I recently discovered The Gamers and their line of games. I was so impressed I immediately bought all their TCS games, many of their SCS and OCS games, took out a subscription to Operations magazine, and bought all the back issues. Why was I so impressed?

For once we have a company producing military games that is headed by a former military line officer (and enlisted man too, if I recall Mr. Essig's bio correctly). I hate to be a snob about this, but unless you were ever an officer or NCO in a line unit, you cannot even begin to appreciate the complexity of waging war. You can read every word ever written, and talk to every vet who ever served, and only then you might get an inkling of an idea of what goes on in the business of making war-and its consequences. That's why I'm concerned about having Bill Clinton as Commander-in-Chief. Sorry, no more politics, but I'm serious about this.

I also don't mean to belittle the importance of the "snuffy" or junior enlisted man who gets stuck executing all the grand schemes of his senior echelon. It is just that junior "EGrades" are not involved with planning operations at a high enough level to get a global perspective of the coordination required. Still, if you served at all at any grade in a line unit, you are magnitudes beyond the average non-veteran in understanding what it's all about.

As a person who has "been there," Dean Essig provides a guiding philosophy that keeps games in perspective with reality, normally in the form of restricting the kinds of things wargamers would love to do, but non-vets can't understand why not. And, as a gamer himself, he also keeps the games focused on the major tactical, operational and strategic aspects of "military problem solving" without cluttering the designs with multitudes of die rolls or the endless paperwork that generals and colonels have entire staffs to handle.

Self-Fulfilling Theories on Paper

What prompted this article was reading Lewis Pond's letter "Con the CWB's Forest Treatment" from way back in issue 5 of Operations. It got me thinking hard (not for the first time), not only about the ways a wargame cannot convey some of the uglier aspects of warfare, but more importantly, how easily erroneous conclusions can be drawn from these quantified and simplified portraits of complex, often unmeasurable events.

For those who haven't read Mr. Pond's letter, he basically states that woods hexes in the CWB series should offer a direct fire defensive benefit to units occupying those hexes. He argues that this is common-sensically obvious to anyone with half a brain, and that Richard Berg developed solutions to this in his Civil War designs where units do in fact receive defensive benefits when occupying those hexes [Ed. note: none other than Richard Berg of White Plains, NY, designer of among other games, the Great Battles of the American Civil War series].

The CWB design veteran, Mr. Dave Powell, indicated he couldn't find sufficient historical documentation to support the notion of Civil War commanders ordering their units into woods in order to reduce friendly casualties; and taking into account factors that he felt essentially canceled each other out, he chose not to include a woods defense modifier, especially given the somewhat largish scale of the CWB series at brigade level. All things considered, it sounded like alogical premise to me, especially since none of my albeit limited studies of the American Civil War provided me with any examples of this tactic either.

Since I am far from an expert on the Civil War, I will neither argue for or against a defensive terrain benefit for units in woods using Civil War tactics. I am however, an expert wargamer, if there can be such a thing, a serious military historian, and a former combat arms officer, an expert of sorts there I should say, and am thus in a position to compare my "cardboard war" experiences with its real world counterparts.

Mr. Pond's approach illustrates the pitfalls of drawing conclusions about "the art of war" from "common sense" applied to paper and cardboard, in particular, the notion that Mr. Berg came up with "solutions" to address the defensive ter-rain benefit of woods during the Civil War. My experience with both soldiering and wargaming suggests that there are no such things as "solutions" in a "game" attempting to simulate the complex interactions of human emotions, thoughts, training, doctrine, machinery, weather, terrain, social philosophy, and the political environment in an arena where the object is to violently kill other human beings under the most unbelievably repugnant physical and psychological conditions imaginable. There are only interpretations and abstractions.

Anyone who uses a game to determine reality on the battlefield is in for one heck of a shock should he ever find himself there.

Being There

Let me provide two brief examples of this sort of surprise from my own--thankfully peace-time--military career:

Prior to joining Army ROTC and then going on active duty as a tank officer, I played every tactical post-WWI game on the market, and I was good at them. Comes from having an obsessive compulsion about things that interest me, I suppose. Anyway, I knew I could do this Army thing and do it well, and I remember the very first time I lead an infantry squad during a field exercise. How much smaller a command can one have, right? Should be a snap, right?

