The Late 1940s and 1950s: The Long Road Back

Our expectations of the future shape that future. The United States expected peace to be guaranteed by atomic weapons, while the Soviets expected continued conflict and doubted the effectiveness of atomic weapons. Because of those expectations, wargaming atrophied within the United States and grew in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As with the space programs, the Soviets widened their lead in wargaming because the United States was standing still. Unlike space programs, Red wargaming was virtually unknown outside of the Soviet Union, so the lead in that field did not spur us to action. Still, this bipolar wargaming world quickly began to change. The seeds of the eventual recovery of wargaming in the West were planted even before its post–World War II eclipse.

Techniques and technologies developed during the war years would eventually support its recovery. A lasting legacy of the war was the mobilization of the scientific community for the war effort. The Manhattan Project is the most famous example, but the radar work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and countless other projects on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to Allied success throughout the war.

Those who came to be called the operations research (OR) community frequently had a rapid impact. They were first employed to help win the Battle of the Atlantic by seeking ways to use scarce Allied resources to the best effect. Due to some striking successes by war’s end, OR was being tasked to look into every type of military problem.

The war also spurred the development of computational devices for applications as diverse as code-breaking and artillery tables. The continuing requirement for computational machines during the beginning of the cold war provided the seed money for what would soon take off as the computer industry. As for the actual recovery of war gaming, the Navy again led the way. In 1947, the Naval War College increased its use of wargaming through the addition of a wargame -intensive logistics course and then in 1958 when the Naval War College’s computerized Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator (NEWS) became operational. While later articles would admit this first computerized wargame never quite worked (aside from its big status screen), the mere fact that the wargame was computerized lent an air of modernity to what was supposed to be an antiquated procedure.

The US Air Force’s initial use of wargaming came from the OR community. After the war, the Air Force facilitated the creation of RAND Corporation as a way to retain access to OR specialists. In 1948, RAND began experimenting with “crisis” gaming. By 1954, it launched a number of innovative war-gaming projects. RAND began a computer model of the cold war competition between the United States and the USSR. Input from the Air War College and the State Department prompted RAND to add political and economic factors. Though the depiction of these factors in a December 1954 wargame was viewed as crude, the potential value of including such factors was recognized.

To increase flexibility, RAND later turned to a Free Kriegsspiel style of play and in so doing reinvented the German political/military wargame. Also in 1954, RAND attempted to game through an entire nuclear war. The next year, RAND used an air warfare model to accomplish a “net assessment” at the Air War College. Given the image of OR at the time, this gave an impression of modernity to Air Force wargaming.

Wargaming also recovered to some extent in the Army. Stung by its lack of preparedness in Korea, the Army began a continuing series of field maneuvers. Their cartoon adversaries, the “Aggressors,” did not duplicate Soviet tactics, but it was a start. The Army did realize it might have to fight the Soviets, and it began to prepare for that possibility by starting the debriefing of German officers of the last army to do so. One of the things the Army learned from these German generals was the value that the Germans derived from wargaming.

top: Charles Roberts; bottom: Robert McNamara

In 1953, a young man named Charles Roberts started selling to civilians a map wargame he had designed called Tactics. By 1958, he had sold two thousand copies and had come within $30 of breaking even. Encouraged, he founded the Avalon Hill Game Company to sell war, economic, and sports simulation games to the general public.

By the end of the decade, wargaming was clearly on the rebound. In 1958, the US Marine Corps established a “Landing Force Wargame” series at Quantico, Virginia. Even the Harvard Business Review published an article on adapting wargaming techniques to develop business strategy. Talk about a comeback.

1960s: As Bad as It Gets

The 1960s got off to a promising start. While war gaming was also becoming more international, the main source for hope was the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. His strategy was to merge successful management techniques from General Motors with proven OR techniques. His goal was effective defense at a cost the United States could sustain over the long haul. At its core, his concept for approving/continuing defense initiatives was elegantly simple: accomplish a life cycle cost analysis to learn what a proposal would really cost and then use OR techniques to estimate military utility. The concept was sound, but problems would emerge during execution.

The 1960s also started well for naval wargaming, with Admiral Nimitz giving wargaming a ringing endorsement. He said, “The war with Japan had been [enacted] in the game room here by so many people in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the Kamikaze…” The Naval War College soon began offering a course in wargaming. Later the Navy conducted the first remote wargame, with the players aboard ship and the adjudication accomplished at the Naval War College. By the middle of the decade, the Navy had upgraded its wargaming system to the Warfare Analysis and Research System (WARS). Even so, it believed naval warfare was increasing in scope and complexity faster than the capabilities of its wargames could be increased.

