Peter Perla’s the Art of Wargaming: A

Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists

Edited by John Curry

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This book was first published in 1990 as The Art of Wargaming by the
United States Naval Institute.

This edition printed 2012

Copyright © 2012 John Curry and Peter Perla

The rights of John Curry and Peter Perla to be identified as Author of this
Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior written permission of authors.

Books edited by John Curry as part of the History of Wargaming Project

Thomas Allen's War Games professional wargaming 1945-1985
Army Wargames: Staff College Exercises 1870-1980.
Contact! The Restricted Canadian Army Tactical Wargame (1980)
Dunn Kempf : the Tactical Wargame of the American Army (1977-1997)
Tacspiel, the American Army's War Game of the Vietnam War (1966)
The British Army War Game (1956)
Dark Guest: Training Games for Cyberwarfare
Paddy Griffith’s Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun
Sprawling Wargames: Multi-player wargaming by Paddy Griffith
Verdy’s ‘Free Kriegspiel’ including the Victorian Army’s 1896 War Game
Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming
Phil Dunn’s Sea Battles
Joseph Morschauser’s How to Play War Games in Miniature
And many others

See The History of Wargaming Project at www.wargaming.co for other

publications.

ISBN 978-1-4716-2242-7

Cover photo taken by Tim Price MBE

Trademark Notice: The names of most hobby games are trademarks of the
companies that publish those games. Use of such a trademark to identify a
product discussed in this book should not be construed as implying the
sponsorship of the trademark holder, nor should the use of the name of any
product without mention of its trademark status be construed as a challenge
to such status.

To Steven and Sara—may they never see the game become a

reality; and to McCarty Little and Frank McHugh—may their
work on the first help keep us from the second.

Dr. Peter P. Perla is a senior research analyst at CNA, a Washington-

area, non-profit studies and analysis organization. He has published
numerous articles dealing with wargaming and defense affairs. He is also
the designer of commercial board wargames.

The original work is extensively referenced with endnotes; these

references are together at the rear of the book. Some footnotes have been
added to this edition. This are annotated with a * to indicate a footnote at
the bottom of the relevant page.

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Contents
Peter Perla’s the Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals
and Hobbyists
FOREWORDS to the original edition
Foreword by James F. Dunnigan
Acknowledgments
THE ART OF WARGAMING
INTRODUCTION
WHY PEOPLE PLAY WARGAMES
WAR GAME OR WARGAME?
PART 1: PERSPECTIVES
1: The Birth of the Wargames
THE FIRST NAVAL WARGAME?
FROM WAR CHESS TO WARGAME
VON REISSWITZ: WARGAMES TAKEN SERIOUSLY
THE HEYDAY OF KRIEGSSPIEL
"FREE" VERSUS "RIGID" KRIEGSSPIEL
H. G. WELLS AND MODERN HOBBY WARGAMING
STRATEGIC WARGAMING AND THE WORLD WARS
AMERICAN WARGAMING
2: Wargaming and the U.S. Naval War College
THE CREATION OF THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE
MCCARTY LITTLE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF NEWPORT
WARGAMING
THE FLAWED ORACLE―INTERWAR GAMES AND THEIR
RELATIONSHIP TO WORLD WAR II
STRATEGIC GAMING BETWEEN THE WARS
TACTICAL GAMING BETWEEN THE WARS
EARLY POSTWAR GAMING
NEWS AND THE ARRIVAL OF ELECTRONIC WARGAMING
FROM NEWS TO NWGS
THE WARFARE ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH SYSTEM
WAR COLLEGE REORGANIZATION
THE NAVAL WARFARE GAMING SYSTEM
THE TACTICAL COMMAND READINESS PROGRAM AND
THE GLOBAL WAR GAME
THE ORACLE RETURNS?
3: Wargaming after the War
WORLD WAR II AND THE BIRTH OF OPERATIONS
RESEARCH
THE RISE OF POLITICAL-MILITARY GAMING
CHARLES ROBERTS: WARGAMING BECOMES A HOBBY
THE SIXTIES: WARGAMING GROWS UP
VIETNAM: WARGAMING IN DECLINE
THE REBIRTH OF WARGAMING
GROWTH AND CHANGE
INNOVATION AND EVOLUTION
HOBBY GAMING ENTERS THE EIGHTIES
PROFESSIONAL GAMING REAWAKENS
THE PERSONAL-COMPUTER EXPLOSION
WARGAMING OUTSIDE THE U.S.
NEW DIRECTIONS OR OLD DISAPPOINTMENTS?
PART II PRINCIPLES:
4: The Nature of Wargames
ELEMENTS OF A WARGAME
THE LEVEL OF A WARGAME
OTHER WAYS OF CATEGORIZING WARGAMES
SO WHAT IS WARGAMING GOOD FOR?
5: Designing Wargames
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES: A VIEW FROM THE HOBBY
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES: THE PROFESSIONAL
PERSPECTIVE
COMMUNICATION AND THE ART OF WARGAME DESIGN
THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF WARGAME DESIGN
6: Developing Wargaming
WHAT IS WARGAME DEVELOPMENT?
THE GOALS AND ACTIVITIES OF GAME DEVELOPMENT
VALIDATION AND GAME "REALISM"
PLAYTESTING
PREPLAY AND BLIND TESTING
PREPARING THE FINAL RULES
7: Playing Wargames
ROLE PLAYING
LEARNING FROM PLAYING WARGAMES
PREPARING TO PLAY
PLAYING THE BAD GUYS
POST-GAME COMMENTARY
8: Analysing Wargames
DOCUMENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF WARGAMES
9: Integrating Wargames with Operations Analysis and
Exercises
DEFINITIONS
WARGAMES AND EXERCISES
WARGAMES AND ANALYSIS
SYNTHESIS
PART III PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
10: Navy Wargaming Today
EDUCATIONAL USES OF WARGAMING
RESEARCH USES OF WARGAMES
DEVELOPING INSIGHT AND CONSENSUS ABOUT
STRATEGIC ISSUES
11: What of the Future?
A QUESTION OF BALANCE
COMPUTERS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE
INHUMAN OPPONENT
WHO WANTS ROLE SIMULATION ANYWAY?
NETWORKING AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING
THE FUTURE OF MANUAL AND SEMINAR-STYLE
WARGAMES
THE HOBBYIST AND THE PROFESSIONAL
A VISION: OR IS IT JUST A GLEAM?
HOT WASH-UP
Afterword
Appendix Questions for Wargame Analysis
End Notes
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 FOREWORDS to the original edition
Foreword by Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, USN (Ret.)

The battleship is back! Indeed, the four WWII behemoths, now

averaging 45 years since commissioning, have returned to active service for
what could be another 30 years as the centerpiece of the Battleship Battle
Group, perhaps the ultimate in surface action combatant forces of the
twentieth century. As I and the OPNAV[1]* staff arrived at the decision to
reactivate and modernize these magnificent ships in the late 1970s, a
question frequently directed our way by the critics—and they were many—
was, to what purpose? To what avail? In what scenario? Against what
adversary? Advocates of Dr. Peter Perla's thesis on the utility of wargaming
will be dismayed to know that none of these questions were fended off with
the aid of gaming analyses. Our professional judgment prevailed—and only
history will tell us if that was sufficient. I hasten to acknowledge,
nevertheless, that OPS analysis/ gaming techniques should have been
employed as we grappled with this decision, an acknowledgment I readily
make at this juncture, particularly after having the advantage of new
wisdom invoked by reading The Art of Wargaming.
There is a message in this of some import, I would suggest, which is
that the pages that follow need to be digested by "operators" and
"tacticians" of the naval profession, not just by inquisitive and intent Ph.D.s
and theoreticians. Perhaps that explains with some justification why this
operator has been asked to set the stage for the benefits that are to come to
every reader of this important work. Operators are known for their
skepticism of the usefulness of wargames in their insatiable quest for new
tactical and strategic options. This one is no exception. The history of
combat in the twentieth century provides a plethora of support for such
skepticism. Artfully countering this viewpoint, however, The Art of
Wargaming explores extensively and thoroughly the history, evolution,
employment as well as uncertainty of wargaming so as to make this volume
one of the most thorough compendiums of wargaming thought available on
this controversial subject and a "must read" for the professional.
Wargaming likewise makes the reader acutely aware of the fact that as
with most every dimension of warfare, the pace of change in wargaming
techniques in the last several decades has been nothing less than awesome.
To naval officers of my vintage, who were trained on the checkerboard
floor of the Naval War College and weaned on the now archaic NEWS,
Admiral Nimitz’s observations regarding the value and utility of wargaming
as it applied to the ultimate execution of the Pacific War constitutes the
baseline from which we are prone to judge the marvels and potential of
today's wargaming techniques.
In fact, the encroachment of the computer into the world of wargaming
has been so stunning and dramatic as to prostitute the term "wargaming"
into representing many things to many people, whether it be the hobby
game, pol-mil[2]*, or the full-spectrum global wargame. Biases become
inevitable. Mine reside significantly on the side of focused use of
simulation (gaming) as a tactical training tool born of the expediency of
real-world exigencies. The speed of encounter confronting today's tactician,
brought about by the explosive rate of change in weapons technology has
placed the individual combatant in an almost untenable position. Not only
has the factor of time been compressed by orders of magnitude in the realm
of decision making, but the devastating destructiveness and precision of
modern weapons impute a burden for wisdom that staggers the imagination.
Yet wise and accurate the commander must be. And, not just the
commander. The burden flows down to the lowest tactical element. The
Persian Gulf incident of 1988 in which the USS Vincennes launched
surface-to-air missiles at a supposedly hostile target only to blow a
commercial airliner carrying 290 souls out of the sky is a vivid case in
point.
A lesson seems clear. Wargaming, in terms of extensive employment of
tactical simulators, is no longer a luxury. It is an essential element of
combat team training. It is my conviction that wargaming as a training tool
constitutes the overriding value of the wargaming technique, whether
tactical or strategic. I would almost go so far as to say the only value. For I
contend that using the wargame beyond the training dimension is fraught
with flotsam that endangers the utility of the outcome unless managed with
great care by the experts. Numerous examples are brought forth by Peter
Perla in the pages that follow to support this contention. The number of
instances in which "one-game experts" expound mightily of lessons learned
that are well off the mark is disquietingly large. Yet, it would be foolhardy
and disingenuous to suggest that strategic and pol-mil wargaming are not
without value. They are, and must continue—but with due caution as to
how the end product is employed.
It is also important to bear in mind that the vast majority of major
decision makers in times of crisis and conflict will be those who have
seldom if ever participated in a wargame of any magnitude. It is not
unimportant to note that a major reason for Admiral Nimitz's admiration for
the value of the strategic wargame played during the interwar years was the
fact that it had been repeated more than 300 times before being put to the
test. Therein explains the potential for great advantage today in the
employment of the computer-aided wargame, especially as a research tool
—with its facile ability to replicate and vary key inputs. Valid lessons are
indeed possible from wargames if one is fortunate enough to have the time
and assets for repetitive play in a variety of scenarios looking for trends and
criteria that are consistent and immutable. Even then, the assumptions
themselves can be unwittingly flawed, thereby trapping the wargamer in his
or her own deception. Happily, even assumptions are now amenable to
change and replay with some degree of ease.
The use of simulators as a gaming technique to present individuals,
units, and even battlegroups with a wide variety of tactical scenarios can
provide a volume of encounters of sufficient magnitude as to develop, in
fact, a highly competent combat team. Procedures, doctrine, and teamwork
can be honed to a relatively sharp edge. Repetitive training proves itself
important. A degree of experience can be achieved that is not otherwise
available from another source. But combat, fear, danger, losses, the
unexpected, and fatigue will still be missing—omissions that must never be
overlooked.
I recall well when one of the better uses of the wargame as a tactical
decision-making training device was instituted by Admiral Ike Kidd in the
mid-1970s when he served as Commander in Chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet.
Under his astute direction, the Tactical Command Readiness Program was
implemented to expose his principal operational flag officers and their staffs
to a variety of complex tactical situations, culminating in at least one war
game at the Naval War College. The invention of this training program was
highly praised. The utility to the commanders involved is unquestioned.
Even then, however, the interpretation of its importance as a strategic
planning device was significantly overextended by the Washington
bureaucracy into the arena of budgetary infighting. Its ultimate absorption
into the heated debates over the "Maritime Strategy" of the 1980s was not
only unfortunate and highly disruptive to a clear appreciation of the essence
of that strategy but was often exploited by those critics of the U.S. Navy's
build-up in terms that were not endearing.
The higher the aggregation of the gaming scenario, the more vulnerable
the outcome is to misinterpretation and abuse. The Global Wargame at the
Naval War College is the most obvious case that comes to mind. Initiated in
1981 on my watch as CNO, the Global Wargame has been repeated
annually with increasingly enthusiastic participation and estimates of its
value. No doubt these evaluations are justified. But I would suggest that
perhaps after it too has been run 300 times or more, one might then be
permitted to draw some conclusions with a reasonable degree of certainty of
their validity. Which is not to suggest that global wargames should not be
continued. They should for the educational value they serve and the
opportunity afforded wargame researchers to strive to improve the process.
Thus, the art of wargaming is, indeed, just that—an art. Dr. Perla
provides the student of wargaming an exceptional book that extends across
the full history of wargaming in its many forms and will no doubt provide
the reader an understanding of this artful tool significantly beyond the grasp
most will have had before turning over its first page. Such has certainly
been my experience.
 Lastly, Dr. Perla's concern that the cyclical interest in wargaming
shows evidence of being on the wane at present deserves our attention and
prompt rectification, if so. In some ways, it could be suggested that if the
use of tactical simulators is an appropriate classification of a wargaming
tool, then it is not likely that wargaming will ever again be on the demise.
For simulators are here to stay and will only become more effective, as well
as more complex. With the introduction of artificial intelligence,
knowledge-based system techniques will be but one example of new
dimensions yet to be exploited. On the other hand, if the concern is over the
declining interest in wargaming for pol-mil and strategic scenarios,
fluctuations in their attractiveness might well be beneficial. In any event, let
it be suggested that as long as there are men and women of intellect,
inquisitiveness, imagination, and determination—which is virtually assured
—the future of wargaming as an essential art to be mastered by some and
exposed to many can be reasonably assumed. The Art of Wargaming will go
a long way toward making it so.

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 Foreword by James F. Dunnigan
Bear with me for a few minutes and I'll make reading this worthwhile.
This is being written from the perspective of someone who has designed
over a hundred published wargames, plus numerous DoD[3]*-related
projects and books. I first discovered commercial (Avalon Hill) wargames
during the early 1960s while doing my military service. Being nineteen
years old and in an artillery unit on its way to Korea, I found the games a
compelling means of discovering more about what I was getting into. It was
fifteen years later, in 1977, that I discovered what the DoD gaming
professionals were up to. My fifteen years of isolation from DoD gaming
were devoted to creating commercial games that informed and entertained,
in that order. I was asked, at the memorable 1977 Leesburg DoD game-
developers conference, what type of game I would produce for DoD game
users. My answer was simple. It had to be a game the decision makers
could easily use by themselves, with really minimal training, and obtain
believable results immediately. Or, as I put it then, "a game the user could
play on a computer terminal at home." I haven't changed my attitude, and
such a concept has been technically feasible for over ten years. This
approach simultaneously attacks several problems most DoD games suffer
from: believability, usability, immediacy, and impact.
Let's face it, most DoD gaming results are viewed by many with more
than a little disbelief. Part of this disdain can be attributed to the atmosphere
in which DoD gaming operates. Much of the decision making that gaming
supports is political in more ways than one. The most pervasive "dirty little
secret" of DoD gaming is that the games often are there to support decisions
and conclusions already made. The tail wags the dog. Fortunately, DoD
game developers are largely an intelligent, adaptive, and persistent lot. And
the climate is changing. My work had some impact on the changing
atmosphere. The three hundred games I published while running SPI
reached a large number of military people and many DoD game developers.
This had an impact. As one of the few non-DoD game developers invited to
speak to DoD audiences, I constantly remind everyone what can be done
and describe several ways to do it. Basically, you obtain good games by
paying attention to past experience (history) and letting the chips fall where
they may. Combat is a dispassionate arbiter of what works and what doesn't.
If your games reflect political rather than combat reality, you're likely to
find yourself fatally ill-prepared on the battlefield. More users and
developers of DoD games are coming to appreciate this. However, current
peacetime illusions will always carry more weight than future wartime
reality. Unless someone is shooting at you, immediate political demands
take precedence over potential military ones. This can change if you
actually develop realistic wargames, use them diligently, and widely
distribute the results. This was the advantage of commercial wargames,
especially the ones that covered current and future wars.
I was shocked, but not particularly surprised, when the Arab-Israeli
Wars game we developed during the summer of 1973 proved to be a very
prescient predictor of what would come to pass during the actual October
War. There were many other incidents like this, particularly with regard to
weapons and troop performance. The DoD games are beginning to move
into the realm of the real. For example, the Pk (probability of kill) values
derived during realistic exercises at the army's National Training Center
were found to be only half those used in one of the army’s more widely
used simulations. The variances are usually larger but are beginning to
converge with reality. The historical record is now more frequently
consulted for guidance on what should be going on in DoD wargames.
It's fitting that this book has heavier emphasis on naval wargaming. For
a number of reasons, naval wargaming has achieved a qualitative and
quantitative edge over land and air gaming in this century. This is
particularly true with the U.S. Navy, which established a strong gaming
tradition between the world wars and carried these traditions forward into
the age of high-tech gaming after World War II. Never underestimate
tradition and momentum. The U.S. Army has never gotten a full head of
steam in the gaming department and the U.S. Air Force is not much better
off. There are other reasons why gaming is more likely to thrive at sea. For
one thing, naval battlefields are inherently neater than army and air force
equivalents. It is also easier for fleets to exercise together and under
combat-like conditions. Armies are ponderous and expensive beasts to
exercise, and the air force requires realistic ground-force participation in
order to run its own large-scale exercises under something approaching
wartime conditions. Remember that a U.S. SSN playing tag with another
boat is only the push of a button away from combat. In all other particulars,
an exercise like that is nearly identical to the wartime article. This makes it
easier to keep the wargames honest.
There is a persistent problem with military games and modeling that
can be summed up as "garbage in, garbage out." Nothing new here except
that historically there has always been a steady drift from reality in the
peacetime military. Warfare is a complex process that cannot be easily
understood when you can't actually do it. So it's understandable that
peacetime preparations, including gaming, will "drift" away from the
unknown wartime reality. Contributing to this drift are new weapons and
equipment, new tactics and doctrine, and new political situations. Social
changes also have an impact: things like economic growth or decline,
different partisan political differences, and the replacement of conscription
with volunteers. These changes are complicated by changes within potential
enemy nations. All of this is further clouded by secrecy. Even if one or
more nations were to successfully game out their own and an opponent's
wartime prospects, their opponents would be generally ignorant of these
game results and their contribution to changes in military policy.
All of this drift from reality creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and
surprise when war breaks out. This chaos is an historical constant. Even the
U.S. Navy, which did some superb gaming during the 1930s, was often
caught short during the first year of World War II. Their list of cataclysmic
defeats attests to this. Pearl Harbor and Savo Island are two of the more
noticeable examples. While command lapses were partially responsible for
these defeats, there were also serious shortcomings in perception that had
not been eliminated by the 1930's gaming.
Comparisons between the pre-World War II gaming and what goes on
today are an interesting exercise. World War I was a traumatic experience
for most participants. Wargaming was then already an established and
respected institution, having been steadily developed for over a century in
its modern form. World War I had spawned numerous technical and
doctrinal changes. The innovations that just got started in 1918 were carried
forward in the 1920s and 30s. Twenty years of peace saw the development
and deployment of radically new items like mechanized divisions, long-
range bombers, and aircraft carriers. More efficient submarines and
weapons of all types were introduced. Doctrine and tactics could hardly
keep up. With such chaos to work with, it's a wonder the wargamers were
able to do anything at all. That wargamers were able to accurately model
future combat with useful reliability shows that all the uncertainties
mentioned above do not eliminate the usefulness of wargames.
The changes since World War II include completely mechanized
armies, ICBMs and nuclear submarines. "Smart" weapons are replacing
troops more and more. Electronic devices are everywhere. Wargames will
still work amidst all these untried-in-combat innovations only if the gamers
play devil's advocate diligently. This means thorough field testing to create
realistic wargame parameters. This is where peacetime wargamers
traditionally come to grief. There is always pressure, political and
otherwise, to cook the data base. Before the Japanese defeat off Midway
Island in 1942, Japanese admirals dismissed wargames that showed they
could lose their carriers using their current plans. The Japanese admirals
went ahead, and lost four carriers and naval superiority in the Pacific.
You trifle with wargame validity at your own risk.
 Gulf Strike was a challenging game that was updated twice to
reflect the changing realities of potential war in the Persian Gulf. It
allowed the wargamer to face some of the problems that the real
commanders had to face. (Courtesy of Victory Games Inc).
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 Acknowledgments
When I started this book, I never expected that writing the
acknowledgments would be one of the most difficult tasks. Where to start?
Where to stop?
First of all, I want to thank my wife, Jo Ann. Jo Ann not only put up
with many evenings and Saturdays without a husband, but she also read the
early drafts and made many suggestions for improving the manuscript. Her
help went far beyond the call of marital duty, and it and she are deeply
appreciated.
I would also like to thank Dot Yufer, who saw fit to assign me to a
navy wargaming project as part of my real job, and Phil De Poy, who
supported my continued research. That assignment led by circuitous routes
to Thomas B. Allen, author of War Games[4]*, who introduced me to the
Naval Institute Press.
During my research and writing I spoke and corresponded with many
people who willingly gave up their time to help me find information or
avoid saying too many stupid things. I am especially indebted to Mr. John
Johnston, who unselfishly shared some of his own research and insight into
the history of wargaming. He, too, is writing a book on the subject, and I
wish him much success.
Mark Herman, Bill Nichols, and Rodger Nord helped immeasurably by
discussing their own perspectives on gaming and the ideas underlying their
work. I am also very grateful to Jim Dunnigan, not only for his foreword,
but also for his sage advice to a fledgling author. Mr. Thomas Shaw and
The Avalon Hill Game Company were kind enough to help with my
research and allow me to reproduce the map of their Jutland game in the
book. Admiral Thomas B. Hayward provided far more than a foreword for
the book. His reference to one of my Naval War College Review articles in
a book review he wrote for Proceedings helped convince me that maybe I
did have something worth saying.
To help me say it correctly, the staff of the War Gaming Department at
the Naval War College provided many helpful insights and comments on
the early drafts of the manuscript. Special thanks go to Captain John Heidt
and Captain Jerry Gordon, USN, for all their assistance. Anthony Nicolosi
and the Naval War College Museum provided several of the photographs.
Captain Jay Hurlburt, USN (Ret.), former head of the War Gaming
Department, contributed many useful suggestions and a wealth of personal
insights.
I must also thank Mr. William Leeson, who provided the translations of
several of the critical articles dealing with the Prussian Kriegsspiel. Thanks
also to the publishers of National Defense for their permission to reproduce
in chapter 10 some of the material from the February 1987 issue.
Much of Part II is based on work originally done for the U.S. Navy and
Rear Admiral "Skip" Armstrong, USN (Ret.). (All of the work has been
cleared for public release.) Some of the many naval officers who
contributed their thoughts and experiences to the ideas in those chapters
include Captains Monroe "Hawk" Smith, Ted Hill, Pat Brisbois, Don Estes,
and Bob Gamba; Commanders Dallas Bethea, Larry Stratton, and Jamie
Gardner; and Lieutenant Commanders Pat Cassidy, Ray Barrett, and Mike
Wilmore.
My civilian colleagues at the Center for Naval Analyses included
Darryl Branting, Jack Hall, Al Hepp, Ralph Passarelli, and
Richard Simon. Dave Dittmer provided valuable comments on
the text from his perspective as a naval operations analyst in Washington,
out in the field, and at the Naval War College. Thanks
also go to Pamela Charles and Ann Fitzgerald, who helped me track down
many old books and articles, to Roger Rudy for his help with some of the
figures, and to Pat Thorne for her patience with my copying needs.
Finally, I want to thank, or at least try to thank, two very special friends.
Michael French is a hobby gamer who has on more than one occasion
administered a beating to my ego. He also waded through the first draft of
the book and helped smooth out several rough spots. His most significant
contribution, however, was the fact that he refrained from killing me for
taking up so much of his wife's time.
In many ways Beth French is ultimately responsible for this book's
being written in the first place. It was Beth who told Dot Yufer about my
background in wargaming, and so helped launch the assignment that, in a
sense, is now finally over. Unlike a chemical catalyst, however, Beth did
not simply start the ball rolling and then sit back and watch. Without her
help with the typing, initial editing, and proofreading of the manuscript, the
book would probably still be scattered all over my office. She saved me
from my tendency to get carried away with fancy words and convoluted
phrases, encouraged me when I thought I would never finish, and kicked
me in the tail when it seemed as though I was trying my best to make sure
that I didn't finish. I owe more to her than I could ever hope to repay.

For this second edition of the book I must thank John Curry for
honoring me by including this work in his series of historical books about
wargaming. Literally, without John this version of the book would not exist.
I must also thank my wife, JoAnn, not only for putting up with me all these
years since the first edition; not only for doing yeoman work on
proofreading the draft of this edition; but most especially for saving my life
to see this effort go forward.

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THE ART OF WARGAMING
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 Introduction
Why people play wargames
Games about warfare have probably existed nearly as long as war itself.
I suspect that almost everyone who reads this book has heard the story of
how modern chess evolved from an ancient Indian game of war in which
the pieces represented the various components of the armies of the time:
cavalry, elephants, foot soldiers, and so on. Somehow, though, the idea of
making a game out of violence, destruction, and bloodshed seems so self-
contradictory as to be almost absurd. Yet, despite this fundamental
contradiction, or perhaps even because of it, games about war continue to
exist and grow in popularity, among both gaming hobbyists and defense
professionals.
Indeed, 1987 was in many ways a banner year for those who devise
and use wargames. Early in the year, professional gamers from all four
military services testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee
about the techniques of wargaming and its influence on the development of
U.S. military strategy and policy. Over the Fourth of July weekend, the
Origins convention drew gamers from around the world to the Baltimore
Convention Center. And during that year, two books about wargaming
were published. One, a major work called War Games by investigative
journalist Thomas B. Allen[5]*, dealt with many of the same questions
asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The other, a less-
ambitious book called Pentagon Games by long-time hobby-game designer
and observer of defense affairs John Prados, looked at how military games
are designed and used and included three actual games.
In early 1988, the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State
sponsored a two-day conference in Washington about the use of Serious
Games to answer Serious Questions. The conference was attended by more
than two hundred military and civilian wargaming professionals, including
one of hobby gaming's best-known personalities, Jim Dunnigan, now a
consultant to professional wargamers.
 With such a long history and high level of current interest, it might be
tempting to think that the use of games and gaming in the study of military
topics must be a well-developed and well-understood art form, perhaps
even approaching the rigor and status of a science. Why, then, another book
about wargames and wargaming so soon after its most recent predecessors?
The fact is that wargames and wargaming are consistently
misunderstood, denigrated, even denounced, not only by gaming outsiders,
but also by gaming proponents and practitioners. This unfortunate situation
is a result of a failure to reconcile the fundamental ambiguities of
wargaming, to understand the nature of the tool—the game—and of the
process of using it—gaming.
Hobby gamers understood more of the nature of the process earlier
than their professional counterparts, but because for the most part they were
only vaguely familiar with other forms of military analysis and simulation,
they could not clearly articulate gaming's value. Professional gamers, those
working for the defense establishment, had a much broader perspective, but
were apparently too self-conscious of the toy-store image to accept games
for what they are. The professional's reluctance to recognize the inherently
dual nature of gaming is well reflected by his tendency to insist on using the
two-word term war game in place of the hobbyist's integrated word
wargame.
In 1987, a book titled Team Yankee gave a fictional account of the
experiences of an American army unit in a hypothetical Third World War
between the Soviet Union and the United States. Later that year, Game
Designers Workshop published a hobby wargame of the same name. The
introduction to the game captures many of the reasons why people play
wargames.
The experience of reading Harold Coyle's Team Yankee gives a feel for
the action that modern combat can have. Team Yankee, the game, takes the
concept one step farther and actively involves two players in the actions and
decisions that Sean Bannon [the book's central character, and commander of
combat team Yankee] and others will have to make in a succession of
modern battles.
 Along the way, players will experience firsthand the capabilities of
modern weapons, both U.S. and Soviet, and see their effects and how they
are used on the modern technological battlefield.
Team Yankee is an easy game to learn, and an easy game to play. Its
lessons, however, are important ones that need to be learned.1
These sentiments are well supported by the findings of a survey
conducted by the wargaming hobby's premier independent magazine, Fire
& Movement. When asked why they played wargames, the most frequent
response of survey participants was “to simulate what they had read."2 The
sentiment is not a new one; it was eloquently expressed by H. G. Wells in
his 1913 book entitled Little Wars.

How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real

Thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative
strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of
accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed or
sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated
country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal
boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage
or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and
charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a
real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.3
There, in a proverbial nutshell, does Wells capture the essence of why
people play wargames.
Ask a hobby gamer why he plays, as Fire & Movement did, and you
will get answers like: "I enjoy the intellectual challenge and competition";
"I am a student of history"; "I like the fellowship and social exchanges that
gaming provides." Such statements are all true, but they are also
incomplete. Wells was more honest; wargamers seek information,
understanding, and (be honest now!) glory.
 Jim Dunnigan said that "the most common reason for playing the
games is to experience history.”4 He further defined that experience in
terms of "being able to massage information in order to see what different
shapes the information is capable of taking." Dunnigan, and many of the
other leading figures in the present-day hobby world, focuses on the
intellectual side of gaming, on the quest for more information and improved
understanding. This focus is not surprising when you consider the quantity
and depth of the research that underlies most historical board games—the
genre most familiar, and owing so much, to Dunnigan and his
contemporaries.
Wells, on the other hand, while acknowledging the intellectual aspects
of his game, focused on its emotional side. The wargame provides an
opportunity for glory without gore and defeat without destruction. By
involving the player as an active participant in the events, not merely as a
passive observer, wargaming provides a unique learning experience that
leads to a deeper and more personal understanding and appreciation of
warfare than can be attained by any other method short of actual
participation on the field of battle.
Yet, most hobbyists (and nearly all professionals!) are squeamish about
the emotional side of gaming. In the first issue of Moves magazine, several
prominent game designers, critics, and players debated what is known as
"The Rommel Syndrome." This syndrome named after the famous German
desert commander and acknowledged master of mobile warfare, was
described as follows:

1) A person who plays war games is essentially

undergoing all of the rigors of a real commander, less the
horror of war, and 2) a person adept at war games will be
adept at real war. These two forms are the Rommel
Syndrome: the delusion that each wargamer can become his
own Rommel and lead his troops to victory.5
 Where those who expressed concern about this "immature" tendency of
wargamers to identify too much with their game personas went wrong was
in giving gamers too little credit for common sense. Perhaps the most
perceptive response to this attitude was that of Redmond Simonsen who
argued that trying to force people to be more "mature" in their attitudes
about wargaming was an attempt to suppress "one of the prime reasons
people participate in hobbies: to have a controlled model (of the
uncontrollable real world) in which to act out their fantasies . . . and they do
recognize them as fantasies—they just don’t want to be constantly reminded
of the fact.”6
Of course, those who play in professional games do so for reasons that
are much different from those of their hobby cousins. Although many
professional gamers experience the same feelings of intellectual and
emotional challenge that the hobbyists do, that is seldom the reason that
they are playing. Typically, their motivation is more mundane; playing is
part of their job or their education. As such, they often resent the term
"playing" and sometimes even the term "game," preferring the euphemisms
(and misleading ones at that) of "exercise" and even "interactive
simulation."
Hobbyists have suffered from a sense of self-consciousness and
defensiveness about their pastime as well. Anyone who has ever been asked
the incredulous question "You mean you play games about war?" (often
accompanied by a look of borderline revulsion) might be forgiven for a
certain reluctance to discuss the hobby with the uninitiated. As a result,
wargaming (and the broader category of "adventure gaming") has been a
relatively small and closed society about which the general public knows,
and cares, very little. In fact, hobby gaming has suffered somewhat from its
connection with fantasy games, whose practitioners enjoy an environment
rich in swords and sorcery and have sometimes been accused of aberrant
behavior.
Fortunately, the last decade has seen some progress in the public’s
perception of wargaming. In some ways the burgeoning popularity of the
microcomputer, and the growing number of wargames available for these
machines, may have helped to broaden wargaming's popular base. Why is
this fortunate? Well, for hobby gaming the answer is obvious; new players
mean new customers and new opponents to play.
It is less obvious that the trend is fortunate for the defense community
or even society at large. Yet I believe that this is so. Although war has
always been unpleasant, especially for civilians caught in its wake, the
dawn of the nuclear age has made the direct effects of war almost
incomprehensible. Earlier societies understood the weapons of their time
because they lived with them every day. The sword, for example, was
functionally little more than a large and elaborate knife, something even the
poor and uneducated knew and used. The effects of such weapons, what
they could do to human beings, did not need to be studied because they
were experienced at close range. The introduction of specialized
mechanical devices for killing, especially the advent of firearms, began the
process of separating warfare from the day-to-day experience of the average
person.
Politicians have said, probably from time immemorial, that "war is too
important to be left to the generals." Modern war is too important to be left
to the politicians. Even below the nuclear threshold, the destructiveness of
modern weapons is difficult for anyone to fully comprehend. But if modern
societies are to engage in warfare, no matter how "limited," then the nature
of the terrible price to be paid must be understood more deeply and more
widely.
If the use of military force is to be avoided when it is inappropriate, and
applied judiciously when it is, then everyone, not just generals and
politicians, must understand the consequences. No amount of cardboard-
and-paper board games or computer games will bring about this popular
understanding of war, not alone anyway. Yet, if they are taken seriously
enough by their creators and players to be accepted as valuable learning
devices, wargames can have an important role in this long and essential
educational process.
This is also true for the professional military wargamer. Wargames have
traditionally been used to help prepare junior officers to meet the
requirements of higher command by giving them a small taste of the
problems and opportunities of commanding armies or fleets. New
implements of war and concepts for their use have been explored on
gaming tables before they ever appeared in the field. This learning process
is, if anything, more urgent today than in the past. It is not only the
destructiveness of war that has made quantum leaps in the last hundred
years; so too have the cost of the tools of war and the speed with which they
can work their effects. The choice of the best weapons and the men who
will most skillfully employ them is a major concern for the military and the
nation. Wargames and wargaming are important tools for helping to sort
through such choices.
All that sounds pretty ambitious, and perhaps it is a bit hard to believe,
especially if you have never played a serious wargame. That you believe
right now is not important; convincing you that it may be true is what this
book is all about. Writing this book has been more than just a way for me to
fill dark and stormy nights. It is my hope that by explaining the nature of
the tool—the wargame----and the process for using it----wargaming----their
true value and place will become clear to both the hobbyist and the
professional, both practicing and potential. It is also my hope that reading
this book will be more than just a way for others to fill their own dark and
stormy nights. If this book can convince wargamers—hobbyists and
professionals alike—of the need to integrate the lessons learned by all
gamers, the future of wargaming can continue to expand its capability to
educate its players by involving and entertaining them.
The first step to take, as is so often the case, is into the past. Part I looks
at the history of wargaming in both its hobby and professional incarnations.
The goal of this foray into the long and fascinating history of wargames is
to discover why they were played, what tools the different generations of
wargamers devised, what problems they faced, and what progress they
made. The answers to these questions will, of course, vary, not only
between hobbyist and professional, but also from place to place and time to
time. There is a great deal of common ground, and the threads of several
important themes wind their way throughout, many of them coming
together in the history of wargaming at the U.S. Naval War College.
Based on an understanding of the history of wargaming, Part II isolates
the threads and ties them together. It defines some fundamental principles
of what wargaming is and what it is not. It describes the subjects that
wargaming is useful for exploring, and suggests how wargaming can best
be used. This is the tricky part, for too often in the past wargaming's
proponents have oversold their wares as a kind of magic answer to all the
world’s questions. That certainly is not the case nor is it my intent. Nor is
wargaming the worthless, misleading dose of snake oil its detractors would
have you believe.
Wargaming is part of a larger toolkit of techniques useful for learning
about warfare. Part III of the book begins with a discussion of where and
how wargaming fits into the larger picture. This final part builds on the
historical perspectives and the theoretical principles of the first two parts,
both to examine some of the trends in current navy wargaming from this
broadened perspective and to project into the future of wargaming. It argues
that the war aspects (or realism) stressed by the professionals and the game
aspects (or playability) more often stressed by hobbyists need to become
better balanced. This cross fertilization of hobby playability and
professional realism can help both types of games improve their ability to
educate and enlighten their users through the powerful medium of active
and absorbing involvement in the challenge of making "life and death"
decisions.
A key element in understanding the past, present, and future history of
wargaming and its lessons can be found in the story of its use by the U.S.
Navy, and in particular at the U.S. Naval War College. Despite the danger
that its author (a naval operations research analyst, after all) may be accused
of professional bias, the book contends that the Naval War College, of all
U.S. professional gaming organizations, has most consistently and
successfully espoused the use of wargaming as both an educational and
analytical tool. This has not been so because of any dedication to
developing larger and fancier mathematical or mechanical models, though
the college has been intimately involved in such developments. It is true
because the source of the Naval War College's leadership resides in an
underlying, almost subliminal, philosophy of never allowing the tools to
dominate the process, of recognizing the ultimately central importance of
the human being as both player and warrior. It is a philosophy of balance,
perhaps influenced by the arguments of the War College's most famous son,
Alfred Thayer Mahan, for a "balanced fleet." Balance is of central
importance in dealing with so self-contradictory a subject as wargaming.
OceanofPDF.com
 WAR GAME OR WARGAME?
If there is a central theme to this book, it is my belief in the overriding
necessity of turning a war game into a wargame, of integrating realism and
playability in a delicate balancing act designed to achieve a well-understood
and well-chosen objective. A wargame must be interesting enough and
playable enough to make its players want to suspend their inherent
disbelief, and so open their minds to an active learning process. It must also
be accurate enough and realistic enough to make sure that the learning that
takes place is informative and not misleading.
Wargames revolve around the interplay of human decisions and game
events; this active and central involvement of human beings is the
characteristic that distinguishes wargames from other types of models and
simulations. A wargame’s maps, rules, pieces, or computers are only the
media through which competing decisions are implemented and judged.
Wargames are tools for gaining insights into the dynamics of warfare. They
can help players come to a more complete understanding of the sources and
motivations underlying the decisions made by historical commanders by
placing players in the shoes (or at least the headquarters) of those
commanders and challenging them to do better. Games dealing with current
or future military situations can help explore the potential implications of
various courses of action, and can raise important questions whose answers
can only be found through actual military operations or exercises, or
through careful and rigorous mathematical analysis.
Wargames are best used to investigate processes. They can help the
hobbyist and the historian better understand the principles and limitations
by which military command was or could be exercised under a wide variety
of real or hypothetical past, present, or future conditions. They can help the
professional commander and staff officer experience decision making under
conditions that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in peacetime (such
as massed aircraft carrier battle group operations, or full-scale
mobilization). Wargames provide an inspiration and incentive for learning
the facts of history or current practice, and they can impose a structure and
discipline that force game designers, players, and analysts to organize those
separate facts into operationally meaningful packages. They can help
wargamers explore the feasibility and implications of alternative strategic
plans, concepts of operations, or technological innovations. Finally,
wargames provide a unique forum for communicating ideas in vivid and
memorable ways, and for discussing the validity and applicability of those
ideas in a more empirical and less abstract way than the exchange of
scholarly papers.
The process of wargaming provides many opportunities for learning.
Learning occurs during the research that precedes and accompanies the
design of the game, during the play of the game as the participants absorb
and act on the information presented to them, and after the game during the
inevitable post mortems (or "hot wash-ups"). Whether it involves informal
discussions (or arguments) about how one player was successful over his
opponent (usually the result of rolling better dice, at least from the loser's
perspective) or formal analysis of the structure and play of the game, the
hot wash-up is a crucial part of the gaming process.
A wargame's structure is built during the game design and development
process. The designer must understand the game's objectives and translate
those objectives into the infrastructure, information, and mechanics through
which those objectives can be met. After this initial design is prepared, the
game development process tests and refines it to ensure as far as practicable
that the game is complete, valid, and effective at achieving its goals.
Although some of the details of the design and development process may
differ between hobby and professional games, the fundamental principles
remain fairly constant.
The same holds true, if perhaps to a lesser extent, for the play of hobby
and professional games. Professional games are played to meet formal
educational or training objectives, or to conduct research about specified
issues or concepts. Players in professional wargames must understand that
their decision-making processes are the key subjects of the games'
investigation or instruction. Effective play of professional wargames
requires that the participants prepare for their roles by reviewing the issues
to be explored during the game and by understanding the real-world
systems and concepts they may be called upon to employ. They must play
their game roles seriously and diligently. They must also be familiar enough
with the mechanics of play to allow the game to flow smoothly and to
enable them to interpret the inevitable artificialities that result from the
game's compromises with reality. Postgame comments and criticisms by the
players are an important element of the process of analyzing the game,
learning what it has to teach, and achieving its objectives.
One of professional wargaming's most serious dilemmas is an almost
universal tendency to confuse wargaming with systems or operations
analysis. Good professional wargame analysis resembles exploratory
science or historical research far more closely than it resembles systems or
operations analysis, subjects with which many of the people involved in
professional gaming may be more familiar. To be of value, wargame
analysis must be based not on a complete numerical tabulation of forces and
losses during play, but on careful and comprehensive observation of the
gaming process. It must include thorough documentation of critical
assumptions and decisions, and the rationales for each. Finally, those who
use the results of a professional wargame and its analysis need to be aware
of the central difference between wargame models and operations research
models. Although mathematical models are essential for simulating the
occurrence and outcome of game events, their numerical outputs are best
regarded as inputs to the gaming process rather than as its results.
Wargaming is not, after all, a good tool for producing answers to technical
or quantitative questions.
The professional wargamer must remember not only the possible uses
of wargaming, but also its potential abuses. In particular, he must remember
that, though powerful, wargaming is still only a tool. It is an imperfect
mirror of reality, reflecting it best in the decision-making processes of its
players. As a result, interpreting the insights derived from wargaming
requires special care.
It is also important for the defense community to remember that
wargaming is only one of the tools needed to study and learn about defense
issues. For the professional, wargaming must be linked with the lessons of
exercises, mathematical analyses, history, and current operational
experience in a continuous cycle of research that allows each method to
contribute what it does best to the ongoing process of understanding reality.
Analysis quantifies the physical parameters and processes, wargaming
explores human decision making, exercises test human and mechanical
abilities to carry out decisions, and history and current operations illustrate
what the actual outcomes of military evolutions might look like. Only by
integrating the information available from all these techniques can the
defense community hope to gain a better, more balanced understanding of
the reality of modem warfare.
It is not immediately obvious that the hobby gamer is under this same
sort of compulsion to learn from wargaming and to integrate its lessons with
those of other tools and processes. Hobby wargamers play wargames
because they enjoy the intellectual challenge that games embody, and for
myriad other reasons as well. Such reasons may range from the simple joy
of competition to the Walter Mitty fantasy of commanding the operations of
armies and controlling the destinies of nations.
What many professionals may fail to understand about their hobby
counterparts is that no serious hobby wargamer plays merely to pass the
time. Indeed, the amount of time passed in the play of most hobby
wargames would imply that gamers either have a pathological need to kill
time, or are in pursuit of some higher goal whose attainment is worth the
price of the many hours invested. Even the simplest of today's hobby
wargames can take four hours to play to a decision. The most complex
hobby games can rival not only the weeks involved in the play of the largest
professional wargames, but the months spent fighting the actual historical
campaigns they represent.
What is it about hobby wargames that inspires such devotion and
sacrifice by their players (not to mention their families)? Competition,
fellowship, and spending an enjoyable social evening certainly play a part
in the attraction, but those can be obtained in sports, or bridge, or any
number of other pastimes. What makes wargaming unique is its ability to
teach its players something about war and something also about themselves.
These are the same characteristics that make professional wargames
important research and educational tools. The designers, players, and
analysts of hobby wargames have far more in common with their
professional counterparts than either group may imagine or care to admit.
The serious designer of hobby wargames will outline his objectives and
research his topic as thoroughly and as carefully as his professional
counterpart. The serious player will study the history represented by a game
and spend hours, days, or even weeks devising a strategy and plan of action
for achieving victory. The serious game reviewer (dare I say analyst?), a
breed spawned by the wargaming hobby's growing interest in fostering
more accurate and more playable games, will dissect a game's research,
assumptions, and mechanics and report on his assessment of their validity
and their effects on the play of the game. If it can overcome its self-
consciousness and prejudice, the professional wargaming community can
learn much from hobby wargamers. This book is only the first step in a long
and surprisingly important journey to bring those two communities closer
together.