Nothing went right in spite of my having a strong background in military history and years of wargaming experience playing the most detailed and sophisticated tactical level games in the history of modem wargaming. Here's why:

The first thing I noticed was that there was no such thing as a good field of fire. No matter where I looked, I saw dozens of blind areas or dead zones, and all kinds of folds in the ground and so on where bad guys could hide. (Where were the woods hexes that blocked, and the open terrain hexes that clearly delineated line of sight?)

The second thing was that I couldn't just move my "counters" willy-nilly where I wanted them. They moved wherever the hell they wanted! I had to go from soldier to soldier and tell each man exactly where he needed to go and what sector of fire he needed to cover. I often had to yell to be heard, and then the troops had to work with how they interpreted my shouted orders. And sometimes they were too far away to hear me anyway, especially once the firing started, because you can't hear a thing when an M-60 is rattling off burst after burst six feet from your head! (What the heck kind of Command and Control die roll was I rolling anyway?)

The third thing is that when the firing started, 1 couldn't see anybody. Not just the "enemy," but even my own troops. Once the ship hit the sand, everyone took cover and I couldn't see but maybe two or three men out of an eleven-man squad. I expected to not see the enemy--after all I had played games with hidden movement-but I never expected to not be able to see my own guys, especially when I knew they were all within a few tens of meters of me. I didn't even know if any, or how many had been "hit." I and the two men I could see might have been the only survivors. (Hey, what happened to my God's-eye view of the game map? This is worse than inverted/ dummy counters!)

Then, once I kind of figured out where the enemy was (contrary to the movies, modern military small arms to not make an appreciable muzzle flash regardless of whether shooting live ammo or blanks), I then ordered one fire-team to shoot at the bad guys (suppressive fire) while I led the other team down this draw to sneak up on the bad guys from the flank. At least that was the plan. Once we got down into the draw, the sides were so steep and muddy we couldn't get out of the darn thing. On the 1:25,000 topographic map I had, this draw was represented as a shallow, gentle stream bed. Of course, the map was ten years old....

The exercise ended when the enemy heard our thrashing about in the muddy, brush-filled draw and dropped a half dozen grenades down on top of us. I thank God that was only a training exercise. That little adventure educated me real quick that the operative part of the word wargame is game.

I got much better at this squad leading stuff the more I did it, but the same disadvantages were common to all exercises:

• You can't see what's going on except for immediately around you.
• You don't know what the terrain is really like until you walk it.
• You can't control anything that you are not directly, actively involved in controlling.

The good news is that the bad guy suffers under the same handicaps.

Second Scenario

The second example was when I was a tank platoon leader. Imagine a scenario similar to the one above, but instead of your squad being spread out over say, fifty or a hundred meters, picture instead your tank platoon spread out over five hundred meters or a thousand--in woods.

Imagine your radios work perfectly about seventy-five percent of the time and the rest of the time they don't, and the scary part is that when a radio goes belly up it doesn't shout, "Hey, I just broke!" Instead, you can be running for days with an intermittent glitch, short circuit, or loose transistor or microchip that allows randomly selected messages to come through or not, without your even realizing it.

Imagine having one tanker on of the twenty in the platoon hooking up his commo, helmet backwards in effectively shutting down the radio net because he thinks his helmet is set for "intercom" and in reality he transmits over the air every time he opens his mouth--with sometimes rather colorful remarks about everything from the girl waving from the window to the dubious parentage of his chain of command.

Imagine having a tank commander who's been in the army longer than you've been alive. Imagine he's a two-tour combat veteran, and the closest you ever came to combat was your ROTC and basic training, your wargaming, and that fight in junior high-and now you are his boss. Imagine further he is incompetent and cannot perform even the most basic NCO functions. You wonder how he survived twenty-six months in combat, and how you are going to convince him of your credibility and your right to lead, your shiny new lieutenant's bars notwithstanding.

In fairness, I'm certain the prospect of this baby-faced soaking wet behind the ears LT leading him into the "first battle of the next war" as we used to say, probably scared him senseless at times; especially during those not-so-rare moments when his Platoon Leader performed spectacular feats of stupidity as young, gung-ho second looies are wont to do.

Imagine your great plan of moving along a cleverly selected approach route disintegrating as half your tanks throw tracks and are immobilized before you realize the terrain was not really tank trafficable despite what the map showed.

