Connections 2000

History of Wargaming

Lecture by Lt. Col. Matt Caffrey


According to a wargame database, there have been over 4300 wargames published over the last half century or so. All fall on one rung or another, or sometimes between runs, of the wargame "ladder": model--simulation--simulation game--wargame.

Why study history and war? It's primarily from a learning (training) objective, but also with an eye towards planning and budgeting (try and figure out how much it would cost for a full-scale overseas wargame by moving all the assets ofthe US military!) aspects. You see, history tends to repeat themes:

    history leads into theory leads into doctrine leads into strategy leads into war experience which leads back into history.

These themes, besides impacting on history, also deal with the capabiliities and limitations of the people and forces involved.

Royal Toys

In the olden days, wargames were the povince of of royalty, for it was they who led the troops during a war. For example, the ancient Egyptians had a war game discovered from toys ina tomb. Fast forwarding to Frederick the Great in the mid 1700s, he was the first to use topographical maps to accurately portray a region of fighting. Ben Franklin caused somewhat of a stir by opining that commoners should learn to play chess--a notion the landed nobility found appalling.

In 1811, von Reisswitz introduced the Sand Table, which included modeled terrain, an umpire, and players split between two teams. In 1824, his son modified the system to include maps.

Later, von Moltke the Elder created a wargame club, which evolved into a war college. He would lead staff rides where the generals would go to a location, brainstorm about battles and strategy, conduct a wargame, and then lead a field exercise with troops to compare their brainstormed plans with reality. Prussian success in various 19th century wars ensured that other nations would copy such techniques as war colleges and staff rides.

In 1883, Major Livermore brings the German rules to the US, adjusting the combat results table in the process. Chief of Staff William T. Sherman ignores Livermore's efforts. three years later, US Navy Lt. Little starts naval wargaming, and by 1899, the US Army forms the War College.

These late 19th Century rules included morale and routs, using casualty stats from previous wars and a free kriegspiel process of umpiring that moved the games along faster. At the start of the 20th century, HG Wells had picked up and popularized wargames in the civilian arena, however, overall use declined due to lack of "face time" allowed from duties and that the Germans were now the "bad" guys and command staff didn't ant to emulate the Germans.

In 1905, the British fought a game vs. the Germans (and the Germans won).

In 1910, von Moltke the Younger took the Kaiser out of the game (too many German staff officers would simply agree with whatever the Kaiser said!), added Machine Guns (which weren't in the previous versions!), and added logistics (also not in previous versions...indeed, a wargame of the Schlieffen Plan finds the army running out of ammo, leading Moltke to create a motorized transport corps).

In 1913-14, the Russians wargamed an invasion of East Prussia to attack German forts. The two Russian lieutenants playing the Germans retreated into the lake district, counterattacked on the flanks and annihilated the Russian force. The game was dismissed, but the end results of the campaign when WWI actually started were the same.

In post WWI, wargaming declines. The US alters parameters to make its Navy cleverer than the Army or Air Force, the UK doesn't bother, and even Hitler orders wargaming.

However, in WWII, Manstein wargames a plan to cut through the Ardennes forest in 1940. It is successful and so goes history. Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR, is very accurate as the game simulated week after week from May to Novemeber 1941. However, it failed to incorporate all the USSR forces (saying only 60 divisions would be left in November when in fact 210 were left) and neglected to game the winter (figuring the campaign would be won before that). In Normandy, the Germans wargamed out that an invasion at Normandy was not a diversion, but the real thing, and showed that the invasion would succeed. So, they moved in additional divisions. They were going to wargame the scenario again on June 6, 1944. Commanders were away during the actual invasion.

In Japan, Pearl Harbor was wargamed twice, but neglected the political outrage of the US civilians. The famous Midway battle found a Japanese admiral restoring two sunk Japanese carrier for no other reason than national pride. Indeed, post-Guadalcanal wargames found the Japanese losing again and again, which is how they hit upon a strategy of making the war so costly for the US, the US would negotiate an end instead of taking casualties.

In post-WWII, wargames were eclipsed by the Atomic Bomb, as the military planners figured the bomb rendered all other weapons obsolete. However, with the emergence of the Cold War, wargaming re-emerges. The US Navy creates the first computerized wargame in the 1950s, the Pentagon simulates the Vetnam war in the 1960s, and in the 1970s the US Navy goes back to the 1930s-style global wargames and the USAF starts Red Flag exercises to teach pilots to last more than eight missions (most pilots were shot down before the eight mission. If you made it that far, you probably would not get shot down after that). In the 1980s, the emphasis changed again to joint, international wargames, and the USAF starts the Wargaming Institute. In the 1990s, the US wargamed the Iraqi campaign using "Soviet" style programmed moves. This effected the accelerated deployment of the Patriot anit-missile defense system and force transport systems, a cancellation of an air-mobile attack, and an estimate of 30,000 US casualties--the latter might explain why the entire war was cut short.

On the commercial side, the kings of wargaming divided into decades:

    1950s: Chris Roberts
    1960s: Avalon Hill (Dotts)
    1970s: SPI (Dunnigan)
    1980s: Crawford and Grigsby
    1990s: No one entity: it's a $25 billion market

Wargames are cheaper, have no environmental impact, involve less spying, and are crediblein Congress. On the down side, there are doubts about casualty calculations and exitisng designs have no relevence to situations like Serbia.

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© Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum
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