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 PART 1: PERSPECTIVES

Victory Games 2nd Fleet, game of Modern Naval Combat in the North
Atlantic. The scenario is in 'Harm’s Way' and the NATO ships are starting
to probe the Russian submarines.

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 1: The Birth of the Wargames

Nobody really knows when or where human beings first used small
objects to represent the maneuvers of warriors on a stylized piece of terrain.
Possibly the first "toy soldiers" were little more than polished stones, and
the first game board no more than a flat spot in the dirt. Nor do we really
know who was responsible for the first formal rules for moving the objects
around the board and fighting with them. We do not even know why the
first wargame was invented. What we do know is that toys and games based
on warlike subjects existed long before the dawn of written history.
Archaeologists have unearthed sets of miniature soldiers representing
ancient Sumerian and Egyptian armies, and games like chess and Go,
primitive wargames at best but still games dealing with military concepts,
have been played continuously for centuries.1
Despite our uncertainty about the true origins of wargaming, it seems
somehow fitting and at the same time satisfying to follow the lead of
Captain Abe Greenberg of the U.S. Navy and credit the invention of the
first wargame to Sun Tzu, the Chinese general and military philosopher
whose classic Art of War has influenced and enlightened so many readers
for so many centuries.2 (And, incidentally, has also served as the inspiration
for the title of this book.)
Greenberg credits Sun Tzu with creating the game known as Wei Hai
(meaning "encirclement") about five thousand years ago. Little is known
about the game or its actual origins, but it appears likely that it was similar
to, and probably the original version of, the later Japanese game of Go. Like
Go, Wei Hai used a specially designed abstract playing surface upon which
each of the contestants maneuvered their armies of colored stones. In
keeping with Sun Tzu's philosophy of resorting to the chances of battle only
as a last resort, victory went not to the player who could bludgeon his
opponent head-on, but to the first player who could outflank his enemy.
 In India at about the same time (give or take a thousand years), a four-
sided board game known as Chaturanga began to become popular among
the nobility. Unlike the spare, lean games of the Far East, Chaturanga had
lots of local color. The playing pieces were not simple smooth stones, but
elaborate representations of foot soldiers, chariots, elephants, and cavalry.
These pieces maneuvered over a playing board according to a set of fixed
rules, but the outcomes of the moves were judged by the roll of dice.3
Most writers on the subject seem to agree that modern chess evolved
from Chaturanga. If recent experience is any indication, the number of
players was reduced from four to two because it proved too difficult to find
four people willing to invest the time and effort to play the original version.
Similarly, the randomness and luck introduced by the dice was probably
done away with by a sore loser who blamed his defeats on bad luck rather
than inferior skill.
Over the centuries chess grew in popularity until it achieved its current
status as one of the world's foremost games. It is the most highly developed
and longest-lived game of its type. Those early games were wargames only
in a very abstract way. The stylized, almost cartoon-like representation of
actual warfare that games like Chaturanga and chess employed were almost
certainly never intended to be anything more than introductions to the basic
principles of military thinking.
The chess-like games require the players to focus on a well- defined
objective and to evaluate the abilities of their own and their opponent's
forces. They must analyze the strengths and weaknesses of various
dispositions, and devise strategies and tactics to overcome the enemy's
strength and compensate for their own weakness, and thus achieve the
objective. All of these skills are central to military thinking, yet it is a
tremendous step from playing chess on a board of sixty-four squares to
leading an army on the field of battle, even an ancient Persian army.
The recognition that games like chess were too abstract to be useful as
a tool for teaching the finer points of the art of war led in the mid-
seventeenth century to variations and complications of the basic chess
model to add more and more military detail and flavor. The first game of
this new wave to receive enough attention that its name and existence were
recorded for history was the "King's Game" or Koenigspiel, invented in the
German town of Ulm by Christopher Weikhmann in 1664.
Weikhmann's game was based on chess, but employed a larger board
and provided each of its players with thirty pieces. Like chess, each of the
pieces was named for a character common in the political and military
world of its time. There was the inevitable king, a marshal, colonel, captain,
and various numbers of lieutenants, chancellors, heralds, knights, couriers,
adjutants, bodyguards, halberdiers, and private soldiers. As in chess, each of
the pieces had its own peculiar movement capabilities.
In many respects, Koenigspiel and other similar games, which came to
be known collectively as "military chess" or "war chess," were little more
than fancified and overcomplicated versions of their venerable cousin.
These games were heavy on what today we might call "chrome" (period
color, if you like), but rather light on technical military content. Despite this
fact, Weikhmann claimed that his game "was not designed to serve merely
as a pastime but that it would furnish anyone who studied it properly a
compendium of the most useful military and political principles."4
Weikhmann's remarks are perhaps the first recorded instance of game
designers overselling his wares. Much of the literature dealing with the
history of wargaming suggests that games of the "war chess" variety were
considered by the players of their time to be valuable "training" devices. It
is difficult to accept such evaluations. It seems highly unlikely that any
military professional could have believd such abstract representations of
reality could be useful for much more than teaching the basic terminology
and principles of warfare.
Although "war chess" and other early games were thus at best
rudimentary wargames, the inevitable processes of fiddling with the rules to
increase the games' realism slowly led to the introduction of three
fundamental concepts central to the future development of wargaming.
Although it is not known when each of these ideas first appeared, all three
were incorporated into a game invented in 1780 by another German, Dr. C.
L. Helwig.5 Helwig's game made use of the concept of aggregation,
employing a single playing piece to represent a large body of soldiers or
organized combat units. It replaced the abstract, bicolored chess board with
a multicolored one that represented different types of terrain. Finally, it
employed an umpire to supervise the play of the game (and, we might infer,
to referee the resulting arguments between players).
Helwig was the Duke of Brunswick's master of pages, and he designed
the game to be both entertaining and educational for the group of young
noblemen charged to his care. He sought to entice them into thinking about
the important military questions of the time and to teach them some of the
basic elements of military art and science.
Although it was a major innovation, Helwig's game still retained many
of the basic trappings of chess. The playing surface was larger than a chess
board, containing 1,666 spaces. But the spaces were still basically the
squares of the chess board. Red squares were mountains, and blue squares
were lakes or rivers; light green squares represented marshes, and dark
green squares symbolized forests; black and white squares were open
terrain, and buildings were depicted by half-red squares.
Physically, the playing pieces were essentially chess pawns, but they
represented several different types of military units. Each of the two
opposing sides deployed about one hundred and twenty pieces: infantry
battalions, light and heavy cavalry squadrons, artillery, and even pontoons
and pontoniers[6]*. Players also could employ about two hundred special
pieces to represent fortifications and entrenchments.
A dotted line across the middle of the game board separated the
opposing sides at the start. The combat units had to cross the line to try to
capture the opponent's main fortifications, which were deployed in opposite
corners of the board. The pieces moved in a manner somewhat similar to
chess. Infantry moved in a straight line, and light cavalry employed a move
very like that of a chess knight, first thrusting forward and then fanning out
to a flank.
Farrand Sayre quotes Helwig from a 1781 letter as saying: "Numbers
of military men, profound in the theoretical and practical science of their
profession, examined it; . . . they recognized in it a very efficacious means
for attracting the attention of young men destined for military service,
creating in them a taste for the service, and lessening the difficulties of
instruction."6
Apparently the game enjoyed some success, and its use spread to
France, Austria, and Italy. Over the next half-century it spawned a number
of imitators and many fancified variations. All of these games, which were
put into the class of "military chess" or "war chess," clearly and
unashamedly stressed the game aspect of wargaming at the expense of the
war aspect. They were designed to be a pleasant entertainment for the petty
nobility who made up their principal audience. They were also designed to
provide a little painless and basic education in the terminology and
principles of war as taught at that time. If they were perhaps overly rigid
and formal to the anarchic eyes of today’s wargamer, they were, after all, a
product of their times, when war itself sometimes seemed as rigid and
formal as a mathematical proof. "Military chess" was in many ways an
outgrowth of the general notion prevalent among the military philosophes
of the time that much, if not all, of war could be reduced to basic concepts
and formal rules. As McHugh so aptly described it, "War chess resembled
rather than simulated warfare. In some ways it might be considered as
having the same relationship to later war games as the game of Monopoly
bears to current business games."7

THE FIRST NAVAL WARGAME?

About the same time that military chess was the rage on the continent, a
Scotsman, who had never been to sea, devised an ingenious method for
representing combat actions between sailing ships. John Clerk used small
wooden models to reenact the great naval battles of history. But mere
historical study was not his goal; he sought no less than a chance to
revolutionize the naval tactics of his day. Using his models, he studied the
way that ships moved and fought and devised more efficient tactics for their
employment.
In the preface to his major work, An Essay on Naval Tactics,
Systematic and Historical, Clerk wrote the following. "As I never was at
sea myself, it has been asked, how I should have been able to acquire any
knowledge in naval tactics, or should have presumed to suggest my opinion
and ideas upon that subject." [Emphasis added.] His explanation revealed
the seriousness and depth of his study: "I had recourse not only to every
species of demonstration, by plans and drawings, but also to the use of a
number of small models of ships which, when disposed in proper
arrangement, gave most correct representations of hostile fleets, extended
each in line of battle; and being easily moved and put into any relative
position required, and thus permanently seen and well considered, every
possible idea of naval system could be discussed without the possibility of
any dispute."8
Clerk's approach is well described in his own words. "[A]s often as
dispatches with descriptions of these battles were brought home, it was my
practice to make animadversions, and criticize them, by fighting them over
and over again, by means of the aforesaid small models of ships, which I
constantly carried in my pocket; every table furnishing sea-room sufficient
on which to extend and maneuver the opponent fleets at pleasure; and
where every naval question, both with respect to situation and movement,
even of every individual ship, as well as the fleets themselves, could be
animadverted on; . . ."9, (If, like me, you were unfamiliar with the word
animadversion, it is fairly archaic and means a critical and usually
censorious remark. Clerk's use of the term is certainly colorful, if perhaps a
bit redundant to modern readers.)
By these means Clerk was able to work out the geometry and the
mathematics involved in sea battles. He studied the effects of wind and ship
maneuvers, the firepower of their weapons and the damage they could
inflict. Through his dedicated effort he began to piece together his insights,
which he illustrated with detailed drawings. In 1779 he circulated the
preliminary results of his work among a few experienced sailors and
prominent naval officers. Their generally favorable comments encouraged
him to publish a more complete version in 1782. Copies of this version he
sent to various influential naval persons, including Admiral Sir George
Rodney, who was soon to take a fleet to the West Indies.
Rodney was particularly taken with Clerk's novel approach to breaking
an enemy's line of battle, a tactic seldom employed at that time. Later in
1782 Rodney made an opportunity to put the tactic to the test of battle in an
engagement against the French fleet of Admiral de Grasse. Rodney credited
Clerk's tactics with the British success, which resulted in the annihilation of
the French fleet and the capture of de Grasse. The great Lord Nelson
himself was to employ variations of Clerk’s techniques to even greater
effect in 1797 off Cape St. Vincent, and also in his storied and ultimate
victory at Trafalgar in 1805.
Clerk had been in the right place with the right tool at the right time.
Although it is difficult to call his device a true game (the lack of active
opposition makes the term manual simulation seem perhaps more
appropriate), it is difficult to believe that many of his experiments did not,
in fact, much resemble games in the truest sense. Clerk’s technique was
similar to the use some of the eighteenth century military experts made of
scale models of infantry units to study the basics of battlefield maneuver.
Where Clerk had the advantage over his contemporaries, who were
concerned with combat on the land, was that the flat tables on which he
maneuvered his model fleets could readily represent the surface of the
ocean over which the real fleets sailed and fought. The inventors of land
wargames had no such luxury; they were stuck with the chess-like board of
squares until someone came up with a better way of representing the
complications of terrain.

FROM WAR CHESS TO WARGAME

In 1797, a scholar and military author by the name of Georg Venturini
designed a new game that was published in the German territory of
Schleswig. Venturini's game was based on the style of "war chess," but
pushed its development to its most advanced form. Venturini was one of the
lesser military philosophes, the author of the impressively titled work A
Mathematical System of Applied Tactics and the Science of War Proper. He
published his game under the title Rules for a New Wargame for the Use of
Military Schools, a book of some sixty pages.10
Venturini's game board still used the conventional square grid of
Helwig's basic system, but expanded its size to about 3,600 such squares,
each of which represented one square mile. As with the earlier game, each
of the squares was colored to represent the terrain contained within it. Most
importantly, the board was no longer a mere abstract piece of imaginary
terrain. It represented a portion of one of the most fought-over stretches of
real estate on the continent, the border between France and Belgium.
The playing pieces that maneuvered over the simulated ground
represented not only infantry and cavalry brigades, the principal combat
arms, but also included various supporting arms and equipment. Pieces of
different shapes and sizes symbolized bridges, fortifications, supply
magazines, artillery, convoys of wagons, and even field bakeries.
Venturini's balanced view of representing an army's need for logistic as well
as combat elements is one that modern wargame designers and players
would do well to emulate.
Although still restricted by the artificialities imposed by the square grid
of his map, Venturini attempted to make his forces move more like real men
and animals than chess pieces. He even included restrictions on movement
during winter months and incorporated the effects of proper support and
provisioning of the combat arms.
As its title indicates, Venturini intended his game to be used by military
schools, not any budding hobbyists. Its quantum leap in realistic
representation of actual military operations required the introduction of
complex rules for movement, combat, and logistics. Indeed, the modern
hobby gamer who is impressed (or appalled) by the thirty-two- or sixty-
four-page rules books of contemporary high-complexity games should
ponder the implications of a sixty-page set of eighteenth century game
rules. Undoubtedly, the game was plagued by the bane of all detailed
manual games, slow play, and Venturini's comment that "one should not call
this officer's exercise a game" was probably an accurate assessment of its
entertainment value."11
Venturini's game apparently achieved a certain amount of popularity
with military-minded men in Germany, Austria, and Italy, but it was not
without its detractors (a common theme among virtually all wargames).
General von der Goltz, an eminent Prussian soldier of the latter nineteenth
century, commented wryly that it “resembles very closely the game of
‘poste et de voyage' ... in which, upon making an unlucky throw of the dice,
one tumbles into a swamp, or breaks an axletree, or experiences some other
such mishap. . . . This war game is a bad product of the refined military
education of the period, which had piled up so many difficulties that it was
incapable of taking a step in advance."12
But even as Venturini advanced the square-grid-based wargame to its
highest pre-twentieth century form, new developments were on the horizon,
portending a revolution in wargaming of immense proportions. The key
ingredient, and one we today easily take for granted, was the introduction of
accurate maps.
As early as 1730, a Dutch engineer had devised a means of using
contour curves to represent the bottoms of rivers. By the end of the century,
a version of that technique began to be applied to maps of the countryside.
These new maps were used by Napoleon to great advantage in his conquest
of much of Europe. The new maps and Napoleon's revolution in the art of
war provided the motive and opportunity for breaking away from the
confines of war chess and its abstractions. As more realistic models of the
ground became available, new ways of employing them were applied to the
wargame. The watershed, perhaps not surprisingly, came in Germany.

VON REISSWITZ: WARGAMES TAKEN SERIOUSLY

As the nineteenth century broke over a war-torn Europe, the pieces of
the wargaming puzzle lay strewn around the continent. The process of
fitting those pieces together was begun by a Baron von Reisswitz, who was
not himself a soldier, but was a civilian war counselor (Herr Kriegs-und-
Domanenrath) to the Prussian court at Breslau.13 Von Reisswitz discarded
the game board of war chess in favor of a sand table in which actual terrain
could be modeled in relief. The playing pieces were made out of wood, cut
to scale to represent the frontages taken up by the military units of the time.
Symbols representing the different types of units were pasted to the blocks.
By a stroke of good luck, von Reisswitz and his game had come into
contact with a Prussian officer by the name of von Reiche. The latter just
happened to be the captain of cadets at the Berlin garrison, and in 1811 was
responsible for instructing the Princes Friedrich and Wilhelm (later to
become no less than Kaiser Wilhelm I) in the art of fortification. He
happened to mention the game to his young students, who promptly
petitioned their governor, Oberst (colonel) von Pirch II, to arrange for a
demonstration at the castle in Berlin where the princes lived.
Von Reisswitz, von Reiche, and another young officer of von Reiche's
acquaintance (2nd Lieutenant, and later General, von Wussow) were invited
to arrange such a demonstration, and the princes enjoyed the game so much
that they wanted to play it again. Von Pirch, who had watched the play of
the game with some interest, agreed and also allowed them to tell their
father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, about their experience. The king was
fascinated by the idea of this new, much more accurate representation of
war, and advised von Pirch that he would himself like the opportunity to
witness a demonstration of the game.
Imagine for a moment what von Reisswitz must have felt like when he
heard this news! But after his first flush of delight, von Reisswitz decided
that the sand table on which he currently played the game was not really
appropriate to so great an occasion. He thereupon began the time-honored
practice of polishing up the physical presentation of the game before
attempting to "sell" it to the boss.
He also nearly blew it by taking so long! It was not until the following
year that von Reisswitz finished constructing his fancy new portable
system. Although the king had almost forgotten about the game by that
time, he agreed to a demonstration, and "was not a little astonished to see
something in the shape of a massive piece of furniture arrive."14
 The new apparatus "was in the shape of a large table open at the top for
the terrain pieces to fit into. The terrain pieces were three to four inches
square, and the overall area was at least six feet square. The small squares
could be re-arranged so that a multiplicity of landscape was possible. The
terrain was made in plaster and was coloured to show roads, villages,
swamps, rivers, etc. In addition there were dividers for measuring distances,
rulers, small boxes for placing over areas so that troops who were
unobserved might make surprise attacks, and written rules which were at
this stage not yet in their fuller form. The pieces to represent the troops
were made of porcelain." The play was driven by a “General Idea” or
scenario that described the situation in which the players found themselves
at the start of play.
At this stage in its development von Reisswitz's game rules dealt only
with the movement of the troops, and not with combat. The results of
engagements were worked out by the players themselves. By all accounts
one of the players, the king himself, was very enthusiastic, keeping his
family up well into the night to play.
By the early 1820s, however, the novelty of the game had worn thin,
and the relative peace on the continent contributed to a general decline in
interest. Undoubtedly, the unhandiness of the physical apparatus also played
a part in this flagging of enthusiasm. Just when it seemed that von
Reisswitz's game would follow its predecessors into the closet of history,
the elder man's son introduced a new and much improved adaptation of his
father's ideas, and one destined to direct the course of much of wargaming's
subsequent history.
Lieutenant George Heinrich Rudolph Johann von Reisswitz was a first
lieutenant of artillery in the Prussian Guard when he developed and
introduced his revised version of his father's game in 1824. The most
obvious difference between the two games was the scene of action; gone
was the old sand table, replaced by detailed topographic maps drawn to the
scale of 1:8000 (roughly eight inches to one mile). In addition, with
characteristic Prussian thoroughness, the younger von Reisswitz attempted
to codify actual military experience and introduced the details of real-life
military operations lacking in his father's game. In particular, he quantified
the effects of combat so that results of engagements were calculated rather
than discussed.
 The game was thus implemented with a detailed set of rules covering
virtually every contingency of operations of units up to the size of divisions
and corps. These rules, developed by von Reisswitz and several of his
officer friends, he finally published in 1824 as Instructions for the
Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame
(Anleitung zur Darstelling militarische manover mit dem Apparat des
Kriegsspiels).
The publication of this truly seminal work in the history of wargaming
was once again due in a large measure to the intervention of Prince
Wilhelm, who after an evening's play advised von Reisswitz and his friends
that he intended to recommend the game to the king, and to the chief of the
general staff, yon Muffling. Such a warm reception seems to have given
von Reisswitz the encouragement he need to publish the game, much as the
earlier attention of the royal family had encouraged his father to jazz up his
apparatus.
True to his word, the prince soon arranged for von Reisswitz and
company to present their wares to von Muffling. Like many superior
officers before and since, the old general was skeptical, if not disdainful,
and probably a bit put out by the fact that he had to endure such silliness
because of a royal edict by the young and headstrong prince. One of von
Reisswitz's companions on that day was a young officer named Dannhauer,
who would later attain general's rank. He described the scene as follows.

On our arrival we found the General surrounded by the

General Staff officers.
"Gentlemen," the General announced, "Hen von Reisswitz
is
going to show us something new."
Reisswitz was not abashed by the somewhat lukewarm
introduction. He calmly set out his Kriegsspiel map.
With some surprise the General said, "You mean we are to
play for an hour on a map! Very well. Show us a division
with the troops."
 "May I ask Your Excellency," replied Reisswitz, "to
provide us with general and special ideas for a manoeuvre,
and choose two officers to be the commanders for both sides.
Also it is important that we only give each commander in the
special idea the information he would have in reality."
The General seemed rather astonished at the whole thing,
but began to write out the necessary idea.
We were allocated as troop leaders to both sides, and the
game began. One can honestly say that the old gentleman, so
cool towards the idea at the beginning, became more and
more interested as the game went on, until at the end he
exclaimed, "This is not a game! This is training for war! I
must recommend it to the whole army."15
Unlike many later officers in positions of authority, von Muffling had
kept his mind open enough to recognize the potential value in von
Reisswitz's fledgling game. The general wasted little time in making good
on his pledge to recommend the game to the entire army by publishing the
following notice in the Militar Wochenblatt, no. 402.

There have already been a number of previous attempts to

represent warfare in such a way as to provide both instruction
and entertainment. These attempts have been given the name
"Kriegsspiel." They have usually presented many kinds of
difficulties in the execution, and they have always left a large
gap between the serious business of warfare and the more
frivolous demands of a game.
It is noticeable that up till now it has only been non-
military personnel who have occupied themselves with the
wargame invention, and the resulting incomplete ideas of
warfare, and its incomplete imitations have never seriously
been able to claim the attention of trained officers.
 At last, after years of trial, insight, and perseverance, an
officer has pursued the topic begun by his father, the
Reigerungsrat von Reisswitz, and has so much extended it
that warfare can actually be represented in a simple and
lively way.
Anyone who understands those things which bear on
leadership in battle is able to take part immediately in the
game as a commander of a large or small unit, even if he has
had no previous knowledge of the game or has never seen it
before.
The execution of good plans on realistic terrain, and the
ability which the game offers of presenting a multiplicity of
situations, makes it continually instructive.
I will gladly, by all means in my power, assist in seeing
the number of available copies augmented.
If the 1st Lieutenant von Reisswitz has already found
reward for his efforts through the approval of princes of the
Royal Household, the Army War Ministry and high ranking
officers who have come to know of his efforts, the further
distribution and knowledge of the game will earn him the
thanks of the whole army.16
Pretty impressive. Clearly von Reisswitz had in fact done something
new. His was no longer a game about war or a war game, but was finally
the integrated, balanced Kriegsspiel, capable of fusing the "serious business
of warfare and the more frivolous demands of a game." Perhaps the best
way of describing the means by which he achieved this long-elusive end is
to let him do so in his own words:

The Kriegsspiel has the aim of representing that moment

in warfare when the strategic object can only be realized by
an attack.
 A general idea of the game is given in the following short
description.
No great preparation is required for the game. Any room
can be used.
Three players are necessary, one of whom will give an
idea for the game and keep a tally of losses. More can take
part, and any extra players are allocated equally to both sides.
Ideally four to six players take part. Then one player on
each side becomes the commander-in-chief and the others are
allocated command of individual units. One needs to know a
few things about the use of the equipment, but no special
practise is needed. Any officer familiar with the
arrangements for the different troop types can take part at
once.
A good map in 1:8,000-1:12,000 scale, which gives good
terrain detail can be used. The troops are represented by
small metal strips. These are marked up in the same way as
they are found on battle maps. They are moved on the map
with consideration of time and distance.
Time in the introductory phase and in the course of the
battle is divided into two minute intervals. These intervals are
called moves. Anything can take place in one move which in
reality could happen in two minutes, both as far as
movement, fire effect, and hand-to-hand attacks are
concerned, and as far as experience and study would indicate.
The troop symbols are so arranged as to give the correct
frontage for troops in line and also for troops in march or
attack column—the first is given by the length, and the
second by the breadth of the blocks. All movements or
positions of the enemy which would remain concealed in
reality are similarly undisclosed in the game. The troops in
such cases are not put on the map, but the player (umpire)
who designed the manoeuvre and who controls the game
records their positions. As soon as they reach some point
where they could be seen by their opponents they are placed
on the map.
To simplify the game, and to affect the players, as in
reality, by considerations of good luck or bad luck in the
outcome of battles, the results based on experience, for the
effect of fire weapons in good and bad circumstances, are
stuck on to dice and determine the losses. The attacks with
hand-to-hand weapons are similarly noted on the dice so that
equal or unequal strengths of forces can be considered. So,
for instance, one side might have two or three chances to the
enemy's one.
The strength of forces, however, is not only a question of
the numbers of troops, and the advantages which might come
from favourable terrain, flank attacks, etc., are also taken into
consideration.
The object is for the player who has good luck to seize and
use it, and for he who has the misfortune to meet with bad
luck to take those correct measures which in reality would be
required. The equipment consists of the following:
1. Troops for each side—26 battalions, 40 squadrons, 12
batteries, 1 pontoon train.
2. Rulers and dividers for finding the correct march and
firing distances.
3. Dice for deciding fire effect, and the results of hand-to-
hand attacks.
4. A small book of six chapters containing the introduction
to the use of the equipment and the rules.
5. A map covering 4 square miles (Rheinl.) 1:8,000.
 The whole equipment is contained in a mahogany box 10
inches long and 6 inches wide, so taking up little room.17
Unfortunately, von Reisswitz could not package the key ingredient of
his successful demonstration for von Muffling in the small mahogany box.
Almost certainly much of the favourable impression the game made on the
old general was due to the ease and smoothness with which von Reisswitz
and his cadre of experienced gamers managed to guide the inexperienced
staff officers through the play of the game. Although the demonstration
convinced von Muffling that anyone with experience in actual military
operations could play the game immediately without the need to learn an
elaborate system of rules, von Reisswitz's description of the equipment and
instructions gives the lie to that assessment. As with any new tool, those
unfamiliar-with its effective use had to learn its capabilities and limitations,
and becoming skilled in its employment undoubtedly required study and
practice. These, in turn, depended on devoting a certain amount of time to
the game.
A junior officer’s time, however, is a commodity of which his seniors
often are jealously possessive. Just as von Muffling had at first been cool to
von Reisswitz despite (because of?) Prince Wilhelm's recommendation,
many senior field officers were hostile to von Reisswitz's game despite or
because of von Muffling's endorsement. Many of those officers became
converts, just as the old general had; many more were not as open-minded
as the distinguished chief of the General Staff and simply refused to accept
or even evaluate the game as a useful device. Indeed, the criticism most
often levied against Kriegsspiel was that allowing junior officers even a
simulated taste of commanding forces beyond the prerogatives of their rank
would make them impatient with the day-to-day routine of company-level
duty. This, in turn, would cause them to become less conscientious in
performing their normal tasks.18
Despite arguments, and even evidence, to the contrary, the debates
between proponents and detractors of von Reisswitz's Kriegsspiel continued
throughout its early years. Von Reisswitz himself soon ran afoul of some of
his detractors, who transferred him to Torgau, site of a famous battle of
Frederick the Great's, but at that time nothing more than an obscure
provincial border fortress far removed from the glamours of royal courts
and all-night Kriegsspiel parties.
Von Reisswitz clearly resented his transfer, which he ascribed
principally to jealousy, and began to brood about the injustice of it. Cut off
from his circle of friends and from any real ability to develop his game
further, von Reisswitz soon became despondent. Tragically, in 1827, his
meteoric rise to fame and notoriety ended with an equally sudden and
dramatic suicide.

THE HEYDAY OF KRIEGSSPIEL

The game von Reisswitz left behind proved more resilient than its
inventor. Despite the forces of conservatism and reaction, Kriegsspiel grew
in popularity among the future leaders of the late nineteenth-century
Prussian war machine. Even the demigod himself, Helmuth von Moltke,
was an avid player of the game as early as 1828.
Through the middle years of the nineteenth century, Kriegsspiel
continued to attract the attention of new adherents in the Prussian military,
but spread little outside that country. Inevitably, as more and more officers
played the game, their different experiences and perspectives led them to
introduce changes in von Reisswitz's original rules. During that period
many officers published extensions and modifications of Kriegsspiel's basic
ideas, one of the most prominent being the work of von Tschischwitz.
Particular dissatisfaction seemed to center around the complex and rigid
nature of many of the original rules, and also on the role of the umpire.
Then, as today, a focus of much of the debate and revision was the
method used to resolve the outcomes of combat. Throughout the early
growth of the game, the usual method of calculating outcomes evolved into
a particular pattern, probably given its principal form by the Prussian
Captain Naumann, who published his rules in 1877 under the title of Das
Regiments Kriegsspiel. "Captain Naumann originated the idea of selecting a
standard case and deducing from it, by applying a suitable multiplier, the
result to be expected in any particular case."19 In this system, a particular,
recurring, basic combat event was defined as the standard. For example,
one minute of fire of a body of infantry in a particular formation could be
expected to produce a certain amount of casualties on an opposing force.
This became the standard result, but was adjusted by a series of multipliers
to reflect the particular circumstances of the engagement.
The complications, and computations, were clearly legion in such a
system. Over time, this approach spread its tentacles throughout the game,
as new standards and new multipliers were added for new weapon and
tactics and situations. As a result of this massive compilation of details, the
role of the umpire evolved into virtually that of a computer. Tables of
logarithms, to speed up the process of multiplication, became nearly as
essential to wargaming as maps. The umpire's main contribution, besides
his arithmetic skills, became deciding just what set of multipliers to employ
in a given set of circumstances.
The system of increasing detail and pseudo-exactitude, whose origins
lay in the desire to make the game more realistic, detracted from the very
realism it had hoped to improve. Play became tedious and slow, dominated
by the calculation of losses, which would often prove to have little real
effect on the decisions of the players.

"FREE" VERSUS "RIGID" KRIEGSSPIEL

The stunning Prussian success in the "Six Weeks War" against Austria
in 1866 was followed only a few years later by their even more stunning
defeat of the French. In the aftermath of the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian
War, European and world military opinion suddenly became enamored of
things German, including Kriegsspiel, to the use of which many experts
attributed the German victories. At the same time, the tremendous practical
experience of battles and war, which had hitherto been somewhat lacking in
the practitioners of Kriegsspiel, now made its weight felt. The reaction that
had been so long in coming now struck with the force of an exploding shell.
 In 1876, Colonel (later General) Jules von Verdy du Vernois opened the
ball with a slim volume that did little more than briefly describe a simple,
but somewhat revolutionary, idea and give an example of its use. Verdy was
one of the foremost military writers of his day, and was especially
influential in the realm of troop training. He was dismayed by the fact that
wargaming was still having a difficult time establishing itself as an
important training and educational device, despite its obvious advantages.
For von Verdy the reason for wargaming's lack of popularity lay "in the
numerous difficulties that beginners run against in handling tables,
calculating losses, and the like."20 He argued strongly that "it would add to
the usefulness of the game to be rid of these numerous rules and tables."21
His proposed solution lay in the technique used by von Moltke during
the latter's staff rides.
In the excursions of the General Staff, the military results
that are sought are the same as in the War Game. ... In no
case do they decide upon the success of an operation by the
cast of the die, but each time the umpire decides according to
his own views. It is not thought necessary to decide in every
case the effects of fire, shock, etc. All that is necessary is to
reach the general result, to determine if a body of troops has
had great losses, if it has been so badly broken that its power
of resistance has been sensibly diminished. Therefore, the
means employed on the ground in these staff excursions can
be easily applied in the lecture-room with maps. . . .
The mode adopted is to place on a map all the troops as
soon as they are in contact. In the staff excursion they require
an officer on the ground itself, to answer such a question as:
"What would you do if you saw a hostile column coming
suddenly from yonder village?" Very good officers, who in
real presence of the enemy would see at once the proper thing
to do, are often embarrassed and cannot answer. This is
because the imagination is not developed to the same extent
 with everybody. This lack is filled to a great extent by the
War Game, and by the placing of the blocks.
The War Game is then used in three different ways, with
more or less extension, according to the end in view. 1. The
strategic game, on a comparatively small map, showing the
larger operations, without tactical details. 2. The game with
dice, rules, and computations. 3. The simple method on a
large-scale map, without rules, tables of losses, or dice.
Every body of officers should use the system best adapted
to its end. Whatever the method, its value as a military study
will depend largely upon the degree of ability possessed by
the director.22
Here, in a nutshell, von Verdy states the case for what was to become
known as "free Kriegsspiel," in contrast to the "rigid Kriegsspiel" of von
Reisswitz and its descendants. The essence of von Verdy's approach can be
described as the transformation of the umpire from computer to "God." But
he was not to be a capricious god, but a conscientious one who would
explain his actions and assessments after the game.
Although enthusiastically accepted and applied by those who found the
rigid games too complex and boring, free Kriegsspiel was obviously not
without its own problems and detractors. The contention between the
proponents of rigid and free Kriegsspiel brought into sharper focus the
inherent tension between realism and playability. More importantly,
however, it revealed the fact that the lack of realism could result in a lack of
playability, just as a lack of playability could lead to a shortage of realism.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus began to see
increased efforts to achieve some sort of balance between the false realism
of rigid Kriegsspiel and the false playability of free Kriegsspiel. "We find
the writers on Free Kriegsspiel occasionally admitting that rules and tables
may sometimes be useful; and on the other hand, the advocates of Rigid
Kriegsspiel generally begin with the statement that these rules and tables
are intended to be merely of an advisory character and that the director
should proceed without them whenever his personal knowledge suffices for
the occasion. The distinction between the two systems is, indeed, largely
one of degree; yet it is sufficiently marked to justify its recognition."23
Despite such attempts at balancing rigor and speed of play, turn-of-the-
century wargames were at best a mixed blessing. Sayre, whose book Map
Maneuvers and Tactical Rides gives a good account of the state of the art in
the early 1900s, was of the anti-game school, arguing for the use of the term
map maneuver, and for downplaying the competitive "game" aspects of the
exercise.

Although map maneuvers owe their origin to a game, the

game feature is no longer an important element of them. A
predominance of the game idea has always been an obstacle to
the proper development of these exercises as a means of
military instruction and training. Through the influence of the
game idea, the exercises have often been carried farther than
was necessary or profitable. In order to ascertain which of two
parties of players would be the winners, it was necessary to
push an engagement through to a decision; and in order that no
injustice might be done to either side, computations of losses
were made, and accurate records kept, by a definite and uniform
system. The dice, tables, and rules served to secure fairness to
the players and to clear the director of the suspicion of bias; but
when the idea that the map maneuver is a sort of game—in
which one merely plays to win—is set aside, these
considerations lose their importance.24
Despite the solid good sense of much of his work, here Sayre errs. He is
right to argue that it is the learning and not the winning that is important
when games are used as educational or training aids; he is wrong to assume
that such learning does not need to worry about the possible biases of the
directors. Biased direction can teach invalid, and potentially deadly, lessons.
Solid research and mathematical modeling, embodied imperfectly perhaps
in the games of Sayre's time, are important elements of the educational
process, not merely devices to help assure competitive fairness.
Yet, it is difficult to dismiss all of what Sayre has to say on this subject,
for he clearly perceived the central problem of achieving realism in any
wargame that attempts to deal with actual combat. "A few hundred years
ago, battles were fought by common consent of both armies, and the art of
war was limited to the battlefield. But at the present day the most important
movements of troops generally takes place out of sight of the enemy, and
these we can feel sure of representing faithfully on a map; but we cannot
feel so sure of representing correctly the latter stages of combat, for no one
can tell with certainty the manner in which future battles will be fought."25
It is this very lack of certainty, however, that makes wargaming so
important. We may never know the right answers, but gaming can
sometimes help us learn to ask the right questions.
Unfortunately for Europe, too few military men and politicians were
asking themselves the right questions in the first decade of the twentieth
century. As the storm clouds of World War I gathered on the horizon, one of
the great writers in English history, and also one of that society's most
fervent pacifists, brought a new perspective to the subject of games about
war, and in so doing gave the principal impetus to the development of
something new, a serious amateur wargaming hobby.

H. G. WELLS AND MODERN HOBBY WARGAMING

Today, Herbert George Wells is probably best remembered as a writer
of science fiction; The Time Machine and War of the Worlds are probably
his most well-known works. Yet, Wells was much more. He was an
historian, publishing his monumental Outline of History in the 1920s. He
was a well-known pacifist. He was also interested in games, publishing
Floor Games in 1912 and, most importantly for our story, Little Wars in
1913.
 Little Wars described a system for playing battle games using toy
soldiers made of lead and a spring-loaded cannon that fired a wooden
projectile capable of knocking the men over. The battlefield was
constructed of model houses, miniature trees, and various other ingenious
devices to give the toy soldiers an appealing and interesting country over
which they could engage in mortal combat.
Some form of toy-soldier warfare had probably existed as long as the
toys, but Wells's system was the first to receive widespread attention,
among other reasons being that while his basic ideas were quite simple and
easy to implement, they were also easily extended and adapted to more and
more complex situations. Play proceeded in turns during which each of the
two opposing sides could maneuver and fight. Each of his three combat
arms—infantry, cavalry, and artillery—were imbued with certain unique
abilities to move and engage in fire or "shock" combat. Fire, carried out in
the basic system only by the guns, simply consisted of firing a set number
of shots from each eligible cannon each turn. Any soldiers knocked over by
the cannon fire were considered killed and removed from play. When
soldiers from one side moved close to soldiers from the other side, a close
combat ensued in which a certain number of pieces from each side would
be eliminated. Special provisions were made for heavily outnumbered or
surrounded forces to surrender rather than fight to the death, and for the
escort and release of prisoners.
Although Wells intended his game to be nothing more than an
amusement and not something of use to the professional military, at the
urging of professional acquaintances he included in an appendix to Little
Wars his thoughts on how some of his principles might be applied to the
professional kriegsspiel of the time. Wells's approach was, in some ways, a
return to the representative physical model used by the elder von Reisswitz.
But Wells went one step further. He opposed the standard professional
practice in which the results of actions were either decided by an umpire
based on his own experience and prejudices (the "free kriegsspiel"
described earlier) or calculated from extensive charts and tables ("rigid
kriegsspiel"). Instead, Wells argued that the results of combat "should be by
actual gun- and rifle-fire [using the toy cannon] and not by computation.
Things should happen and not be decided."26 Thus Wells advocated the use
of physical representations not only for terrain but for combat as well.
Wells's ideas on replacing calculation and arbitrary judgment with a
physical model of combat, intriguing and appealing as they are from a
philosophical viewpoint, have never had much of an effect, especially on
professional wargames. Some of the resistance to using something like his
spring-loaded cannon in a professional game was undoubtedly because of
its too obviously toy like (not to mention undignified) nature. But it was
also impractical to represent an action much larger than a small skirmish
with the equipment and approach taken by Wells. For larger battles there
appeared to be no substitute for the map, and no opportunity to represent
combat physically.
Despite the fact that one of his key ideas never achieved a great degree
of popularity, even among hobbyists, Wells is usually considered the father
of modern wargaming with miniatures. Indeed, for many years the gaming
hobby annually awarded the "H. G. Wells Awards" to companies and
individuals who had made a significant contribution to the miniatures
gaming hobby during the preceding year. The publication of Little Wars,
coupled with the ready availability and affordability of the mass-produced
soldiers and cannon needed to play it, finally made wargaming a hobby that
anyone, not just the well-to-do, could pursue.