Imagine driving your car with the windows taped up except for a slit about two inches high and a foot wide while being on the lookout for a madman trying to shoot it-and you-full of holes. Imagine doing it at night. In the rain. Without having slept for three days. Covered from head to foot in chemical protective clothing while wearing a gas mask so you can't even eat or drink, or having to be very careful when relieving yourself-after all there are some things you just don't want to get nerve or blister agent on.

Imagine pulling into a rearward battle position during a night defensive action because you just got your butt kicked off the one closer to the enemy, and discovering an enemy tank and infantry company already sitting there! (Man, none of this stuff happened in my Tank or Fireright games.)

What is interesting about these stories is that you can find countless anecdotal and historical references that highlight those very same things I personally experienced.

The moral of these stories is: the men running the wars are generally pretty good at it. They've trained hard in most cases and trained under as close to combat conditions as possible. Most of them served in combat and led in combat. And a funny thing happens: when you make a command decision and the result is the blood of other men on your hands, you generally learn pretty doggone quick how to keep as much of that red stuff off of there as possible.

History and Experience

So what about the simple, common-sense idea that trees stop bullets? No doubt they do. But this characteristic is most useful only if the trooper happens to be behind the tree at the time. My understanding of the linear tactics employed at the time leads me to believe that the huge majority of Civil War troops deployed in battle line in woods would in fact be "in the open," between individual trees, unlike modem tactics where every soldier takes cover.

And if you believe that Civil War troopers actually aimed at visible targets (I do, I would), then trees in general would provide little or no real cover to the unit as a whole, especially if the target unit was deployed far enough forward in the woods to actually fire back on the enemy. In fact, historical accounts indicate that combat in woods in the Civil War was at least as bloody, if not bloodier than engagements in the open. This seems to support the idea of shooting at the guys in the open between individual tress. But, whatever mechanism is used--bullet or bayonet--at whatever range-- three hundred yards or thirty--it doesn't matter much to the dead trooper.

Therefore, I submit that if Civil War commanders had found it more advantageous to use woods for cover in order to reduce casualties, and still retain the command and control benefits they would have had in the open, then they would have done so regularly, and it would have been commonly reported in the press, military journals and field manuals at the time and immediately following the war. Most Civil War battlefields abounded in "woods hexes" bordering "clear terrain hexes," yet my research shows not one example of commanders moving their units into the woods to reduce casualties while returning fire as their WWII counterparts would have done. I am forced to ask, why was this?

The American officers of the Civil War were not ignorant and, contrary to popular myth, were not using rote Napoleonic tactics, but tactics shaped as a result of studying actual recent battles. The official texts, manuals, and journals of the period show that the Crimean War just ten years earlier was a topic of intense study -- as was the anticipated effect of the rifled musket on tactics.

Technology and tactics are synergetic and shape each other. As technology advances, tactics evolve (eventually) to adapt the technology to its most efficient and effective use. As tactics change, newer technologies are developed to counter the tactics or technology of the other side. And sometimes an increase in the lethality of technology, e.g. the rifled musket, and its attendant increase on casualties, still did not outweigh the loss in command control (and firepower) that would have resulted had troops dispersed and "found their own trees."

So, in general, if it ain't in the history books, training manuals, and documentaries, it probably didn't happen--at least not very often--and for probably good reason in most cases.

Wargames, with their clearly defined procedures and quantifications of everything, yield well to logical analysis. Real warfare more often defies logic. So wargarnes can actually be historically misleading if they tempt us to put too much faith in common-sensical "solutions" to battlefield questions.

A seemingly reasonable explanation (of casualty rates or whatever) that disagrees with either firsthand experience or the weight of historical evidence is most likely either wrong or fails to take some other aspect of the phenomenon into account. This is especially true with wargames where so much of what the player knows, both historically with 20/20 hindsight, and currently with his satellite intel view of the board, was/is denied his real world counterpart; plus so much of the event and its environment is either abstracted or ignored in the design of the game.

One of the values of wargames is that they can give us some historical insight. But if you're going to use a "game" as a historical reference, you had better really understand the historical reality of the period and scale represented, so you can make an intelligent appraisal as to the reference's (game's) credibility as a historical source. After all, a wargame is just a series of abstractions based on interpretations based on in many cases, filtered historical information. If you start using one game or system as the historical yardstick by which to judge another, you have your cart and horse hitched up the wrong way around.