Major advances were also made in Air Force wargaming. Working with the Joint Staff and RAND, the Air Force started to wargame the Strategic Air Command’s single integrated operational plan (SIOP) against a Red SIOP. The latter was prepared by intelligence officers who studied not only Soviet weapons but Soviet strategies and tactics as well. The Air Force also wargamed the defense of North America using a wargame called Big Stick. Big Stick was demonstrated at the Air Command and Staff College in 1961 and in 1964 became part of the school’s core curriculum. Finally, in 1967, the Air Force introduced the world’s first instrumented air weapons range. Established at Eglin AFB, Florida, and used in weapon-effectiveness testing, the full impact of this innovation would become apparent in the next decade.

Army wargaming also became more effective during the 1960s. Wargaming was used by helicopter enthusiasts to develop the concept of an air-mobile division. It then used wargaming in 1962 to sell the concept to McNamara, who directed that the Army quickly follow through with the idea. When the Army deployed its first air-mobile division to Vietnam, it, like the Marines’ before it, found that real combat was different from the wargames. Also like the Marines’, the Army’s helped ensure that initial concepts were close enough for field adaptation.

Joint wargaming was becoming a reality. In 1961, a wargaming operation was established at the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) level to provide an unbiased, joint arena to conduct McNamara’s wargames. The next year, predictions of a wargame cost study helped convince McNamara to support the creation of an air-mobile division, while relatively low-cost-effectiveness predictions influenced him to cancel the Skybolt air-to-surface missile system. This caused a storm of protests from Britain, which had spent significant funds on the program. The United States was blindsided by this criticism because McNamara’s attrition-per-dollar calculations did not even consider the possible diplomatic repercussions of program cancellation.

Attempts were made during the 1960s to broaden wargaming beyond attrition. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President John F. Kennedy had complained that his military advisers did not understand the political implications of their recommendations. This encouraged the use of politico-military war-gaming at the Pentagon and at professional military education (PME) schools. In 1964, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded efforts to produce a wargame that would depict all the political, psychological, and economic ramifications of an insurgency. This would have produced an entirely new generation of wargames capable of examining all wars in a much more comprehensive way. Regrettably, despite some interesting work in this area, the defense planning community continued to use attrition-based wargames.

In 1964, the JCS conducted a politico-military game called Sigma I-64. This exercise depicted US strategy options for Vietnam. The exercise was repeated with an even higher level of participation. In his book War Games, Thomas Allen implies that these wargames predicted a US defeat. However, review of the actual declassified reports on both exercises presents a different image. First, the strategy executed in the wargame did not match what followed in the actual event. During Sigma II-64, the Blue side immediately executed attacks on an expanded version of the JCS’s 94 Target Lists, and North Vietnam’s ports were promptly mined. Second, each exercise depicted only the first several months of US involvement. Even if they had been able to adjudicate the political consequences of US casualties, the wargames did not cover sufficient time for those consequences to arise. The most effective wargaming was done by the Communist North Vietnamese.

Using Soviet wargaming methods, the North Vietnamese wargamed each of their operations. Familiarity with the plan produced by the Soviet method allowed the Communists to conduct fairly complicated attacks without radios, accomplishing coordination using wristwatches and subordinates’ memory of the plan.

The 1960s witnessed the steady growth of civilian wargaming. While the decade started with one publisher and a few thousand annual sales, it ended with a half-dozen publishers with total sales of over 100,000 units per year. The sophistication of these wargames also increased due to the competition of the marketplace.

1970s: To Study War

Very little was published on wargaming in the early 1970s. Perhaps this reflected the anti-military attitude of the times. It appears that there was also something of a downturn in the actual use of wargaming. If so, the decline was short-lived. As before, the Navy led the way, but this time they were soon overtaken—by the Air Force.

The war in Vietnam was not going well. Among all the other problems, our air-to-air kill ratio had dropped from spectacular in Korea to dismal (occasionally worse than one to one, seldom even two to one). A study called Red Baron concluded we were teaching our pilots how to fly, not how to fight. If a pilot survived his first eight missions, his “on-the-job training” would teach him to fight, and he would survive his tour.

The Navy acted first by establishing its Top Gun school in 1971. The aggressor/instructor pilots flew small, nimble jets similar to those flown by the enemy. They also attempted to duplicate Soviet-style tactics. It worked. The Navy saw a significant improvement in its pilots’ kill ratios over Vietnam.

The Air Force response took longer to kick off but was more comprehensive. In 1974, the Air Force established the Fighter Weapons School. The school would be similar to the Navy’s Top Gun school but different in that air-to-ground tactics would also be taught. Then, in 1975, the Air Force initiated the Red Flag series of exercises to improve the fighting skills of all its combat pilots. Both the school and Red Flag used an electronic range like that at Eglin to allow more accurate adjudication and debriefing of engagements. Over time, the Air Force created an entire enemy “nation” in the Nevada desert complete with strategic targets guarded by simulated air defenses. This also provided a realistic environment for trying out new equipment and tactics.