The full caption reads: Mr. Wells has developed his game so
that the country over which the campaign is to be fought is laid out
in any desired manner, with the aid of branches of shrubs as trees,
with cardboard bridges, rocks, chalked-out rivers, streams and
fords, cardboard forts, barracks, houses, and what not; there are
employed leaden infantrymen and cavalrymen, and guns firing
wooden cylinders about an inch long, capable of hitting a toy
soldiers nine times out of ten at a distance of nine yards, and
having a screw adjustment for elevation and depression. There are
strict rules governing the combat. Before the battle begins, the
country is divided by the drawing of a curtain across it for a short
time, so that the general of each opposing army may dispose of his
forces without the enemy's being aware of that disposition. Then
the curtains are drawn back and the campaign begins. All moves of
men and guns are timed. An infantryman moves not more than a
foot at a time, a cavalryman not more than two feet, and a gun,
according to whether cavalry or infantry are with it, from one to
two feet. Mr. Wells is seen on the left of the drawing, taking a
measurement with a length of string, to determine the distance
some of his forces may move. On the right and left are seen the
curtains for dividing the country before beginning the game.
Although the most prominent of the early twentieth century's amateur
wargamers, Wells was by no means the only well-known figure to enter the
field. In fact, several years before the publication of Little Wars, Fred T.
Jane, the editor and driving force behind the long-lived annual Jane's
Fighting Ships (originally All the World's Fighting Ships), published a set of
rules for playing wargames with cast miniature warships. Interestingly,
Jane's game employed the same notion of having things happen rather than
just making calculations.
Jane certainly did not view his game as a toy or as part of any "gaming
hobby." Instead, he and the many proponents of his game saw it as "a most
instructive lesson in the capabilities of different types of ships to withstand
or carry on attacks. ... In short, it puts very fairly before the players the
actual problems which would face them were they commanding squadrons
in times of war, and if played in seriousness cannot fail to instruct them."27
Jane himself also undoubtedly saw it as a means to promote his books,
which were used as "the textbook of the game", and as a device to allow
him to gain access to "naval officers specifically selected in all navies"
whose opinions served as a source for his method of evaluating the results
of combat.28
Play of the game used ship models, which were accurately scaled and
unmarked. These models had "to be recognized by their opponents just as
they would have to be in real war."29 They were maneuvered on a large
playing board marked off in large squares representing 2,000 yards and
smaller ones of 100 yards. As each move of the game represented one
minute, moving a single small square was equivalent to making a speed of
three knots, and so moving five squares was the equivalent of fifteen knots.
Diagonal moves required the use of a measuring device, and in especially
complex games detailed turning circles were employed.30
Ships were maneuvered on the board under the overall direction of the
opposing admirals and usually with a single player as captain of each ship.
"The admirals, till fire is opened, are allowed to give any directions they
please to their captains; after fire is opened they may transmit signals only
through the umpires and at the discretion of these, and each captain has to
think for himself and carry out his orders as best he can. As the umpires
rarely allow anything save the simplest signals to be made in battle, the
admiral who lays down his orders clearly beforehand is in much the same
position as one who does so in real war."31
To evaluate the effects of fire, each ship was "supplied [with] a large
number of similar drawings of her on thin card. These drawings, elevation
and plan, are divided into sections equivalent to 25ft. lengths."32 Each
section was rated for armor protection using the scheme defined in All the
World's Fighting Ships. The effect of gunfire depended on the caliber and
penetration of the firing weapon relative to the protection of the region in
which hits occurred.
 Jane's method of determining hits was perhaps the most unique element
of the game. It used the differently sized drawings of target ships as a
function of range or, in an alternative method, it was based "on the
combined speeds of the ship firing and the ship fired at, i.e., whether they
are relatively stationary or shifting bearings rapidly."33 Firing itself was
"done with a striker, consisting of a strip of thin wood about 15 in. long,
with an enlarged end, somewhere near the centre of which a short pin point
projects."34 The selected target view was laid on the table and the firing
captain struck at it with his striker, the resulting hole in the target indicating
if and where the ship was hit. The number of strikes was determined by the
rate of fire of the particular weapon firing.
This approach, so similar in spirit to that of Wells, "seems at first sight
crude, and it is only after having used it for some time that its suitability is
appreciated. In no two strikers is the position of the pinpoint the same, and
the expanded end of the striker is of such size that a large area of the target
is covered, so that a sufficiently large margin of chance prevails. It has been
found that all the attempts to secure accuracy which different players adopt
end, as a rule, in failure, and no matter whether a short strike or a long
strike is made, the effect is generally the same. As a rule, moreover, the
accuracy of firing gets worse as the excitement increases. It will thus be
understood that the strikers do fairly imitate the conditions of actual
shooting."35
Jane also included rules for the strategic maneuvers of fleets prior to
contact, and these rules seem very similar to those employed at the U.S.
Naval War College, described in the next chapter. Although Jane managed
to raise the ire of many in the U.S. Navy by describing a hypothetical naval
war between the United States and Germany, other naval aficionados were
usually quite pleased with his game.36 "The rules alone, apart altogether
from their bearing on the game, contain a mass of information . . . which
cannot be found in so compact a form elsewhere, whilst. . . the strategical
game will show that a number of things have to be thought of by those who
command fleets in time of war."37 To critics like Lieutenant Commander
Niblack, USN, however, the game seemed too much "like one of those 'get-
rich-quick' schemes."38
In later years, naval wargaming did achieve some popularity in the
United States in the form of Fletcher Pratt's Naval War Game, published in
1940[7]*. Pratt employed a complicated mathematical formula that rated
each ship as a function of armor thickness, speed, and the caliber and
number of guns it mounted. Ships were assigned a pool of points based on
this formula, and when hit by enemy fire, the pool was reduced by some
number depending on the strength of the attackers. Although even Pratt
himself admitted that the formula he used was "extremely arbitrary," and
made a mathematical relationship out of "widely different elements among
which there is no genuine mathematical relation, “he countered such
criticisms with eminently practical, and potentially dangerous, argument
that despite its quirks the system worked.39
As evidence of this purported accuracy, Pratt used the example of the
real-world action off the River Platte, fought in December 1939 between the
German pocket battleship Graf Spee and the British cruisers Exeter, Ajax,
and Achilles. Despite its heavier armor and longer-ranged guns, the German
ship suffered severely at the hands of its more numerous antagonists and
was forced into the neutral port of Montevideo. Rather than leaving port to
engage the British once again, the Graf Spee's captain eventually scuttled
her. Pratt argued that his rating scheme accurately showed the combined
superiority of the three British ships despite the larger battleships individual
superiority. This example, overstated as it certainly is, has made Pratt's
game "part of the lore of both commercial and military wargaming."40
Whatever the technical merits of the games of Wells, Jane, Pratt, and
others, wargaming was undoubtedly making progress among both civilians
and military in the first half of the twentieth century. But that progress was
fitful, and dampened by reactions to the real horrors of war experienced in
World Wars I and II. It was also confined almost exclusively to games with
miniatures. There is little evidence of serious hobby map or board gaming.
The militarily oriented board games that did exist strongly emphasized their
game aspects at the expense of realism.
One early board game made its appearance in the United States during
the Civil War. The game cast the player as a blockade runner, and
challenged him to find a safe route through the Union squadron to the open
sea. This game was little more than a maze.
Another game, which appeared in Great Britain sometime in the 1920s
or 1930s, was reminiscent of the early "war chess" games, and the
forerunner of the modern game of Stratego. Each player had an army of
cardboard figures mounted on tin bases. These figures were printed on one
side only, thus preventing the opposing player from seeing the ranks of the
pieces. The players moved the pieces over a square-gridded map, and when
one piece entered the square occupied by an opposing piece the lower-
ranked unit was destroyed.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, at least two games achieved some success in
Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. The first was known as
Schlactenspiel, played in a manner similar to Chinese checkers but with
terrain and buildings to impede movement. Sets of the game provided for
the "re-creation" of several battles from the 1813 struggle against Napoleon,
and later the 1814 and 1815 campaigns. Additional set-ups dealt with the
Prussian wars against the Danes, Austrians, and French, and with some of
the more interesting battles of World War I.
"The historical research for Schlactenspiel was meticulous. For each
battle, the terrain was to scale, the various troop contingents were identified
on the set-up maps by unit numbers and commanders' names, a historical
account of the battle was given, and each of the set-up folders included a
historical narrative of the respective campaign, linking all the battles. . . .
Surprisingly, Schlactenspiel never became very popular in militarist
Germany of the 1930's. Perhaps it was too historical, analytical, academic
in its approach, perhaps it just lacked good advertising."41
The second game was known as Wehrschach, roughly translated as
"combat chess," and was promoted by Nazi Party organizations. It was
much like chess, but was "despised by dyed-in-the-wool chess aficionados,
and was too complex and abstract to appeal to minds other than chess
players."42 Similar complaints probably explain the relative slowness of
board wargaming's rise to popularity in general.

STRATEGIC WARGAMING AND THE WORLD WARS

If the gaming hobby was slow to adopt and develop games played on a
map or other flat board, such was not the case with the professionals. The
nature, number, and quality of maps available for gaming increased rapidly
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the original maps
of imaginary or "ideal" terrain used by von Reisswitz and other pioneers,
gamers moved to detailed charts of actual terrain in various scales. The
availability of the different scales abetted the expansion of the domain of
wargaming from its tactical roots into the higher realms of military
operations and strategy.
As late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century warfare seemed to
become a matter of who could mobilize and deploy to the right place
fastest, the emphasis on strategic gaming to test mobilization plans
increased. Because the growing size of the armies made it impractical (not
to mention provocative!) to practice a full-scale mobilization, the need for
some sort of simulation was apparent. The advent of strategic gaming
signified a shift in wargaming's focus from its origins as a training and
educational device into a tool for study and research into the potential
problems of mass military operations. In particular, the high-level games
were adopted as important planning tools. Once again, the Germans led the
way.

German Gaming
As described in the paper prepared for the U.S. Army by high-ranking
German officers following World War II, the German army saw wargaming
as a broadly applicable tool.43 The term kriegsspiel (translated by the
unenlightened as the two-word "war game," the use of which in the
following quotations does not constitute an endorsement) encompassed a
variety of different types of activities. "Besides serving its main purpose of
assisting in the training of officers of all ranks, the war game is a means of
testing new methods and checking certain combat principles."44
One of its earliest uses in this latter role occurred under the regime of
another of the great Prussian/German chiefs of the General Staff, Alfred
Graf von Schlieffen. Von Schlieffen led the German armed forces from
1892 to 1906, a period of intense war planning by all the European powers.
He used wargaming and wargaming techniques, along with staff rides and
standard exercises, to help him test his various plans for fighting the French
again, who might this time have British and Russian aid.
Despite the failure of von Schlieffen's plan as ultimately modified and
carried out by the German army under the younger von Moltke in 1914, the
Germans continued to use high-level wargaming even during the actual
fighting in World War I. The most well-known example is that of the final
German offensive of 1918. The Germans tested and rehearsed their plan for
this last-ditch attack in several strategic games, all of which indicated that it
seemed to have little chance to achieve decisive success45.
German gaming between the wars spanned the spectrum from tactical
to strategic. In addition, the Germans pioneered a new form of gaming, now
known as political-military gaming. In 1929, a young officer named
Manstein, who would later become one of the most brilliant of Hitler’s field
marshals, suggested a game scenario in which the new Polish state, recently
victorious over the Bolshevik Russians, invaded German territory. Instead
of being a purely military game, representatives of the Foreign Ministry
were invited to play the roles of the president of the League of Nations and
the important political and diplomatic leaders of Germany and Poland.
The Germans used gaming for all the traditional reasons as well. New
combat principles of mobility and firepower were examined in games
during which one team employed the strategy and tactics estimated to be
appropriate to the chosen enemy. Other games suppressed the tactical play
somewhat and concentrated on exploring problems of logistics and
transportation.
 In the early 1930s Field Marshal von Blomberg organized several high-
level games and staff studies to explore "the problems which the military
and political situation had created for German national defense and,
especially, to establish a theoretical basis for the joint action of the Supreme
Armed Forces Command and the high commands of the Army, the Navy,
and the Luftwaffe in all the important sectors of warfare."46 At the more
operational level, Generaloberst Beck employed wargaming in his 1936
effort to prepare a new manual of modern operations for the entire army.
After he and his advisers had decided on the principles they thought were
most important in the new conditions of warfare of their time, they called
on "seasoned officers" to test those principles using wargames. "However,
General Beck was completely aware of the fact, which he constantly
emphasized, that, all the knowledge gained in war games can never replace
experience gained in actual warfare. ... [A] war game is only one out of
many aids for recognizing the demands which will be imposed by a future
war."47
This same Beck, as Chief of the Army Staff, conducted a game only
two years later, in 1938, to explore the prospects for a German invasion of
Czechoslovakia. Beck used the results of the game in his attempt to
persuade Hitler that the invasion of Czechoslovakia could only bring
"catastrophic results ... for Germany and all of Europe."48 Beck lost his
argument with Hitler, and his job. The Munich accord saved the Germans
from finding out how prophetic Beck's game was, but led to even greater
disasters in 1939.
As political tensions mounted in the period after Munich, Captain (later
Grand Admiral) Karl Doenitz, chief of the German submarine force, gave
serious thought to how his U-boats would have to operate in a coming war
against the British. Earlier he had developed the concept of group tactics
(what would become known as the wolfpack) for attacks on escorted
convoys. With war approaching, he also explored the tactical and
operational problems of his proposed concepts by using wargaming
techniques.
 In the winter of 1938-39 I held a war game to examine,
with special reference to operations in the open Atlantic, the
whole question of group tactics—command and organization,
location of enemy convoys and the massing of further U-
boats for the final attack. No restrictions were placed on
either side and the officer in charge of convoys had the whole
of the Atlantic at his disposal and was at liberty to select the
courses followed by his various convoys.
The points that emerged from this war game can be
summarized as follows:
1. If, as I presumed, the enemy organized his
merchantmen in escorted convoys, we should require at least
three hundred operational U-boats in order successfully to
wage war against his shipping. ... Given this total, however, I
believed that I could achieve a decisive success.
2. Complete control of the U-boats in the theatre of
operations and the conduct of their joint operations by the
Officer Commanding U-boats from his command post ashore
did not seem feasible. ... I accordingly came to the conclusion
that the broad operational and tactical organization of the U-
boats in their search for convoys should be directed by the
Officer Commanding U-boats, but that the command of the
actual operation should be delegated to a subordinate
commander in a U-boat situated at some distance from the
enemy and remaining as far as possible on the surface.
I therefore insisted that a certain number of the U-boats
under construction should be equipped with particularly
efficient means of communication which would enable them
to be used as command boats.
3. With the number of U-boats already available and with
the additions which, according to prevailing construction
priorities and speed of building, we could hope to receive, we
 should not, for the next few years, be in a position to inflict
anything more than "a few pin pricks" in a war against
merchant shipping.
I incorporated the conclusions which I had reached as a
result of this war game in a memorandum which I submitted
to the then Admiral Commanding the Fleet, Admiral Boehm,
and to the Commander-in Chief of the Navy. The former
came out in strong and unequivocal support of my
contentions.49
When war finally came, far too early for Doenitz, the concepts that the
wargame had helped him to flesh-out proved all too effective for the Allied
Cause.
The coming of World War II saw the Germans making extensive use of
wargames in all situations. Prior to the 1940 campaign in France and the
Low Countries, and again before the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union,
games and exercises of all types were used "to prepare all the officers and
noncommissioned officers theoretically for the impending operation. Each
of them down to company commanders, was familiar with his preliminary
duties and with the difficulties which he would have to overcome with
respect to both the enemy and the terrain." As a result of such extensive
preparation, "the first days of fighting went off without any friction
according to the prescribed plan, and in almost no place was it necessary for
higher echelons to intervene." 50
Finally, it is fitting to end the discussion of German wargaming during
the Second World War with Hofmann's original account of one of the most
famous, or at least one of the most notorious, games played. It took place on
2 November 1944 in the period of sporadic American attacks on the
approaches to the German Siegfried Line, which preceded the Ardennes
battle (the Battle of the Bulge) of mid-December. The site of the game was
the staff quarters of the Fifth Panzer Army. Let us now take up Hofmann’s
account.
 On this occasion the staff, under the direction of Army
Group Model, was supposed to rehearse the defense
measures against a possible American attack against the
boundary between the Fifth and Seventh Armies. The leading
commanders and their General Staff officers were assembled
at the headquarters. The map exercise had hardly begun when
a report was received that according to all appearances a
fairly strong American attack had been launched in the
Hurtgen-Gemeter area. Feldmarschall Model ordered that
with the exception of the commanders who were directly
affected by the attack all the participants were to continue the
game and use the currently received front reports as
additional information for the course of the game.
During the next few hours the situation at the front—and
similarly in the map exercise—became so critical that the
army group reserve (116th Panzer Division) had to be placed
at the disposal of the threatened army. It thus happened that
the division commander, General von Waldenburg, who was
present in the room and engaged in the game, received his
orders one after another from the army group, the army and
the commanding general in question. After only a few
minutes General von Waldenburg, instead of issuing purely
theoretical orders at the map table, was able to issue actual
operational orders to his operation-officer and his couriers.
The alerted division was thereby set in movement in the
shortest conceivable time. Chance had transformed a simple
map exercise into stern reality.51
Japanese Gaming

Japan, Germany's erstwhile ally in the Second World War, probably

learned about wargaming principally from the work of Meckel, who visited
the islands at least twice. The Japanese War College soon introduced
gaming into its curriculum, and "the successes of the Japanese Army in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904 were attributed in part to the 'lessons learned'
by Japanese officers in war games."52
After the outbreak of European hostilities in 1939, the Japanese
expanded their preparations for war and included wargaming among their
research and planning tools. The Total War Research Institute was
established in 1940 as part of the "powerful Planning Board which
coordinated the vast, complex structure of Japan's war economy."53 The
institute's job was to explore the possible courses of action that might be
open to Japan in the increasingly dangerous conditions of the time.
Analytical gaming of the political-military type became one of the principal
tools of the institute. Games were designed to have players represent "not
only different nations such as the U.S., Britain, Russia, China, Germany,
etc., but also the conflicting interests within Japan: Army, Navy, and
civilian."54
As war with the United States began to seem more and more likely, the
plans for fighting such a war became the topic of hot debate between the
Naval General Staff, under Admiral Osami Nagano, and the Combined
Fleet, under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. To analyze the effectiveness of a
proposed surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and to rehearse for its execution,
a series of wargames was played in the fall of 1941 at the War College in
Tokyo, including "table top maneuvers" held at the Tokyo Naval War
College in mid-September." Additional games were employed to aid the
planning for the attacks on Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, the
Dutch East Indies, the Solomons, and the islands of the Central Pacific,
including Guam and Wake. 55
After their brilliant initial successes, the Japanese again began to
debate their future strategy. By late February 1942, the Combined Fleet
proposed a plan for an operation in the Indian Ocean. "The plan was then
put to the test in a war game staged on board super-battleship Yamato,
which had just been designated flagship of Combined Fleet. The game
continued over a four day period with representatives of the Naval General
staff attending."56 The scheme played out in the game was rejected by the
army, which was preoccupied with its ongoing operations in Burma and its
concern about the USSR.

Combined Fleet reacted to the rejection of the western

campaign by looking again to the east, but this time only as
far as Midway, a little over a thousand miles from Hawaii.
Midway was only the beginning of an ambitious operation
the Japanese now began to test, again with wargames playing
a prominent role. On the first of May 1942, the headquarters
of the Combined Fleet began a series of wargames that would
go on for four days. These games encompassed the entire
range of operations envisioned by Combined Fleet for the
next phase of the war, including the capture of Midway and
the western Aleutians in early June, the seizure of key points
in New Caledonia and the Fiji Islands in July, carrier strikes
against Sydney and the southeast coast of Australia, and
attacks against Johnston Island and perhaps even Hawaii in
August.
Except for the staff of Combined Fleet Headquarters, all
those taking part in the war games were amazed at this
formidable program, which seemed to have been dreamed up
with a great deal more imagination than regard for reality.
Still more amazing, however, was the manner in which every
operation from the invasion of Midway and the Aleutians
down to the assault on Johnston and Hawaii was carried out
in the games without the slightest difficulty. This was due in
no small measure to the highhanded conduct of Rear Admiral
Ugaki, the presiding officer, who frequently intervened to set
aside rulings made by the umpires.
 In the tabletop maneuvers, for example, a situation
developed in which the Nagumo Force [the carriers]
underwent a bombing attack by enemy land-based aircraft
while its own planes were off attacking Midway. In
accordance with the rules, Lieutenant Commander Okumiya,
Carrier Division 4 staff officer who was acting as an umpire,
cast dice to determine the bombing results and ruled that
there had been nine enemy hits on the Japanese carriers. Both
Akagi and Kaga were listed as sunk. Admiral Ugaki,
however, arbitrarily reduced the number of enemy hits to
only three, which resulted in Kaga's still being ruled sunk but
Akagi only slightly damaged. To Okumiya's surprise, even
this revised ruling was subsequently cancelled, and Kaga
reappeared as a participant in the next part of the games
covering the New Caledonia and Fiji Islands invasions. The
verdicts of the umpires regarding the results of air fighting
were similarly juggled, always in favor of the Japanese
forces.
The value of the games also was impaired by the fact that
the participating staff officers from several major operational
commands, including the Nagumo Force and the shore-based
Eleventh Air Fleet, had had little time to study the operations
to be tested. The result was that they could only play out their
parts like puppets, with the staff of Combined Fleet
Headquarters pulling the strings. The lack of preparation was
illustrated by an incident which occurred during the Midway
invasion maneuvers. There, the somewhat reckless manner in
which the Nagumo force operated evoked criticism and the
question was raised as to what plan the Force had in mind to
meet the contingency that an enemy carrier task force might
appear on its flank while it was executing its scheduled air
attack on Midway. The reply given by the Nagumo Force
 staff officer present was so vague as to suggest that there was
no such plan, and Rear Admiral Ugaki himself cautioned that
greater consideration must be given to this possibility.
Indeed, in the actual battle, this was precisely what happened.
57

Most accounts of the Japanese Midway games latch onto the changes
made to the rulings of the umpires as a prime example of the dangers of
introducing bias into wargames. Indeed, the games were almost certainly
biased; based on their fundamental premises of such grandiose operational
schemes, they could hardly be otherwise. But the point that is too often
missed is that contained in Fuchida's last paragraph. The game raised the
crucial issue of the possibility of an ambush from the north; the operators
ignored the warning, a warning reiterated by the oft-maligned Ugaki.
Ugaki's change of the umpires evaluation of the effectiveness of the U.S.
land-based-bomber attack was not necessarily blind arrogance. In the actual
battle, B-17s attacked the Japanese force on more than one occasion and
failed to score a single hit! The myth that the Japanese umpires successfully
predicted the course and outcome of the battle of Midway only to be
overruled by the overly optimistic game director is one that is in serious
need of exploding. Ignoring or changing the results of a few die rolls did
not constitute the failure of Japanese wargaming in the case of Midway;
ignoring the questions and issues raised by the play did. The almost
legendary Commander Minoru Genda, air officer for Nagumo's staff, put
his finger on the principal failure of the game when he discussed the play of
the "American" commander for the game, Captain Chiaki Matsuda. In
postwar remarks, Genda stated that Matsuda’s uncharacteristic American
play "might have given us the wrong impression of American thinking."58
The disaster at Midway did not prevent the Japanese from continuing
their use of wargaming, but it may have made them more careful in their
choice of who would play the Americans in the games. After the U.S.
Marine Corps's assault on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, the Japanese
conducted a series of games to explore their options for destroying the U.S.
forces in the South Pacific. Officers of the Naval General Staff who were
intimately acquainted with the current condition of the fleet played Blue,
the Japanese side.

To obtain the best possible players for the Red (United

States) side, the General Staff arranged for participation by
the most thoroughly informed Japanese officers with the
most up-to-date contacts with the United States. They found
them among some outstanding Japanese Naval Intelligence
Officers who had been assigned to duty in the Japanese
Embassy in Washington, and who had been interned with all
Japanese nationals in the United States when war broke out.
In August 1942 arrangements were completed to repatriate
internees, with a mutual exchange of Embassy personnel. 59
Before the ship carrying the returning intelligence specialists could
even dock in a Japanese harbor, however, the General Staff had sent a
launch to pick up the navy officers and whisk them straight to Naval
Headquarters in Tokyo, "where they were held incommunicado to seal them
off from all news and contacts which might affect the 'pristine information
they carried concerning the U.S.' "
"The officers were told they were to play the Red (U.S.) force in war
games, a task they performed thoroughly and exceedingly well. This Red
team of Japanese intelligence experts demonstrated in the game that Japan's
only hope was to achieve its conquests and consolidate them as early as
possible, because the greater resources of the United States, once converted
to full war-making capacity, would surely deprive Japan of its war potential
and force her surrender."60 Hausrath gives the source of this information as
Lt. Roger Pineau, USNR, who interviewed the Japanese officers involved in
the games after the war. lt was Pineau's opinion that "the Japanese indulged
in some sort of war game for every major operation of World War II."61

Russian Gaming
 The Russians were somewhat slower to adopt wargaming than other
European countries, but by the mid 1870s wargaming techniques were an
accepted element of officer training, “By War Department Orders No. 28 of
1875 and No. 71 of 1876 the systematic instruction of officers was to be
taken up by means of written exercises and lectures on tactics under the
direction of regimental and battalion commanders. War games were to be
held in conjunction with this instruction whenever sufficient time, rooms
and other facilities were available."62 By the early 1900s more senior
officers were involved in large-scale games, and naval war games were also
held.
The results of the Russian games were not, however, universally
successful. In 1903 War Department Orders No. 85 identified the causes of
failure as "the inability of the directors to arouse interest in the games; too
much adherence to fixed models; a scarcity of good directors; a lack of
interest on the part of the higher commanders; and insufficient familiarity of
the participants with the tactical handling of the three arms."63 The Russian
defeats at the hands of the Japanese in 1904-05 encouraged greater interest
in wargames on the part of the higher command, and as the storm clouds of
1914 gathered, the Russian General Staff played a game to test their plans
for mobilization against the Germans and the initial attacks into East
Prussia.
The Russian plan envisioned an attack by two armies, one moving to
the north of the Masurian Lakes and the other to the south. (See figure 1.)
The games were played to test this plan, and their course revealed a serious
weakness in it. Because of the separation between the two armies, forced on
the Russians by the geography of the region, the timing of the advance was
crucial. Should one army begin its attack too late, the other would be
exposed to a concentrated German counterattack. The games indicated that
to avoid decisive defeat the Russian Second Army would have to begin its
march three days before the advance of Rennenkampf's First Army, "an
action not contained in the plans. This change, so clearly indicated in the
war games, was never made in the plans or in their execution."64
German games dealing with the situation identified the same potential
problem for the attacking Russians, but the Germans took the lesson to
heart. The German Eighth Army under Hindenburg and Ludendorff
smashed both Russian armies, one at a time, in what came to be known as
the Battle of Tannenberg. Unfortunately, there is precious little published
documentation of the further role of wargaming in Russian (and later
Soviet) military developments before the end of the World War II.[8]*

Figure 1. The Russian/German (East Prussia) border in 1914.

British Gaming
Despite some earlier fits and starts, wargaming was seldom used by the
British military until after the Franco-Prussian War. Captain Baring of the
Royal Artillery, introduced a set of game rules for the British Army in 1872.
Baring’s rules were based on those designed by von Tschischwitz, and were
thus of the "later rigid" school of Kriegsspiel.
In a little over a decade, wargaming achieved some measure of
acceptance in the British Army, enough to encourage the commander in
chief, the Duke of Cambridge, to introduce wargaming officially into the
army by an order of October 1883. After another dozen years, an official set
of British army wargame rules was published under the title “Rules for the
Conduct of the War Game on a Map."65 Perhaps the most important and
influential figure in British wargaming in this latter part of the nineteenth
century was a well-known military reformer named Spenser Wilkinson.
In his work Essays on the War Came, Wilkinson described wargames,
in terms similar to those used by Sayre, as maneuvers held on a map. He
cautioned: "Probably no form of military study is more useful if properly
conducted, as certainly none is so liable to be misused." To Wilkinson,
wargames were useful principally as a means to improve the tactical and
strategic understanding of the participants. "The only difference from actual
war is the absence of danger, of fatigue, of responsibility, and of the friction
involved in maintaining discipline," minor details that just happen to be
crucial in real war. "The question therefore becomes—How many men must
be killed or wounded before the remainder will be induced to change their
mind and go back?"66 This emphasis on attrition and on assuming that the
unmeasurable applied equally to both sides will appear again and again in
different guises.
The Royal Navy also got a taste of wargaming after Captain Philip H.
Colomb, RN, invented and patented a ship-to-ship game in 1878. Colomb's
game, called "The Duel," simulated the detailed combat actions of two
contending ships. As perhaps the first true naval wargame, it elicited a
certain amount of interest on the part of both the French and Italian navies,
as evidenced by the appearance of reviews in Revue Maritime et Coloniale
and Rivista Marittima.67
As Wells's comments about the general lack of interest in army
Kriegsspiel imply, wargaming never really caught on among the
professional British soldiers. Nor did Colomb's game make much headway
with the Royal Navy.
Wargaming, particularly the type of strategic gaming popular with von
Schlieffen and his contemporaries, never had as much influence on British
planning prior to World War I as it did in Germany. Perhaps this was
because of the British tendency "to obey tradition and instinct, and, in the
Army, an antipathy for professionalism."68 There was, however, at least one
exception to this rule, one occasion when the classic German methods were
applied to study an important issue, the potential for British Army
operations in a major European war Following the Crimean War of 1854-
56, British foreign and military policy was deeply affected by
apprehensions over an imperialistic Russia. Indeed, during the ill-fated
voyage of the Russian fleet from the Baltic to the Straits of Tsushima during
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the dangers of a serious conflict
between Britain and Russia seemed very real. Yet, as the new century
began, some perceptive officers began to see the growing Anglo-German
trade rivalry and German push for naval equality or supremacy as an even
more serious menace.
Initial concerns about a direct German invasion of Britain, a topic of
some discussion in the German press, gave way by 1905 to concern about
the possibility that war between the two countries could result from a
German violation of Belgian neutrality during an attack on France. In that
year, the new British General Staff decided to explore the possibility in a
wargame. "The games main purpose was supposed to be instructional, but it
became the basis of British military planning for years to come."69
The scenario, as we would call it today, assumed that war between
France and Germany had broken out in January 1905. For two months the
Germans had attacked the French defenses in the same region they had
struck during the Franco-Prussian war, between Sedan and Belfort. (See
figure 2.) Stymied in their attack, the Germans decided to send more than
250,000 men to outflank the French defenses by marching through
Belgium. Britain, the guarantor of Belgian neutrality, would thereupon be
obliged to enter the war.
 Figure 2. The French/German border in 1914.

The game was a three-sided one. Colonel C. E. Callwell, who would

probably suffer a severe case of deja vu when he became the deputy
director of operations in 1914, played the British commander in chief.
Major General "Wully" Robertson, head of the foreign section of the
Military Intelligence Department, played the German commander in chief.
The Belgians were handled by Major A. Lynden-Bell, a staff officer.
Several officers of the Military Operations and the Intelligence staffs
assisted in game play.70
The game highlighted several interesting insights, one of the most
distressing of which was the amount of time needed to transport any
substantial British force across the Channel using the existing plans. “The
most far-reaching conclusion drawn from the war game, however, was that
since a German invasion of Belgium could be expected to succeed, France
could not be expected to resist an attack on her own. This resulted, after
1906, in staff talks with the French also, and in the evolution of the Anglo-
French Entente, on the strength of which France mobilized in 1914."71
Further information about British military gaming from before World
War I and through World War II is limited. Perhaps the best-known example
of their use of wargaming techniques centers around Field Marshal Bernard
Law Montgomery's activities in World War II.
Montgomery, given command of the British Eighth Army facing
Rommel at El Alamein, developed a typically eccentric mode of operation.
During particularly critical stages of his operational planning process,
Montgomery would abandon his headquarters in favor of a quiet, out-of-
the-way spot in which he could contemplate his options and develop his
ideas without the constant interruptions of day-to-day duties. His chief of
staff routinely visited the sanctum sanctorum to bring the commander
updates on the situation and return with any new orders.
During these intense planning periods, Montgomery would test his
ideas by means of wargame-like exercises with his staff and unit
commanders. "Each protagonist was quizzed on specific details of
capabilities, requirements, reactions to enemy moves, and what he could
deliver in relation to the situation and plans before him. Montgomery
required his intelligence officers to play through the forthcoming battle,
with the dispositions of the enemy and his own troops spread out on a map.
The staff was required to imagine themselves the enemy, to react as the
enemy would, and 'to play against Montgomery [this] strange and
fascinating parlor game, making move-for-move against the British.' Most
of this activity was accepted practice in planning, but Montgomery played
with intensity and tried always to put himself in Rommel's place. He
anticipated enemy actions by close study of his adversary and always asked
himself, Now what would Rommel do about it?"72
In some sense, British wargaming during and after World War II was
limited and in many ways supplanted by a new technique, which became
known as operational research. A similar effect was felt by American
wargaming, which was, if anything, even less solidly implanted than its
British cousin.

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 American Wargaming
The growth of wargaming in the United States suffered from America's
traditional distrust of military professionalism and from the lack of a
pressing need to develop any. After the War Between the States ended in
1865, the U.S. Army settled back into its normal routine of small posts and
garrisons. The mass armies that had marched and fought over the southern
states were gone, and seemed unlikely to be needed in the near future. Yet a
few prophets cried out in the wilderness, realizing that America's few
professional soldiers had been the heart of both the Union and Confederate
high commands, and that if war with a major European power should ever
threaten, the small band of professionals would once again be called upon
to lead the mass of the country's citizen soldiers into battle. If American
soldiers were to prepare for that eventuality, they would need to supplement
their limited experience of handling large bodies of troops. The new-found
popularity of Kriegsspiel among the Europeans seemed an ideal tool to
provide such a supplement.
W. R. Livermore is usually credited with introducing German-style
wargaming to the United States. In 1879 Livermore published his two-
volume work The American Kriegsspiel. Based largely on the work of
Captain Naumann, Livermore’s system was a derivative of rigid
Kriegsspiel. To solve the usual problems of that approach, especially its
long playing time, Livermore turned to a technical solution rather than a
procedural one.
The blocks representing combat units were made of porcelain, metal, or
wood. They were colored red and blue in the traditional manner, but various
other colors, including golds and greens, were used to distinguish different
types of combat arms and specialized units such as engineers. The playing
pieces were cut to scale, so that the same blocks could be used to represent
differently sized units. Depending on the scale of the map, the longest of the
blocks could represent a regiment of infantry in line of battle (about 1,000
men in two ranks and elbow to elbow), or a company of skirmishers
deployed with sixty-four men over about one hundred and sixty yards.
The different sides of the blocks were marked with small lines or dots
called scores. The number of scores exposed indicated the fraction of a
unit's strength that it had lost. Special blocks were used to record
ammunition levels, fatigue, and the amount of time spent on constructing
trenches or other fortifications. By these means Livermore hoped to reduce
the volume of paperwork that plagued rigid Kriegsspiel.
To indicate the movement and fire of the troops, Livermore employed
two different kinds of physical pointers. "Arrows" were pointed at one end
and rounded at the other, "indices" were shaped like swords. Both the
arrows and indices were marked With vertical lines that divided the pointers
into ten equally sized segments also called scores. (Figure 3 illustrates some
of Livermore's devices.)
Arrows were used to indicate the direction and volume of fire. Swords
were used in a similar manner to indicate the direction and speed of march.
Players could thus issue orders to their units simply by placing the pointers.
Unfortunately, the savings in time over written orders were probably
marginal at best, and the need to be careful about precisely how and where
the pointers were placed almost certainly required the players to spend
some amount of time adjusting their devices.
Despite Livermore’s great hopes that "technology" could be the
solution to the problem of speeding up play, practical experience with his
game proved otherwise. The complexity and artificiality of his devices, no
matter how clever they may have been, required players and especially the
umpires to spend no little time mastering the conventions of their
manipulation. The detail and comprehensiveness of the rules and data were
designed as much as possible to cover any situation likely to arise in actual
combat operations. But Livermore himself realized that the devices and data
did not, in fact, help speed up play to the extent he may have hoped.
Instead, he encouraged umpires to rely more on their judgment and
experience, guided by the vast quantities of data he provided, than on the
computations alone. In the 1882 edition he wrote that "it cannot be too
strongly stated that all these computations not only need not, but must not,
be made in every case, after the players and umpire have had a little
practice, especially if they are at all familiar with military operations. They
are intended to facilitate and hasten the game and should not be so
perverted as to retard it."73
Livermore's game was clearly of the German school, and in the opinion
of some American soldiers was not appropriate to the unique conditions of
the United States. One of the most outspoken of the critics was Lieutenant
Charles A. L. Totten, who published his own book of wargaming
techniques, Strategos: A Series of American Games of War Based upon
Military Principles, in 1880, shortly after Livermore’s first edition hit the
booksellers.
Totems purpose in writing is well described in his extended title: "And
Designed for the Assistance Both of Beginners and Advanced Students in
Prosecuting the Whole Study of Tactics, Grand Tactics, Strategy, Military
History, and the Various Operations of War. Illustrated with Numerous
Diagrams. To which is Appended a Collection of Studies upon Military
Statistics as Applied to War on Field or Map." Anything else?
Because none of the foreign systems of Kriegsspiel had been available
in the U.S. until his work was essentially finished, Totten was able to
provide a truly unique American perspective. He avoided jumping right into
the intricacies of a full-blown Kriegsspiel (as Livermore did), instead
structuring his games to progress from the simple to the complex. Through
his progressively more elaborate approach to the different levels of warfare
in his grand tactical and battle games, Totten hoped to help the new student
move up to that more advanced level, which he also covered in his
advanced game.

Two Infantry Companies Deploy

 Infantry Walk Two Minutes and Fire Five Minutes

Figure 3. Examples of the equipment for Livermore’s game.

Modern hobby gamers will find much that is familiar in Totten's games.
The philosophy, physical components, and even many of the basic concepts
(like the stacking of units and the area of command, now better known as
the zone of control) are all amazingly similar to the basic elements of
modern board gaming.
Unfortunately, as the twentieth century dawned, Totten's start toward a
balanced, progressive approach to the study and gaming of war seemed to
be swamped in the general acclamation for military things German. As the
world wars loomed, American experimentation continued with but mixed
results.
In 1912, Major William Chamberlaine designed the Coast Artillery
War Game for the Department of Artillery and Land Defense to train
artillery officers for their possible wartime duties. Chamberlaine was
somewhat unhappy with the title. McHugh quotes from the preface to the
first edition: "It is considered unfortunate that some name more descriptive
of its purpose could not be found but the present one has been adopted after
considering several others."74 The army's apparent uneasiness over the
word game did not, however, dissuade them from cooperating with
Scientific American, who in 1914 published an article that described gaming
at the Army War College. The article noted that the technique was "used
now in the instruction of every army of the world," and that wargames were
not played "to see who will win, but to get results and experience, to profit
by the mistakes made."75
 Following somewhat in the tradition of Sayre, the Army General
Service Schools published a book called The Solution of Map Problems.
The stated purpose of the book was to bring about "that state of mind
wherein the individual, when confronted with a situation in the field, goes
about its solution with full confidence in his ability to see things in their
proper relations, to weigh conditions one against the other, and to reach a
sound decision without undue loss of time."76
Although there is some opinion that the Army War Plans Division used
wargames to explore U.S. mobilization plans in the late 1930s, most
American gaming seemed to remain tightly focused on training and
education rather than on planning and analysis.77 The important exception
is the experience of the Naval War College, which is described in the next
chapter. For the U.S. Army, wargaming meant Kriegsspiel, and Kriegsspiel
meant training. The March 1941 issue of Military Review signified the
army's attitude on the eve of American involvement in World War II. In that
issue appeared a condensed translation of a German Army booklet on
wargaming written by General von Cochenhausen.78 According to the
editors of the journal, "no better means than the 'Kriegsspiel', or war game,
has been devised for training commanders and general staff officers,
approaching as it does the semblance of actual battle. It demands definite
decisions and orders for the commitment of troops, also being conducted
within the realm of time and space thereby leading to exactitude in troop
leading."79
As was the case with the British, there is little solid evidence
concerning American use of wargaming (as distinguished from operations
research) during the course of World War II. One example is taken from the
history of the U.S. Ninth Army. After the Ardennes fighting of December
1944, the Ninth Army was transferred from Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army
Group to the command of Montgomery's Twenty-first Army Group. As part
of the process of integrating the army into its new command, the
commanders and staffs prepared a complete and formal "estimate of the
situation." The separate corps presented their plans at a combined meeting
of all the commanders and principal army and corps staff officers. This
allowed each of the corps to understand the plans and rationales of their
fellows. These plans "were then 'wargamed'—played out on the map—so
that the action could be thoroughly previewed and every possible
contingency discussed in detail."80 Of course, like the similar "games"
played by Montgomery, such wargaming of operational plans in the midst
of combat was not done according to the formal systems of Kriegsspiel
popular before the war.
It seems that neither the British nor the Americans ever quite accepted
the full range of wargaming's potential value prior to the end of World War
II. Like its early days in Prussia, Kriegsspiel had a great deal of difficulty
really catching on in the English-speaking nations. The armies of both
Britain and the United States recognized some potential training value for
wargames, and even made limited use of the techniques of gaming to test
war plans. Yet the prominent role played by operational research in the war
efforts of the Allies tends to obscure what contributions the older method
may have made. The single, and stellar, exception to this assessment is the
development and application of wargaming at the U.S. Naval War College.
It is to Newport, then, that our story must now turn.

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 2: Wargaming and the U.S. Naval War College

THE CREATION OF THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

The latter quarter of the nineteenth century was a time of social and
technological upheaval for the U.S. Navy. The sudden growth in the navy's
size and fighting power occasioned by the War Between the States was
followed by an equally precipitous decline after that war's end. At the same
time, the technological revolutions in ship construction and weapons, which
the war had helped accelerate, had left the navy's core of professional
officers with deep-seated feelings of uncertainty about the future and the
navy's place in it.1
There was a feeling abroad in the country and much of the world that
economic progress and industrial efficiency would soon lead to the
disappearance of war and so the need for armed forces of all types. For the
United States especially, insulated from the great powers of Europe by the
wide expanse of the Atlantic, military security seemed virtually assured by
simple geography, and military forces seemed almost superfluous. Indeed,
the secretary of war, Redfield Proctor, wrote in 1890 that the ‘military
resources of the nation have been so recently demonstrated and its network
of railroads is so adapted to a rapid concentration of troops on any
threatened point, that no hostile force is likely to seek an encounter with us
on our own soil. A small army sent upon our shores could not hope for
success; it is not probable that any large one will run the risk."2
If civilians believed the military to be unimportant, naval officers felt
themselves unappreciated. The ships, what remained of them, were old. The
officer corps was plagued by the twin specters of a rigid system of seniority
and an overabundance of seniors. It is little wonder that officers with
ambition and imagination found the naval service less than satisfying.
"Confronted with the combination of public indifference and professional
stagnation, many officers became mere timeservers while others buried
themselves with great thoroughness in some technical branch of their
calling, ordnance or electricity, engineering, or international law."3
Determined to pull the navy from the pit of its despair, a small band of
"reformers" took the initiative to turn the navy into a true profession. Led
by Commodore Stephen B. Luce, the reformers sought no less than the
complete transformation of the navy's officers, not into mere technicians,
but into well-educated, well-rounded masters of the tools and techniques of
a unique naval art. In addition, they sought to secure a place for these new
naval professionals in the public's appreciation and understanding by
demonstrating the importance of that profession for the general life and
well-being of the nation and its people.

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One of the earliest illustrations of wargaming at the Naval War College
from Harpers Weekly 1894. This was the first year that wargaming became
an integral part of the College’s instruction. Note two Chinese naval
observers are shown in the central background. (Courtesy of the Naval War
College).

