shot at to being pestered with reports by anxious sub-commanders. You don’t actually have to count such occurrences rather allow that they take place by allocating a number of observations as an alternative to being able to see in all directions all of the time and being able to react to all of them.
Very few current rule sets actually formalize the process of observation. The only one I am aware of (though there may be others) is Napoleonic Principals of War [5] which uses a combination of distance from the observing general and the terrain type the target is in together with a dice throw to determine if the target is spotted. However, even these rules do not allow for smoke.
One thing that players need to accept is that in the real world relatively few orders are actually issued that affected the course of a battle. In fact, the higher up the chain of command the fewer the orders or decisions there were. This is for a number of reasons. The nature of warfare in a period without the ability to control matters by radio communication meant that once a course of action was decided upon it was not only difficult, but also sometimes positively unwise to try and alter matters. Effectively informing all the commands involved in the time available was almost impossible.
Hence we see the concept of maneuvering battalions or squadrons whereby one unit was designated to lead a formation and all the others conformed to its evolution. This at least gave hard-pressed Brigade Commanders one point of direction to work from. In any given action it was at this level of command, above all, that the battle was actually fought. Their place in the chain of command left them to decide on a number of key areas. Not always the Brigade formation, higher commanders often dictated this for them but most certainly the co-ordination of the battalions and the direction of the objective. Along with the interpretation of what was actually going on at the ‘sharp end’ and the reception and transmission of reports and orders in both an upward and downward direction. Oh, and the small matter of ‘leading’ the Brigade. Whether actually out in front or not, the percentage casualty rate at this level of command was frightening.
It is curious to note that there appears to be only two significant works that discuss brigade tactics. These being Ney’s Memoirs and Baron Meunier’s Evolutions par Brigades. Perhaps this is why this significant area of command is so hard to understand. However, those with access to Imperial Bayonets [Nafziger]
[6] will find enough to give them a headache.
Below this level, battalion commanders had less of a problem. The decisions they made were largely involved with keeping their formation in good order to deliver fire, or assault a position, while following the evolutions of the brigade. Unless they had been assigned some special mission, like assaulting a village for example, the whole formation would be in immediate reach.
Compared to their counter parts in the modern era who have to deal with their companies and platoons spread out all over the countryside as a matter of routine, controlled from a distance by map and radio, it was not that much of a problem, particularly if blessed with competent subordinates. However, there was a high demand for leading by example and personal courage, which should not be overlooked. As a result, a lot of battalion commanders also became casualties.
Above the brigade the number of decisions and associated orders dropped off in proportion to the level of command. At division, corps and army levels, as the distance from the direct points of contact increased, it became more difficult to control the activity and more reliant on long range visual and manually transmitted information. Perhaps the Divisional commander was the last point where detail and the ‘big picture’ overlapped given that they regularly directed the deployment of their divisions.
However, unless there was a very specific reason at the top-most level, the detail of how objectives were achieved was what your subordinates were paid for! One exception again being Wellington, who seems to have got involved in formations and other specifics, partly due to not having a real corps structure, one suspects.
Any one who has played large scale Kriegsspiel games will tell you that once you get to Corps level and above, after the instigation of initial orders, you better have a good book to read, for the number of inputs to events you have will be strictly limited. The time spent awaiting “SitReps” can really drag on.
This is only to be expected. Given that an army commander could find himself in the centre of a seven to nine mile front where his personal view was affected by terrain and smoke or dust, the reliance on reports from subordinates as to progress, or the lack of it, was paramount. From these reports the real skill was in not over reacting but making a small number of measured responses, or to go and look for yourself. A major failing of new Kriegsspiel players at this level of command is to issue a stream of orders, or requests for information, without thinking of the game time that will pass before they reach their destination which may then make them redundant or impossible to carry out.
In table games we need to regulate this order stream depending on what level of play we are trying to represent. At the army/corps level the simple device of initiative points à la DBA(CC, Phil Barker) is a good method. It is a little artificial, but what it does reproduce is the inability to try and affect all events, a temptation that player’s slide into all too easily. Of course linking LoS conditions or received information to this process makes the whole sequence more credible.