Also in 1975, the Navy established its Command Readiness Program, an ongoing series of wargames played by the actual surface combatants. At decade’s end, the Navy launched a new batch of games, its Global Wargame series. A deliberate attempt to recapture the ability to gain valuable insights that Navy interwar games produced, Global also started with fast climactic naval battles. Like in earlier wargames, the rigors of wargaming changed expectations of a war with the Soviets.

The 1970s were good to commercial wargaming. An increasing number of publishers and growing sales encouraged innovations such as depicting the effects of morale, training levels, surprise, and many other supposedly “intangible” factors. Commercial wargaming was also starting to attract serious attention. In 1974, the US Army became the first service to buy a commercial-style wargame, the tactical ground combat simulation Fire Fight. In 1975, Origins, the first civilian wargaming convention, was held. Sales rose steadily during the decade, exceeding two million units in 1979.

Still, the trend with the most profound effect came from within the services. As the 1970s progressed, company-grade officers of the Vietnam era began to enter positions of greater authority. Many felt their fighting forces had been hamstrung by a failure of strategic vision and a lack of basic campaign planning. As individuals and as groups, many of them worked to ensure that the services would be better prepared intellectually the next time. In the Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Denny Drew pushed to put more “war” in the war colleges. In the Army, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Macedonia pressed for more wargaming.

1980s: Promise and Performance

Things seemed to come together for war gaming in the 1980s. Each service, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and commercial wargaming made major progress. The Army made the most important advances of the early 1980s. In 1980, the Army opened the National Training Center (NTC). This “Red Flag for ground forces” employed an instrumented range, technology similar to laser tag, and a credible aggressor force to produce the most realistic ground-combat environment ever. More wargaming was also being done at home station, thanks to an innovation by III Corps. It simply established a wargaming center at each maneuver base. Wargaming skyrocketed when overworked commanders found the centers meant it took less of their time to set up a wargame than other types of training.

In 1981, the Navy upgraded its WARS war-gaming system to produce the Naval War Game System (NWGS). Seven years later, they upgraded its system again as the Enhanced Naval War Game System (ENWGS). Each upgrade roughly doubled computing power. Yet, the scope of naval wargaming always seemed beyond its latest system. As in the 1950s, faculty filled the gaps with innovation, common sense, and long hours. The strain stemmed from increasing Naval War College and fleet use, and the Global exercises. As GLOBAL increased in sophistication, it became increasingly evident that a war with the Soviets would likely be protracted and that in a protracted war the Soviets were doomed. As GLOBAL attracted more of Washington’s power hitters, that perception became widespread, coloring not only Navy strategy but national strategy as well. As Global increased the credibility of wargaming with Congress, the Navy turned to wargaming to support its budgets. In 1988, the Marines began wargaming Program Objectives Memorandum (POM) initiatives as well.

In 1984, the Air Staff director of operations was given oversight of all Air Force wargaming. In 1986, construction was completed on the Air Force’s first wargaming facility, located at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Two years later, this $21-million facility/ computer system was declared fully operational—despite continuing problems with adjudication software. As with the early generations of naval computer adjudication, hard-working individuals came up with workarounds.

The 1980s were also successful but transitional years for commercial wargames. Publishers of printed wargames saw their sales plummet. Peaking at 2.2 million units in 1980, sales dropped to less than a million at mid-decade and half a million by the decade’s end. Much of the decline was due to the rise of a new (for civilians) wargame medium. Personal computers allowed the recreational software industry to take off, and with it, computer-based wargames for home use.

The 1980s also saw innovations in joint wargaming. In 1982, the National Defense University finally initiated a war gaming center, and the Warrior Preparation Center became operational in Germany. The latter was specifically designed to allow senior US leaders and NATO headquarters to try war plans without having to maneuver troops. Bills for exercising damage, environmental concerns, and concerns over Soviet capabilities to monitor live exercises all contributed to increasing support for the center. By the late 1980s, all area commanders in chief (CINC) were using wargames. A 1989 study concluded that US Central Command (USCENTCOM) was clearly ahead of the pack — a circumstance that turned out to be fortunate.

The 1980s also saw the first unclassified reports on how the Soviets war game. This was due in part to greater openness. Articles that wanted to appear frank but revealed little began to appear in the Soviet open press. However, the real meat came from defectors from the Afghan army. Trained in Soviet war-gaming methods, these officers were only too happy to provide details.

Another source was watching the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis used Soviet wargaming methods during their successful offensives during the Iran-Iraq war. However, Soviet wargaming could not adjudicate the strategic impacts of airpower. So, in 1986, Iraq contracted with the US defense contractors for a computer wargame.

Toward a History-Based Doctrine for Wargaming

Introduction
1811-1904: Wargaming Beginnings
1905–18: Wargaming and the Great War
1919–38: Interwar Wargaming: The Visionary and the Blind
1939-1945: World War II
1946-1980s: Decline and Revitalization
1990s: Gulf War and More