It was a tall order, but one Luce accepted as a challenge worth his
commitment. In 1881 Luce was appointed commander of the newly formed
Training Squadron in the Atlantic, with his flagship, the USS New
Hampshire, anchored off Coasters Harbor Island only two miles north of
the city of Newport, Rhode Island. The ship's executive officer was a young
lieutenant named William McCarty Little, whom Luce had known as a
student at the Naval Academy while Luce had been on the staff there.
Operating from this base in Narragansett Bay, Luce embarked on a
concerted campaign to establish a higher school for the professional
education of naval officers.
In October 1884, after extensive efforts both within and outside the
navy, Luce succeeded in getting the secretary of the navy, William
Chandler, to sign General Order 325, formally establishing the Naval War
College on Coasters Harbor Island. A year later the college became a
reality, with Luce, detached from his command of the North Atlantic
Squadron, as its first president. Among his staff were a Captain Alfred
Thayer Mahan, and the now retired Lieutenant William McCarty Little.4
 McCARTY LITTLE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF
NEWPORT WARGAMING
McCarty Little, as he was known to his friends, began his navy career
in Newport in 1863, where he entered the Naval Academy during its brief
hiatus there during the Civil War. (Annapolis was a bit too close to the front
lines.) Graduating in 1866, McCarty Little served in various sea and shore
assignments, many of which enabled him to maintain his association with
the city he had grown to love. In 1876, however, he suffered an accident
ashore, which cost him the sight of one of his eyes. He was able to return to
active duty and served well for several more years until one of those
unfortunate and inexplicable bureaucratic actions resulted in his discharge
for medical reasons in 1884, after twenty years in the navy. Inevitably, he
chose Newport as his new, and final, home port.
Just as inevitably, it seems, he became deeply involved with the
activities of his old friend Luce. Although his role in the establishment and
the organization of the Naval War College during its first year of existence
is not fully recorded, "McCarty Little assisted in the preparation of teaching
aids, established and maintained a library, and fulfilled administrative duties
of a routine nature."5 His responsibilities expanded the following year.
Luce had been detached to resume command of the North Atlantic
Squadron, and Mahan had assumed the role of War College president.
Plagued by bureaucratic and political problems, Mahan leaned heavily on
McCarty Little for both moral and practical support. For McCarty Little, an
unofficial member of the staff, that support included the preparation of
maps and charts for Mahan's lectures on strategy and tactics, and also the
preparation and delivery of a lecture of his own. The latter, simply titled
"Colomb's War Game," was the first on the subject to be given at the
college. It was not the last.
Little's budding interest in wargaming was almost certainly stimulated
by his association with army Major W. R. Livermore, author of The
American Kriegsspiel, who was stationed across the harbor from the Naval
War College in Fort Adams. The two men worked together on a unique
project conceived by Rear Admiral Luce, who had left the college in body
to take command of the North Atlantic Squadron, but had not strayed far in
spirit.
During the summer and fall of 1887, Luce brought the ships of his
North Atlantic Squadron into Narragansett Bay for an extended period of
time. He took advantage of his position to place them at the disposal of the
college, in keeping with his notion that the education of naval officers
required both theoretical and practical instruction. The end result was a
joint army-navy maneuver, which Livermore helped the War College plan.
Two maneuvers were held in the bay during October and November.
The first simulated a night torpedo attack on the ships of the North Atlantic
Squadron. The second was an elaborate attack on the city of Newport itself.
For the latter, the squadron ran through a minefield, past Fort Adams at the
entrance of the bay, and suffered a torpedo attack as it passed the Navy
Torpedo Station on Goat Island. It then carried out an amphibious landing at
Coddington Point to the north of the War College’s home on Coasters
Harbor Island. Livermore served as the umpire for the maneuver, with
McCarty Little acting as his assistant. At the conclusion of the exercise, a
critique was prepared and discussed at the college.6
Unfortunately, the new secretary of the navy, William C. Whitney, was
not enamored of Luce, his maneuvers, or the Naval War College. The
experiment would not be repeated until after the turn of the century. In the
midst of a raging bureaucratic war over the future of the college, McCarty
Little's suggestion to use steam launches in place of actual warships for the
colleges "school of application" ran into difficulties over acquiring even
these poor substitutes. As a result, the college came to rely more and more
on wargaming as a supplement to its curriculum of readings and lectures.
McCarty Little, now an official member of the War Colleges staff,
expanded his single lecture of the previous year into a series of six
presentations for 1887 and conducted his first actual wargame at the
College.7 Little continued his lectures in 1888 and 1889, and he also
continued refining and developing his own ideas. Livermore had become
even more closely associated with the college during this period, and in
1889 he lectured there on military strategy and tactics. But the political
travails of the college continued.
From 1891 to 1892 courses were suspended during construction of a
new War College building on Coasters Harbor Island, but McCarty Little
did not suspend his work on wargaming. While continuing to refine his own
techniques, he also embarked on a course of translating important foreign
works dealing with naval strategy and tactics. Not surprisingly, his first
translation was one dealing with wargaming, the Italian rules published in
1891 by Lieutenant A. Colombo of the Italian Navy.8
McCarty Little followed a two-year absence from the college (to
serve as the United States's special commissioner to Spain for the 1892
Colombian Exposition) with a rapid reentry into the swing of things at
Newport. In addition to the incessant political battles waged against
opponents of the college, Little returned to his work on wargaming. A
single game had been conducted during 1892 while he was away, but it was
not completed. During the following year, classes were not held at the
college, but the staff continued to work on refining gaming techniques. In
1894, under newly appointed President Captain Henry Taylor, gaming
became an integral and permanent part of the course of study for all
students.
Taylor, possibly with the encouragement and certainly the assistance of
McCarty Little, integrated wargaming with that part of the students' course
in which the class was assigned a problem. Typically in those early years
the student problems focused on coastal defense, and each student was
required to develop a complete solution to the problem. These solutions
were then examined, tested, and critiqued in a wargame.
The wargames, which had had such a fitful birth at Newport, suddenly
exploded in their popularity and prominence. The news media reported that
"the War College has taken a new and successful departure, and the year's
work just closed has been peculiarly practical and progressive. It consisted,
first and foremost in working out a problem in strategy—an application to
American naval tactics of the 'Kriegsspiel' to which the German Army, and
particularly the officers of the General Staff, owe their high efficiency in
mobilization and strategic movement. . . . That complete preparedness
against all probable contingencies is the ultimate aim of this institution; and
in the absence of an American General Staff, naval officers are here to
determine before hand what an enemy must or would be likely to do in
attacking us by sea, and what, under each set of circumstances, is the best
way to repel him."9 The secretary of the navy himself, Hilary A. Herbert,
visited the War College in 1895 and spent his entire sojourn there observing
the play of the games. He was reportedly very "well pleased by what he
saw."10 In an 1897 letter, the new assistant secretary of the navy, a Mr.
Theodore Roosevelt, wrote, "When I come on to Newport, I want to time
my visit so as to see one of your big strategic games."11
The strategic game referred to in Roosevelt's letter was only one of the
three types of games whose rules McCarty Little compiled for use at the
college. The simplest game was the Duel, or Single-Ship game. The Fleet
Tactical game dealt with the maneuvers and engagement of two competing
forces already in contact with each other. Finally, the Strategic Game
examined the wider dispositions and operations of fleets involved in a
major campaign.
In the Duel, ships were represented by cardboard or celluloid cutouts
roughly three inches long. In the earliest days, the playing surface was a
piece of paper marked off into grid squares to assist in the movement of the
ships and to help record the action for later analysis. A similar grid, marked
off on a scale of ten inches to the mile (one of the popular scales for land
wargames of the period), was used for the Fleet Tactical game. A standard
navigation chart served as the game board for the strategic game. As the
size and scale of the games increased, the paper game boards became
boards in a very literal sense. The grid was painted on a wooden board and
laid across low sawhorses. Even later, after World War I, these boards also
proved too small, and play was transferred to the deck (or floor) of a large
room. The scale was reduced to four inches per thousand yards.12
 In the duel and tactical games, dice were used along with charts of hit
and damage probabilities to determine the outcome of gunfire and torpedo
attacks. The strategic game adopted a more aggregated method of
resolution: "If two fleets meet with odds of 2 to 1, the inferior will be
removed; with odds of 3 to 2, the inferior loses one-half; with odds of 4 to 3
the inferior is destroyed but the superior is crippled for the remainder of the
game."13
The duel game was never very popular at the War College, probably
because of the limited scope of decision making that it provided. It was
discontinued in 1905. The strategic and tactical games, however, remained
mainstays of Newport gaming until after the Second World War. Those two
types of games could be played separately, or they could be incorporated as
part of the same exercise.14 In the latter case, the staff of the college would
prepare a hypothetical scenario and divide the students into two groups.
One group would represent the United States, or Blue Navy; the other group
would play the role of the opposition. Both teams then prepared plans and
issued orders under the rules for a chart game. Once the opposing fleets
closed within range of each other, the chart game ended and play shifted to
the game board for resolution at the tactical level. Once the game was
finished, the War College staff would analyze the performance and plans of
the players and discuss with the students the strengths and weaknesses of
the opposing strategies and tactics.15
The analyses of the games, together with the other work done by the
students and staff of the college, served as the basis for many important
insights, which were later incorporated into the navy's planning and
doctrine.16 Some examples include the fact that "in 1896 the College
recommended that oil fuel be explored as a substitute for coal, and in 1901
concluded that the all-big-gun warship had substantial advantages over the
mixed caliber type then being used by all major navies; both conclusions
were well ahead of their time."17
 In one of his last major articles, McCarty Little pointed out one of the
principal early contributions of the techniques he had so staunchly
pioneered. "The principle of concentration of the fleet . . . was the direct
result of a strategic game. . . . Dissemination had been our rule for years,
i.e., the ships were divided more or less impartially among the stations 'to
show the flag' as the expression was; and at that time the same rule was
general with other nations. At the beginning of the game most of the
conference [class] had never entertained a suspicion that the custom was not
perfectly correct; but at the end there was but one voice, and that strong and
outspoken for concentration. But this view, which required but the time of
one game thoroughly to capture the entire conference [class] took many a
weary month before by mere argument it could convince all of those of our
naval authorities who had not had the privilege or opportunity of seeing
with their eyes.' It was some time after this that England adopted the same
principle"18
In the introduction to this same article, however, Little revealed his
uneasiness with the term "war game," that same uneasiness that plagues
professional wargamers even to this day:

In embarking on this lecture I would like to say, by way of

preface, that the name Game, War Game, has had much the
same depreciating effect as the term Sham Fight has had with
regard to field maneuvers. To avoid this, the Army has had
recourse to the expression Map Maneuver. We, of the Navy,
may in like manner say Chart Maneuver, and we have lately
decided so to do. There is a further reason why it is well for
us to prefer that term, namely, that it accentuates the fact that
the strategist's real field of operations is the chart, just as the
architect's real field is the drawing board; indeed, Jomini
calls Strategy "War on the Map.
Still, war itself has been declared to be a game, and rightly
so, for it has the game characteristic of the presence of an
 antagonist. It has, however, another characteristic which
differentiates it from most other games. The latter are played
for sport; and good sport requires reasonable chances of
winning for each side, and aims to give amusement even to
the losers. In the game of war, on the other hand, the stake is
life itself, nay, infinitely greater, it may be the life of the
nation, it certainly is its honor.19

Little's perception of the similarities and differences of war and games

deeply influenced his work at Newport. A critical element in the play of the
War College games, and one that distinguished them from Clerk's early
efforts and the contemporary map maneuvers and tactical rides championed
by Sayre, was what Little himself described as "the existence of the enemy,
a live, vigorous enemy in the next room waiting feverishly to take
advantage of any of our mistakes, ever ready to puncture any visionary
scheme, to haul us down to earth."20 This opportunity to pit one intellect
and will against another was seen as an essential element in the education of
a naval officer, and some of the War College's staff came to see the
wargames as more valuable than fleet maneuvers.21
The wargame came to be the college's primary means of
tying together the broad principles that served as the basis for its
educational program under Luce and Mahan to the more practical
requirements of command stressed by the likes of Sims and
Fiske after World War I. McCarty Little worked prodigiously to
help the Naval War College manage this period of transition in
the early 1900s. He was instrumental in helping to persuade the
navy to adopt the "military planning process," then known as the
"applicatory system." This system "was a method of teaching based on the
idea that military principles were learned best by application. It consisted of
three parts: the estimate of the situation, the writing of orders, and the
evaluation through gaming or maneuver board exercises. Its purpose was to
permit officers in command situations to exercise intelligent options for the
resolution of problems rather than to be slavishly bound to a method
conceived at a higher level."22 McCarty Little argued that "it is the war
game that had led to the adoption of the system," and that it was "the game
[that] sought the method and not the method that sought the game."23
Yet McCarty Little and the Naval War College, though convinced of
the value of wargaming, were only too well aware of its limitations. During
his tenure as president in 1897, Captain Goodrich addressed the following
words to the graduating class: "I am confident . . . that you have derived
much benefit from the tactical games, which have at least taught you some
things which a fleet should not do. . . . The single-ship game has made a
distinct step forward through the introduction of the torpedo as a weapon.
Experience and study will improve this as well as the other games, so that
they may more nearly represent the conditions of actual warfare. It should
be borne in mind, however, that a reasonable approximation is the best we
can hope for . . . because of the imperfections that must necessarily exist in
this mimic warfare, its results can not be accepted in their entirety, but must
be analyzed and digested before they can be made the basis of future
campaigns."24
When William McCarty Little died on 12 March 1915, the Naval War
College had grown from its troubled beginnings into a powerful force for
the development of naval professionalism in the United States. The tool he
had helped to mold and develop from a mere curiosity into a central
element of the War College experience was firmly entrenched in the navy's
future. Francis McHugh, one of his true descendants in his dedication to
both gaming and the Naval War College, summarizes McCarty Littles role
in Newport gaming:

The inclusion of Little’s lectures in the college curriculum

represented the first official recognition of war gaming in this
country, and very likely its first official recognition by any
navy. The scheduling of such a series at a time when the
majority of naval officers had little patience with theoretical
pursuits, and when the very existence of the college was in
 doubt, required an unusual amount of courage and foresight
on the part of the then relatively unknown president of the
College, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, U.S. Navy. … Except for
one short period, he [Little] remained at the College until his
death in 1915. Congress, by a Special Act, appointed him to
the rank of captain in 1903.
Throughout his long distinguished War College career,
Captain Little was concerned with wargaming. His
knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm made possible the
orderly development of gaming at the college; his continuous
service and prestige insured such development. He seems to
be have been the world’s first professional war gamer.25

THE FLAWED ORACLE―INTERWAR GAMES AND

THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO WORLD WAR II
Little’s death heralded the end of the beginning for Naval War College
wargaming. During his long career Little had seen the War College place a
great deal of emphasis on the use of games as an analytical tool, applying
them in the efforts to help institute a solid professional system of planning.
For these purposes, he could afford to aggregate the results of combat
actions to a high degree without unduly affect- ting the utility of the results.
In most of the games of the period, all ships of a given type were assumed
to have the same characteristics for the purposes of damage basement.
This simple technique proved inadequate to meet the requirements
imposed on gaming after the First World War. During the battles of that war
the capabilities and weaknesses of different classes within a particular ship
type (such as the tendency of British battle cruisers to blow up at the Battle
of Jutland) proved to be very important. At the same time, the increasing
prominence of the submarine and aircraft in naval warfare dictated the need
for updated methods.
A wargame in Luce Hall in the academic year 1905-6. Note the game
director and umpire on the raised platform on the left. The small model
ships on the board on the right, with their tracks being marked with chalk.
The board shows the game was between the Blue (U.S) and Red (Great
Britain). (Courtesy of the Naval War College).

When Admiral William S. Sims assumed the presidency of the Naval

War College (for the second time) in December 1918, his focus was on
educating naval officers in the practical elements of command at sea.
Instead of concentrating on the theoretical or on the material and technical,
Sims stressed his belief that the “art of command and coordinated effort
should be given precedence over all other consideration.”26 The college’s
assumption of a principal role in navy planning, which had occurred in the
ten or so years prior to the entry of the U.S. in the World War, was to be
balanced by renewed emphasis on education.
Thus, Newport wargaming came to focus on educational games, “that
is, games conducted for the primary purpose of providing the players with
decision-making experience."27 The strategic games were improved by
increasing the numbers of forces involved and by adding aircraft and
submarines. The tactical games followed suit, and their play and analysis
contributed substantially to the development of ideas about how to employ
the aircraft carrier. Wargaming, though changed in emphasis, continued to
play an important part in the growth of the U.S. Navy's professional spirit
and competence.[9]*
 In a 1923 article, Admiral Sims described the place of wargaming in the
navy.

The principles of the war game constitute the backbone of

our profession. ... At the Naval War College our entire fleet
with all of its auxiliaries, cruisers, destroyers, submarines,
airplanes, troop transports, and supply vessels, can be
maneuvered on the game board week after week throughout
the college year against a similar fleet representing a possible
enemy—all operations being governed by rules, based upon
the experience of practical fleet officers, and upon the
immutable principles of strategy and tactics that the students
are required to learn. There is no other service in the career of
a naval officer that can possibly afford this essential training.
In no other way can this training be had except by assembling
about a game board a large body of experienced officers
divided into two groups and "fighting" two great modern
fleets against each other—not once, or a few times, but
continually until the application of the correct principles
becomes as rapid and as automatic as the plays of an expert
football team.28

In 1922, as an outgrowth of Sims's emphasis on realistic education, the

Naval War College adopted a new and much more complex system of
battle-damage assessment. This system "was based on actual armaments
and actual ships. Known as the 'War College Fire Effect System,' it was
designed to lead 'to sound tactical conclusions when used in connection
with game board problems,' and to furnish 'a means of making substantially
accurate relative strength comparisons of ships and forces.'”29 This new
system, developed, extended, and improved over the years, served as the
basis for tactical play throughout the interwar period. It also reflected a
subtle and not altogether positive divergence in the philosophies underlying
the strategic and tactical games.

Strategic Gaming Between the Wars

Unlike the tactical games, the form of Newport strategic games
changed little in the interwar period. The basic tool was the chart, on which
the forces were represented by symbols. As before, the staff presented the
strategic scenario to the opposing players who then prepared their
assessments of the situation and their plans of campaign. The players
submitted their plans to the game director and the latter determined an
appropriate length of time that the first "move" would encompass. The
player teams retired to separate rooms where they plotted their maneuvers
on overlays, which were used by the control group to update a master plot
of both side's activities. The game director assessed the new situation, gave
each side an intelligence update (with allowance for the fog of war), and
defined the duration of the next move. Once the principal opposing forces
closed to engagement range, the director either terminated the game or
transferred play to the tactical level. The only change made to this classic
approach during the interwar period was the addition of an intercom system
and pneumatic tubes to speed the flow of moves and
information.30
When compared to earlier strategic gaming, however, the interwar
games displayed a somewhat different character, despite the similarity of
techniques. For one thing, the scale of forces was much greater and now
included aircraft and submarines in some numbers. Instead of being
concentrated on campaigns resulting from a foreign threat to the U.S. coast,
the games also explored the broad expanses of the Pacific Ocean and a
possible American counteroffensive thrusting from the eastern Pacific to the
Philippines. In addition, the games were more closely integrated into the
course work of the strategy department. Although the staff encouraged free
discussion of situations and options during the course of play, they also
prepared a "staff solution", which served as the basis for postgame
discussion and critique of student plans and actions.31
 The archives of the Naval War College have preserved the records of
more than 300 wargames played during the interwar period. Of these, more
than 130 emphasized campaign-level or strategic play, with all but nine of
those focused on a possible war with Japan. During the course of these
games, the discussions and critiques of players and staff evidenced a
growing appreciation for the strategic realities that would later surface
during the war in the Pacific. From an initial focus on a Mahanian vision of
an early, decisive clash of the battle fleets, which would decide the outcome
of the war in an afternoon, the games evolved into a more realistic and
grimmer vision of a prolonged struggle, not just between fleets, but between
nations and societies. During the process, the young officers who would rise
to the command of task forces and fleets in the coming war saw their
perceptions of reality torn apart and then rebuilt.32
Much has been made of the famous statement of Admiral Nimitz that
nothing that happened in the war was a surprise except the kamikazes.33
More interesting, and probably more indicative of the value of the games in
the development of Nimitz's and the navy's strategic thinking, are the words
he wrote in his 1923 thesis: "To bring such a war to a successful conclusion
Blue must either destroy Orange military and naval forces or effect a
complete isolation of Orange country by cutting all communications with
the outside world. It is quite possible that Orange resistance will cease when
isolation is complete and before steps to reduce military strength on Orange
soil are necessary. In either case the operations imposed upon Blue will
require the Blue Fleet to advance westward with an enormous train, in order
to be prepared to seize and establish bases en route. . . . The possession by
Orange of numerous bases in the western Pacific will give her fleet a
maximum of mobility while the lack of such bases imposes upon Blue the
necessity of refueling en route at sea, or of seizing a base from Orange for
this purpose, in order to maintain even a limited degree of mobility."34
Over the course of the interwar strategic games the type of careful and
perceptive thought exhibited by Nimitz reshaped the way the navy came to
think of its role in a future war with Japan. One historian of the War College
games has argued that

the repeated strategic gaming of Orange war forced the

Navy to divest itself of several former “reality-assumptions”:

· The notion that war at sea was defined according to a

formal, climactic clash of battle fleets, and that naval
strategy consisted of maneuvering one's fleet to bring
the adversary to decisive engagement.
· The belief that superior peacetime naval order of
battle was equivalent to available force in war, that a
peacetime treaty status quo would persist indefinitely,
and that only traditional naval weapons according to
traditional hierarchies of importance would be
necessary to defeat the enemy.

· The assumption that naval war across an oceanic

theater could be conducted quickly, and that enemy
advantage in strategic geography was marginal both to
strategic planning and to the conduct of naval
operations in war.
· The hypothesis that war with Japan would be limited
in forces engaged, in objective, in belligerent
participants, and in time.35

By emphasizing the broad questions of strategy and managing a fleet at

the expense of downplaying some of the technical and tactical details of
combat, the War College's strategic games left the players free to explore
their options and to teach themselves the deeper truths of the war that was
coming. Based on the insights afforded by strategic gaming, the navy began
to explore the requirements for a measured, step-wise offensive campaign
to span the Pacific, requirements not just for the navy, but for the entire
national political and military apparatus. "Gaming reality forced the Navy
to seize a set of strategic concepts about the conduct of future war which
had the capacity to redefine the very nature of America's role in the
world."36

Tactical Gaming Between the Wars

Contrast this assessment of strategic gaming with the evaluation of the
contemporary tactical gaming made by a student of the latter games. "While
the war games played by the American Navy prior to World War II hinted at
tactical problems, alternative hypotheses were rarely tried and apparently
not desired. The games were a poor source of analysis made even poorer by
a failure to seek alternate solutions for the problems discovered and a sense
among the American naval hierarchy that the results of the game were
adequate for the purpose of tactical evaluation. Missing from the study of
game results was the realization that the analysis of the outcomes is the
beginning of wisdom, not the end product."37 Why this dichotomy?
When Harris Laning became the president of the Naval War College in
the early 1930s, he drew on his experience as a student at the college and as
the head of its tactics department to increase the emphasis on the tactics of
combat action between battle fleets. He created a department for statistical
studies to compile and summarize the available data on weapon
effectiveness and the operations of different types of ships as well as
aircraft and submarines. Furthermore, the department was to "keep full
records of the details of all games played and from study and analysis of
these records to ascertain the salient points and features relating to gunfire,
torpedo fire, bombing, smoke screens, damage received and inflicted by the
different types, use of aircraft, etc., together with statistical data as to
material features."38
 The end result of such fascination with purportedly hard data was an
extremely detailed system of damage assessment that rated ships in terms of
their ability to sustain damage from fourteen-inch shells. Each weapon was
rated in such terms for its ability to damage each target. "The losses were
computed or extrapolated from the results of target practice and armor
penetration studies, and such factors as rates of fire and angles of impact of
hits were carefully considered."39
The tactical game was played in time-stepped moves of three-minutes’
duration. During each move there were discrete phases for movement,
search, and communications, all separate from the allocation and
assessment of the effects of fire. Screens were placed on the game floor to
limit the information available to the players to that which they could
themselves see or which were communicated to them by subordinates.
"Visibility, sea state, wind, and the relative position of the sun were all
considered in the evaluation of gunfire between ships. …The game rules for
maneuvering forces were extensive, and integrated with the restrictions on
visibility and communications …"40

A logistics wargame in Sims Hall of the Naval War College in 1952.

The logistics course began in 1950 headed by Rear Admiral Henry E.
Ecles. (Courtesy of the Naval College).

Despite all their detail and apparent realism, however, the complex
rules of the tactical game failed to account for one of the most crucial
elements of the reality of ship-to-ship action during the Pacific war. In the
limited number of surface combats fought by the U.S. Fleet, virtually none
of which followed the expected, classic battle-line versus battle-line
scenario, sudden engagement, rapid decisions, and catastrophic losses were
the order of the day. The leisurely pace of the three-minute move was
nowhere to be seen; "Three minutes was a long time in a night battle at
point blank range; information about opposing forces was scant and often
confusing. The game at Newport, which stressed thorough planning and the
measured engagement of the enemy in gradual attrition at long range, was
poor preparation for the mayhem of the close-in clashes of the Solomons
where forces rapidly approached each other at point blank ranges, and ships'
combat lives were measured in minutes."41
The same commentator softens his blows somewhat by declaring that
"the blame cannot be laid entirely upon the game and its rules; they merely
reflected the predilections of the American Navy at the time and sought to
frame these inclinations into tangible form for reduplication on the game
floor. . . . Gaming's failure in the case of the Solomons was more the failure
of tactical conceptualization than of the gaming system."42 Yet, as we saw
earlier, that same navy was fully capable of discarding its preconceived
strategic notions, something it failed to do with its tactical doctrine.
The failure of interwar tactical gaming can be traced to a failure of
perspective. For the first time in its history, Naval War College gaming
came to be dominated by the tool, particularly the Fire Effects System, to
the detriment of the player. The almost overwhelming pseudo-realism of the
charts and tables seemed to reinforce the validity of the doctrinal
assumptions of the dominance of the gun over the torpedo and the centrality
of the battle-line engagement. Immersed in the intricacies of maneuvering
their ships and firing their guns, the players lost sight of the larger
questions. Instead of inculcating the players with the habits of quick
thinking and reaction to the unexpected, which would have served them
well in the Solomons and other actions of the Pacific war, the interwar
games lulled them into a false sense of comfortably paced, discretely
phased combat. The result was a hard and bloody reeducation in the waters
of the south Pacific.

EARLY POSTWAR GAMING

As the storm clouds of World War II gathered on the horizon, the Naval
War College underwent a series of changes. The president of the college, as
senior officer in the area, was given added responsibilities as commandant
of Naval Operating Base, Newport. The courses of the college were
restructured and shortened considerably, leaving little time for wargaming,
although gaming facilities and equipment were sometimes used to restage
actual battles from the war. In addition, the college became one of the sites
of the Army-Navy Staff College, a 1943 creation designed to acquaint
officers from each service with the characteristics and practices of the other
in hopes of facilitating joint operations.43
After the war, as the navy and the college struggled to adapt to a new
environment, the number of games was reduced at the same time that their
scope and level increased. Yet gaming was still considered an important
element of the War College experience, and plans to modernize the gaming
facilities were considered as early as 1945.44 Meanwhile, the game "rules
and the damage assessment system which had been employed for all
College games were replaced gradually by less-rigid rules tailored to the
purpose, the level, and the scope of each separate game."45 By the early
1950s, each wargame was designed with its own set of rules and damage-
assessment criteria. One of the earliest uses of these individualized
techniques was made in the new logistics course under the supervision of
Captain (later Rear Admiral) Henry E. Eccles. The students in this course,
established in 1947, "solved naval problems, working them out on the game
board. These ranged from a quick tactical problem to a major one involving
a global war."46 The junior and senior classes in the Command and Staff
course also continued the tradition of solving game problems, with the
members of the junior class usually taking on subordinate roles for each
side.
During the first twelve years after the war, War College gaming
focused strongly on education and emphasized operations at the level of
task groups and higher. During the later years of the period, the techniques
for playing the board game changed dramatically in an effort to speed play.
The players operated from separate rooms, sending their moves to the
control group in much the same manner as had been employed for the old
chart game. "The control group made the moves on the game board,
evaluated interactions with the aid of simplified procedures, and relayed
CIC-type intelligence to the players."47
The strategic games changed as well. They no longer concentrated on
strictly naval campaigns, but also included joint and combined operations.
National-level strategic games were introduced incorporating political and
economic factors.48 Moves in such games "frequently involved days rather
than hours, and evaluations were based largely upon the professional
judgment of the umpires. During the 1956 and 1957 national-level strategic
games, leased teletype lines connected the College and The George
Washington University, and the high-speed computer of the latter's Logistic
Research Project was employed to check the logistic feasibility of opposing
plans and to assist in the assessment of damage."49

NEWS AND THE ARRIVAL OF ELECTRONIC

WARGAMING

The link to the George Washington computer was the herald of the
future of Newport wargaming. The modernization plans laid in the late
1940s came to fruition in 1958 when the Navy Electronic Warfare
Simulator, the NEWS, was commissioned. The NEWS occupied the three
floors of the central wing of the War College's Sims Hall, and had taken
thirteen years and $7.25 million to complete.50 In a very real sense, it was
"the post-World War II successor to game board and chart maneuvers
introduced by William McCarty Little in the 1880s."51 Not only did it make
the old boards and ship models obsolete, but it also got the attention of the
fleet commanders, who saw its potential utility as an operational-training
device.
The name of the NEWS can sometimes cause confusion today. NEWS
was not a simulator of electronic warfare, but was rather an electronic
simulator of warfare. The system was built around a large-screen display
that dominated the bottom floor of the facility and served as the principal
tool by which the umpires kept track of the action. The second floor
contained shops and air-conditioning equipment, but also had a balcony
overlooking the "game floor" and a small conference room. The third floor
was the player area, composed of twenty command centers, ten each for
"Green" and "White," the original, non-traditional colors used to denote the
opposing sides. (See figure 4.) Command centers were equipped with
displays, control facilities, and also voice-, digital-, and hard-copy
communications facilities.52

Manual wargaming nears the end of its heyday at Newport in this 1955
Pringle Hall game. Note the two large poles may have been used to screen
the formation of the two sides approaching each other. The low black screen
is probably used to denote a smoke screen, perhaps laid by destroyers.
 The NEWS was made up of three primary subsystems: the maneuver
and display, damage computer, and communications subsystems.
The maneuver and display subsystem had the capability of displaying
the location and movement of up to forty-eight separate "forces" (and also
fourteen fixed forces or targets) on both the master plot and the displays in
the various command centers. A force could be used to represent anything
from a single ship or aircraft to an entire task force. Forces were projected
on the master plot screen, with the shape and color of the image reflecting
the type of force and the side to which it belonged. Command centers
received less information, their screens displaying all forces as a standard-
sized "blip," which in itself carried no information about the force it
represented. The maneuver and display system integrated the movement
orders made in those command centers and presented to the players the type
of information they would receive in a Combat Information Center (such as
azimuth, course, speed, and identification of a contact).

The status board of the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulator (NEWS) in

Sims Hall of the Naval War College, 1957. (Courtesy of the U.S. Naval War
College Museum.)

The damage computer was a specially designed, time-shared, analog

machine. Its database was capable of storing the effectiveness
characteristics of twenty different weapon types against twenty different
target types. Each weapon-target combination was characterized by the
maximum engagement range, the probability of hit at zero range and at
maximum range, the change in hit probability as a function of range, and
the incremental damage on the target per hit. Each force was identified
according to its target type and could employ up to four weapons. If a force
commander elected to engage a target, he would press weapon controls in
the command center that activated the damage computer. The results of the
attack were reported to the umpires and the command centers in terms of
the fraction of effectiveness the target had remaining. Lost effectiveness
translated into a reduction of weapons capability and possibly of maximum
speed. There was also provision to allow damage assessment to "be
manually modified by umpire decision due to operational considerations,
resulting in changes in hit probability and incremental damage per hit."53

Figure 4. Schematic of the Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator (NEWS)

facility. (Adapted from McHugh, Francis J. Fundamentals of War Gaming.
3rd ed. Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College, 1966)
 The third major component of the NEWS was the communications
subsystem. This system integrated "eight simulated voice radio networks, a
teletype, and an intercom facility in each command center."54 An additional
system allowed the transmission of digitally coded information in a one-
way link from command centers to umpires. Like the manual games of the
early 1950s, players could either control their forces directly, using the
equipment and procedures available in the command centers, or they could
employ the communications facilities to pass maneuver and fire orders to
the umpires, who would then carry out those orders using the NEWS
systems and report back to the players. This indirect mode of play was
especially appropriate when flag officers were involved in the game.55 Over
time it became the more popular technique for using NEWS, limiting the
amount of specialized knowledge and equipment manipulation required of
the players.
NEWS was designed to play two-sided games in continuous time. The
speed of the clock could be set to real time or to twice or four times real
time. Detections occurred automatically, as did the calculation of
engagement outcomes. The umpires, relieved of these "tedious and time-
consuming details … [were] free to watch the larger picture, to inject their
professional judgment into the game."56 This automatic aspect of play was
considered of prime importance because NEWS was designed to be an
"educational rather than analytical war gaming device, … [presenting]
Naval War College and fleet officers the opportunity to gain significant
combat command experience in a realistic setting and under the press of
real time."57
Unfortunately, from the day it first came on line NEWS suffered from
several limitations. It had originally been conceived of as little more than a
fancy modern update of the game board (one of its preliminary names had
been the Electronic Maneuver Board System), and this ancestry showed all
too clearly.58 As originally designed, the system could represent only four
different sizes of areas of operation: 40 by 40, 400 by 400, 1,000 by 1,000,
or 4,000 by 4,000 nautical miles. Force positions were restricted to a fixed
4,000 by 4,000 grid, independent of the size of the area (that is, 1,000 grid
spaces represented 1,000 nautical miles at the largest scale and 10 nautical
miles at the smallest), and although the size of the playing area could be
altered during a game, grid positions were not automatically adjusted to
reflect the dimensions of the new playing area. Each side was restricted to a
maximum of twenty-four forces, and the system did not automatically track
or record the positions or status of those forces over time. Furthermore,
although the time scale was flexible, changes in the game clock rate
affected only the horizontal component of a force's movement; changes in
altitude and depth continued to require a fixed amount of real time. Finally,
damage probabilities were determined only as a function of range, and
target azimuth had no effect. Weapon time of flight was ignored, as were
the effects of a near miss (weapons had to hit to score any damage, limiting
the ability to reflect the use of nuclear weapons).59
To get around these limitations, a whole host of "scaling factors and
other gimmicks" were developed. Scaling factors allowed the approximate
representation of areas of different sizes by adjusting the speed controls of
the forces and the clock rate. Other techniques were employed to adapt the
damage computer to simulate fuel expenditures, and the weapons
characteristics to simulate fighters. In addition, manual gaming techniques
were used to supplement the NEWS, especially for play at higher levels of
command.60 Such tricks of the trade could only be created and employed by
the experts at the newly established War Gaming Department. (One of the
original members of the department was Francis J. McHugh, a civilian,
whose War College career had begun in the 1930s and, except for a stint in
the army during World War II, would continue until the mid-1970s.
Although not as well known to later generations as McCarty Little,
McHugh’s influence on War College gaming and the War Gaming
Department was probably second only to that legendary figure.) Created to
operate and maintain the NEWS, the War Gaming Department was charged
with developing and conducting not only War College curriculum games,
but also with providing support to the fleets as part of the Navy War Games
Program.
Established under the chief of naval operations in 1958, the Navy War
Games Program was administered by the assistant for war gaming matters
(Op-06C). This program focused on analytical gaming, and in particular on
the development of computerized combat models. The key technical
support groups for the program were originally the Planning Analysis
Group of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and
the Warfare Analysis Division and Operations Research Division of the
Computation and Analysis Laboratory, U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory at
Dahlgren, Virginia.61 The Naval War College, and specifically the War
Gaming Department and the NEWS, were also included as major elements
of the program.
The War College had two principal roles in the program: to provide
facilities for the conduct of wargames by operational commanders, and to
conduct a course in wargaming for fleet officers. This course was "directed
primarily toward operational commanders and members of their staffs . . .
engaged in operational planning." Its purpose was "to acquaint them with
the Program and to familiarize them with the means by which war gaming
can assist commanders in evaluating or rehearsing their plans."62 This
program was the first time "that the Naval War College gaming facilities
and personnel were made available to Fleet Commanders for gaming their
own specific problems with their own personnel.”63
The wargaming course, established in 1960, dealt with the history of
wargaming and the various types and techniques available. Naturally,
special emphasis was placed on the employment of the NEWS to explore
fleet operations. Elements of the 1967 course covered "the fundamentals,
probability concepts, digital computer simulations, and the capabilities and
limitations of simulation."64 In addition, attendees participated in games to
familiarize themselves with the various roles of players and umpires.
 The Navy Destroyer School at Newport soon asked the fledgling War
Gaming Department to design a game for the use of its students, and the
first game was conducted in 1962. These games were designed to let the
students practice antisubmarine warfare operations in a very realistic
setting. They employed "the proper voice calls and communications
procedures" to run their simulated task group, and so gained "an insight into
the complexities and uncertainties of the command and control problems of
modern antisubmarine warfare" in preparation for the assignments they
would soon have in the fleet.65
In addition to such fundamental educational uses, the fleet began to use
gaming for other purposes. They used wargames to "familiarize the staff
with an operations order prior to an at-sea exercise and, as one Carrier
Division Commander observed: 'To make our mistakes in the NEWS before
we get to sea.'"66 The fleet also found gaming useful for trying out new
tactics and combat formations, testing command-and-control arrangements,
and exploring the possible effects of enemy counteractions to plans. The
fleet discovered both the value and limitation of gaming because the "Fleet
games—like the curriculum games—do not provide formulas for victory, or
quick and easy solutions, or even reams of data. But they do provide their
planners and players with command-and-control experience and with
greater insight into the complex military problems of today and tomorrow. .
. . [They also] indicated that the planning and play of NEWS games by
experienced naval officers provide valuable contributions to the naval
warfare analytical studies sponsored by the Chief of Naval Operations."67
In 1962, the traditional mode of playing fleet games locally at Newport
was supplemented by a program of remote play. In that year, the
commander, Fleet Air Quonset and his staff initiated this new capability
using secure communications lines to send their operations orders from
their own headquarters to be carried out by the umpires at Newport. "The
following year a game was played for the Commander, Barrier Forces
Atlantic, and then a much larger game known as the Canadian-United States
Training Exercise was conducted. This involved six east coast operations
control centers and the war gaming facilities of both Naval War College and
the Canadian Joint Maritime Warfare school, A game involving the
movement of an amphibious task force to its objective area was conducted
in 1964, In this game the commander and his staff played from the flagship
which was tied up at its pier in Norfolk. And one year later the first remote-
play game was conducted for U.S., and Canadian Pacific Coast Commands.
The players functioned from their operation control center on the West
Coast and Hawaii."68
Over the next decade, the navy’s wargaming program would continue
to expand. McHugh cites eight major fleet games played either at Newport
or by remote links in 1964 and 1965.69 But even during this period of
growth and expansion, the seeds of change were sprouting both for
Newport wargaming and the college as a whole.

OceanofPDF.com
 FROM NEWS TO NWGS
The big splash made by NEWS, especially its introduction of
wargaming to the fleet, helped to elevate wargaming to a level of high
interest throughout the navy. Part of this interest resulted from the
association of wargaming with the newer quantitative analytical techniques
of operations research and systems analysis, which had accompanied the
arrival of Robert S. McNamara and his "whiz kids" at the Department of
Defense. It was this association that led to the inclusion of both wargaming
and analysis in the Navy Wargames Program and would plague wargaming
into the future.
It was not long, however, before the flash and promise of the potential
of the NEWS gave way to disappointment with its limitations. Some of
these limitations were obvious—a restricted area of play, severe restrictions
on the number of forces involved, and limited ability to control the speed of
the game clock. Others were less obvious, such as the virtual impossibility
of adapting the system to newer types of sensors and weapons. Even as the
NEWS reached the pinnacle of its reputation and degree of employment,
the thoughts of many turned to what steps might be taken to replace it.
Three options suggested themselves. The analog NEWS system could
be expanded to allow a larger playing area and greater numbers of forces to
be involved. This option was seen as very costly, and carried no guarantee
that it would correct the inherent deficiencies of the analog system' In
addition, both the navy and the computer industry were shifting away from
analog systems in favor of digital ones. The second option was to
institutionalize the ad hoc arrangements developed at the War Gaming
Department for using the display capability of the NEWS as a supplement
to essentially manual wargaming. Such an approach was certainly
inexpensive and familiar to the staff, "but could not offer realism, timeliness
of information, or the depth of detail required. Therefore, the complexities
of modern naval warfare with its associated exacting logistic implications
could not be effectively gamed."70 This left the third alternative, a shift to
the new technological promise of the general-purpose digital computer.
 The Warfare Analysis and Research System
The NEWS promise of virtually automatic wargaming now beckoned
from the world of bits and bytes. The new digital computers seemed to hold
out the hope of solving all the old problems. "Programs could be
specifically structured to game requirements. Real-time information and
exact logistic accounting became immediately available, and since the
ability to change was designed into the system, it should be less susceptible
to obsolescence."71 The vision of the future was given the whimsical
acronym WARS, the Warfare Analysis and Research System, and in the
early 1970s the War College began to phase out elements of the NEWS and
to replace them with pieces of the more modern system, creating a
Frankenstein-like hybrid. About this time also, the War Gaming Department
acquired the more grandiose title of the Center for War Gaming.
The design philosophy that underlay the WARS was based on the War
Gaming Center’s perception that the type of gaming central to the Naval
War College was best described by the term “decision gaming," and
differed from the type of tactical training simulations employed elsewhere.
"Decision gaming is a unique educational or analytical process with the
primary emphasis upon human choices."72 To deal with this type of game,
the computer program would have to be supremely comprehensive and
flexible. It would be founded on a detailed data base of the characteristics
and capabilities of sensors, weapons, communications systems, and
platforms, as well as on the parameters of platform motion, logistics, and
the environment. The Master Simulation Program was to be capable of
representing crises or conflicts of any scope or scale that could be located
anywhere on the globe. Play could range from one-on-one encounters to a
full-scale global war.
The proponents of WARS argued that it had three critically important
advantages, unique to the War College system. First was its integrated
approach to warfare, melding its models to allow any type of action to be
represented. Second, the fact that it was a game system, and not a purely
analytical simulation, allowed the easy incorporation of the unexpected
decisions and actions of human players into its models. "Beyond the
obvious value this offers in the area of decision-making experience, this
capability permits each model to operate as an entire family of models, each
modifiable as the game progresses in order to mesh with specific
requirements or permit comparisons of the effect of differing actions."73
Third, WARS was to be capable of a flexibility in modeling and
representation of combat actions unknown in previous systems. The user
could select the level of command he would represent, and built-in tactical
doctrine would dictate the action of subordinate units outside the scope of
his decision-making prerogatives.
The WARS ideal was simply described by its War College
project officer in the mid-1970s. "The computer assumes the tedious duties
of bookkeeping. Most important, however, players and umpires are relieved
of the burden of manual labor involving computations, track update,
damage assessment, and detection calculations. Unhampered by the
minutiae of bookkeeping, the gamer is free to concentrate on his thoughts,
his tactics, and his decisions which, after all, is what war gaming at the
Naval War College is all about."74
As the NEWS attempted to evolve toward this WARS ideal, the War
College's hybridized wargaming facilities continued to expand their base of
customers and breadth of application. In addition to its ever-present support
for the college's curriculum games, the early and mid-seventies saw the
Center for War Gaming play host to a wide range of games for an eclectic
collection of customers.75
 The game floor of the WARS, Sims Hall, 1981. (Courtesy of the U.S.
Naval War College Museum)

· The office of the chief of naval operations, for a series of games to

explore advanced tactical concepts, under the direction of the Center
for Naval Analyses
· NATO and navy fleet commands, for several regular series of
games used to allow staffs to test operational plans and concepts of
force employment
· The Naval Materiel Command, which sponsored games to allow
the engineers and scientists of navy laboratories to explore the
implications of new developments in sensors and weapons
· The Naval War Colleges of the Americas, with an annual game
played to explore the routing and protection of convoys in the
Western Hemisphere, and which was played with remote links to the
South American countries involved; U.S. players were composed of
naval reservists whose mobilization billets were with the
organizations involved in Naval Control of Shipping.