What you are in effect building in is a representation of time passing and the vagaries in the command system of having to rely on local subordinates with the presence of mind to inform senior commanders what was going on in the heat of action. In this way, you don’t have a decision made on all the possible alternative events during the same period of play. This should be viewed not as rationing the commander’s ability to make decisions but rather as his limited reaction in terms of the piecemeal fashion in which Situational Awareness was updated to the point he felt he could make those decisions.
In other words we do not say he is only ‘allowed’ two decisions, rather that in this period of the game/battle he only had enough information or effective time to make two decisions. This is of course a supreme piece of rationalization but looked at in this manner and the way battles were actually fought it is a device that runs close to actual events without introducing yards of rules and conditions to produce the same result.
Justifiable Cause
Another concept that interests me is that which I call “Justifiable Cause” This is based on simple common sense principals and draws its inspiration from the “Dialoguing” method of the late George Jeffery introduced as part of his Variable Length Bound system, Code Napoleon, as George’s rules were known( The Courier, No 85 - ED.). Players, after writing orders for their units would move them freely describing their intentions and what their opponents could see until a reaction or Change of Situation (CoS)was reached. Where upon the issue of new orders or some form of combat/firing took place. Once these were resolved the amount of game time taken was recorded and events moved on until the next CoS took place.
This took a fair amount of recording and the more individual events occurred the worse this and the problems of co-ordination in game time became. As an alternative, particularly one that could be used with turn based games, I have been toying with an idea that changes in orders need only be recorded in outline following an agreement by both sides as to “Justifiable Cause” being present.
The arbiter of such a state would be the Situational Awareness conditions I have set out in this article being met, and the units concerned being in the proper or delegated chain of command of the general that is supposed to be making that decision. This could simply be a case that a command figure was in a position to meet an agreed list of conditions drawn from the four SA elements. In this way we could have more realistic circumstances governing changes in orders than the all too familiar player driven “well I can see it” perspective from high above the table top.
Now of course this does assume the adoption of some form of visibility rules and the creation of a pretty cute list of conditions but we are already doing some of the things that could be used in current rule sets. “How many friendly units advancing?” “How many on attack orders?” “How many retiring?”
“Number of units routed this move” are common questions that could contribute to Projection and Prediction. Also, we rate commanders by experience already so why not use this factor to gauge Comprehension or why not use quality of staff to help rate Perception?
There are many possibilities to the enhancement of command and control. Not all of them have to involve 10 charts and endless preconditions. Why not have a think about some and share them with us through The Courier. The only thing I ask is please, please, please, don’t come back and suggest a Comprehension or Perception Radius! Or, if you do make sure you have a really good case for it!
[5] Gourgaud, Gaspard. Sainte-Helene: Journal inedit de1815 a 1818, Paris
David Commerford is a resident of West London where he lives with his wife and three children. He has written articles for First Empire magazine and has been a member of the Southlands Wargamers for nearly thirty years. He was inducted as a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society (FINS) in 1997. David’s favorite aspect of Napoleonic gaming is to use rules as a living history tool in order to examine how commanders controlled battlefield operation.
-- Napoleon
Perception: acquiring the available facts
Comprehension: understanding the facts in relation to our own knowledge of such situations
Projection: envisioning how the situation is likely to develop in the future, provided it is not acted upon by an outside force
Prediction: evaluating how outside forces may act upon the situation to affect our projections
NOTES
[5] Napoleon The Final Verdict – Arms and Armour Press 1996 pp176
[5] As defined by Mica Endsley “Towards a Theory of Situational Awareness in Dynamic Systems” Human Factors, 37 (1995), pp 32-64
[5] The Waterloo Companion by Mark Adkin, Aurum Press Ltd, 2001, pp 296-301
[5] Napoleonic Principals of War by Tom Penn, First Edition 1997, Second Edition 2002
[5] Imperial Bayonets, George Nafziger, Greenhill Books, 1996, pp 133-152
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