War College Reorganization

In the midst of this period of evolution and growth at the Center for
War Gaming, the War College itself was undergoing another of its periodic
upheavals. As the navy attempted to adjust to the new philosophy and ways
of doing business introduced by Secretary McNamara, the War College
slowly began to reorient itself toward the future. The mid-1960s saw the
Department of Detense take renewed interest in the affairs of all the service
colleges, and civilian officials made repeated calls for a rebirth of
professionalism in the military officer corps. One of the tools suggested for
use in fostering such a rebirth was the relatively new technique of political-
military gaming. (See the next chapter for a discussion of political-military,
or pol-mil, games.)
When Vice Admiral John T. Hayward was appointed to the War
College presidency in 1966, he began the first of two major periods of
restructuring that the college would experience before the middle of the
1970s. He instituted a core curriculum of courses required of all students.
He also expanded the number and diversity of civilian faculty at the college
by establishing several new chairs, including a Theodore Roosevelt chair of
economics and a Stephen B. Luce chair of naval science. The core
curriculum and elective courses drew on the expertise of the new faculty to
introduce the students to a broad spectrum of military and political affairs.
"The final two months of the core curriculum were devoted to enhancing
the knowledge of the students in the art and science of naval warfare
generally. Specifically, they examined naval capabilities of the United
States to engage in worldwide operations in support of national policies.
They conducted war games to confirm or disprove their assessments. While
the senior level course studied such issues, the command and staff course
concentrated on operational matters and especially on the complexities of
planning for military operations. Gaming played a large role."76
Admiral Richard G. Colbert followed Hayward as president of the
Naval War College in 1968. Colbert added a McCarty Little Chair of
Wargaming to those created by his predecessor "to increase the rigor and
scope of the expanding games being played on the NEWS."77 He also
expanded the connections of the college with other navies across the world.
This work was carried forward and extended by Colbert's successor, Vice
Admiral Benedict J. Semmes. Yet by the time Semmes retired in 1972, the
college, despite the significant gains of the previous six years, "had neither
a stable faculty nor a large, stringently selected student body."78 Nor had its
reputation within the navy improved substantially. In that year, Chief of
Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt took steps to increase the
appreciation of naval officers for the broad scope of the navy's mission. He
established a Navy Net Assessment Group to help measure the U.S. Navy's
ability relative to its likely adversaries and objectives. He instituted Project
2000 to look at the navy's requirements for the next century. And he chose
as the president of the Naval War College a man capable of revising the
school's curriculum in ways that would help broaden the navy's thinking.
That man was Rear Admiral Stansfield J. Turner.
Turner arrived in Newport with a free hand to make whatever changes
were needed to accomplish Zumwalt's principal objectives: "broaden
officers who are often preoccupied with their area of specialty; and help
them learn to analyze problems."79 Drawing on his own experiences as a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1947-1949, Turner sought to develop in the
students at the War College an ability "to reason through problems and to
see that there was more than one answer to any problem. He wanted to
teach them to deal with uncertainty."80 By ensuring that the students,
courses, and faculty of the college met the very highest standards of
excellence, Turner believed that its graduates would become highly
regarded and sought after in the navy, thereby establishing Newport's
reputation by results rather than by bureaucratic fiat.
Turner's program focused on the fundamental principles of strategy,
management, and tactics. Students were given heavy doses of reading in
both history and theory. Wargaming continued to play an important role in
the educational process, especially in the field of tactics, but Turner's
philosophy took it in new directions. He stressed the use of gaming to help
educate individual students, and demanded changes in gaming techniques to
allow more students the chance to command large formations. The
transition to the new WARS system was delayed for two years to
accommodate Turner's belief that students should be able to "see" the
process by which their tactical decisions were evaluated in a game. He
wanted a system that would let them "actually see on a screen how their
sonar beam went out. Then they would see the submarine closing and, as
the beam would cross the submarine, the dice roll. On the screen you would
see that you had a 50% probability and you did or didn't make it that time.
That would let them understand what probability means. It would let them
see what would have happened if they had used their sonars in a different
way. You could run the action over and over again and let the man go back
and make a different decision."81 Turner's focus on education deemphasized
the use of the War Gaming Center to support the fleet. Instead, Professor
Jacques Naar, the first holder of the McCarty Little Chair, assisted with the
development of more tabletop games to allow more students to take
command roles. In Turner’s wargames not only would more students be
able to give orders, but they would have a better understanding of why their
orders led to specific game results.
In 1974, Vice Admiral Julian J. LeBourgeois had the unenviable task of
succeeding the dynamic and sometimes abrasive Turner as president.
LeBourgeois's tenure was a time of consolidation rather than revolution. He
did, however, make some important changes. One of the more significant
ones was the establishment of the Center for Advanced Research in 1975,
under Captain Hugh G. Nott, USN (Ret.). Nott had been Turner's chief of
staff, and his importance to Newport wargaming is attested to by the fact
that the auditorium of the wargaming center at Sims Hall has been named
for him. Under Nott's direction the Center for Advanced Research drew on
the most promising students as well as faculty and visiting scholars to study
important issues, using traditional research techniques liberally spiced with
wargaming. In particular, the center led the way in the development of
potential employment concepts and tactics for the new Harpoon surface-to-
surface missile, explored possible naval operations in the Norwegian Sea,
and conducted a study of synthetic fuels.82
 LeBourgeois also led the way for the next generation of the War
College's computerized wargaming system, an evolutionary outgrowth of
the WARS concept. In his farewell statement in the Naval War College
Review, LeBourgeois had this to say about Newport wargaming past and
future.

The importance of War Gaming to our officers'

professional development, to their decision-making ability
and to their sense of strategic and tactical awareness is well
known. Historically, the College has led the way in the
development and the use of gaming techniques. With the new
and substantially improved Naval War Gaming facility
scheduled, under the direction of Captain Herbert Cherrier, to
come on line in 1980, a wide range of new and important
capabilities suggests a renewed emphasis on war gaming at
the College and throughout the Navy as an aid to professional
development. The opportunity for 20 students to be exercised
simultaneously as Fleet Commanders will exist. Ultimately,
we envisage remote terminals in Norfolk, San Diego, and
Pearl Harbor so that Fleet Commanders may test operations
plans and develop their subordinates' tactical proficiency
without the necessity to leave their headquarters. Terminals
aboard ship are also being considered. The future of war
gaming at the College will be limited mainly by our ability to
use imaginatively the capabilities which will soon exist.83
LeBourgeois's vision was on the verge of becoming a reality, but the
reality was somewhat different from what he imagined.

The Naval Warfare Gaming System

The Naval Warfare Gaming System, or NWGS, was installed in the
War College’s new computer system in 1981, and from the first was
plagued with minor and major problems. In keeping with the trend that had
led to WARS, NWGS was to be virtually a fully automatic gaming system.
The computer would keep track of the forces, monitor detections by their
sensors, and evaluate the results of attacks. It was designed to support up to
2,000 separate tracks, each of which could represent one or more ships,
submarines, aircraft, or cruise missiles. The fact that multiple sensors of
several different types (such as radar, sonar, or visual) could be present in
each track obviously made for a large number of potential sensor-target
interactions. The size and scope of the system, one of its key improvements
over the limitations of NEWS and even WARS, proved to be a source of
some of its major problems as well.
As originally conceived in the early and mid-1970s, NWGS was
primarily envisioned as an educational gaming system, in keeping with the
War College's emphasis at that time. Its design, therefore, stressed relatively
simplistic modeling of sensor and weapon performance, but also included a
provision for adding on more detail in a modular fashion. The plans also
included a capability to support the production of postgame reports by
allowing easy access to the data base and scenario for a game, as well as the
narrative of game events.
As finally installed, NWGS tried to be virtually all things to all
potential customers. An advertising brochure published by the prime
contractor stressed the system's flexibility, ease of operation, cost
effectiveness, high availability, and adaptability.84 It was supposed to
support both educational and research games, ranging from one-on-one
tactical encounters to global warfare, and to allow the employment of both
existing systems and future projections. In a sense, it was McCarty Little's
three-tiered gaming system all rolled up into one main-frame computer and
several dozen terminals. It used the same basic structure of several separate
command centers for the players and a large "game floor" for the controllers
and umpires. Each center and work station now had both an alphanumeric
computer terminal and a graphics terminal through which players could
access information and give commands.
The mathematical models incorporated into NWGS were designed to
simulate the broad spectrum of naval conflict. Separate models, formulated
 to be as similar as possible, evaluated anti-air warfare, anti-submarine
warfare, surface warfare, air war fare, submarine warfare, mine warfare,
and amphibious operations. The human players could play against each
other, or the computer could be programmed to provide the opposition.
Virtually every aspect of the design, preparation, play, and analysis
of an individual game was to be supported by the computer system. A
master data base would contain information on all types of weapons,
sensors, and platforms, and specific bits of information could be extracted
from the data base to be incorporated into a tailored game-design file. Game
"preparators" worked with a specialized computer-programming language
to choose the level of simulation model used for various game functions, to
establish the command and communications linkages, and to define tactical
doctrine for the units in play. The actual play of the game could take place
at one or more different levels of command. Units not directly controlled by
human players operated according to predefined doctrine, a sequence of
individual "actions" (such as "launch aircraft" for a carrier) designed to
respond to a potential situation likely to arise during play.
Finally, the system supported postgame analysis through its
ability to record and display the sequence of game events. It allowed an
entire game to be replayed in either real time or at a speeded rate. It also
provided for stopping the replay at any point and picking up the play from
there.
As with any game or game system, the heart of NWGS lay in its
extensive set of mathematical models. The philosophy underlying those
models, and in fact the whole notion of automated gaming, were described
by the prime contractor in the following terms. "An important advantage
of automated war gaming is the capability to simulate activities that occur
in real-world situations. With stimuli similar to those expected in actual
confrontations, the player continually monitors activity, makes decisions
on the basis of the stimuli, and enters decisions into the computer. The
computer model controls the simulated activity through complex
mathematical routines, making modifications as determined by user inputs.
 "Computer simulation models can provide varying amounts of
realism and detail depending on the specific requirement. Since war games
have different objectives, NWGS provides a family of models at different
levels of detail in each of the areas that it simulates." The different levels of
details were key to making NWGS work. The sponsor, designer, and
preparator, of each game had to choose from two or three levels of detail in
several areas.
· Three levels of warfare area models, simulating the "pre-
engagement activities of forces in the seven basic warfare areas."
· Three levels of kinematics models, controlling the "simulated
motion of ships, planes, and submarines according to designed
course, speed, and altitude/depth information."
· Two levels of intelligence and communications models, simulating
"satellite, HF/DF [high-frequency direction finding] and SOSUS
[sound surveillance system] detections, and communications
networks that transmit detection information used in games."
· Two levels of detection models, which simulated the "activity of
sensors and countermeasures generating appropriate detection and
lost-contact alerts."
· Two levels of engagement models, which dealt with the "activities
of forces during the engagement phase of warfare, including the firing
of weapons and calculating the number, type, and position of
individual hits."
· Two levels of logistics models, dealing with "the availability,
consumption, and replenishment of fuel, ammunition, sono-buoys,
and other designated consumables."
· Two levels of battle damage assessment models, evaluating "the
outcomes of engagements on the basis of the number, type, and
position of hits."
The choice of which level of model to use, was to be guided by the
following principal. "A detailed model uses more parameters and more
complex computational routines than a more generalized model to provide
greater fidelity of simulation. For example, the most detailed kinematics
model, takes into account acceleration, deceleration, turning, and climb and
dive rates in modeling aircraft motion, while the less-detailed model simply
performs the requested kinematics change. The degree of detail required for
a specific game or for a particular event or entity within that game is
selectable. When an event is deemed less important to game objectives, a
less detailed model is selected, allowing greater computer efficiency." The
problem, of course, was to figure out when and if the more detailed models
would be needed. Another problem was to be sure that the models were
reasonably accurate, no matter what their level.
The stated goals and lofty promises of the NWGS brochure were not,
unfortunately, matched by the system's performance. The actual operation
of NWGS was at best a disappointment, and at worst a disaster. In simple
terms, NWGS never worked in the manner the Naval War College or the
Center for War Gaming expected. It may have been an excellent computer
program, but it was an abysmal game and a poor simulation of naval
warfare. Some of its more significant problems included:

A detection model that calculated detection probabilities once every

minute and then drew a random number against those probabilities to
determine if contact was gained, held, or lost. Such an approach
grossly exaggerated the performance of a sonar against a slow-moving
target. If, for example, the detection probability were .10, then a
detection would occur an average of once every ten minutes—about
the same frequency with which a ship might provide updates when it
held continuous contact on its target. Sonars simply do not work that
way.

· All sensors were assumed to be omni-directional, and generally

provided information that was unrealistically accurate.
· Communications were also too good, with no provision for
communications jamming by the enemy. Other types of jamming
were handled in a very simplistic fashion.
 · No provision was included for the effects of shipping noise on the
performance of acoustic sensors; an entire battle group could sail
through the middle of a sonobuoy field without degrading the field's
detection performance.
· The bulk of the models were designed with the operations of U.S.
Navy forces in mind; they had a difficult job of reproducing the
ways the Soviet Navy might conduct certain types of operations.
The Center for War Gaming quickly perceived those and other types of
problems with the NWGS and began working to correct them. As usual,
however, the primary response to the shortcomings of the tool was an
increased reliance on the people. Those elements of the NWGS that worked
reasonably well were used; those that did not were ignored. Another large
and expensive computer system found itself relegated primarily to the role
of glorified maneuvering board. Battle-damage assessment, traditionally
the term applied to the entire process of determining the results of an
engagement and not simply to the effects of individual hits, was carried out
by a small team of officers using paper and pencil, hand-held calculators,
and, later, personal computers.
Once again, a new tool had proved to be less than its promise, but War
College gaming continued despite the disappointment. With their problems
and shortcomings patched over as best as possible by the personnel of the
Center for War Gaming, the WARS and the NWGS were still able to play
important roles in two significant developments in navy wargaming in the
mid- and late-1970s, and helped provide concrete examples of what
Admiral LeBourgeois had meant when he called for imaginative uses of
gaming.

The Tactical Command Readiness Program and the Global

War Game
Strictly speaking, the Tactical Command Readiness Program (TCRP)
was and is neither a wargame per se nor a Naval War College project.
Newport wargaming has been a major element of the program from its
inception, however, and so it seems appropriate to discuss the subject
here.85
In 1975 Admiral Isaac Kidd was appointed Supreme Allied
Commander, Atlantic/Commander in Chief U.S. Atlantic
Command/Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. The admiral was
concerned about the fact that his principal subordinates, including senior
flag officers, lacked extensive real-world experience in the type of complex
military decision-making environment they would face in a crisis or
wartime situation. To help rectify this perceived shortcoming, Kidd turned
to Mr. Erv Kapos, then a senior analyst working for a defense consulting
company, to help come up with a means of exposing Kidd's subordinates to
stressful decision-making situations in a complex joint operating
environment. Kidd, who had himself participated in wargames at the Naval
War College when he was commander of Destroyer Flotilla 12, specified
only that the program should include some Newport gaming. (Indeed,
many credit Kidd's use and support of Newport wargaming in the 1970s
with saving the program while the "War Gaming Department wallowed in
the WARS/NEWS morass.")86
As ultimately implemented, Kapos's ideas, developed with the
participation of Rear Admiral Paul Peck and others, and also with the direct
involvement of Kidd, led to an approach that employed what Kapos
described as "two-dimensional progressiveness." The quarterly cycles of
what was to become the Tactical Command Readiness Program progressed
from an orientation to an engagement-level problem, then to a full-scale
battle, and finally to a broad campaign. Each step was based on some form
of simulation media, progressing from a seminar discussion to programmed
instruction, to a one-sided tactical battle problem, and ultimately to a full-
scale interactive wargame held at Newport using the War College's
computerized gaming facility.
The seminar helped bring the individual commanders and their key staff
officers up to speed on the current operational objectives and concepts
important to the command, and also helped develop the concepts of
operations for the scenario to be investigated in subsequent stages of the
cycle. The tactical situations used in the programmed-instruction phase of
the cycle allowed the commanders and their principal staff officers to
master the technical and tactical information they needed to deal
successfully with the more complex elements of their operational
responsibilities. The battle problems, held at a navy facility for training the
watchstanders of Combat Information Centers, placed the commanders in a
realistically simulated combat environment. Finally, the War College game
thrust them into the broader and deeper arena of the entire Atlantic theater,
and forced them to play against reacting opponents. Through this
progressive approach, each of the commanders was given an opportunity to
prepare himself fully for the successive levels of activity. By avoiding the
dangers inherent in placing a player into an artificial situation for which he
was not properly oriented, this approach helped make the most of each
phase of the cycle without frustrating, and so losing the attention of, its
participants.
Originally a navy-only program, the TCRP soon expanded to include
all elements of the Atlantic Command and even representatives from other
organizations, such as the Strategic Air Command, the Military Airlift
Command, and the Coast Guard. Over the years, despite the deletion or
modification of some of its other elements, the Newport game continued to
be an integral part of the TCRP. Though at times it wandered away from the
interactive, continuous-time game originally espoused by Admiral Kidd
into a freer form using irregular time-steps, there has been a recurring
tendency for the fleet to try to return the TCRP game to its roots in order to
incorporate the stress of decision making under rigid time constraints.
Overall, the Tactical Command Readiness Program has been a visionary
and usually successful operation, one that has built its success on an
appreciation for the critical need of preparing the players, especially flag
officers, for their game roles.
In addition to the TCRP games, the mid- to late-1970s saw the
development of a second major new use for the wargaming facilities at
Newport. Under the inspiration and direction of Captain Hugh Nott, and
with the assistance of Commander Jay Hurlburt and Professor Francis J.
"Bing" West, the Global War Game (GWG) series sprang into existence in
1979. Designed to explore the nature of a modern global war, Global (as it
has come to be known) sought to identify those issues most important in the
development of a global strategy, not only for the navy, but for the entire
nation. Like no other wargame played by professionals (at least none that
we in the West know about), from the very start Global incorporated an
incredible wealth of military and political elements, ranging from strategy,
tactics, and logistics to diplomacy, international economics, and the role of
advanced technologies in future warfare.
The Global War Game has been played for three weeks every year from
its inception. During those years it has drawn hundreds of players from all
the military services, government, laboratories, and industry. The Global
games have employed virtually every gaming technique used at Newport
since the end of World War II. WARS and then NWGS served as the basis
for the principal naval play. Tabletop techniques, supplemented in later
years by microcomputer models, were used to play the air-land battle
ashore. Seminar-gaming techniques were adapted to explore special topics
in off-line sessions that dealt with subjects like the potential uses of
advanced weapon systems, the complications of chemical warfare, or the
prospects of nuclear escalation in a conventional war. Players assumed roles
as varied as the commanders of task forces, the Supreme Allied
Commander, Europe, or the chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.

THE ORACLE RETURNS?

The first Global War Game was played in 1979. Less than two years
later, the trends which had spawned that game, the same trends which
pushed senior navy officers and civilians toward taking a broader view of
the navy's missions, resulted in another significant restructuring of the
Naval War College. In April 1981, at the War College’s Current Strategy
Forum, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas B. Hayward announced
the forthcoming establishment of a Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the
college. In July, former Under Secretary of the Navy Robert J. Murray was
appointed to head the new center for the navy's strategic thinking.87
The Center for Naval Warfare Studies was built around the Strategic
Studies Group, a select team of eight officers, six navy commanders and
captains, and two Marine Corps colonels, specially chosen by the chief of
naval operations and the commandant of the marine corps. These officers
were picked to represent all the warfighting communities, and they each
had extensive operational experience. Their one-year appointment came
with a mission—to help the navy develop its thinking about the nature and
extent of the maritime contribution to the national strategy.88
In addition to the Strategic Studies Group, the Center for Naval
Warfare Studies was also to include some of the older elements of the War
College organization—the Center for Advanced Research, the Naval War
College Press, and the Center for War Gaming. The latter was included at
the suggestion of the president of the War College, Rear Admiral Edward F.
Welch. Welch "believed the war-gaming center wasn't being used
constructively enough for the Navy, and here was a chance to connect the
officers who were going to produce new ideas with the officers who had a
means of testing ideas and arguing issues on a grand scale through
gaming."89
Despite some early concern among some of the other elements of the
War College that the new kid on the block would keep all the toys to
himself, Murray and the Center for Naval Warfare Studies worked to keep
up the level of wargaming support provided to the War College curriculum.
At the same time, however, they expanded the role of the wargaming center
into other aspects of the navy's planning and development processes.
With the strong support of Admiral Hayward and his successor as chief
of naval operations, Admiral James D. Watkins, the Center for War Gaming
became the official "center for Navy wargaming at the battle group level
and above." Its fundamental purpose became the examination of "the larger
tactical and strategic issues of deterrence and war fighting." Its new charter
was to work with the office of the chief of naval operations, the
headquarters of the Marine Corps, "with the fleets, with the Tactical
Training Groups, and with others in and outside the Navy and Marine Corps
—other services, OSD [the office of the secretary of defense], the allies—to
conduct these larger level games."90
 Murray initiated changes to revive the spirit and role of the Center for
War Gaming. When he arrived in 1981, he discovered that wargaming at the
Naval War College was considered little more than a training device for the
education of students and fleet staff officers. There were little or no records
of the games that had been played in the nearly forty years since the end of
World War II except those kept by the Atlantic Fleet. Unfortunately, the
turmoil of the early 1970s had prevented the War College from firmly
establishing a dedicated group to oversee research, development, and
evaluation of games. "One of the real tragedies that resulted . . . was the
destruction of all game records held at the Naval War College in 1975. All
documentation and histories of games before 1973 were thrown away; with
them went all chances for evaluation of games, for some much needed basic
research, and even for an assessment of changes in the operational styles
and capabilities of successive generations of naval leadership."91 Recalling
the storied past of Newport gaming between the wars and its effects on the
navy's strategic planning for the war in the Pacific, Murray was
disappointed. He had expected to find a "very lively war-gaming center."
What he actually discovered was "an interesting center, but not a lively
one."92
Murray set about changing things at Sims Hall. "I found that officers at
the war-gaming center provided umpiring services but did not themselves
have much opportunity or incentive to think through the issues of war
fighting on a sustained basis; that the war-gaming center was rarely used to
test real war-fighting concepts and war plans, but was mainly for training
students; that the games played seldom considered Marine Corps issues
beyond their initial movement, or land and air engagements at all, even
though it was impossible to get any true measure of the value of naval
forces without doing so; and that the war-gaming center didn't work with all
the Navy, only the East Coast Navy. These were real problems. Change was
needed if war gaming was going to be a useful tool for the Navy in
developing strategic and tactical concepts. Something had to be done.
Something was done."93 In early 1982, Murray and his staff devised a new
concept for what the Center for War Gaming was and how it should operate.
It would support all the fleets, including the numbered fleets as well as the
higher commands. It would "argue real-life questions of strategy and
tactics, test real war plans, and develop new concepts of operations." The
center would use its own officers "to design the game, write the scenario,
analyze the results, and draw the conclusions, and then argue the
conclusions anew in subsequent games." The play of the games would be
diligently recorded "so the future Nimitzes could always have available a
record for pondering, a source of ideas for helping to deter or fight."
Murray oversaw the installation of the NWGS and pushed for the
incorporation of remote gaming capabilities to link Newport to the fleets
and allow the fleet commanders to play games interactively from their
separate headquarters. More importantly, perhaps, Murray's team developed
a process so that the analyses done by the Center for Naval Warfare Studies
and others "could be incorporated in future games, and ideas that emerged
in the games could be subjected to outside, or off-line, analysis."94
The prime example of this new emphasis on integrating wargaming
with other forms of research was seen in the program followed by the
Strategic Studies Group. The preliminary research of the officers set the
stage for a wargame, which was carefully designed to address the main
issues of interest. Players and other participants were selected from a broad
spectrum of military and civilian organizations to play a series of games to
explore the ideas postulated by the Strategic Studies Group.
In addition to those games, Murray also started the ball rolling on
another series of Navy games, the first of which actually took place after he
had already been relieved by the new head of the Center for Naval Warfare
Studies, Robert Wood. This series of games, known as the POM War
Games (for Program Objectives Memorandum, a navy programming
document in the annual budget cycle of the Pentagon), began in 1984 under
the sponsorship of Director for Naval Warfare Vice Admiral Lee Baggett.
The POM games allowed the fleets and the Washington navy to explore
jointly the warfighting implications of the navy program within the context
of its agreed-upon strategy for future global conflict. The 1988 POM game
also explored issues related to low-intensity conflict for the first time in the
history of the series.
The POM games were only one example of Admiral Watkins's
renewed emphasis on the importance of the Naval War College, and its
wargaming facilities, to the navy. He convened several conferences of the
navy commanders in chief at Newport, rather than at the more traditional
locations in Washington and Annapolis, and on those occasions took the
opportunity to conduct wargames with the very highest levels of the navy's
uniformed leadership. Watkins stressed the need for wargaming to be
closely tied to operations research and tactical analysis. Writing for the
practitioners of such research and analysis, the director of the navy's
Program Resource Appraisal Division stated that "war gaming has been
practiced at the Naval War College for decades. The naval aspect of our
current concept, though, is its ready applicability to tactical and strategic
analysis and its acceptance by top Navy leadership (as demonstrated by
recent CINC war games) as a valued and proven tool. Thus, naval analysts
are beginning to make a new kind of impact by using analytical tools to
support war gaming and drawing on war gaming results."95
Admiral Watkins made a strong case for expanding the role of
wargaming in the War College's and the navy's view of the world. Under his
influence, Rear Admiral James E. Service, Welch's successor to the War
College presidency, took the War College's role as the center of navy
wargaming seriously, increasing "the amount of student war gaming three-
fold, using crisis action, theater and world-wide games." Watkins himself
"developed a direct link for the Naval War College with war gaming, fleet
exercises, and operational planning."96
That period of the early 1980s was an especially innovative and
exciting time for the U.S. Navy. The navy's view of itself and its role in
support of the national interest in peace and war changed dramatically.
Admiral Watkins articulated an innovative strategy for the use of the navy
in wartime, one that stressed early, forward offensive operations as the best
defense for the critical assets, areas, and sea lines of communication of the
United States and its allies. Newport wargaming, especially the games done
for the Strategic Studies Group and the Global series, played an
instrumental role in developing the strategic thinking and operational
insight that became fundamental to that strategy.
Although Watkins's successor, Admiral Carlisle Trost, has been less
vocal about the role of wargaming, there is little evidence of a decline in its
stature at the Naval War College or in the navy in general. Fortunately,
however, the dangers of wargaming's becoming once again the false oracle
in a time of change, while still present for the individual, seems to have
been overcome by a broader awareness of the strengths and limitations of
the techniques. As Murray said, "If there's anyone who scares me, it is
someone who goes to one war game and thinks he's learned the answers to
his problem, whatever the problem is. A war game doesn't have that
capacity. On the other hand, if there's anybody who frustrates me, it's the
guy who thinks he can get nothing out of war games and doesn't want to
take the time to
bother."97
Robert Murray's tenure at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies was an
especially important time for the development of Newport wargaming. His
sense of wargaming's potential and importance was complemented by his
stress on three fundamental elements in wargaming: "good preparation,
good intelligence, and good people. People are the most important factor in
a good game. Much turns on the quality of officers assigned to the gaming
center and the seriousness with which they approach gaming."98 The navy's
high-level support for wargaming and the Naval War College in the early
1980s made the assignment of such individuals more likely than it had been
in the past, and the accomplishments of the period bore out Murray's
assessment.
Although there have been some changes in Newport gaming since
Robert Murray's departure, in many ways they have been changes in form
and not in substance. In 1985, the Center for War Gaming reverted to its
older title of War Gaming Department. The Naval Warfare Gaming System
is being phased out, to be replaced by the Enhanced Naval Warfare Gaming
System (ENWGS). But the same sorts of problems the War College has
always had with its computerized facilities seem to be cropping up in
different guises even with the newer system. Although the final verdict on
ENWGS will not be in for several years, its development has again shown
the dangers of attempting to develop a massive, special-purpose system that
takes several years to design and install, and which is beyond the
conceptual grasp of a single designer. Even as the new computer begins its
operations, the War Gaming Department finds itself conducting more and
more seminar-style games to avoid the strictures imposed by the rigid
structure of the computerized system.
From 1972 to 1988, the wargaming pendulum at the Naval War
College swung from Stansfield Turner's emphasis on its role in the
education of individual officers to Robert Murray's emphasis on its role in
educating the navy as a whole. Both attitudes can find many supporters in
the pages of War College history. Throughout that long history, the Naval
War College has retained its faith in the usefulness and value of wargaming,
first as an educational device, and also as a tool to help explore new ideas,
and to create and evaluate new concepts and plans. From the cardboard and
paper games of McCarty Little to the electronic marvels of the Enhanced
Naval Warfare Gaming System, the college has always been open to new
tools to assist it in its process of educating and exploring. Sometimes the
tool became too important, but never did it remain that way for long. In the
end, the secret of the Naval War College's successes with wargaming was
perhaps best summarized by Frank McHugh when he wrote that the heart of
the Naval War College gaming system was that it was one "in which the
human decision makers, and not the machine, play the dominant roles.99

OceanofPDF.com
 3: Wargaming after the War
WORLD WAR II AND THE BIRTH OF OPERATIONS
RESEARCH
The previous chapter discussed the role wargaming played in helping
the U.S. Navy prepare itself for World War II. As chapter one described,
however, wargaming was little used in the West during the war itself. The
professional military, wargaming's principal users and sponsors in the
United States and Great Britain, had too little time to spend on such
theoretical pursuits because they had to get on with the very real business of
fighting a global war.
As a result of the military's preoccupation with the practical business of
fighting and dying, civilians came to dominate the theoretical study of war,
at least among the Western powers. The pioneers were a diverse group of
academics who came to be known as operations researchers. They saw their
field as "a scientific method of providing executive departments with a
quantitative basis for decisions regarding the operations under their
control."1
Most of the operations researchers were drawn from the ranks of
physical scientists. They eschewed the lack of rigorous, statistically valid
experimentation inherent in wargaming's emphasis on human decisions.
Instead, they stressed the quantitative and scientific analysis of the physical
aspects of military operations. They based much of their early work on
detailed statistical analysis of operational data, and on the mathematical
modeling techniques popular in the physical sciences. In some cases,
however, they discovered that wargaming techniques could be useful
adjuncts to their more mathematical analyses.
One of the first operations research organizations formed in the United
States was the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group
(ASWORG). ASWORG was born in April 1942 under the direction of
Professor Philip M. Morse, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. As its name implied, Morse's group focused on the problem of
defeating the German U-boats in the Atlantic. Scientists attached to
ASWORG developed useful mathematical techniques for analyzing the
different aspects of searching for submarines and screening surface forces
from their attacks. One of the operations they studied involved hunting for a
submarine in a specific area of the ocean in which the submarine was
known to be hiding. This type of search could arise as the result of a
sighting of the submarine or an attack made by the submarine (a "flaming
datum"[10]*).
One technique employed by Allied forces in such a situation had been
simply to flood the area with anti-submarine units, particularly aircraft.
These units would attempt to hold the U-boat under water until its battery
power or air supply was depleted. When the submarine was forced to the
surface, the circling hunters could close in for the kill. It was a simple idea,
but it required an enormous number of forces to cover the continuously
expanding area of uncertainty in which the U-boat might be located. Many
of these saturation hunts were conducted in 1942 and 1943 with but limited
success.2
ASWORG became involved in the problem, and set about analyzing
the vast amounts of operational data available. They soon discovered that
the "hunt-to-exhaustion" technique was often failing because "the hunters
were exhausted before the hunted."3 A U-boat might be able to remain
submerged for as long as forty-eight hours, during which time searching
aircraft would tend to cover too small an area or break off the hunt too soon.
Sometimes the weather would interfere, or other missions would pull the
searchers off the hunt. "The problem, therefore, was to work out a way for
aircraft to regain contact with the submarine that would have a reasonable
chance of success without using an unreasonable amount of flight time."4
To help in solving the problem, ASWORG devised a wargame to
explore the dynamics of the operation. Using specially designed equipment
that simulated the ability of the aircraft and submarine to see each other
under different conditions, the wargame indicated that the submarine could
often spot the plane through its periscope and determine the aircraft's
operating pattern, thus allowing the U-boat to optimize its evasion plan.
 As a result of this insight, ASWORG developed a new plan, called a
"gambit," in which the aircraft would appear to leave the area in hopes of
inducing the U-boat to surface and attempt to evade at high speed. If the
submarine fell into the trap, it would once again make itself vulnerable to
the aircraft, which would have established a new patrol pattern some
distance away. Gambit plans were designed in real time to take account of
specific operating conditions, and they proved to be quite successful. "Not
only were more contacts achieved, but much less flying was required."5
Thus, wargaming, used in conjunction with operational experience and
quantitative analysis, proved a useful tool even in the case of wartime
tactical development.
In another such example, at a higher level of operations, the operations
research group at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory undertook a study of the
possible application of mine warfare to defeating Japan.6 Progress was slow
until the head of the group’s countermeasures section, Dr. Ellis A. Johnson,
"reinvented war gaming."7 The group used wargaming techniques to
explore the technical and tactical aspects of the problem and also to
evaluate the strategic implications. Alfred Hausrath characterizes this effort
as "a classic example of the significance of the interrelations between war
gaming and operations research."8 The process went through four stages:
· Technical analyses explored the characteristics of mines and
the techniques of their placement that would produce maximum
effectiveness.
· Tactical wargames explored different approaches to mining and
sweeping specific Japanese harbors.
· Strategic wargames studied the overall implications of mining
the Japanese home islands
· Actual military operations carried out the plans developed with
the help of the games and the operational analyses that supported
and flowed from them.
 An interesting sidelight to the mining study is the fact that Dr. Johnson,
the designer of the wargaming approach, was subsequently commissioned
as a naval officer and assigned to implement the very operation his research
had suggested. In commenting on this unique opportunity, Johnson stated:
"As an officer, when I actually conducted the mining campaign against
Japan that I had helped to wargame earlier, I found very often that almost
every countermove the Japanese made to a powerful mining attack had also
occurred in one or more of the war game situations. In fact, the over-all
results of the campaign followed closely the results predicted by war
gaming."9
Despite these and other early attempts to employ wargaming and
operations research together, for the most part the operations researchers
made little use of gaming. The obvious lack of rigor in wargaming and the
apparently scientific nature of operations research led most civilian
researchers, who were scientists after all and not soldiers, to rely on
operations research and ignore the possibilities of wargaming, if they were
even aware of the existence of the technique. Indeed, Ellis Johnson was a
geophysicist by training and had been "in complete ignorance of the long
and illustrious history of war gaming." Hausrath states: "It was not until
later that Dr. Johnson learned that the technique he visualized was well
known in military circles but was used primarily for training and testing of
plans rather than as a research tool."10

THE RISE OF POLITICAL-MILITARY GAMING

Operations research had been born in the dark days of World War II,
and most of the groups assembled by the Allies were strictly ad hoc
arrangements, which nevertheless became somewhat bureaucratized by the
end of the war. The importance and contributions of operations research to
the war effort, however, led to a move to institutionalize some of the more
prominent wartime arrangements. For example, Admiral Ernest J. King, the
commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, urged Secretary of the Navy James V.
Forrestal to continue the navy's Operations Research Group (as ASWORG
had become known) into peacetime, though at reduced manning levels.
Forrestal agreed, and in November 1945 the navy and MIT signed a
contract perpetuating the Operations Research Group in the form of the
Operations Evaluation Group (OEG). (OEG continues to exist today,
providing operational navy commands the world over with analytical
support as part of the Center for Naval Analyses.)
In the new civilian-dominated world of military research, wargaming
was gradually relegated to a relatively small role as a potentially useful
training device and little more. The complex tale of the growth and
interrelations of operations research and wargaming in the early postwar
period is too intricate and confused to deal with in any detail here.11 Over
time, however, the traditional disciplines of wargaming lost ground even
among those who had supported it. The developments in computers and
simulation techniques seemed to hold out the promise of doing away with
the foibles and unpredictability involved in using human beings as players.
Instead, the new methods sought to program the most rational possible
decisions directly into the machines, which would quickly calculate the
outcomes of many such decisions.
The process of rationalization and dehumanization reached its apogee
with the arrival of Robert McNamara as secretary of defense at the
beginning of the Kennedy administration. McNamara brought to
Washington a new breed of civilian "whiz kids," who preached the doctrine
of operations research, systems analysis, and cost-benefits tradeoffs. This
new theology buried wargaming beneath a deluge of mathematical analyses
and computer simulations. For the systems analysts, buying the right
systems required a detailed understanding of the technical nuances of
physics and economics, and exploiting new technology, especially to save
money, became more important than understanding the nature of war.
In the new environment dominated by civilian analysts, wargaming was
all but discarded as a useful tool for conducting research into the physical
realities of combat. But the self-evident utility of the gaming idea was taken
up by an entirely new breed of postwar defense specialists. Academic
strategists and political scientists applied the principles and techniques of
wargaming to what was more obviously a less-than-quantifiable subject—
political issues and behavior. Thus was born the political-military, or "pol-
mil," game, a device that was popularized by the Rand Corporation and
spread in surprisingly divergent directions, to the halls of academia and
the corridors of the joint chiefs of staff (JCS).
As described in chapter 2, both the Germans and Japanese had
experimented with political games during the 1930s, but the applications of
the technique in the United States were quite limited before the 1960s.
Some American political scientists, notably Harold Guetzkow of
Northwestern University, emphasized the use of gaming in theoretical
studies of international relations. Such games used role-playing in an
attempt "to validate theories about the structure of international politics, . . .
[and tried] to quantify the process of international relations by assigning
units of national resources, capabilities, and so on, to teams who in a series
of somewhat stylized moves attempt to maximize their goals and minimize
their losses.… [Such games attempted] to simulate interaction not between
people but between forces represented by people."12
The second school of political gaming focused on more practical goals.
Herbert Goldhamer of the Rand Corporation was the pioneer in this type of
game, which was soon adopted by academic institutions like the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. Rand's key
contribution was to abandon "the attempt to assign numerical values to
political and economic factors or to assess in quantitative terms the relative
value of alternative strategies. Rand's conclusion was that to formalize the
conditions of the game and its payoff would unrealistically oversimplify the
real-life world and confuse the assessments of political strategies and tactics
which emerge from the game."13
One of the early pioneers of academic pol-mil games was Professor
Lincoln Bloomfield. Bloomfield had served in the U.S. Navy during World
War II, and then in the Department of State for eleven years. By 1960 he
was an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and the director of its Center for International Studies'
United Nations Project. Bloomfield was an advocate of "the practical uses
of the gaming technique for training, research, and hopefully, policymaking.
… [He stressed games] in which empirical reality and operational values
are emphasized."14
In 1958 Bloomfield directed an experimental game at MIT's country
estate of Endicott House. The scenario revolved around the crisis resulting
from a coup in Poland. Such a scenario clearly required strong Soviet,
Eastern European, and American teams. But because Bloomfield
"anticipated that the problem would go before the United Nations, it was
necessary to have teams representing aggregates of countries in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America." For three days the game "engaged the rather
fascinated attention of a group of senior scholars and officials,"15 and
helped Bloomfield and his associates achieve their principal objective, that
of learning more about the gaming technique.
Bloomfield also tested several other potential values in this type of
"reality gaming."
· The "attempt to uncover factors in a given operational situation
which might not otherwise receive priority or even awareness in
more conventional types of planning and research."
· To "help clarify premises which underlie thinking and planning but
which are not often if ever put to the actual test of events."
· The "identification of new areas of potential research which may
be subsequently investigated by either further gaming or by more
conventional research."16

Finally, Bloomfield characterized the "notion that the future can be

predicted by the use of gaming" as the "ultimate temerity." As he puts it,
"Artificial simulation of events is going to distort reality in inescapable
ways."17
Bloomfield also identified several fundamental factors that seemed
important and in common to designing and playing virtually all types of
political games. He stressed preparation, and the importance of the choice
of the problems as "determining . . . the scope of the game in terms of
geography, teams, and players."18 He also understood the importance of
defining the relationship of game time to real time, both in the sense of the
time in which the game was set (past, present, or future) and the "clock
speed" of play itself.
As to the actual play of the game, Bloomfield pointed out the
importance of deciding ahead of time "whether the strategy to be followed
by players is to be realistic or what is called a 'deviant strategy.'" He
stressed the importance of requiring players "to put on paper their basic
strategic goals, their estimate of the situation and their appreciation of how
it will probably unfold."19
As to the administration of the game, "the role of umpires is vital." as
are the "mechanics of reproducing and distributing documents and
generally keeping the flow of information moving." Finally "the post-
mortem session following the game is perhaps the most valuable event of
the political exercise. . . . [If] given adequate time and conducted skillfully,
the post-mortem can supply the decisive insights about the planning and
action process in the very way in which the game, like the reality it
simulates, cannot."20
Bloomfield and the other academic gamers were well aware of the
limitations of pol-mil gaming and urged that "future uses of the political
game need to be approached with prudence." Yet, they also saw two very
important benefits to using the games in foreign-policy analyses. "One is
the benefit of interaction between several minds—which can, of course,
also be achieved around the conference table. The other is the rather more
complex set of benefits which flow from the dynamics of the interaction in
the form of role-playing, generating a self-sustaining reaction that develops
its own course independent of the limits or boundaries with which one
starts. There is a potent value in unpredictability, and in exposure to the
antagonistic will of another who is operating on the basis of very different
assumptions. Neither of these values can be derived from solitary
meditation or cooperative discussion."21
In the JCS arena, however, pol-mil games became less contests between
competing teams and more directed discussions. In a traditional wargame or
the type of pol-mil game espoused by the likes of Bloomfield, players were
consciously cast in the role of a particular operational commander or staff.
The players of JCS political-military games, on the other hand, were
explicitly directed to avoid the playing of specific roles. Instead of a
player's, for example, donning the mantle of the chairman of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, an entire team would represent the
USSR, in a sense role-playing an entire nation. Because the JCS games
often served as the basis for policy recommendations, role-playing was seen
as too restrictive and potentially disruptive to a coherent, well-ordered study
of the problem.
The mechanics of the standard JCS pol-mil game were described well
by Hausrath, and have remained fairly constant from the very first game in
1961. "Two or more teams, each of five or six officials, plan actions and
reactions and submit these data through a Control Group of similar size.
The teams meet for several hours daily, or on alternate days, to review the
scenarios and determine objectives, strategy, and plans. Conferences are
held with senior officials who come to the game rooms for an hour or so
each day. With the concurrence of these senior officials, team moves and
strategies are documented and submitted to Control; here they are analyzed
in relation to moves from other teams and world influences. Control records
the updated world situation and designates the intervening period of elapsed
time. The game clock and calendar then are advanced a few hours to several
months, and information is submitted to the teams for another cycle of play
the following day."22
"The initial purpose of the Pentagon games, which involve senior
officials like the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Assistant Secretaries of State and
Defense, was to improve interagency communication between the new
defense intellectuals ("Whiz Kids"). . . and the older professional military
staffs."23 The topics of the games were chosen by the JCS after soliciting
suggestions from various government agencies, and a strict non-attribution
policy was adopted and continues to this day.
The standard structure and procedure for conducting political-military
games was devised in the early 1950s and in many ways reflects an
outmoded view of the world. Those were the days of the "bi-polar world,"
in which the "West" believed itself to be facing a monolithic "Sino-Soviet
Bloc" intent on their imminent, and probably violent, overthrow. The pol-
mil games of this period naturally took on the standard two-sided form that
is still the most popular type today. Such a game structure subtly implies
that the only important players on the world stage are the political leaders of
the two principal contending parties, usually the U.S. and the USSR. An
increasing tendency over the years to require all communications between
player teams to take place indirectly through the umpires may have subtly
influenced many players to believe "that the posturing, deploying and
employing of military forces is the major means available to the two
leaderships to try to influence the decisions of their opponents and
others."24 Perhaps this is the reason that all too often one hears discussions
of "signaling" the enemy by embarking on a particular course of military
action, not only in games, but in the real world as well.
If these sorts of vague, almost amateurish notions of how international
politics works are disturbing when we read about them today, they were
possibly even more disturbing to the professional military at the time.
Although JCS has conducted pol-mil games almost continuously since the
1950s, other military organizations have tended to view their "touchy-feely"
procedures and "squishy" conclusions with well-founded skepticism. As the
most prominent examples of research-oriented gaming of their time, it is
little wonder that the questionable reputation of political-military games
cast a long shadow over all gaming techniques and reinforced wargaming's
declining popularity among the active, operationally experienced military.
It seems clear that the virtual castration of wargaming in the 1960s and
1970s in many ways reflected the increased civilianization of military
affairs that occurred during the same period. This ascendancy of the
amateur over the professional was a familiar, recurring American theme,
and one that was soon to make itself felt in wargaming as well.

CHARLES ROBERTS: WARGAMING BECOMES A

HOBBY
The postwar period, which saw the increasing involvement and
dominance of civilians in matters military, also witnessed the rise of what
for the first time might accurately be classified as a wargaming hobby. The
founding father of the hobby of board wargaming was, not surprisingly, an
American, Charles Swan Roberts II.
In 1952, Roberts was a young man living in Maryland, and he had just
been commissioned in the army national guard. He entertained hopes of
obtaining a commission in the regular army through a process known as a
competitive tour of duty. While waiting for his opportunity, he designed a
game that would allow him to "practice war on a board as well as a training
field and learn the nuances of the Principles of War in a context that was
less noisy."25
The game used a rectangular map of an imaginary island inhabited by
two contending nations. Over the representation of terrain ranging from flat
plains, to forests, rivers, and mountains, Roberts superimposed a square
grid, similar to the military system of identifying map locations. To
represent the various combat units fielded by the adversaries, he used small
square pieces of cardboard on which he drew standard military symbols to
distinguish infantry from armor or airborne divisions. Each unit was given a
numerical rating for its ability to move through the squares of the grid,
depending on the type of terrain in the square. Each unit was also rated for
its combat capability. Battles were resolved by comparing the strengths of
adjacent opposing units, rolling a die, and comparing the die roll to a table
of results (the Combat Results Table, or CRT) scaled by the relative
strength (or "odds") of the attacker and defender. Roberts discovered that
playing his game did, indeed, have a tremendous educational value. But as
the Korean War came to a close and the army abolished the Competitive
Tour program, his dreams of becoming a professional soldier waned.
Working in advertising and marketing for a living, Roberts decided,
"almost as a lark"26 to publish his game, called Tactics, in 1954. He created
The Avalon Game Company (the name taken from a nearby historical site),
and operated out of his basement. The game was printed by a commercial
firm and distributed through the Stackpole Company, a publisher of books
on military history and science.27 From 1954 to 1958 he sold about 2,000
copies of the game, and "either netted or lost thirty dollars."28

Tactics and its successor Tactics II were part of a post-war trend to

develop more realistic wargames for the civilian market. They were the
most well-known and have had the most impact.

In 1958 Roberts decided to get into game publishing on a larger scale.

To avoid a conflict with another local firm, he changed his company's name
to Avalon Hill. Roberts did not see Avalon Hill as a pioneer in creating a
wargaming market. Instead, he "was convinced that there was a market for
realistic games of a specialty format, designed to appeal to those who enjoy
intellectual challenge and prefer competition wherein skill is a primary
virtue." In addition, Roberts and Avalon Hill targeted the role-playing
aspects of their games from the start, realizing the potential attractions of
the idea long before anyone had coined the phrase. Their early ads
challenged the player to outwit Rommel or Montgomery, Spruance or
Yamamoto.29 His first games included an updated version of Tactics called,
originally enough, Tactics II; the first modern historical board game,
Gettysburg; and the first of his non-war games, Dispatcher, a simulation of
railway operations.
Over the next few years, Roberts and Avalon Hill produced nearly
twenty adult games, about evenly split between wargames and "civilian"
titles. The wargames, however, were always the biggest sellers. In games
such as Chancellorsville and D-Day, the original square grid was replaced
by the hexagonal pattern in common use today. The source for this
innovation, one of the most influential devices ever employed in the hobby,
was the Rand Corporation.
In the early 1950s Rand had contacted Roberts and in a circumspect
manner inquired about the source of the CRT used in Tactics (and virtually
all of the early Avalon Hill games). Roberts's CRT bore an uncanny
resemblance "to the more complex one that Rand was using to wargame
World War III and other horrors."30 This fact was probably somewhat
embarrassing to Rand when they discovered that Roberts had devised his
table in about fifteen minutes, basing it on the popular military notion that
an attacker required a three-to-one superiority in order to be reasonably
assured of success. After this encounter with the think-tank wargamers,
Roberts became more interested in Rand. Later, he saw a photograph of one
of the Rand gaming facilities and noted that they were using an hexagonal
grid. This grid allowed movement between adjacent hexagons (or hexes, as
they are more frequently called) to be equidistant, whereas movement along
the diagonals in a square grid covered more distance than movement across
the sides of the squares. Roberts immediately saw the usefulness of this
technique and adapted it to his subsequent games.
Although the hexagonal grid was one of the most important
contributions Roberts made to wargaming and the hobby during the early
years of Avalon Hill, it was by no means the only one. Early games often
suffered from a lack of clarity and completeness in their rules, necessitating
a hobby "tradition" of post-publication errata. (Certainly a major
contribution!) As part of the solution to the problem of inadequate play
testing, which led to such mistakes, Avalon Hill adopted the use of outside
testers, drawn from the ranks of the most avid of the budding wargame
hobbyists, to identify problems before games were put into production.31
Other contributions of the earliest games included the introduction of
airpower to a land-battle game and the imposition of strict logistical limits
on the forces available (seen in D-Day); unit-breakdown counters, which
allowed a large unit to decompose into smaller subunits (introduced in
Chancellorsville, and hidden movement and search (used in Bismarck).
Roberts also explored the possibility of doing games for the military.
Remembering how effective an educational tool he had found the original
Tactics, Roberts designed Game/Train, "the first tactical board wargame, …
designed to be a squad and platoon level training aid for combat leaders."32
He attempted to sell this game to the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort
Benning, Georgia. After a demonstration, the military officers seemed to be
interested, but the sale was rejected by the civilians who controlled the
contracting—perhaps another example of the dichotomy of opinion
between the professionals and the amateurs about the utility of wargaming.
Despite the failure of his attempt to penetrate the military market, Roberts
continued to pursue other noncommercial enterprises. For example, Avalon
Hill became involved with the American Management Association in a
project to develop simulations to educate managers in new techniques.33
Despite the progress and their expanding market, Avalon Hill faced a
financial crisis in the early 1960s. In 1963, Roberts turned the company
over to Monarch Services, one of its principal creditors. Eric Dott, the
president of Monarch, decided that the company could be salvaged. Dott
appointed one of Roberts's original associates, Thomas Shaw, to be in
charge, and in 1964 a reborn Avalon Hill rose from the ashes.
 Although Charles Roberts ceased to be an active force in wargaming
after 1963, his influence on the hobby continues even to this day. His name
has graced wargaming's equivalent of the movie industry's Academy
Awards (the Charles Roberts Awards, or "Charlies"), and his presence at
gaming conventions is still a major draw.[11]* To put his work into
perspective, perhaps it is best to let him use his own words.

The problems of wargame design in the early years were

considerable. Tactics introduced a totally new method of play
which had no parallel in games designed to that point and
potential players had difficulty in grasping the simple
mechanics. It was revolutionary to say that you could move
up to all of your pieces on a turn, that movement up to
certain limits was at the player's option and that the
resolution of combat was at the throw of a die compared to a
table of varying results. As simple as this sounds now, the
new player had to push aside his chess-and-checkers mindset
and learn to walk again. After he learned to walk, he had to
master the intellectual challenge of the game itself usually
without the benefit of an experienced opponent. The miracle
is that the early player managed to play at all, burdened as he
was in many cases with poorly written instructions.
The lack of basic skills on the part of the typical purchaser
of an early wargame severely limited the designer, forcing
him to simplify the play to get the game played at all. Today
there is a great body experienced players, who can find
opponents with ease and the designer can take wing without
worrying about trivialities. Also, today's designer has readily
available historic data not so easy to find in the early years.
Game design today, enhanced by the evolution of improved
graphics, is by no means an easy task, but at least the creator
 can assume the purchaser will not have difficulty getting the
lid off the box.34

THE SIXTIES: WARGAMING GROWS UP

With the rebirth of Avalon Hill began a decade in which more and
more wargamers would be "getting the lid off" more and more boxes. Over
that next decade or so a small but continually growing body of civilian (and
military) hobbyists began to enter the world of gaming. As the number of
players grew, clubs formed and a gaming press began, initiated and
dominated by Avalon Hill's house organ, The General (begun by Thomas
Shaw in 1964), but including a varied array of mimeographed newsletters
published by the clubs or dedicated individuals.
One of the first of Avalon Hill's new games in the post-Roberts era also
began a new trend in the research involved in game design. Following the
publication of Afrika Korps in the spring of 1964, work began on Midway.
As part of a promotional scheme for the game, Dott contacted Rear Admiral
C. Wade McClusky, an authentic hero of the Battle of Midway (he was the
commander of the dive-bomber squadrons of the USS Enterprise), who
happened to live in a nearby Baltimore suburb. McClusky was only too glad
to endorse the game, especially after Avalon Hill asked his permission to
print his previously unpublished eyewitness account of the battle, which he
had penned immediately after the events of June 1942.
The fact that McClusky's account did not completely agree with the
official navy records or the official history "set a radical change in the
course of Avalon Hill research and design. Henceforth their commitment
was to spend more time developing primary sources rather than rely on the
more easily obtainable secondary sources."35 McClusky became the charter
member of Avalon Hill's Technical Advisory Staff, which later came to
include General Anthony McAuliffe (U.S. Army commander at Bastogne
during the Battle of the Bulge) and Colonel Donald Dickson, a Marine
Corps veteran of Guadalcanal. Despite Avalon Hill's recruitment of such
illustrious figures to help with some aspects of the research for their games,
they achieved only mixed success in their attempts to produce more
historical accuracy. The new-found drive for greater realism, however, was
to become a major theme for the future development of the hobby.
One of the principal navigators into these uncharted waters was to be
James F. Dunnigan. During the early 1960s, Dunnigan wrote Avalon Hill
several letters commenting on the sloppy historical research apparent in
some of the early titles. It was not until 1965, however, that Dunnigan
finally met Thomas Shaw. Doing research for a college term paper dealing
with the accounting aspects of the toy business, Dunnigan showed up at the
Avalon Hill display during a toy-industry show at New York's Toy Center
and began asking questions of the first body he saw, which just happened to
be Shaw. The result of that conversation was an "A" on the term paper and
an invitation to visit the Avalon Hill offices if he were ever in Baltimore.
Over the next year, however, Dunnigan launched his own amateur
publication. With help from fellow wargamer and history buff Vic Madeja,
Dunnigan began writing Kampf, a series of short pamphlets devoted to
detailed historical analyses of important campaigns of the Second World
War. In March 1966 Dunnigan made a trip to Washington, D.C., to gather
information for the series, and he stopped in Baltimore to renew his
acquaintance with Shaw.
During their conversation, Shaw asked Dunnigan if he knew anything
about the Battle of Jutland. In classic style Dunnigan knew just enough, as
he puts it, to fake it, and he was more than a little surprised when Shaw
asked him if he would like to design a game on the battle for Avalon Hill.
Although Dunnigan had little familiarity with naval affairs, and the thought
of designing a game for publication had never entered his mind, he did not
hesitate to answer yes.
Dunnigan saw the deal as an outgrowth of his record of historical
research and his insight into the marketing aspects of the business. For
Shaw, however, Dunnigan got the job by “questioning Avalon Hill's R&D
methodology to the point where he was given a design contract" just so he
would stop being a pest.36
Dunnigan and his questions reflected the evolution of the wargamer as a
player of games into the wargamer as a student of history as well as the
games it inspired. From the initial fascination of just having a game that
could provide a taste of combat command, players began more and more to
ask why the rules were the way they were. From the earliest debates about
the accuracy of the orders of battle for Avalon Hill's original Battle of the
Bulge to the primitive attempts at revising the rules of older games to
reflect their interpretations of historical factors and events, the players of
games were quickly turning into fledgling game designers. And as
designers they were beginning to ask why not when it came to new ideas
and innovations.
Tom Shaw's contract with Jim Dunnigan was the source of Avalon
Hill's first free-lance game design, and Dunnigan was the first serious
example of gamer-turned-designer. The end product of the collaboration
was the game known as Jutland, published in 1967. Unaware of the history
of naval miniatures-gaming[12]* or Fred Jane's wargame[13]*, Dunnigan
"reinvented the wheel" and constructed his system from scratch,
discovering many classic solutions to the problems of tactical naval
wargaming.

OceanofPDF.com
 Figure 5. The Fleet Search Map from the Avalon Mill Game Company's
Jutland Game. (Jutland Fleet Search Map reprinted with permission by the
Avalon Hill Game Company. All rights reserved.)

OceanofPDF.com
 "Jutland was a radical departure from the norm. It was the
first Avalon Hill game to borrow heavily [albeit unknowingly] from
miniatures. It was the first to dispense with the traditional gameboard. print
a four color process painting [on the box cover]."37Its design was a breadth
of fresh air into a slowly developing, if not quite stagnant, art of game
design. Jutland dealt with the largest fleet engagement of World War I,
which took place between the British Grand Fleet and the German High
Seas Fleet in May 1916 off the coast of Jutland (Denmark). The game was
played on two levels. First, the players planned their steaming order and
deployment of their fleets, and plotted their movements on a paper map of
the North Sea. (Reproduced in figure 5.) By superimposing the plots, the
players could determine whether any elements of their forces had come into
contact. If so, play transferred to the floor or any other large flat surface,
and the players laid out their ships in the pre-determined steaming
formations. The ships were represented by one-and-one-half-inch long
rectangular counters depicting an overhead view of each individual capital
ship and simple silhouettes for groups of smaller vessels. Using ruler-like
devices provided in the game, players maneuvered their ships into range of
the enemy and then fired their guns. Results of gunfire (or torpedo attacks)
were determined by referring to detailed tables, and hits were marked off
against each ship in terms of the number of main guns put out of action.
When the full battle was in progress, Jutland was an impressive spectacle.
(Indeed, when, as an undergraduate at Duquesne University, I spread the
Grand Fleet out on the floor of the Student Union Ballroom, I attracted a
great deal of attention and a few new opponents!) Unfortunately, it was not
a big seller, probably because of the inordinate amounts of space (and often
time) it required to play. Jutland was, however, a critical success.
So encouraged, the formula was put to the test yet again. In 1968
Avalon Hill published Dunnigan's second design. The game 1914 dealt with
the opening months of the First World War in France and Belgium. The
four-color printing process, which had graced the box-cover art of Jutland,
was now applied to the mapboard of 1914. Dunnigan used a "step-
reduction" system (in which units that suffered losses in battle were
replaced by counters with reduced combat strength) to reflect the severe
attrition so characteristic of the popular perception of World War I combat.
He also included elaborate strategic-level rules to allow the Germans to
decide how many forces they would commit to the Russian Front, rather
than restrict them to historical levels. 1914 was unquestionably the most
complex game designed to date, but it "was a great sales success"38
That success was to be nothing, however, when compared to
the sale of the next joint Avalon Hill-Dunnigan venture. In
May of 1969 Dunnigan and a friend by the name of Redmond
Simonsen approached Shaw with a prototype game called Tac Force 3. The
game was a low-level tactical re-creation of combat
on the Eastern Front in World War II, using units representing
platoons, companies and batteries of tanks, infantry, and guns. Shaw
changed the name of the game to Panzerblitz and with its publication in
1970 irrevocably changed the shape of the wargaming hobby.
Everything about Panzerblitz seemed new and better. Instead of a
single large but unvarying mapboard, Panzerblitz used three smaller
mapboards that could be joined together in any combination, either side-to-
side or end to end. This "geomorphic", style of map, which had been used
earlier in the year in the disastrous and truly awful game of Kriegsspiel
[sic], would become almost de rigeur in future tactical games. The
counters, too, were among the most attractive and “sexy” yet produced.
They were about 3/4" square as compared to the standard 1/2" size of other
games. Instead of the dry NATO-style unit symbols, the vehicular counters
were adorned with striking silhouettes. Gamers were enthralled by the
mystique of the German Tiger tank and the Soviet T-34/85. Instead of
abstractions, combat was now carried out by ranged fire and "close assault."
No longer would players be restricted to acting as generals far removed
from the real fighting; Panzerblitz brought the action up close and personal
for the first time. Unfortunately, events half a world away were developing
in a similar vein, only the action was taking place in Southeast Asian rice
paddies and not on an American game board.

VIETNAM: WARGAMING IN DECLINE

Just as World War I had dampened the popularity of Fred Jane's game
and World War II had pushed Fletcher Pratt's game into the closet, the war
in Vietnam had profound effects on both hobby and professional games
from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. The professional political-military
games seemed to be little more than amateur and grandiose versions of
"King of the Hill," and many of the games played specifically to explore the
Vietnam conflict were notoriously flawed and misleading. Furthermore, the
games and simulations the professional analysts used to explore questions
of nuclear war left a bad taste of callousness and Strangelovian disgust[14]*
in many mouths. Gaming's reputation among defense professionals,
including finally even the civilians who had adopted and misused them, was
at low tide.
One of the most important topics for Defense Department wargames in
the early 1960s was the continuing bugaboo of nuclear (or in those days
"atomic") war. Significant activity on this subject had begun during the
Eisenhower administration, when the air force adopted the Rand
Corporation's Air Battle Model to conduct a net assessment of U.S. and
Soviet nuclear warfighting capabilities.39 This game was played by Blue
and Red teams in the summer of 1955 at the Air War College at Maxwell
Air Force Base, Alabama, and was somewhat notorious for the inability of
its design to deal with the attack and defense of navy carrier battle groups.
The results of the game indicated the potential devastation of a strategic
exchange; it also showed "that senior government officials are sometimes
not equipped to interpret faults in games and thus can be misled by
wargame outcomes."40
 Nuclear games of the 1960s evolved around the interplay of the U.S.
Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) for strategic strikes against the
USSR, and the best U.S. guess about how the Soviets might employ their
weapons, the so-called Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan (RISOP).
These plans were typically played against each other in computers with
little actual game play. On the procurement planning side, another Rand
game called SAFE (Strategy and Force Evaluation) was used to explore
alternative strategies.41
As the Johnson administration got underway, however, more and more
JCS games began to revolve around the slowly building situation in South
Vietnam. Sigma I-64, for example, explored U.S. options for secret
campaigns to respond to North Vietnamese aggression, including "a secret
bombing campaign."42 Deputy Under Secretary of State Seymour Weiss
criticized this approach because of the virtual certainty that the campaign
would be exposed through the normal workings of the press or the capture
of a U.S. airman involved.43
Less than four months after Sigma I-64, on 2 August 1964, the Tonkin
Gulf incident gave the U.S. its entree into direct combat activity in Vietnam.
A month later the Joint War Games Agency of JCS began play of Sigma II-
64.
Sigma II-64 used an unusual structure in which senior policy-level
teams oversaw and directed the activities of the lower-level working teams.
Senior-team discussions focused on broad questions like whether or not
tactical nuclear weapons should be used, whether partial mobilization
should be declared, and whether the Nationalist Chinese army should be
"turned loose" in Vietnam. The objective of the game was to explore
alternatives "to compel the enemy to cease support of insurgencies, to assist
local forces as necessary in the elimination of the insurgents who thereafter
persist, to reunify Vietnam and to achieve the independence and security of
friendly nations in the area."44
Many of the alternatives considered and adopted by the Blue players of
Sigma II-64 were also to make their appearance in the real world: the
introduction of ever-increasing numbers of U.S. forces, escalation of
bombing in North Vietnam, and planning for amphibious operations.45 But
while the broad outlines of the coming years can be seen in Sigma, the
details of the war eluded other gamers focusing on narrower issues.
A great deal of this lower-level gaming was done by the Research
Analysis Corporation, a major force in analysis and gaming during the
1960’s and 1970’s.46 One of the principal tools in their Vietnam work was
an adaptation of an older model, THEATERSPIEL, which had been
developed as a theater-level analytical game for studying conventional
warfare.
The THEATERSPIEL Cold War Model was designed "to simulate
conditions of insurgency in Vietnam and effect an orderly relation between
military and non-military factors."47 A paradox if ever there was one! The
model combined various elements of the THEATERSPIEL computer
system (intelligence, military, and logistics models) with a new model of
"the economic, political, psychological, and sociological aspects of cold
war . . . [and] terminal models [to] evaluate the output of the other models
and determine political changes."48
The model "was built on the objective of winning the support of the
population of an area for political authority (Red or Blue) while assuring
security and contributing to the economic and social development of that
area," in other words, the same flawed assumptions that underlay the U.S.
"pacification" program.49 To make matters worse, the model assigned
"arbitrary values to depict the impact and effects of military and non-
military personnel in the political, economic, and psychological-
sociological fields."50 Little wonder that such games failed to prevent the
long series of frustrations of U.S. military and political strategy in Southeast
Asia.
Little wonder, too, that the games (and let us not forget all the other
"hard" analysis) of the Vietnam era, and the decisions that those games may
have affected, could lead critics like Andrew Wilson to write the following
words in 1968.
 Could one be so sure, I asked myself, that the American
military planning apparatus might not in the end be
vindicated, even in Southeast Asia?
Seven weeks later ... I found myself on operations with the
U.S. Marines near the Vietnam Demilitarized Zone. In now
different circumstances, watching the parachute flares sink
down on the sad hillsides, I asked myself the same question
again. I was seeing, not for the first time, the lessons of war
games applied in action—and some, I had to admit, had been
well and profitably learned. The logistic apparatus in
Vietnam was superlative. I had seen operations by the Air
Cavalry that were as perfect in execution as a battle school
firepower demonstration. . . .
It was only when one looked at the toll of civilian
casualties, the impoverishment of the countryside, the
growing refugee problem, the degradation and
demoralization of Saigon, that one saw the extent of the
moral and strategic trap into which America had fallen—a
trap from which even "victory" could never rescue it. Here
were the factors with which no war game had reckoned, or
perhaps could ever reckon. The consequences of overlooking
them—the cost in life and treasure, the loss of allies, the
exposure of military impotence, the effects on American
national unity and the American character— would reach out
in ever-increasing circles for years to come.51
The JCS decision to avoid (or at least not condone) individual role
playing, and the push to reduce the role of human players in so-called
"analytical" games, undoubtedly contributed to the self-deluding tendencies
exhibited by many of the games played about the conflict in Vietnam and
other potential trouble spots even today. From its very start, gaming had
drawn much of its value from the tension between opposing intellects and
the competitive instincts of the players. The competition could be especially
keen when a player was asked to step into the shoes of a prospective or
actual real-world opponent. In that case, in trying to outwit the other guy
the player would actually be attempting to defeat his own "side" in the real
world, in order to "win the game." Often such situations produce
exceptionally insightful play, as the "opposition" delights in making their
real-life colleagues squirm. The JCS approach removed much of this
sharpening of the competitive drive, and with it went many of the incentives
and abilities of the players to think well beyond the limits of "conventional
wisdom" and the dictates of the "rational actor" theory of political behavior.
In real games, as in the real world, people sometimes act irrationally (at
least from the other side's perspective), such as when they are angry, or
confused, or pressed by time. The carefully structured, non-role-playing,
almost pristine nature of some JCS-style games removed many of those
pressures and perspectives and so produced unrealistically well-ordered
decisions.
In an attempt to salvage the most useful elements of their tools from
the reaction of disillusioned users and outspoken critics, professional
practitioners of wargaming and simulation tried to present a cautious and
balanced view of the technique's strengths and weaknesses. Hausrath
warned: "Enthusiasts, impelled by visions of gaming and simulation
potentialities, may try too much, too quickly, too soon."52 He agreed that
the art of wargaming was making great advances, but also saw that its
"limitations have been reduced in degree but have not been eliminated."53
In a nutshell, the fundamental problems with creating the "perfect"
wargame, one capable of predicting the future course of battles and wars,
lay in the fact that "man's understanding of the process of warfare is
incomplete and inadequate. . . . Moreover, any simulation, model, or war
game is incomplete when measured against all the factors involved in a real
combat situation."54
To many inside the defense community, and even more so to outsiders,
the majority of professional wargamers were perceived almost as "mad
scientists" attempting to lead the world to its doom to prove their pet
theories. Books like Wilson’s seemed to reflect the public mood when it
condemned the evils of wargaming as an academic and antiseptic way to
plan to send men and women, or even whole societies, to their deaths.
Not surprisingly, the wargaming hobby also found itself experiencing
its own crisis during the Vietnam era. Wargaming's apparent glorification of
war as an exciting and fun way to spend an afternoon seemed incongruous
to many of the young adults on whom the hobby counted for its
membership and support. It was hard to reconcile playing at war when so
many of their contemporaries and friends were dying in the reality of
Vietnam.
Some gamers restricted themselves to wargaming with miniatures.
Although modern-era miniatures games did exist, the bulk of play and
interest took place in older, simpler times. Games dealing with the battles of
Caesar, Nelson, or Napoleon could take advantage of the color and
pageantry that miniatures could produce, thus avoiding the more unpleasant
associations of modern tanks, planes, and warships. Furthermore, much of
the interest and pleasure of miniature gaming was centered around the
miniatures themselves. Acquiring interesting figures, weapons, or ships and
painting them authentically was almost as important, and in many cases
even more important, than playing games with them.
As the modern miniatures-gaming hobby developed, it did so in a fairly
self-contained way, at least in the United States. There were, and are, few
major, professional, national publications dealing with the miniatures
hobby, The Courier being one of the better known. Indeed, one of the most
interesting and academic of all gaming publications is an amateur-quality
magazine called Empires, Eagles, and Lions. EEL, as it is known, focuses
on the warfare of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and
particularly on Napoleonics. Boasting contributors such as David Chandler
and Paddy Griffith[15]* of Sandhurst, EEL has achieved a high reputation
for scholarship, but is virtually unknown outside a small audience of
miniaturists.
Although it is difficult to document, the likelihood is that the majority
of miniatures rules in use today have never been published. They have been
written and used by hundreds of local miniatures clubs and informal groups.
Despite advances in technique and improvements in publicity, especially
the boost it received from its link to the popular science-fiction and fantasy-
role-playing games that developed in the 1970s, American miniatures
wargaming never broke out of its Vietnam-era period of limited, relatively
low-key appeal. Such was not the case with board wargaming.

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 THE REBIRTH OF WARGAMING
In the midst of wargaming's decline, the seeds of its rebirth had already
been sown. Among professionals, the military adjusted to the McNamara
revolution. Programs of higher-level military education began to produce
quantitatively trained officers capable of carrying out their own systems
analyses, and also capable of competing with, and criticizing, civilian
analysts on their own ground. The services developed an increasing
appreciation of the fact that much of the earlier civilian-driven analysis was
perhaps rigorous but almost certainly wrong because the analysts lacked
any real understanding of actual warfare. As the military professionals
began to assert the importance of combining operational experience and an
appreciation for the realities of the field with the theoretical and
mathematical techniques of civilian operations researchers, wargaming
began to make its appearance once again as a valuable tool for
demonstrating and exploring the implications of that experience in the
research arena. The new electronic techniques pioneered at places like the
Naval War College made the processes of gaming relatively less time
consuming, and less obviously subjective.
At the same time, the dominance of Avalon Hill over the
board-gaming hobby was broken by the increasing influence of
James Dunnigan and Simulations Publications, Incorporated. SPI, as it
came to be called, grew from the seed of Strategy & Tactics magazine,
founded in 1966 by Christopher R. Wagner and Lyle E. Smethers.55
Wagner, then an air force staff sergeant serving in Japan, was dissatisfied
with the limited focus and uneven quality of Avalon Hill's magazine The
General. Looking to include articles dealing with the broad spectrum of
wargaming, including miniatures and the small but growing number of non-
Avalon Hill games, Wagner began to publish Strategy & Tactics on a virtual
shoestring. After seventeen issues, the shoestring broke, and Wagner went
shopping for someone to take over the magazine. He found James
Dunnigan, who had been toying with the idea of publishing a large number
of games, but had been unable to find the proper outlet for them. Seeing
Strategy & Tactics as just such an outlet, Dunnigan decided to take over the
magazine.
Avalon Hill had always looked on wargames as games, something
people might be willing to buy in small quantities for the sake of
amusement or, as was the case with chess, to study and master. In keeping
with this philosophy, they had followed a policy of producing very few new
games yearly, and many of their games, especially the earlier ones, used the
same basic system of play. This policy helped ensure that most of the
gamers of the early 1960s were familiar with most of the games then in
existence. Furthermore, new games were relatively easy to learn, because
they were all so similar. Such factors were in fact critically important to the
initial growth of the hobby, when players were few and introducing new
people to gaming required overcoming the obstacles of "long" rules (four to
eight pages) and playing times of more than two hours.
Holding onto an almost unique vision, Dunnigan saw games as more
like books, each with its own particular perspective (and therefore its own
specialized game system), and drawing on a potentially enormous number
of different topics. More importantly, from the practical perspective, they
were things that people might be willing to buy in quantity, if the price were
right, to read or play only a few times, with an opponent or solitaire, to
draw what lessons they might, and then to go on to further exploration of
the same or different topics. When Dunnigan took over the reins of Strategy
& Tactics, he found a ready-made forum from which to test the validity of
his ideas. Dunnigan's fertile imagination enabled him to produce just the
sort of new and innovative designs the gaming public thirsted for. One
description of Dunnigan's "genius" for game design characterized it as "his
refusal to be bound by a fixed pattern when that pattern does not fit."56
In a surprisingly short period of time, Dunnigan collected around
himself a group of people willing and able to experiment with new gaming
concepts, and to explore new, obscure, and diverse gaming topics. These
second-generation wargaming pioneers included Redmond A. Simonsen, a
graphics artist with an abiding interest in wargames, who as art director of
SPI led the way in integrating more and more of the hard data required to
play a game directly onto the map and counters. He also carried the banner
of standardization of gaming terminology and symbology. Some may argue,
with more than a little justification, that Simonsen's utilitarian view of
gaming graphics glorified pure functionalism over the later and more
appealing approach that balances the practical and the aesthetically
appealing. Yet, the combination of Dunnigan’s urge for innovation with
Simonsen's drive to make the innovative at least look and feel familiar
proved a dynamic and influential synergism that helped wargaming develop
by quantum leaps.
While professional gamers struggled during the late 1960s
and early 1970s to devise computer-based approaches that could
adapt old ideas of gaming and analysis to the new systems of warfare, the
wargaming hobby exploded with a wealth of new ideas for exploring old
(that is, historical) systems and methods of warfare. Over the next decade,
SPI produced hundreds of games. Scores of those games were eminently
forgettable, but scores more were brilliant in all or some facets of their
design. They explored the full spectrum of warfare, from ancient times to
the far future, from man-to-man combat to the clash of whole armies and
nations. Logistics, command and control, morale, administration, and the
vagaries of unpredictable ("random") events were introduced as the first
truly professional designers of hobby games began to define their
trade.
Dunnigan and SPI also achieved one of Charles Roberts's long-held
and unfulfilled dreams. For a price of $25,000, the U.S. Army contracted
with Dunnigan and SPI to produce a board game that could be used as a
training aid for infantry units. The following words from SPI’s Moves
magazine describe the origins of this game, published for the hobbyist
under the title Firefight: "One rather obvious reason for the Army wanting
the game is so that it can 'play around' with their tactical concepts on paper
before taking a lot of troops out to do it in the field and, of course, before
they have to do it for real. For civilians. . . the main purpose of the game is
to let people know what is going on in the military. Hopefully everyone will
get something out of it."57
In games like Firefight, Red Star/White Star, Mech War ‘77, Fulda
Gap, and others, Dunnigan and SPI lead the wargaming hobby into new
realms, not only of game design but of gaming topics. No longer would
games deal only with history or science fiction. In these "future history"
games, SPI was introducing, to hobbyist and professional alike, the utility
of gaming to help civilians better understand the potentially violent world in
which they lived.

GROWTH AND CHANGE

Dunnigan and his cohorts at SPI, including John Young (La Grande
Armée, Dreadnought), Irad Hardy (Firefight, War Between the States),
Frank Davis (Frederick the Great, Wellington's Victory), Richard Berg
(Terrible Swift Sword, Conquistador), David Isby (Soldiers, Air War) and
others, injected new life and new ideas into the wargaming hobby. The
success of SPI proved that the hobby could support both diversity and
quantity. The free-lance designers, led by the likes of John Hill (Bar Lev,
Squad Leader) and John Prados (Pearl Harbor, Third Reich), began to play
a more influential role, even as SPI and Avalon Hill developed design staffs
of their own. In addition, small companies and even individual game
producers sprang up. Some, like Robert Bradley and his exciting game
Alesia dealing with Caesar's decisive battle in the Gallic Wars, or Roger
Cormier and his legendary Trafalgar, disappeared after publishing one or
two "labors of love." Some, like Game Designers Workshop and their
legendary Europa series of games dealing with all of World War II in
Europe, survived and grew. Others, like Battleline, produced limited
quantities of high-quality games like Wooden Ships and Iron Men,
Shenandoah, and Flattop, many of which were later purchased by Avalon
Hill to refurbish and give a wider distribution. These small companies made
up the so-called "third world" of a wargaming hobby dominated by the
rivalry between Avalon Hill and SPI. Meanwhile, out on the fringes lurked
the world of fantasy-role-playing (or FRP) games, devised by a group of
board wargamers led by Gary Gygax and David Arneson.
 By the mid- to late-1970s the new strength and diversity of the hobby
was presenting potential game players with a new problem. It was no longer
a matter of waiting with bated breath to see what one or two new games
Avalon Hill would produce this year. Now the question was which of the
hundreds of games available should the hobbyist spend his money on?
Indeed, in 1977 SPI's book Wargame Design listed over 500 games and
more than 25 game publishers. Another 1977 book, The Comprehensive
Guide to Board Wargaming by avid British wargamer Nicholas Palmer,
undertook to give potential wargamers a list of "every professionally
produced wargame"58 that the book's author knew to be available for
purchase (or scheduled to be published) at the time. Each game was
summarized in a few lines, and its ratings from reader polls published by
both Avalon Hill and SPI were also included. The list numbered nearly 300
games, and the top games of the time, based on polls conducted by SPI and
Avalon Hill, are shown below.

Top Games of197759

From the Simulations Publications Incorporated Polls (out of 202

games):
1. Drang Nach Osten (Game Designers Workshop)
2. Bataille de la Moskowa (Martial Enterprises)
3. War in the East (Simulations Publications Incorporated)
4. Frigate (SPI)
5. Antietam (SPI)
6. Wooden Ships and Iron Men (Avalon Hill)
7. Dreadnought (SPI)
8. Bar Lev (Conflict Games)
9. ]ena-Auerstadt (SPI)
10. Torgau(GDW)
11. Crimea (GDW)
12. Sinai (SPI)
 13. Shiloh (SPI)
14. Chickamauga (SPI)
15. Wagram (SPI)
16. Global War (SPI)
17. Kingmaker (Philmar
Limited/AH)
18. Chinese Farm (SPI)
19. West Wall Quad (SPI)
20. Blue and Gray Quad I (SPI)
21. Wurzburg (SPI)
22. Borodino (SPI)
23. Napoleon at War Quad (SPI)
24. Battle of Nations (SPI)
25. Narvik (GDW)
From the Avalon Hill Game Company Polls (out of 25 Avalon Hill
games):
1. Wooden Ships and Iron Men
2. Anzio
3. Panzer Leader
4. Richtofen's War
5. 1776

The numbers and diversity of the new games and new game designers
cried out for a means to help make the consumer aware of which games
were worth buying and which could be passed up. In addition, as games
became more and more complex, the debate over the balance of realism and
playability, which was as old as the hobby itself, took on greater urgency.
Players needed to know what they were getting for their hard-earned
dollars. For some, relatively simple and exciting games were what they
wanted. For others, intricate detail and technical accuracy were the ideals.
Gamers wanted more help in identifying the games that best suited their
tastes. This need was met by the growth of an active and professionally
produced hobby press.
 Avalon Hill had led the way in professional hobby magazines with the
introduction of The General, and Strategy & Tactics had initiated the notion
of an "independent" gaming voice. When Dunnigan took over S&T, that
magazine had lost much of its reputation for independence, despite the fact
that, unlike The General, it occasionally mentioned games produced by
other companies and sometimes even spoke very favorably about them.
Dunnigan had soon expanded SPI's horizons, however, and in 1972 it began
to publish a second magazine, Moves, to deal specifically with game-design
concepts and theory. The short notices and reviews of games that had
appeared in S&T shifted largely to the new magazine and extended in scope
and depth. This game-review function, which had been a staple of many of
the amateur and club magazines of the 1960s, had so increased in
importance that it inspired the creation of a new professional-quality
magazine devoted precisely to presenting independent critical reviews of
new games from all publishers.
Fire & Movement magazine, subtitled The Forum of Simulation
Warfare (later, The Forum of Conflict Simulation), was founded in 1976 by
Rodger MacGowan, its editor, director, and guiding hand. The first issue
revealed MacGowan's motivation and philosophy: "Some readers will ask
why Fire & Movement, when there are so many other wargaming
magazines. The answer is quite simple—to date, the hobby still does not
have a magazine with the capacity to cover the entire field. There is no
single major publication able to cover games published by all the game
companies. This situation constitutes a need and Fire & Movement will
work to fill this need in the hobby. Our publication is designed to provide
coverage in an independent fashion. Fire & Movement publishes no games.
We have no games to 'push.' Our concern is with the hobby and you are the
hobby."60
Fire & Movement contained review articles by many well-known
gaming personalities, and in a major innovation, also included responses to
those reviews by the game designers themselves. Although the appearance
of F&M "was greeted enthusiastically. . . . the enthusiasm was reserved, for
few people within the industry gave F&M more than a fighting chance."61
Charles Roberts's fling had grown into a hobby, and now the hobby had
become an "industry." But the industry insiders were wrong when they
predicted an early demise for Fire & Movement. Despite some inevitable
unevenness in the quality of its reviews, F&M became a tremendous
influence on gamers and designers alike. Reviews and designer responses
were supplemented by "Forum" articles, which allowed designers, critics,
and just plain wargamers to present a variety of viewpoints about many new
or potential design innovations or any other issue of interest to the hobby.
The magazine did indeed go through some difficult financial times,
changing publishers and editors several times. Through all its travails,
however, it survives to this day because it always met the hobby's burning
need for the kind of free and open forum of ideas and opinions it
provided[16]*.
Throughout the 1970s, wargaming and wargamers were maturing. The
serious minded had begun to question themselves and their motives for
playing games dealing with death and destruction and enjoying them so
much. In the Dunnigan tradition, they were also questioning the games,
their designs, and their designers. Some designers objected to such
questioning, and especially to the depredations of some of the F&M
reviewers. The company magazines like The General and Moves had
allowed the designers and developers of Avalon Hill and SPI games,
respectively, to wax poetic about the brilliance and innovation of their
design concepts. Despite some amount of self-deprecation and self-criticism
that such magazines (especially Moves) engaged in, there was no real
"public" interplay between designers and consumers. The growing numbers
of reviews in non-house organs, especially those in F&M, soon found the
staffs of major game companies scrambling to present dissenting opinions.
Perhaps surprisingly, many failed to grasp the fundamentally subjective
nature of game criticism, bemoaning a lack of "objectivity" on the part of
reviewers.
One early example of the dismay with which some game companies
received negative reviews was provided by Donald Greenwood, editor of
The General and developer of the game The Russian Campaign. In
response to a negative review of that game written by Richard DeBaun and
Frank Aker that appeared in Fire & Movement, Greenwood wrote: "I find
no fault with being critical; I'm the first to condemn goodie-goodie reviews
which do no more than list components. A critic who is afraid to criticize is
not worth the name. But there is no denying that it has become highly
fashionable of late for wargamers to point out supposed flaws and mock
professional game designs by their own self-ordained criteria. There is
nothing wrong with this provided those criteria are shared by the majority
of the hobby as well. I contend however that Msr's DeBaun and Aker were
so preoccupied with reaching the height of fashion that they violated the
most basic grounds of objectivity and thus are not qualified to stand in
judgment for the hobby as a whole."62 [Emphasis added.]
In some ways Greenwood was right. Some aspects of the review of The
Russian Campaign were inaccurate, and others perhaps overly biased. Yet
the longing for hobby-wide standards of criticism and qualifications for
reviewers (indeed, Greenwood later goes on to suggest a sort of numerical
"Critic Credibility Factor" to rate the opinions of reviewers relative to the
hobby in general) reflect too much of an academic approach to game
criticism on the part of game designers.
In the sometimes more, sometimes less, adversarial atmosphere
between critics and designers, an important fact was being overlooked. Not
only were designs being subjected to greater public scrutiny, but designers
other than those of Avalon Hill and SPI were also getting a chance to
articulate their ideas to a wider audience. The cross-pollination of design
concepts and approaches that resulted from the increasingly open exchange
and discussion led to a blossoming of new approaches and an explosion of
new games.
 INNOVATION AND EVOLUTION
Partially initiated by Jim Dunnigan and SPl, and lovingly fostered by
the professional hobby press, the late 1970s and early 1980s were a period
of tremendous dynamism for hobby wargaming. Origins, a national gaming
convention, began under the sponsorship of Avalon Hill in 1975. It gave
new focus and identity to the hobby, and served as a place for new games
and designers to introduce themselves to the players face to face. New
topics and new approaches abounded, and a new game without some
innovation to advance the "state of the art" had a difficult time in the
marketplace. Several important trends began to sort themselves out during
this period.
Perhaps the most dramatic development was the appearance of the so-
called "monster game." Monster games were beasts of enormous size and,
often, equally enormous complexity. They arose in some ways from the
belief that more detail meant greater realism. They were the ultimate
embodiment of an attempt to push the scope of a game as broadly and as
deeply as possible, with little regard for practical notions of playability.
The original Charles Roberts games had maps that measured 22" x 28",
and the number of playing pieces seldom exceeded 100 or so. Even Avalon
Hill's largest game of the 1960s, Blitzkrieg, was barely a third larger in map
area and still had fewer than 400 counters. The "standard" SPI game
weighed in at no more than a 24" x 36" map and 200 to 400 counters.
Although larger "homemade" games were constructed out of paper and
shirt-cardboard by many hobbyists (including your intrepid author, much to
the dismay of his mother), the professionally produced big game did not
appear until 1973, when Marc Miller, Frank Chadwick, and Paul Richard
Banner teamed up to create Drang Nach Osten (loosely translated as "thrust
to the east") and form Game Designers Workshop.
 The Origins National Gaming Convention the US is an institution in the
wargaming world. It is a show that showcases much of what is new in
civilian wargaming.

Drang Nach Osten, or DNO as it is affectionately known among

aficionados, was a wargamer’s fantasy come true. It contained five 21" x
27" mapboards detailing much of eastern Poland, Hungary, and Rumania,
and the western Soviet Union. Its 1,700 counters represented the Soviet,
German, and Axis-Allied armed forces that fought on the Soviet front in
1941-1942. GDW also published an expansion kit (!) known as
Unentschieden (UNT), containing an additional four half-maps and 1,900
more counters to allow players to re-create the rest of the Soviet-German
war. As large as DNO/UNT was, it was only the tip of the iceberg for GDW.
Their ultimate intention was to produce a series of games at the same scale,
which could be linked and played together to cover the entire European
Theater of Operations in World War II on a map covering some thirteen
square feet.
Not to be outdone, SPI soon published a rival game, using four of its
standard maps and over 2,000 counters. War in the East was only the
forerunner of a series of SPI monster games. It was followed, predictably,
by War in the West and a combined War in Europe. They even went so far
as to produce a War in the Pacific, with seven maps and 1,600 counters.
(Although your author survived multi-player games of War in the East and
War in Europe, the Pacific contest eluded me. So too did the ultimate, the
combination of War in Europe and War in the Pacific. Gaming folklore has
it that some intrepid soul actually undertook to play this super-monster
solitaire! It seems hard to believe, though, even of a wargamer.)
The initial wave of monster games at the scale of theater-level conflict
was followed by the introduction of the "grand-tactical" monster. The first
board game to deal with a single land battle in an area as large as that
required by miniature games was Martial Enterprises' Bataille de la
Moskowa, a re-creation of Napoleon's Battle of Borodino with roughly the
same physical size as Drang Nach Osten.
Both Drang Nach Osten and War in the East were successful with
gamers as well as critics because, though physically large, their mechanics
were not overly intricate and difficult to master. Experienced gamers (and
even inexperienced ones not put off by the sheer size of the beast) could
pick up the basics of play quickly. This allowed the player to concentrate
his attention on the broad sweep of strategy or the nitty-gritty of deploying
and maneuvering units without having to consult the game every few
minutes.
The big games also offered ready-made opportunities for multi-player
gaming experiences. Playing in teams brought players into firsthand contact
with problems in command and dealing with subordinates that smaller
games often had to abstract into dreaded "idiocy" rules. Some personal
anecdotes might shed the most light on how this could work.
When I was in graduate school, I let my friend Bob Shore talk me into
a multi-player game of War in the East. There were to be six of us involved,
three per side. The only rule was that each side had to complete its
movement in half an hour. I was given command of the central sector of the
Russian line, whose initial dispositions had already been established by the
overall Soviet commander. Although a good player, this commander was
sometimes not as meticulous as I would have liked, especially when faced
with a long front and several hundreds of units to deploy. Unfortunately, the
commander of the German forces opposite my sector was both meticulous
and observant.
As the war opened with the German assault, I watched in horror as
several panzer divisions overran elements of my front line and plunged
deep into the rear, encircling a large portion of my forces while the German
infantry pounded on them in the front. With the best positions for a
secondary defensive line already in German hands and many of my reserve
armored formations cut off, I faced my first movement phase.
I also faced a very personal lesson in the meaning of the euphemistic
gaming term "panic." As the clock ticked away I struggled to grasp the
extent of disaster and to find ways to counter it. All hope of making careful
and precise calculations of how many combat factors I would need to place
in a given hex to prevent German overruns during the next turn proved
vain. I scrambled in desperation to find some way of shoring up the front. I
was only partially successful, but I was completely demoralized. In little
over one hellish hour, I had had more first-hand experience of the
frustration of having to deal with a failure by a higher command and the
panic induced by a surprising and lightning-like penetration of defenses that
had looked strong than I would ever care to repeat.
Just so you don't think that I was a complete dolt as a player, and
incidentally, to point out another aspect of the effects of big games on
modeling reality, take the case of a game of Terrible Swift Sword (the Battle
of Gettysburg) in which I was also involved as a graduate student. In this
case, I came into the game somewhat late, after the Confederate Army had
pushed the Union forces back during the first day's fighting. I was given
command of some battered and disorganized Confederate divisions on the
right center of the army. These units were obviously in no condition to
make a major push anytime soon, and the Union player opposite me was all
but ignoring them.
Slowly and patiently I regrouped my scattered brigades and posted
them within extreme striking range of the Union line. All the while I
collected as many artillery batteries as I could steal from the corps reserve.
Still the Union did little to strengthen its defenses or take advantage of the
Confederate disarray to counter-attack. My opponent had clearly written off
this sector of the battle line as a quiet zone and was spending little or no
time on it. That was to prove a fatal mistake.
I had seen the flaw in the Union dispositions. After nearly three hours
and some five or six game turns of seemingly doing nothing more than
shuffling counters around, I struck. My artillery swung into action and my
infantry charged to the assault. I had the sweet pleasure of seeing the same
sort of surprised and panicked look on my opponent's face as I'm sure mine
held during the War in the East game. He had allowed himself to be lulled
into a false sense of security and had responded by spending too much of
his attention on other sectors of the front. The result was precisely the kind
of surprising and successful attack that so often happened historically under
those conditions.
The monster games that were capable of producing such experiences
were certainly impressive, and not the least impressive element of their
existence was the fact that they were actually played. But getting involved
in that kind of effort was not something all players wanted to do, and few if
any wanted to do all the time. A balance was clearly needed, and that
balance was found in the creation of what came to be called the mini-game.
There were two basic types of mini-games. The first, represented by
SPI's Stonewall, used the full, complex system of its monster-game
progenitor (in this case Terrible Swift Sword), but put it into a smaller
physical package and a more manageable situation. In this way was born a
series of games collectively known as The Great Battles of the American
Civil War. Once they learned the basics involved in such a game series,
players could readily adapt to any new game in that series. The trend
toward series games has continued into the 1980s, with Avalon Hill's Squad
Leader and Advanced Squad Leader games, Game Designers Workshop’s
Third World War series, and Victory Games' Gulf Strike/Aegean Strike and
Sixth Fleet, 2nd Fleet, and 7th Fleet games and West End Games' Civil War
series (South Mountain, Shiloh, Chickamauga).
The second type of mini-game was, in a sense, a ready-made series
game, at least as initially conceived in SPI's Quad games. Quad games were
a set of four small games packaged together (although individual elements
could be purchased separately). Quad games, like Blue and Gray or
Napoleon’s Last Battles were specifically designed to create interesting
games using small maps (18" x 22") and relatively few counters (100 or
less). In keeping with their limited size, they also usually had fairly short
rules (eight to twelve pages) and fairly fast playing times (one to two
hours).
In many ways, the Quad games and other small, simple games, were
designed in the hope that they could play a role in introducing new players
into a hobby that, to some, seemed increasingly dominated by the overly
complicated and unplayable games of which the monsters were but the
extreme example. The need for simple introductory games was reinforced
by another major trend, which can be characterized as a push to include
ever greater volumes of "hard data" in the games.
Some of the most vocal proponents of this trend were all but obsessed
with technical minutiae. Drawing in some ways on the same emotional
sources as the miniature-gamer's emphasis on precise detail in the painting
of uniforms and vehicles, the push for increased volumes of data was most
prevalent among enthusiasts of tactical games, especially those dealing with
World War II armored combat. Avalon Hill's Tobruk carried the trend to an
extreme.
Tobruk was designed for Avalon Hill by Harold "Hal" Hock, a card-
carrying systems analyst. The game dealt with some of the series of desert
battles fought between the Germans and British in the vicinity of Tobruk
during Rommel's 1942 Gazala Offensive. Game counters represented
individual tanks and guns and infantry squads or weapons teams. The
"map" was simply a field of empty desert-tan hexes, each of which
represented some 75 meters across.
Hock's underlying motivation for his design was a "desire to simulate
every significant event as finely as possible."63 Each weapon was thus rated
for the number of rounds it could fire (at either a new target or a previously
acquired one) in a game turn, and also for the probability of hit and damage
against each possible target as a function of range. Furthermore, fire was
resolved on a round-for-round basis. The result was a game dominated by
tables and die-rolls (up to 200 and more in an average game). It was also a
game players either loved or hated.
Hock had spent years modeling the firepower effectiveness of the
various weapons in the game, using ballistic measurements and operations
research techniques. He described his approach as "a careful reduction of all
available data from technical and historical sources into easily understood
systems of play which could be used to expose the data to players of the
game." His goal was "to include every possible influence on the
effectiveness of weapons and personnel either directly or by assumption
into mathematical models built into the game." It was perhaps a noble goal
and certainly one in keeping with the systems analysis philosophy. It was
also unachievable.
Tobruk was technically superb and praised by those gamers who
thirsted for technical detail. But it was also damned by many. Its modeling
of the technical capabilities of systems was hard to criticize, but detailed
technical accuracy and gaming realism are not synonymous. The precision
of Tobruk's weapons-effects model was offset by a lack of sufficient
consideration for environmental effects such as haze, smoke, and dust. To
make matters worse, the game, at least in its original incarnation, gave
players few suggestions about the proper tactical doctrine for fighting the
types of battles it depicted. Too often this lack of guidance resulted in
players' attempting to engage at extreme ranges and rolling dice
interminably for little or no tangible gain. The resulting word-of-mouth did
much to damage the game's reputation and limit its popularity. Even
reasonably favorable reviews like the one headlining F&M #1 were unable
to propel the game to general popularity.64
Fortunately, the Tobruk approach and the push for more and more
technical data were not the only influences on the hobby's expanding
attempts to quantify key elements of warfare. Because games rested
ultimately on mathematical representations of reality, designers had to find
ways of quantifying those aspects they believed to be important, even if
they were the classic "unquantifiables" of leadership and morale.
Once again, Dunnigan and his cohorts took the lead in efforts to
"quantify the unquantifiable." In games like Leipzig and La Grande Armée,
Dunnigan and Young began to rate the capabilities of combat commanders.
Dunnigan also introduced the concepts of command control and panic in
games like Panzer Armee Afrika and American Civil War. Indeed, one of the
major contributions of the large "grand-tactical" games like Terrible Swift
Sword was their incorporation of troop quality and morale, concepts long
popular in miniatures gaming, into the board-gaming world.
Similar advances were made in the treatment of broader concepts.
Logistics, the perennial stepchild of wargamers interested only in fighting
battles, became more important as designers tried to represent its effects
more accurately. Limitations on a unit's or army's ammunition supplies
were used in tactical games like Terrible Swift Sword and Tobruk. Even the
broad scope of supplying pre-modern armies with food and fodder was
modeled brilliantly in 1812 and The Crusades. Finally, a full-scale
treatment of the different supply classes needed by modern armies was
incorporated into GDW's Operation Crusader.
Perhaps even more fundamental, designers began to be more willing to
experiment with different ways of representing the location and movements
of military forces. The simple square or hexagonal grid that virtually
defined board wargaming was joined by more and more "area-movement"
systems, seen in classics like Diplomacy, and point-to-point movement
systems in games ranging from the early and little-known Confrontation to
Napoleon and other games.
More radically, the traditional sequential system of play in which first
one player and then the other moved and then attacked, was more and more
frequently replaced by more intricate systems. All of the new approaches
strived to achieve a more realistic feeling of simultaneity and
action/reaction.
 The old Avalon Hill games of Bismarck and Midway had introduced
simultaneous and hidden movement to the hobby by means of duplicate
playing boards separated by a screen. Players searched for the enemy by
calling out various locations, relying on an honor system to provide each
other with the appropriate information. Such an approach proved difficult to
adapt successfully to the operational conditions, the larger map size, and the
greater number of pieces in a ground combat game. Instead, designers
began to employ purely simultaneous systems that required players to plot
the activities of their units for each turn. Such systems appeared in games
like Manassas (an amateur game later purchased by GDW); Dunnigan’s
Kampfpanzer, Desert War, and Mech War '77; and Battleline's air combat
game Air Force.
These plot-based systems never were very popular because of the great
amount of paperwork they required. Other games, like Tobruk and October
War compromised some simultaneity by allowing players to alternate
moving or firing one unit at a time. This approach did away with much
paperwork and seemed more acceptable to most players.
Many more intricate systems were devised, including those that
integrated movement and combat in an attempt to reflect the costs of battle
in time (for example, in Dunnigan's monster game of a NATO/Warsaw Pact
conflict, Next War). No longer would one player be free to conduct all his
operations in a turn before the opponent could react. An array of techniques
far too numerous to mention here was introduced to allow for sudden shifts
in initiative and much more integrated play.
These and other innovations in game techniques had been spearheaded
by Dunnigan and SPI. As hobby board gaming entered the 1980s, however,
that influential and inspiring source of new ideas was destined to stay
behind. In the winter of 1981-1982, the hobby press was full of the biggest
news in decades. Simulations Publications Incorporated had ceased
operations under the Dunnigan-Simonsen team, and its assets had been
assumed by TSR Incorporated, best known for their (gasp!) fantasy-role-
playing system Dungeons and Dragons.
 HOBBY GAMING ENTERS THE EIGHTIES
Although TSR took over the name and logo of SPI, it could not sustain
the creative spirit that Dunnigan and company had breathed into the hobby.
After a short hiatus, Strategy & Tactics resumed publication. Moves
disappeared as a separate entity, but some of its features were incorporated
in the new S&T. Some of the TSR/S&T games were very well done and
received favorable reviews in the hobby press. John Prados's Monty's D-
Day, about the battle of the British/Canadian beaches at Normandy, was
perhaps the most successful.
TSR also attempted to continue producing boxed games under the SPI
label. Some of these games had already been in the old SPI's mill when the
walls came crashing down. A Gleam of Bayonets was a large game of the
Great Battles of the American Civil War series, which dealt with the battle
of Sharpsburg/ Antietam and was hailed for advancing the quality of that
system significantly. Battle Over Britain was another of these long-awaited
games, with an interesting and uniquely successful system for simulating
the air combat over Britain in 1940. TSR also produced revised or simply
repackaged editions of old SPI games and a few new titles as well.
Despite TSR's best efforts, however, it was clear that the giant was
dead. The bipolar hobby world, dominated by Avalon Hill and SPI, with a
few lesser lights like Game Designer's Workshop and West End Games, and
a host of smaller third-world companies, was gone[17]*. Yet the spirit of
James Dunnigan had not died. Instead, it seemed to split in two and separate
itself, part of it staying on the East Coast and part migrating to the west.
Dunnigan's eastern reincarnation took the form of Victory Games, a
company formed by many of the old SPI team, and headed by Mark
Herman. Herman had been a developer under Dunnigan, gluing together
one of the last of the great monster games, Next War. Under his leadership,
Victory Games formed as a subsidiary of the same larger conglomerate that
owned Avalon Hill. But while Avalon Hill remained true to its philosophy
of trying to produce middle-of-the road, finely crafted, "player's games,"
Victory was more innovative and produced high-quality, boxed games with
greater appeal to the fans of complex and intricate "simulations." In some
ways, Victory Games played Pontiac to Avalon Hill's Cadillac.
Victory's initial batch of four releases took the hobby by storm in 1983.
The Civil War featured a brilliantly conceived and imaginatively executed
system of initiative and command control to produce what is arguably the
most comprehensive and well-received game on that popular subject yet. In
Gulf Strike, Herman designed the first game to integrate completely air, sea,
and ground movement and combat in a game dealing with the Iran/ Iraq war
and the potential for superpower involvement in the Persian Gulf. Ambush,
dealing with combat in Western Europe after Normandy at the man-to-man
level, was a breakthrough in solitaire-wargame design. Even Hell's
Highway, the only poor seller among the four, took a unique and innovative
view of the infamous Arnhem campaign of A Bridge Too Far fame. In one
fell swoop, Victory Games had become a force to be reckoned with in the
hobby, and the philosophical heir to the Dunnigan tradition of innovation
and elegant game-system design.
The second half of the Dunnigan tradition, the willingness to explore
obscure topics and to produce a large number of "paperback" games, was
taken over by Briton-turned-Californian Keith Poulter. Poulter made his
mark in Britain as editor and publisher of The Wargamer, a Strategy &
Tactics-like magazine with a game in each issue, as well as a combination
of historical and gaming-oriented articles.
In the early 1980s Poulter brought his organization, known as World
Wide Wargamers and, inevitably, 3W, to the United States and the little
town of Cambria, California. He wasted little time in making a play to
capture Strategy & Tactic's former role as the dominant magazine in the
gaming hobby. Poulter started with the traditional bimonthly magazine, but
quickly promised a shift to a monthly schedule. Skeptics were numerous,
pointing out the difficulties of producing not only a magazine but also a
game on even a bimonthly schedule, as well as the problems involved in
finding and testing that many reasonably designed games in a year. Many
also quaked at the high price a subscription would inevitably cost.
But Poulter was undeterred. Starting slowly at first, he eventually was
successful in producing not twelve but thirteen games in a single year. In
the process he also achieved the remarkable feat of improving not only the
quality of the physical components of the games, but their design and
development as well.
The number of games published by The Wargamer allowed 3W to
publish successful games on popular topics (such as Sturm Nach Osten on
the Russo-German front of World War II) as well as the occasional foray
into the truly obscure (such as games dealing with Britain's eighteenth
century Afghan wars, the fifteenth century siege of Malta, and the rise of
Saudi Arabia).
Ultimately, Poulter's efforts at The Wargamer succeeded in wresting the
Charles Roberts award for Best Professional Board -gaming Magazine
away from Fire & Movement at both the 1980 and 1987 Origins
conventions. Then, in the kind of flurry of activity so well-known of him,
Poulter acquired the rights to Strategy & Tactics magazine from TSR,
divested himself of The Wargamer (now stripped of its game-per-issue
format), and masterminded a merger with Diverse Talents, Inc., the most
recent publisher of Fire & Movement. By 1988, Poulter had thus become
the controlling force behind both Strategy & Tactics and Fire & Movement
magazines, truly names to conjure with in the wargaming hobby.
In early 1989, however, Poulter surprised the hobby world yet again by
selling Fire & Movement to Christopher Cummins, the new owner of The
Wargamer. Poulter planned to begin publishing a new computer-game-
oriented magazine and to expand his operation into the family-game
market. Furthermore, the merger with Diverse Talents had brought with it
another wargaming magazine, Battleplan. Battleplan was oriented toward
game-play topics, such as variants and replays of existing games as well as
hints on strategy and tactics. Poulter's new team gave increased attention to
Battleplan and its relationship to Strategy & Tactics, in an apparent attempt
to reestablish the old S&T/ Moves tandem masterminded by Dunnigan.
Although perhaps not as prolific or innovative as Jim Dunnigan, Keith
Poulter is a successful game designer in his own right, especially of
Napoleonic and American Civil War titles. His ultimate influence on the
hobby is one of the intriguing questions of the coming decade.

PROFESSIONAL GAMING REAWAKENS

While hobby gaming was literally exploding with new game-design
concepts, new ideas for using old tools, and new tools altogether,
professional wargaming, though not completely stagnant, was advancing far
more slowly. As the war in Vietnam wound down and belief in the utility of
nuclear weapons as the means to prevent all future conflict dissipated,
defense analysts and decision makers began to address the difficult
questions posed by the needs of limited, or even global, conventional war.
Wargaming's popularity as a research tool staged a comeback.
In the new breed of professional wargame, an increased emphasis on
speed of processing went hand-in-hand with an increased emphasis on
detailed physical accuracy. The availability of large computers, like the one
used in the NWGS, seemed to hold the promise of resolving the ancient
tension between realism and playability by the crude expedient of brute
force. And brute force was all that was available to the majority of
mathematicians, operations researchers, and computer programmers who
were tasked with designing wargaming systems. Lacking the enormous and
varied game-design experience of the hobbyists, they sought the wrong
solutions, often to the wrong problems.
The big systems sometimes succeeded—the Navy's WEP-TAC system,
for example—but more often than not they promised much more than they
were capable of delivering. To supplement their capabilities, professional
wargamers were forced to adopt the types of ad hoc combinations of human
judgment and manual and personal-computer-based techniques that came
into use at the Naval War College.
Despite the defense community's continued problems with design,
implementation, and execution of playable and realistic games, gaming and
gaming techniques became increasingly important at nearly all levels and
among all the branches of the military. By 1977, the disarray and sense of
frustration in the community of analysts and wargamers was "mildly akin to
the atmosphere among theologians on the eve of the Reformation."65
In Leesburg, Virginia, in September of that year, the Office of Naval
Research sponsored a conference titled "Theater-Level Gaming and
Analysis Workshop for Force Planning." The conference brought together
many of the leaders of the professional wargaming and analytical
community. Included among their number were Andrew W. Marshall and
none other than James F. Dunnigan.
Marshall was, and still is, the director of Net Assessment in the office
of the secretary of defense, responsible for making overall evaluations of
the relative military strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Marshall had searched in vain for existing analytical models and wargames
that could be of use to him. It was time for something new.66 Three years
later, Marshall would issue a request for proposals to build a new
methodology for conducting high-level strategic and policy analysis. The
request would eventually result in the development of the Rand Strategy
Assessment System (RSAS) (originally known as the Rand Strategy
Assessment Center, or RSAC).
Marshall's search for new approaches, and his recommendations that
the professionals should look more closely at what the hobbyists were
doing, eventually prompted Dunnigan to schedule an appointment to visit
him in the Pentagon.67 Dunnigan told Marshall that he and SPI could
produce a global-war simulation for less than one-fifth of the cost of
Marshall's initial exploratory contracts with the larger professional
organizations. The result of the meeting was a contract for Dunnigan to
develop such a system for wargaming on the global level, a system that
became known as the Strategic Analysis Simulation, or SAS. Although
Dunnigan left SPI soon after the project got underway, Mark
Herman took over development responsibility and finished the initial
version of the system. SAS is still in use, particularly at the
National Defense University where it "allows the players to analyze
decisions at the National Command Authority, Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Commander in Chief and fleet commander levels. It simulates armed
conflict between major land, sea and air forces, supports a major National
Defense University study exercise each year, and is refined by students
through the National Defense University electives
program."68

At the same time that Marshall began his search for RSAS and
commissioned Dunnigan to produce SAS, the Army War College at
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was reintroduced to wargaming by Dr. Raymond M.
Macedonia, a former army officer, who “with the unpaid assistance of Jim
Dunnigan and some of his hobby-shop board games, started developing a
new military center for gaming and model-making."69
The biggest push for wargaming at Carlisle was soon provided by
Army Chief of Staff General Edward C. Meyer. Meyer urged Macedonia, as
only an army four-star can urge, to develop an easily set-up and easily used
system to help the army conduct contingency planning. The task fell to Fred
McClintic, one of the programmers who were helping Macedonia
computerize some of Dunnigan's old games. McClintic, "using new
principles of computer architecture, created what became known as the
MTM—the McClintic Theater Model."70
The model was designed with two purposes in mind. The first was the
traditional wargame role in the U.S. Army, that of training. The second was
to "provide the basis for evaluating and modifying corps commander's
strategy and tactics in the Tactical Command Readiness Program."71 Its
earliest applications, however, were even more ambitious.

The first application of this model was for the Chief of

Staff of the Army's [CSA] Contingency Planning Seminar in
November, 1980. At that time the CSA, DCSOPS [Deputy
Chief of Staff for Operations] and 11 of 16 active division
 commanders used the model as a tool to examine alternative
courses of action. In April, 1981, the model was used by VII
Corps commander and all of his division and brigade
commanders plus their senior staff officers in Exercise "Cold
Reason" to walk through their general defense plan. In July,
1981, the model was used by REDCOM/RDF (Readiness
Command/Rapid Deployment Force] staff officers to
examine sustainability/logistics and operational problems and
opportunities for exploiting enemy weaknesses. In addition to
these applications, it was used by the Strategic Studies
Institute for the Parametric Force Analysis Study (PFAS)
examination of the effects of the Geneva Protocols in the
NATO theater of operations, and in several Army War
College Advanced Courses.72
To accomplish its many and varied purposes, the McClintic model was
designed to allow the players themselves to operate their computer
terminals, giving commands to their forces in a free form style using certain
key words. Showing the influence of commercial board games, the model
"is based on a variable size hexagonal grid network and is applicable to any
part of the world."73
The model was also designed to allow play using only two terminals,
although in that case the game controller would have to share a terminal
with one of the players. Although compatible with computerized graphics
hardware, the original system did not require graphics capability to play.
Instead, players relied completely on a standard map overlaid with a clear
hexagonal grid.
One of the key, and in many ways revolutionary, features of MTM is its
use of continuous time to drive the game, as opposed to the more frequently
seen Red/Blue team sequencing. Unlike the "event-driven" protocol used in
many strictly analytical computer simulations, "MTM is time driven; that is,
battle time proceeds at a predetermined rate faster than real time regardless
of when the next event occurs. This gives wargame commanders a chance
to change or countermand orders up to the time that order is actually
executed."74 In this adaptation of the "game clock" idea, used in the Naval
War Colleges NEWS and NWGS systems, to a game based on a relatively
small, transportable computer, the McClintic Theater Model may have
scored one of the professionals' few successes in beating the hobby gamers
to the punch with a new innovation.

OceanofPDF.com
 THE PERSONAL-COMPUTER EXPLOSION
Sometimes a revolution begins with a "shot heard 'round the world."
Sometimes one begins with an obscure and long-forgotten article in a small
magazine. Such were the origins of the electronic revolution in hobby
wargaming.
The first published description of an electronic version of a hobby
wargame seems to have appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 1974 edition of the
Avalon Hill General. Interestingly enough, this article described a device
that could serve as "an electronic map-board which duplicates the map of
the North Sea that is given in the standard Jutland game."75 Thus, Jim
Dunnigan’s first professionally published design, Jutland, is accorded the
status of serving as the basis for the hobby's first electronic game.
Simply described, the device was a wooden box on the opposite faces
of which were inscribed the North Sea map used in the search phases of the
standard Jutland game. In the center of each of the map's hexes was a metal
rod, "connected, by wire, into another rod in the same sea square [hex] on
the other side of the board. . . . The positions of ships are marked by
alligator clips which are placed on the rod of the sea square in which that
ship or group of ships is supposed to be. . . . Movement takes place just as it
does in the standard Jutland game. The players move their clips from sea
square to sea square and when both players have ships in the same sea
square a light flashes which signifies contact."76
From such humble, basement workshop beginnings, the fuse was lit
that, in less than a decade, would ignite an explosion of computerized
wargames for the hobbyist. When personal computers began to become
accessible to the hobbyist in the late 1970s, wargaming was not far behind.
The early personal computers, like the original Apple kits and the early
TRS-80 and others, provided the wargamer with a means of storing and
rapidly manipulating the quantities of mathematical data needed to play the
games of the period. (Some of the earliest uses of computers revolved
around automating the calculation of combat odds and determining
engagement outcomes.) Not surprisingly, Jim Dunnigan was one of the
early pioneers in the use of computers in "game assistance programs" and as
an aid to game design. SPI had computerized some aspects of its business
operations in the early 1970s, and in 1975 they began using the corporate
computer to assist with game development— for example, testing the model
of the Soviet economy for War in the East. An attempt in 1974 and 1975 to
publish a newsletter dedicated to promoting the use of computers for
wargaming proved premature, but by 1979, Moves magazine raised the
issue again and advertised for the submission of game assistance programs
for SPI games.77
Of course, it was not long before the fledgling game-assistance
programs gave way to full-scale wargames for the computer. The early,
first-generation games were often little more than military-style "arcade"
games, similar to those designed for home video-gaming systems. (Today,
many commentators on computer wargames give these early games, like
Instant Software's Ball Turret Gunner and The Cornsoft Group's Missile
Attack, short shrift or ignore them completely. Yet such games were the
forerunners of important later developments like Microprose's Silent
Service and deserve at least a passing mention.)78
The second-generation games followed rapidly on the heels of their
arcade-style brethren. These games, typified by Avalon Hill’s early Midway
Campaign and North Atlantic Convoy Raider, were basically simplified
electronic derivations of board wargames. Strategic Simulations, Inc., better
known as SSI, began its rise to success with this type of game, one of the
earliest of which was Computer Bismarck. A reviewer at the time described
the game in the following terms. "Currently it is to the hobby what the
original Bismarck by Avalon Hill was in its first release back in the sixties.
We still have a lot to look forward to, but you can enjoy it now."79
The second-generation games typically retained much of the
conventions of board wargaming; the hexagon-style maps and sequenced
player turns were perhaps the most prominent. But the early designers, such
as Gary Grigsby, creator of Guadalcanal Campaign and War in Russia,
quickly saw the advantages of the computer’s "potential for artificial
intelligence. The first use they saw for it was to command the enemy forces,
thus offering even the most isolated wargamer an intelligent opponent who
is always ready to play. Since many wargamers play solitaire much of the
time, a built-in opponent has inestimable value. This feature is so important
that virtually all computer wargames offer some solitaire capability."80
As the computer-wargame designers gained experience, however, they
cautiously began to deviate from their board-game roots. The obvious uses
of the computer (to introduce limited intelligence and more complex
combat resolution systems) began to be supplemented by adapting the
computers artificial intelligence to have it "act as the player's subordinates.
Like a real commander, the player issues general orders, and intermediate
commanders then try to carry them out."81 In addition, the shift to
continuous-time games, similar in philosophy to the system underlying the
McClintic Theater Model, began to make itself apparent by the mid-1980s.
Games such as SSI's Combat Leader and Microprose's Crusade in Europe
were forerunners of a third generation of computer wargames. The critical
links to that third generation, however, were Microprose's Silent Service and
Strategic Studies Group’s (SSG) Carriers at War.
Silent Service, as its name implies, deals with the activities of the U.S.
submarine force in World War II. Unlike Battleline, Avalon Hill's board
game Submarine, however, Silent Service literally places the player on the
bridge or in the conning tower of his boat as he plans and carries out an
anti-shipping mission in the Pacific.
Silent Service is a "flight simulator" for submarines. The player
literally sees what his real-life counterpart would see, as animated ships
move across his field of view. Or, he can descend to the sonar room to
watch the display of acoustic contacts on the screen. To the arcade-game
tradition of visual appeal and the need for quick mental and physical
reactions, Silent Service added accurate systems simulations and historical
scenarios to create one of the most intense, personally involving wargames
yet invented. It was the forerunner of Microprose's newer and ever more
impressive Red Storm Rising game, based on the best-selling novel by Tom
Clancy (and, incidentally, hobby-game designer Larry Bond). The Red
Storm Rising game simulates the operations of U.S. nuclear submarines in a
hypothetical future war.
At a higher level of command, SSG's Carriers at War also scored a
major breakthrough. CAW, as it is known, deals with the major clashes of
aircraft-carrier fleets in the Pacific War. Designed by Australia's Ian Trout
and Roger Keating, CAW allows a single player to "assume the role of a
(lowly?) task group commander and let other players, or the computer,
handle other functions. Or, a player can be the theater military commander
and delegate subordinate functions to other players, or to the computer.
Beyond the solitaire and multi-player options, design-your-own scenarios
allow: altering terrain, choosing from 7 types; up to 63 different airplane
types in up to 127 squadrons, for over 4,000 total aircraft; up to 24 land
bases; 63 ship classes and 48 task groups, as many as 32 carriers plus 215
other ships from transports and destroyers through seaplane tenders and
submarines, to full battleships such as the Yamato and the (original) New
Jersey."82 Using a menu-driven system to help the player carry out his game
functions, and relying on a continuous-time system to simulate the action,
"Carriers at War, quite simply has no peer on the public market today. One
of the reasons that it has become one of today's 'giants' is that it stands
squarely on the shoulders of several of yesterday's highly-rated board and
computer games."83
SSG's success with Carriers at War in 1984 was followed by the
publication of Europe Ablaze, a strategic/operational game of aerial warfare
in World War II. Then they proceeded into the field of land combat,
producing Battlefront, which emphasizes the limitations on the player-as-
commander's ability to move and direct the activities of each of his
subordinate formations. In just a few short years, this Australian company
came from down under to lead the way into the long-awaited third
generation of computer wargaming, games that dispense with the structure
of a board-gaming mentality and board-gaming conventions. This
successful penetration of a non-U.S. company into a field dominated by
Americans is, perhaps, symbolic of the slow, but steady progress of postwar
wargaming outside the United States.

WARGAMING OUTSIDE THE U.S.

The importance of American experience in wargaming since 1945 is
hard to overstate. As was the case with so many other things in the postwar
world, the U.S. had become the dominant force in defense analysis and
wargaming among the nations of the free world. Yet it would be remiss to
end this chapter without discussing the perspectives of a few other nations
with wargaming experience and programs.
The defeat and destruction of German and Japanese military power had
also destroyed their wargaming traditions and "corporate memory." Both
nations were infected with the same brand of confusion between wargaming
and operations research that afflicted the U.S. In West Germany, for
example, "the term 'Gaming' is considered to subsume all techniques that
employ some kind of model of competitive interaction between actors who
may be individuals or groups. . . . They encompass the entire range, from
training games in which the trainee acts out the life role for which he or she
is being trained, to analytical games which describe the interactions in
terms of highly abstract objective functions."84 Figure 6 shows the
relationship between reproducibility and degree of abstraction on one hand
and the resource requirements and operational realism on the other for the
various things considered parts of the gaming category in Germany. (Note
that "Analytic Games" are equivalent to what we in the United States would
simply call analysis.) "All of these types of games are presently being used
in one form or another in the German defense establishment for purposes of
training as well as planning and analysis support at all levels, i.e., from
weapon system design up to strategic contingency analysis."85
 Indeed, most European nations, including many analysts in the United
Kingdom, view wargaming in much the same light. There are exceptions,
however, to this commingling of wargaming and other techniques. One
British analyst, in a paper dealing with "mathematical models and computer
simulations," distinguishes them from wargames, which "fall into a
completely different category by virtue of the strong element of human
decision-making and the interactions among players. They deserve
discussion in their own right."86 Even more to the point, "Canada has
persisted over the years in manual war games and shunned the
mathematical battle models."87 The Japanese, too, have only recently made
the decision to reenter the field of real wargaming in a serious way,
contracting with U.S. firms to produce a system similar to that used at the
U.S. Naval War College.

Figure 6. A West German view of analysis, wargames, and military

experiments and exercises. (Adapted from the talk Gaming and Simulation
—A German Perspective presented by Reiner Huber at the symposium
Serious Games for Serious Questions)
 The Israelis, however, have made extensive use of wargaming in
almost every aspect of their society.88 Israeli military gaming is based on
the notion espoused by Sun Tzu that military power is composed of human
beings, weapons, and wisdom, of which wisdom is the dominant force. To
the Israelis, gaming is a central tool in the development of wisdom.
Israeli games are used to sensitize people and organizations to potential
situations and so help avoid surprises. They are also used in the traditional
roles of planning and training aids. Games have been used with great
success to identify the types of intelligence information that might be
required in certain foreseeable situations, and to assess and evaluate
possible threats and identify vulnerabilities.
The basic principles of Israeli military gaming include:

• Play with real people (usually subordinates as close to the primary

decision maker as possible).
• Play with real data.
• Play in real time (crucial to avoid teaching wrong lessons).
• Play according to real manuals, orders, and procedures.
• Play real problems.
• Play in real psychological environments, putting players into the
field to create as many realistic pressures as possible.

Perhaps you have noticed a single word common to all these principles.
The Israeli stress on realism is so strong as to be almost obsessive.
Perhaps most interestingly, the Israelis believe strongly in playing
games with multiple groups, often in parallel, seeking different viewpoints
and alternative solutions to the problems presented. This philosophy
extends at times even to "Red" play. Typically, the opposition is provided
by the usual source of opposition players, the intelligence community.
Sometimes, however, a second opposition team may be put together
consisting of the "outsiders" in the intelligence community, those whose
opinions differ from the conventional wisdom.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Soviets are also heavily involved in
gaming and simulation. Although to date there is little information available
in the West about Soviet wargaming techniques some things are known
based on information provided by defectors and émigrés from the USSR
and Afghanistan.89
The Soviets define the study of war in extremely scientific terms, terms
significantly different from the less-formalized view of the U.S.
"Sometimes the Soviets use wargames to analyze, test, and develop ideas
that emerged during training exercises. Or they use games to develop
theories imposed by policy decisions."90 A Soviet wargame is initiated as a
result of a directive from the headquarters ordering the game.
The critical element in organizing the game is the establishment of the
control group, which in turn organizes the umpire group and player teams.
The control team thoroughly prepares the materials required for supporting
the game and prepares the location in which the game will be played. The
control team also prepares the "concept of the operation" for running the
game and designs the "initial situation" or scenario.
The control team also decides on the procedures that will be used to
regulate player actions and presentations of results. The chief controller
specifies the role of the umpires, and the control team also determines the
time intervals for action. The Soviets view "each game as a vignette
focused on specific critical actions or activities which the control wants to
investigate or to teach to the players. The method for handling the decisions
made by both sides. . . is one of the most critical aspects of the game
design. In many if not most games there is only one time step. The next
time step becomes another wargame."91
Interestingly, "the plan for the wargame includes the method for
drawing conclusions from these team decisions."92 The control team also
prepares the plans for conducting the critique of the game, which occurs
immediately after play is complete.
"The Soviets use wargames for research and development . . . [and] for
developing actual war plans. There are examples of instances in which a
wargame proved a plan was faulty and they changed the plans."93 Although
the original Soviet term for wargame was literally translatable as "war
game," their new term corresponds more closely to "staff training exercise."
"Wargames are a favored method for training command and staff personnel
. . . [and they] consider wargames so important that officer participants have
been promoted or demoted on the basis of their performance in
wargames."94
Of course, the Soviets also recognize the shortcomings of wargaming.
"One of the most difficult aspects of wargames is the creation of the proper
psychological conditions."95 Wargames are certainly not a panacea. "The
Soviets conduct much research and development prior to the wargame and
incorporate the results in turn in further development work. The process is
continuous as more questions are answered and they in turn raise other
questions. Therefore wargames are important, but only a part of a larger
system."96 In many ways, however, there is a rigidness in the larger system,
which uses wargames too often to study the standard "prototype" situations
of Soviet theory, each of which will typically already have an accepted
solution, at least in general terms. Whether the Soviets can thus benefit
from the competitive drive of wargaming is unclear.
In addition to the types of professional wargaming activity described
above, hobby wargaming has also developed outside the U.S., but again on
a lesser scale. The strong tradition of miniatures gaming in the U.K. was
never supplemented by a strong board-gaming tradition. Although many
U.S. games were imported, only a very few indigenous U.K. games were
ever produced. Indeed, one of the most productive U.K. wargame
companies was 3W under Keith Poulter, who moved his business to the
more dynamic and lucrative U.S. market.
Hobby wargames have also been published in France, Sweden, and
especially Italy. In recent years, Japanese board-game publishers like
Hobby Japan have produced first-class products, both of domestic designs
(Pacific Fleet) and of games by U.S. designers (Norway, 1940).
It is in Australia, however, that non-U. S. hobby wargaming seems to
be most prolific and most interesting. Led by John Edward's pioneering
company, Jedco, several Australian concerns have made significant
contributions to gaming in the 1980s. The Australian Design Group
produced the large and popular game World Aflame, dealing with the
entirety of World War II, following an equally impressive effort
representing the Napoleonic Wars (Empires in Arms). Panther Games
entered the fray with an extremely innovative design dealing with, what
else, the Russo-German war (Trial of Strength) and led the way into new
realms of computer wargaming with Fire Brigade. As discussed earlier,
however, when it comes to Australian computer-game companies, Strategic
Studies Group, producers of Carriers at War, Europe Ablaze, Battlefront,
and many others, clearly dominates the market.

NEW DIRECTIONS OR OLD DISAPPOINTMENTS?

As has been the case with so many aspects of the modern world, the
progress of wargaming in the past 25 years has far outstripped the
developments of the previous 2,500. Even so, wargaming has been unable
to escape from the recurring cycle of popularity and
disfavor that has dogged its steps throughout its long and checkered history.
In the professional world, the status and importance of the wargame as
both a tool and a discipline seem unquestioned. By the early 1980s the need
for some sort of automated planning and decision aids to help the military
commander sort through an increasingly complex modern environment was
a major factor in the establishment of the JCS-sponsored Modern Aids to
Planning Program (MAPP). One of the principal elements of the MAPP is a
complex computerized simulation and wargaming system known as the
Joint Theater-Level Simulation (JTLS), an evolutionary development of the
concepts underlying the McClintic Theater Model. In 1987, the Senate
Armed Services Committee held closed, secret hearings on the practice of
high-level wargaming and its role in the formulation of national military
strategy and policy. Led by the Naval War College, the principal military
service schools are all involved in wargaming to a greater or lesser extent.
In the Pentagon, the joint chiefs of staff continue their longstanding
program of political-military gaming to explore potential crisis situations
around the globe. Even President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative has
come under the scrutiny of academic, industrial, and military wargames.
The director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Defense Department
felt so strongly about the potential value of wargaming in assisting the
policy formulation process at the highest levels that he has contracted for
the creation not only of a large, "automated wargaming" system (the
RSAS), but has also arranged for the development of a series of smaller,
more traditional games relying on human players, drawing designers from
the wargaming hobby into direct involvement with the Department of
Defense.
From its small and tentative beginnings, the wargaming hobby has
grown in numbers and stature, as hobby gamers bring their background and
experience to bear on real-world problems. The hobby games themselves
cover the broad spectrum of military history, science fiction, and, perhaps
most importantly, current and near-term military affairs. From "traditional"
leaden miniatures, to "classic" paper and cardboard, to the most advanced
"high-tech" personal computers, hobby wargames attempt to exploit the
best of the old and, at the same time, experiment with the best of the new.
Despite all the new ideas and new techniques evident in both worlds,
however, wargaming today stands on the threshold of another downturn in
popularity and acceptance, both with the hobbyists and the professionals.
Hobbyists have made it difficult for new players to join their ranks because
many of their games have become so large and complex that they are
almost impossible for an inexperienced player to grasp. Professionals still
struggle with unwieldy or unworkable systems or ideas and continue to
make promises they can neither retract nor keep. To prevent the type of
downturn wargaming has experienced in the past, it is necessary for those
who believe in the value of wargames and wargaming to draw on the
experiences of that past to identify the central principles of wargaming, and
to define the sphere of its legitimate application. Part II addresses these
issues.

OceanofPDF.com
 PART II PRINCIPLES:

There has been a trend (2000-2010) of designing figure games

that play on hexagon or squared surfaces (for example, see the
range of rules from the Peter Pig Company). These games include
many standard features of board games, such as movement points
and zones of control, but have the inherent flexibility of using
miniatures and the players assembling the terrain in whatever
configuration is required. Photography reproduced by kind
permission of Martin Rapier, Wargame Developments.
OceanofPDF.com
 4: The Nature of Wargames
Over the course of their long history, wargames have taken many
different forms and served many different functions. From the early
topographic maps and detailed charts of the rigid Kriegsspiel or the lead
soldiers and spring-loaded cannon of Little Wars, to the small personal
computer of Carriers at War or the large mainframe computer of the Naval
Warfare Gaming System, the tools and techniques continue to evolve.
Despite the obvious differences in form, the substance of what makes all
these different devices wargames remains the same. Yet in its modern
usage, especially, the term wargaming has been defined in many ways, and
it is important to examine what wargames are and what they are not.
In its broadest application, the term wargame is used to describe any
type of warfare modeling, including simulation, campaign and systems
analysis, and military exercises. In the 1979 edition of Webster's New
Collegiate Dictionary, for example, "war game" (note, two words!) is
defined as a “simulated battle or campaign to test military concepts and
uses. Conducted in conferences by officers acting as the opposing staffs," or
"a two-sided umpired training maneuver with actual elements of the armed
forces participating." Such definitions contribute to imprecise and
sometimes misleading discussions of the subject. In fact, these broad
definitions are especially a problem among professional wargamers and
other members of the defense community, who too often look to wargames
for solutions to problems they cannot usefully address.
What wargaming is not is usually even less obvious than what it is.
First and foremost, wargaming is not analysis, at least not in the defense
community's usual sense. It is not a technique for producing a rigorous,
quantitative or logical dissection of a problem or for defining precise
measures of effectiveness by which to compare alternative solutions.
Nor is wargaming real. Despite the similarities of gaming language and
the gaming experience to important aspects of actual military operations, its
abstractions are many, and too often they are not obvious to those without
real-life experience.
 A wargame is not duplicable. You cannot replay a wargame changing
only the random numbers (or the die rolls). The chances that two
independent games will produce the same sequence of decisions and
outcomes are so low as to be negligible.
A more restricted and more useful definition is that a wargame is a
warfare model or simulation whose operation does not involve the activities
of actual military forces, and whose sequence of events affects and is, in
turn, affected by the decisions made by players representing the opposing
sides. In the end, a wargame is an exercise in human interaction, and the
interplay of human decisions and the simulated outcomes of those decisions
makes it impossible for two games to be the same. As a result of all those
factors, wargaming is not a panacea for learning about or solving the
problems of warfare. Its forte is the exploration of the role and potential
effects of human decisions; other tools are better suited to the investigation
of other more technical aspects of reality.

ELEMENTS OF A WARGAME
The focus on human decision making implies that a good wargame
must be structured to help human players make decisions and to allow them
to learn about the effects of those decisions. Although different games have
taken drastically different structural approaches, they all have made use of
the same key elements. Whether it is a hobby designed to help two people
study an historical campaign during the course of an afternoon, or a week-
long professional game designed to help hundreds of people explore the
potential for future warfare, a good wargame needs:
· Objectives
· A scenario
· A data base
· Models
· Rules
· Players
and, especially for professional games,
· Analysis.
 Every wargame has objectives. The most abstract hobby game may
limit itself to providing its players with an enjoyable afternoon's
entertainment in a quasi-military setting. The most detailed professional
game may strive to give its players the most realistic training experience
possible short of the use of actual hardware and live ammunition. Whatever
those objectives may be, the more clearly they are stated, and the more
judiciously chosen, the more likely that the game will be a success.
Well-defined objectives are essential to a professional game. In
specifying the objectives, game sponsors, designers, and analysts must
clearly identify how and in what ways the game can provide the type of
experience and information needed to achieve them. The statement of
objectives should be as specific as possible to allow game-design efforts to
focus on those elements critical to the production of that experience and
information, and to the assimilation of training lessons or the collection of
research data. A wargame's objectives should be the principal drivers of its
entire structure.
The scenario sets the stage for the game by placing players in specific
situations and giving them a context for their decision making. The scenario
can have a significant, if not overwhelming, effect on the decisions players
are able to make. As a result, the game designer must carefully determine
how the scenario may affect the factors he is most interested in exploring.
Detailed scenario descriptions should allow the players to understand those
factors and how they arose, so that they can understand how the underlying
assumptions may affect the scope of their decision making.
The data base contains the information players may use to help them
make decisions. Typically, this information includes the forces available,
some measure of their capabilities, physical or environmental conditions,
and other technical facts. Because of its importance to decision making, the
data base must present clearly and concisely the information players would
reasonably have available to them in an actual situation, and it must do so in
a manner easy for them to use during play.
A set of models, usually a combination of look-up tables and
mathematical expressions, translates the game's data and the players'
decisions into game events. Models must be flexible enough to deal with
unforeseen player decisions. They should be designed to allow the data base
to change without requiring major changes to the models themselves. Their
mechanisms should reflect accurately those factors most important to the
decision-making levels represented by the players. As much as practicable,
the question of whether a model will depend on random numbers should be
driven by the underlying real-life process. Just as real battles are affected by
chance, game battles should usually reflect the role of luck in carrying out
any operation.
But models alone are not enough. A wargame must also have a set of
rules or procedures that dictate how and when to apply the models. These
rules and procedures help sequence game events, and allow for accurate
chains of cause and effect, or action and reaction. They must also ensure
that the players receive the appropriate quantity and quality of information
during play. Where possible, the rules should try to introduce errors into the
player's information and delays into the execution of orders or arrival of
new information. Such procedures, designed to simulate the "fog of war"
are often the most difficult to devise. In most professional games, and in a
growing number of hobby games, one or more umpires may be employed to
monitor player actions and control the flow of information. As faster, more
powerful, and more flexible computers become available, even to
hobbyists, many of these umpire functions are being assigned to the
machine.
Ultimately, however, there is one function that cannot be given to a
machine without fundamentally changing the character of a game and
turning it into something else. A real wargame must have human players
whose decision affect and are affected by the flow of game events. A game
is most effective when those players can be cast in operational roles and be
given the information and responsibility required to make the decisions
appropriate to those roles.
In professional wargames, a seventh critical element must be added to
those described above. This final element is game analysis. If the objectives
of the game define the information that must be extracted from its play,
game analysis assures its capture. In a training game, analysis will usually
consist of an instructor’s observation and critique of the student’s play. In a
research game, analysis focuses on understanding why decisions were
made. A good analysis plan, outlining where observers should be placed
and what they should be looking for, is essential, but the process of game
analysis is not simply one of mechanics or even observation. The data
collected during game play is only the raw material for the synthesis of
insights and identification of issues.
Even hobby games are subjected to analysis, and two types of such
analysis are evident in the hobby press. The more common type is the game
review or critical analysis of the game system. Good reviewers focus on the
designer's viewpoint of reality and on his approach to representing that
viewpoint through the game system. Reviewers assess the strengths and
weaknesses of the viewpoint and of the resulting game mechanics and
evaluate how well the game plays. The second type of game analysis
concentrates on an actual play of the game. This type of analysis, often seen
in Avalon Hill's General magazine under the title "Series Replay," consists
of a turn-by-turn recounting of play in which each of the players
summarizes the considerations underlying his or her decisions, and a neutral
commentator evaluates those decisions on the basis of prior experience with
the game and full knowledge of both players' plans. Although such analysis
seldom attempts to project beyond the game board into reality, it is
otherwise somewhat similar to the type of analysis done for professional
games.
Each of the elements of a wargame will be discussed in greater detail in
the chapters dealing with game design, development, play, and analysis.
Before getting into such details, however, it is useful to understand some of
the more arcane language of wargaming. We begin with the broadest
characterization of what a game is all about.

THE LEVEL OF A WARGAME

Hobby Games

The publishers of hobby wargames often advertise their products with

terms like "tactical-level simulation" of a particular battle, or "operational-
level game" of an important campaign, or "strategic study" of an entire war.
Some games, such as the large-scale re-creation of the battle of Gettysburg
known as Terrible Swift Sword, are even christened with the high-sounding
title "grand tactical game." Although there is some amount of marketing
hype involved in this terminology, the distinctions among levels of game
are real and important.
The two most popular criteria for categorizing the level of a game are
based on the command level represented by the player, or on the level of
activity at which a player's decisions are implemented and evaluated. The
words used to describe these levels are usually the same words used to
define the major aspects of the military art: strategic, tactical, and
operational.
A player's decision level is strategic if his responsibility extends to
allocating resources, possibly including economic and political resources as
well as military forces, to fight and win an entire war. A player is making
tactical-level decisions if he is most concerned about positioning relatively
small numbers of men and weapons to apply violence directly to the enemy;
that is, to fight battles. The operational level game is less easily described;
here the player is concerned with maneuvering relatively large forces so
that they can be positioned to win the battles they fight, and so that those
battles can help win the war. In the sense of decision making, then, the level
of the game reflects the scope of the players' decisions.
In the sense of evaluation of results, on the other hand, the level of the
game most closely represents the degree to which the processes of military
violence are abstracted. In a tactical game, the emphasis is on that process
itself, not only on what the outcome is but also on the physical processes by
which it takes place. An operational-level game may abstract this evaluation
process, considering only the types, numbers, and relative positions of
forces involved in combat and ignoring the lower-level details of who fired
what weapon at whom and when. A strategic game might abstract this even
further, resolving actions over large expanses of territory and time by
comparing gross amounts of forces involved and ignoring completely the
niceties of maneuver and application of fire.
A classic example of a tactical game is the popular modern-naval
miniatures system of Harpoon. In this game the players command one ship
or a small group, possibly with aircraft in support. Their goals are usually
fairly limited and for the most part involve engaging and destroying an
enemy force while avoiding the same fate. Individual missiles, bombs, or
guns are fired at specific targets and detailed physical effects are calculated
(such as whether a round disables a particular weapon or sensor system).
The board game 2nd Fleet is a good example of an operational-level
game. The players are concerned with an entire theater (in this case the
Norwegian Sea) and large numbers of forces of many types. The action
takes place over a span of days or weeks as opposed to Harpoon's hours or
days, and the objectives of the players involve control of wide expanses of
ocean, not merely the destruction or avoidance of specific enemy units.
An example of a strategic game is Pacific Fleet, dealing with the
entirety of World War II in the Pacific. In this game, players represent the
supreme commanders of all the forces involved in the war, maneuvering
entire fleets and armies. The action extends over months and years, with
individual engagements resolved simply by comparing the effective
strength of the opposing forces in a large expanse of ocean or ground
territory.

Hybrid Levels

It is possible for games to combine a higher level of decision making

with a lower level of combat resolution. Strategic-operational and
operational-tactical games are often popular with the hobbyist. For
example, Pacific War covers much of the same strategic ground as Pacific
Fleet, but includes a much more operationally oriented combat system.
Carrier Battles deals with the air-sea campaigns around the Solomon
Islands in World War II at an essentially operational level, including
detailed tactical rules for resolving combat.
The principal difficulty involved in such hybrid games is their potential
for allowing the player to fall between two stools. For example, a player
who concentrates on his high-level command position to the detriment of
his low-level tactical skills may find himself fighting the right battles but
losing them because he is not as able as his opponent in designing defensive
ship screens. On the other hand, a good tactical player may never lose a
battle, but could lose the game for the lack of a coherent campaign plan.
This disconnect between the level at which the player is required to perform
his principal decision making function and the level at which those
decisions are resolved can be even more pronounced in professional games.
Fortunately, many of the problems arising from the disconnect can be
solved when a sufficient number of players are available to allow a division
of command responsibility along the lines of the different command levels.

Professional Games
Professional games are seldom characterized on the basis of the level of
combat resolution. Instead, the most useful categorization of modern
professional wargames combines the idea of geographic scope with the
level of the decision making. This scheme defines three broad classes:
global/strategic, theater/operational, and local/tactical.

Global/Strategic

In global/strategic games, the primary decision makers represent

opposing National Command Authorities. Typically, the goals of such
games are to improve the perspective of the participants, test strategies, and
identify important issues at the global level. Early examples of these games
focused attention principally on pre-hostilities and the politics and force
deployments involved in the transition from peace to war, the D-day
engagements, and questions regarding escalation or war termination. Recent
games have expanded their explorations into the capacity of the opposing
sides to sustain prolonged conventional war, and into the effects of threats
to the strategic nuclear balance within the context of conventional war. The
primary output of these high-level games is qualitative, consisting typically
of game narratives with some interpretations of events and little numerical
data. Games on this scale usually require large numbers of people and great
amounts of time to play, and are seldom, if ever, repeated under identical
conditions.
 The Global War Game series conducted at the Naval War College for
the past ten years has had a growing effect on the development of strategic
thinking in the navy and in the defense community as a whole. The scope of
the effort, both in the global nature of its scenarios and the numbers and
diversity of its participants, has served as a catalyst for raising important
research issues. It has facilitated the exchange of ideas among professionals
who seldom have the chance to interact (such as experts in Soviet political
affairs and scientists working on advanced technological concepts).

Theater/Operational
The primary decision makers in theater/operational games are typically
cast as commanders in chief of the unified or specified commands in a
particular region. Some games actually combine multiple theaters to
achieve a pseudo-global scope, but because decisions are made at the
theater level, these games are closer to the operational rather than strategic
scale.
Theater/operational games are usually designed to explore specific
issues and identify strategic, operational, and tactical problems in the
theater. Often they point out areas in need of further study. Such games
focus on the force levels and employment options necessary or feasible for
carrying out specific military missions. Although the output of these games
is similar in nature to that of global/strategic games, there is a tendency to
have the same group of players run through the game more than once and
also to generate more numerical data.
Theater/operational games may be the level of game most usefully and
most frequently employed for many research areas. They are used to "pre-
play" or test plans, from exercise designs to fleet war plans. When well
designed, such games force participants to deal with the same situations
they might face in an actual operation. They allow commanders and their
staffs the chance to explore how and why their plans might be able to deal
successfully with the problems they have perceived. They also provide
fertile ground for identifying unforeseen difficulties and unexpected
solutions.

Local/Tactical
 The primary decision makers in this category of game are generally
battle-group commanders or below. (In land-combat games, the equivalent
command level is typically that of a corps or divisional commander or
lower.) As is the case with the global/strategic games, a principal purpose of
tactical games is to give their participants an improved perspective.
Local/tactical games are also used to compare various tactics and force
structures and, perhaps even more than in the other types of games, to
identify topics for further analysis.
Typically, local/tactical games focus attention on force levels and
tactical deployments, weapon and sensor performance, and
interrelationships among various warfare areas. The outputs of these games
usually have a greater balance of qualitative and quantitative results than do
the others. The number of times players replay a local/tactical game varies,
but it does tend to be higher than in either of the other two categories.
Games at the tactical level, dealing as they do with the most basic
realities of warfare, are the most difficult to design "accurately." There is an
unfortunate tendency to focus more closely on numerical "results" even
when the reliability of such results does not deserve it. Yet, when properly
designed and executed, tactical wargames can be incomparable tools for
exploring the feasibility of tactics, identifying the hidden assumptions, both
valid and invalid, on which such tactics might be based, and highlighting
their potential strengths and weaknesses. The ideas that evolve from such
games are often easily translated into concepts that can be further tested and
refined by at-sea or field exercises.
Table 1 compares the three categories of professional games defined
above.

OTHER WAYS OF CATEGORIZING WARGAMES

In addition to the level of the game, wargames can be characterized by
the mode of evaluating activity, the number of players or "sides," the
information limits imposed on the players, the game's style, and the game's
instrumentality.

Mode of Evaluation
 We have already discussed the notion of evaluating the outcome of
player decisions in terms of the level of detail involved in the process. A
more basic distinction, almost as old as wargaming itself, is that between
"free" and "rigid" evaluation techniques.

Free evaluation techniques rely principally on the capabilities and

experience of an umpire to determine the outcomes of encounters without
requiring the use of any particular set of data or mathematical models. Rigid
evaluation techniques center around precisely those types of formal models
seldom used in the free methods. Not surprisingly, most hobby games
employ the free method, but increasingly a mixed approach is preferred in
which the umpires use both their experience and some models to make their
evaluations.

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Table 1. Levels of Professional Wargames

Number of Players
Most wargames today are two-sided. One player or team will represent
each of the two major contending parties or coalitions. The two-player
game has been a staple of hobby wargaming since before the invention of
chess, and is equally popular in purely military professional games. In the
latter, however, there is often a third, non-player team called "control,"
which handles matters outside the scope of the player decision levels, and
carries out the umpire functions.
Multi-sided games, with three or more independent active player
teams, are most often seen in the realm of diplomatic or political-military
games. Indeed, one of the wargaming hobby's most celebrated games,
Diplomacy, is designed for seven players representing the great powers of
Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. In the professional gaming
world, political-military games have been played by the Organization of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Defense University, and other
organizations, to allow the exploration of multilateral interactions in a wide
variety of scenarios.
 At the opposite extreme is the one-player game, in which a single
player or team plays against a pre-programmed opponent, or in which the
control team assumes direction of the opposition side in addition to its usual
functions. One-player games are frequently employed for training purposes,
the instructors controlling the play to reinforce specific lessons.
Most hobby gamers are familiar with one-player games in several
different guises. Because of the complexity and time-consuming nature of
most board wargames, opponents can be difficult to find, and many players
play a large number of games solitaire. However, the solitaire game in
which a single person plays both sides of a two-player game, is not what we
mean by a one-player game. The true one-player game, in which the
opposition's activities are directed by the game system, umpire, or other
devices, was a rarity in hobby gaming until just recently, when Victory
Games Ambush series and Mosby's Raiders game popularized two different
approaches to games designed specifically for solitaire play. The advent of
personal computers has made solitaire gaming more feasible because the
computer can provide a pre-programmed opponent that is ready to play the
game whenever the human player is. One-player games dominate the hobby
"simulator" market, as evidenced by Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, and
F-19 Stealth.

Information Limits
One of the most dramatic distinctions among wargames is that between
an "open" game and a "closed" game. An open wargame allows all players
essentially free access to all available information about each side's forces
and capabilities (but not about plans!). Typically, such games use a single
situation map on which forces from both sides are, for the most part, openly
deployed. A closed game better simulates the "fog of war" by introducing
limits on the information available to the players. Such games usually
attempt to restrict player knowledge of their own and their enemy's forces
to that which could realistically be expected from available sensors. Closed
games almost always require some sort of computer assistance unless they
are very small in size or scope. As a result, true closed games are a recent
development, despite the long history of attempts to introduce some form of
limited intelligence into games. The difficulties of successfully playing a
closed game without computer support are strongly indicated by the very
small number of such games published by the wargaming hobby.

Style
Another major categorization of wargames is their separation into
seminar games and system games. In a seminar game, opposing players
discuss the sequence of moves and countermoves they are likely to make in
a given situation and agree on what interactions are likely to occur. A
control team then assesses the results of those interactions and reports back
to the players. This process is repeated for each of the "moves" in the game.
Seminar games often use moves of various lengths of real time (time steps)
and so tend to resolve different periods of action at different levels of detail.
Not surprisingly, seminar games tend to be open games, at least for the most
part. They also tend to be limited to the professional gaming world where
research, discussion, and learning are usually more important than the
personal competition that plays a more significant role in hobby gaming.
Most hobby wargames are system games. A system game substitutes a
structured set of highly detailed and specific rules and procedures for the
more informal discussion process of the seminar game. Player decisions are
implemented through the medium of the system, and actions that the system
does not provide for may not be undertaken. Once the decisions are
enacted, the system determines any interactions and outcomes. Although
not all system games are closed, nearly all closed games must be system
games.
In some ways system games are closely related to rigid umpiring, while
seminar games are related to free umpiring. Just as professional gaming has
endured a long-standing competition between rigid and free umpiring, there
has been a similar competition between seminar and system games. The
increasing advocacy of computer gaming has reinforced the pressure for
increased use of system games. The continued lack of realistic operational
data on which to build a detailed system argues for the utility of the give-
and-take of a seminar game, where bad ideas or skewed evaluations are
subjected to greater scrutiny. As with most such debates, the proponents of
either side too often fail to see that each approach has merit.

Instrumentality
Although it may be possible to play some forms of wargames without
the use of any prepared materials, most wargames require a set of tools to
keep track of and to display data, force locations and movements, and
interactions between opposing units. In chess, for example, there is the
simple board of sixty-four squares that allows each of the thirty-two playing
pieces to be positioned and moved. A typical hobby board game will make
use of a map board on which is superimposed a hexagonal grid containing
hundreds of hexagons on which players maneuver some 200 or more
cardboard counters.
The strictly manual games represented by the above examples were the
norm of wargaming for over a hundred years. The tools were relatively
simple: maps, charts, notebooks of data and orders of battle, perhaps a set
of written rules and procedures. As computers grew in capability after
World War II, they began to be adapted to wargaming, first by the
professionals and then by the hobbyists.
Computer-assisted games use machines ranging from desktop personal
computers to very large mainframes. The machines are used to help keep
track of the positions of forces, their movement, weapons capabilities and
other critical, data-intensive pieces of information. The extensive
bookkeeping required to keep track of dozens of pieces of information
about many hundreds of units virtually prohibited the types of detailed
global wargames that are possible today from even being contemplated
before computers became available.
The Rand Corporation has been in the forefront of an effort to extend
the role of the computer beyond that of capable assistant or sometime
opponent. In their Strategy Assessment System, Rand is attempting to
replace not only one but both human players by computer software. Using
artificial intelligence and expert-system concepts, Rand is seeking a way of
automating the decision process to allow multiple replications of
"wargames" with changes in basic assumptions. Such computer-played
games are difficult to categorize as true wargames. They may develop into a
new, but related, tool, but their dangers are many. Early enthusiasm for the
potential of Rand's approach must be tempered by the realization that no
system of this sort can do more than allow us to explore the implications of
our own assumptions as embodied in the computer programs. This is far
different from exploring the dynamic interaction of two human beings
responding to ever-changing challenges.

SO WHAT IS WARGAMING GOOD FOR?

After all the discussion of what wargaming is and is not, the definition
of a wargaming taxonomy and the dissection of a wargame's anatomy,
where do we stand? What is all this stuff good for after all? Is it really the
answer to every defense decision maker's dream, the oracle that allows us to
peer into the future? Or is it just an elaborate toy, an incursion into the
world of serious issues and serious decisions by something better left on the
gaming tables of warmongering adult hobbyists who somehow never
outgrew their destructive childhood impulses?
Aperiodically, the press of one country or another decries wargaming,
either as a hobby or as a professional tool. One of the latest such incidents
occurred in West Germany, where that country's "Examination Board For
Publications Harmful to Young People" decided that hobby wargames were
"morally corruptive and coarsening for the young user" and therefore their
advertisement and sale should be prohibited. (Presumably, the older user
was already corrupt beyond hope of redemption.)1
Sadly, there are wargaming hobbyists, and professionals, to whom such
concerns and criticisms may well apply. They see only what they want to
see, and learn from a game only those things that confirm their own
preconceived notions. But such people are not unique to wargaming, and if
wargames did not exist they would simply find other devices that could
allow them to realize their dreams of conquest or their certainty in the depth
of their understanding and the value of their own insight. For the vast
majority of thoughtful, serious, and eager-to-learn gamers, however, the
conclusion of H. G. Wells's book Little Wars vividly describes the
fundamentally humbling experience that even the victorious wargamer
reflects on in his quiet moments alone.

I have never yet met in little battle any military

gentleman, any captain, major, colonel, general, or eminent
commander, who did not presently get into difficulties and
confusions among even the elementary rules of the Battle.
You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to
realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be.
Great war is at present, I am convinced, not only the most
expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all
proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and
suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason,
but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I
think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable, and Little
Wars brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.2
In today's world, where the critics of wargaming of both the
professional and hobby variety castigate it for encouraging a fondness or
longing for the illusory challenges and glories of war and therefore for
fostering a readiness to engage in it, the insights of one of history's most
famous, vocal, and sincere pacifists can be illuminating. Wells recognized
that there are powerful emotional and intellectual challenges found in war
that are difficult to discover in other forms of human activity. Rather than
decry these challenges as abhorrent, Wells sought to reproduce as many of
them as possible in a safe and sane way, on the game floor rather than on
the battlefield. War, or Great War, as Wells characterized it, was and is
abhorrent and unimaginably chaotic and destructive, especially for those
who have never experienced it first hand.
But wargaming, Wells's Little Wars, not only provided a harmless
setting in which human beings could face some of war's challenges without
destroying lives, property, or nature, but also taught something of the reality
of Great War to those not familiar with its practice. For those in the military,
wargaming (Kriegsspiel in Wells's lexicon) was an important tool for
training and education, an ideal means for "waking up the imagination."3
Rather than condemn the study of warfare by the military services (whose
profession it was, after all), Wells the pacifist argued cogently that if "Great
War is to be played at all, the better it is played the more humanely it will
be done." He saw "no inconsistency in deploring the practice while
perfecting the method."4
In today's world, where another Great War could well mean the end of
mankind, wargaming is not just a hobby for the over-educated or a toy for
the military-industrial complex, it is a way to help us understand the nature
of the beast, and through that understanding to, if not tame it completely, at
least prevent it from devouring us.

The Usefulness of Wargaming

In the end, the role of wargames of all types, sizes, and levels is to help
human beings investigate the processes of combat, not to assist them in
calculating the outcomes of those processes. Wargame designers, players,
and analysts, as well as critics and decision makers who judge the validity
of a game or define its results only in terms of what happened, not why, or
only in terms of "lessons learned" not "issues raised," have lost sight of
what a wargame really is and where its main benefits are to be found.
Wargames can help explore questions of strategy, human decision making,
and war-fighting trends. They are of little use in providing rigorous,
quantitative measures to "objectively" prove or disprove technical or
tactical theories. Instead, they can often provide the kernel of new theories
that can be tested with other tools.
Wargaming is most productive when used as an organizing and
exploratory tool or as an explanatory device. It seems especially appropriate
for exploring the dynamic nature of warfare. The design of the game
(organizing) and the play and subsequent analysis of the game (exploring)
form a circular chain or feedback loop, in which the questions and issues
arising from one play of the game can reshape or reorganize the game
system itself to make it a more accurate representation of reality.
As an organizing tool, wargaming helps designers and participants tie
their thoughts together and give them a more operational focus. Designing a
game requires comprehensive and coherent study and modeling of the
interplay of different types of forces carrying out different kinds of missions
for different sorts of reasons. The successful translation of quantitative and
qualitative tactical analysis into a workable and meaningful game system
requires a basic understanding of all possible force interactions, how and
when they might occur, and what might determine their outcome. It also
requires an understanding of how players interact as they develop different
approaches to the problems posed by the game. Finally, it requires an ability
to translate that understanding into intelligible and practical procedures so
that the players can concentrate on making realistic decisions, not on
remembering artificial rules.
When used as educational devices, wargames force the participants to
begin translating what they have studied about strategy, tactics, or
administration into something they can use in carrying out their mission or
in understanding reality. Students at the navy's Surface Warfare Officers
School may have been taught the rate of fire of a surface-to-air missile
system, the reliability of the missile, and the radar horizon of a ship's search
and guidance systems. They may have studied the speed and altitude of an
enemy submarine-launched cruise missile and the number of such missiles
a threat submarine might carry. They may even be aware that the time they
might have available to react to an attack on their ship by such a missile
submarine may be less than one minute. Yet, the true meaning and
interconnections of all those facts are difficult to perceive in an abstract
setting. By using a wargame to place students in "command" of a ship that
is the target of such a missile attack, however, instructors can not only
demonstrate the facts, but they can also allow the students to demonstrate
their implications to themselves.
As an exploratory tool, wargaming can give players, analysts, and other
observers and participants new insights, which can lead them to further
investigation of the validity and the sources of their beliefs. Wargaming
forces participants to look at reality from a different angle and can lead to
fundamental changes in how they see that reality. If the initial design of a
game incorporates well-known critical factors into its models and
procedures, the play of the game and the questions and issues it raises can
lead to the discovery of other factors whose importance may have been
previously unsuspected or undervalued.
 By explicitly allowing human decisions that are made under the press
of time and on the basis of imperfect or incomplete information to influence
the course of events, and by incorporating the capricious effects of
randomness and "luck," wargaming comes closer than any other form of
intellectual exercise to illuminating the dynamics of warfare. By illustrating
the effect of these "unquantifiable" factors in concrete terms, wargaming
also helps to illuminate the sources of that dynamism.
Finally, as an explanatory device, wargames can effectively
communicate historical, operational, and analytical insights to hobbyists or
to professional members of the defense community. The latest intelligence
about threat operational doctrine or options can present commanders with
new problems and challenge them to find feasible solutions. The
operational implications of advanced weapon systems can be portrayed
vividly by forcing players to deal with the opportunities and difficulties
they present rather than by simply providing decision makers with
numerical estimates of a limited number of technical parameters. The
constraints of knowledge and capability under which historical commanders
had to operate can be re-created to allow players and researchers a fresh
perspective on why events took place as they did, helping to offset the
distortion and intellectual arrogance that too often accompany 20-20
hindsight.
Participants in wargames are not a passive audience. Their interaction
with the scenario, the systems, and each other provides opportunities for the
development of new insights. These insights can, in turn, prompt more
detailed historical, operational, quantitative, and scientific analyses whose
results can become incorporated in follow-on games. This process of
sharing, testing, and revising knowledge and understanding is fundamental
to the productive use of gaming.

Dangers of Wargaming
The power of a wargame to communicate and convince, however, can
also be a potential source of danger. Wargames can be very effective at
building a consensus on the importance of key ideas or factors in the minds
of participants. They attempt to create the illusion of reality, and good
games succeed. This illusion can be a powerful and sometimes insidious
influence, especially on those who have limited operational experience. For
example, a poorly designed game could allow players access to an
unrealistic quantity and quality of information and so give those players a
false picture of the worth of a weapon system that relies on just such
unattainable information to be effective.
In wargames, as in any approach to study and analysis, there is always a
possibility that intentional or unintentional advocacy of particular ideas or
programs may falsely color the events and decisions made in a game and
lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. The designer of a game has great power to
inform or to manipulate. The players and others involved in the game and
its analysis must be aware of this danger. They deserve and should demand
an explanation of why events run counter to their expectations. They must
be allowed, indeed encouraged, to be wary and skeptical and to question the
validity of insights derived from the game until the source of those insights
is adequately explained. If the reasons underlying an insight seem artificial,
the insight may be a false one, and the game system may be in need of
correction. These and other aspects of the roles and interactions of game
designers, developers, players, and analysts are the subjects of the next four
chapters.

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 5: Designing Wargames
It is important to make one thing clear at the very start; designing a
wargame is an art, not a science. Experienced military officers, practiced
operations research analysts, and accomplished computer programmers are
not necessarily capable of designing useful wargames. Although some or all
of the knowledge and skills of such people are important tools for a
wargame designer to possess, the nature of game design requires a unique
blending of talents.
Wargaming is an act of communication. Designing a wargame is more
akin to writing an historical novel than proving an algebraic theorem. The
latter requires the use of deductive reasoning within a previously defined
framework of knowledge; it proceeds from a set of assumptions to a set of
conclusions by following the strict paths dictated by the rules of logic. The
former requires the construction of a framework, the creative building of an
internally complete and consistent world whose broad contours are
contained within the bounds of its historical context. Yet, within those
bounds many paths may exist, and not all of them may be apparent when
the work begins.
So it is with a wargame; perhaps even to a greater degree than with a
novel. The wargame designer builds his world and provides a set of maps
and instructions for exploring it. But it is the player, not the designer, who
dictates which paths will be taken. Indeed, it is often the case that players
will discover paths through the game world that even the designer did not
perceive. As a result, and perhaps paradoxically, the end product of a
wargame design must be much more structured, rigorous, and clearly
delineated than any novel, precisely because the game's designer cannot
dictate more than the broad limits of its player's explorations.
As an art form, all wargame design is based on some fundamental
principles. These principles have been recognized in various guises from
the earliest days of Helwig and von Reisswitz. Yet, the actual shape of any
particular design will take on a unique form, a form that springs from the
reasons for which the game was created, the nature of its participants and
audience, and the talent and skill of its designer. Unlike music and
literature, however, whose formal rules of pitch and grammar are codified
and generally well understood (even by those who choose to violate them to
achieve an artistic effect), game design has no real formalisms. Instead, it is
dominated by individual style and by fashion, and in that respect is more
like painting than other arts.
Previous chapters have described some of the changes in gaming
fashion. The abstract and rigid formality of war-chess gave way to the
representational realism and free umpiring of Kriegsspiel; the spring-loaded
three-inch naval gun of Little Wars gave way to the detailed charts and
tables of modern miniatures gaming; the gridded floor of the coffee mess at
the Naval War College gave way to the computer graphics of the Naval
Warfare Gaming System. Fashions change, and those changes result more
often from the emergence of certain "landmark" game designs, created by
designers with a new idea, than from the slow evolution of generally
accepted design techniques.
The world of hobby wargaming clearly shows the influence of this
phenomenon. Charles Roberts designed Tactics and launched the board-
gaming hobby and industry. James Dunnigan designed Tactical Game 3 and
spawned an entirely new genre of board wargames. Roger Keating and Ian
Trout designed Carriers at War and redefined the state of the art of
computer wargaming. Each new ground-breaking design almost inevitably
produced a flock of imitators and a wave of innovations building on its
fundamental ideas.
Since perhaps the mid-seventies, however, the design of wargames for
the defense community has suffered from the lack of such revolutionary
ardor. Most of today's professional wargames are based on long-established
principles and techniques. (One possible exception, the Rand Strategy
Assessment System, makes use of recent advances in artificial intelligence
research, but, as discussed earlier, it is not really a wargame.) The Naval
War College, which has done so much to maintain and advance
wargaming's popularity and usefulness, has nevertheless built its reputation
on a continuing refinement of the basic ideas and methods espoused by
Francis McHugh in the early 1960s. The seminar wargame, albeit with
increased computer assistance, remains the cornerstone of War College
wargaming. The Army's new JANUS system is little more than a variant of
the old McClintic Theater Model. Only OSD's attempts to introduce "path
games" seems to be breaking new ground.
Professional wargaming organizations (or, more accurately,
professional organizations involved in wargaming) are generally built
around a staff that spends most of its time adapting existing game systems
and facilities to the needs of next week's game. They rely on many years of
corporate experience and tend to relegate the individual game designer to
choosing which aspects of the available tools will be used, not to designing
new ones. In many cases, they have succeeded quite well at producing
useful wargames. Unfortunately, the lack of innovation in technique has
resulted in stagnation. The older systems are beginning to show their age,
and fancy new facelifts like the Enhanced Naval Warfare Gaming System
or high-resolution color graphics will not be able to reverse the trend.
The underlying cause of creeping obsolescence of game systems lies in
the fundamental nature of game design itself. Ultimately, the goal of all
wargame design is communication. Consciously or unconsciously, a
wargame designer transmits specific messages, concerns, and even
conclusions to the players of the game through the medium of its structure
and procedures. As the message changes, so must the game.
In a professional wargame, the source of such messages and concerns is
the game's sponsor. The sponsor is an individual or organization who
initiates the game and who wants the game to achieve certain goals. Usually
the game designer is not the sponsor, and, as a result, the designer must first
strive to understand the sponsors intentions and objectives. He must then
devise some effective means of transmitting those intentions to the players,
thus achieving the game's objectives through their play.
The professional wargame designer must also remember that the game
communication flows both ways, and he must structure the game's design to
facilitate that flow. Through their participation, the game's players transmit
their own concerns, questions, interpretations, and insights back to the
sponsor. These elements of the wargame experiment are collected and
reported, either directly through player comments, or indirectly through
game analysis.
Hobby game designers are usually their own "sponsors." They
communicate to the game's players their personal understanding and
interpretations of the events their game portrays. There is, however, less of
an immediate two-way exchange of information in hobby games. Hobby
designers do get some feedback, though, either through direct contact with
players, or through reviews and surveys conducted by hobby magazines
devoted to criticism and analysis of games (and often of the historical
situations on which they are based).
In both the hobby and professional worlds, the problems that designers
or sponsors need or want to address change with the growth of new ideas or
new technologies, or with the refinement of the designer's understanding
and insight. The open, free market of the wargaming hobby shows the
effects of this process of growth much more dramatically than the relatively
closed and self-perpetuating society of professional wargaming and
analysis.
To return to the example of James Dunnigan, his designs of Tactical
Game 3, Combat Command, Red Star/White Star, KampfPanzer, and Mech
War '77 show the progressive development and growth of his ideas about
how best to represent modern mechanized warfare in a game. In the
professional sphere, only the Naval War College's evolving Global War
Game series, largely under the managing inspiration of O. E. "Bud" Hay,
exhibits a similar prolonged period of growth and development, but without
quite the same sense of vibrancy as that exhibited by Dunnigan. Perhaps
this shortage of real, revolutionary change that plagues the professional
wargame is one of the sources of the up-and- down cycle of gaming's
popularity.
As the tools of warfare continue to evolve at an ever-quickening pace,
professional game designers need to break out of the confines of past
practice. They must develop dynamic new approaches to modeling the
effects of those tools on human decision making, and also the effects of
human decision making on how those tools are used. To do so, however,
designers must be given the time to design, not just to assemble the next
game. They must also return to the fundamental principles of wargame
design.
In addition, the designers of professional wargames can turn to the
wargaming hobby for new ideas and new approaches. Although the details
of hobby-game systems are seldom accurate enough to transplant whole to
the professional world, it is more often the case that broad approaches
developed in the hobby can contribute significantly to new professional
directions. This is so because the fundamental principles of game design
apply equally well in both arenas.

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES: A VIEW FROM THE

HOBBY
In his book The Complete Wargames Handbook, James Dunnigan
characterizes a wargame as a "non-linear communication" device. He also
describes his two basic rules for constructing such a device. Expressed with
typical, Dunniganesque irreverence, these rules are "keep it simple" and
"plagiarize."1
Coming from Dunnigan, one of the hobby's great originals, the second
rule seems so unlike his actual practice that it could easily be dismissed as
mere flippancy. Yet Dunnigan is serious, and "plagiarize" is but a brash way
of stating an important truth. In the long history of wargaming, or even the
shorter but more intense history of hobby board wargaming, some
fundamental techniques have proven themselves successful time and again.
For example, nearly every hobby wargame rates each unit for the
number of hexes it may move in a single turn, and represents the effects of
different types of terrain by imposing added costs in movement points for
entering certain hexes or crossing certain hex sides. The vast majority of
ground combat games are based on a comparison of attacker's strength to
defender’s strength, expressed as an "odds ratio." In naval games, even the
most elaborate systems are sometimes only variations on the basic idea of
comparing offensive firepower to defensive "protection."
Even a revolutionary game system can make use of such proven
techniques to simulate some aspects of reality. Not only does such judicious
plagiarism take advantage of hard-won experience, but it may also make the
player's task of assimilating a new system easier. An experienced wargamer
who already understands the basics of some of a new games "borrowed"
subsystems can concentrate on adapting to the more revolutionary concepts
reserved by the designer for the game's most important elements.
The designer who rejects this rule without good cause can, indeed,
produce dramatically new and different game systems, but may pay a high
price for doing so. There are numerous examples of hobby games in which
many of the major subsystems used a unique, new approach. For example,
Jack Radey's Black Sea * Black Death introduced brilliantly conceived new
approaches to initiative, movement, combat, and the interplay of different
types of forces and arms. Despite critical acclaim for its innovations, there
is little evidence that the game is actually being played. It was, perhaps, too
much of a good thing.
The key to understanding the importance of Dunnigan's second rule is
appreciating the difficulties of achieving his first rule. Keeping things
simple, especially when developing innovative approaches to game design
problems, is one of the proverbial "easier-said-than-done's." As anyone who
has ever tried to design a game can verify, it is far too easy for the game to
take on a life of its own and explode beyond the confines of the designer's
initial concept. There is a seductive tendency for a designer to become
tangled up in micromodeling reality in new and alluring ways. When such
subsystems are examined apart from the game as a whole, they often appear
both reasonable and elegant, but when combined with all the other similar
components that grew to maturity during the designer's quest for innovative
ways of modeling the real world, the entire system becomes
undecipherable, unwieldy, and totally unplayable.
As if to help himself follow his two precepts, Dunnigan seemed to
practice his art at breakneck speeds. He churned out game after game,
developing his technique in incremental stages rather than laboring for
years over the last detail of the elusive "perfect game." To facilitate the
assembly-line-like approach that dominated the early years of Simulations
Publications Incorporated, Dunnigan followed what he called the ten steps
in the game design process. These steps, also described in The Complete
Wargames Handbook, are:

1. Concept development
 2. Research
3. Integration of ideas into a prototype
4. Fleshing out the prototype (adding the "chrome")
5. First draft of the rules
6. Game development
7. Blind-testing
8. Final rules edit
9. Production
10. Feedback

It is especially interesting to note that Dunnigan included the feedback

step in his design process. The production of a game did not end the process
of its design, at least not in the evolution of its designer's thought processes.
Dunnigan believed that feedback from those who actually played the game
was an important contributor to that evolution.
From his years of design experiences and the feedback and criticism of
thousands of players, Dunnigan distilled two basic concepts that he believed
must underlay the design of historical games. First, the game must
accurately simulate, in some sense, the historical events it intended to
portray. Second, the game's designer must carefully choose his focus and
level of simulation detail and design the entire game to be commensurate
with that choice. If a game dealing with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union failed to allow the re-creation of the spectacular initial German
successes and their equally spectacular later reverses, it violated the first
principle. If the game cast the players as the overall theater commanders
and simultaneously required them to choose the assault tactics for
individual corps or divisions, it strayed from the proper focus.
In these two basic concepts, Dunnigan succeeds in stating two
fundamental requirements of any wargame: realism, the accurate simulation
of events in some sense, and playability, achieved by choosing that sense
and also the focus required to make it meaningful. Achieving these goals
demands a blend of controlled innovation and reliance on proven
techniques. To carry the process through, the designer must first develop the
broad outlines of what he is trying to achieve, collect the facts necessary to
inform and support his modeling, integrate his concepts and facts into a
working model, and refine and document that model.

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES: THE PROFESSIONAL

PERSPECTIVE
Unlike those in the wargaming hobby, professional wargamers work in
a relatively closed society. One organization's games are not freely available
for all to try, critique, and modify. Professional wargame designers may
document their games (usually in classified publications), but they seldom
describe the design process they employed to create them. The handful of
open-source books that deal with professional wargaming (Brewer &
Shubik, Hausrath, Wilson, Allen, and others) discuss the various types of
games and the need for mathematical models to represent combat activity.
For the most part, they fail to address the problem of actually turning a
collection of such models into a game. It is this step that is the essence of
the game designer's art.
In designing a professional wargame, the designer must ask and answer
a set of questions that is somewhat different from those of greatest
importance to the hobby designer. While the latter is concerned primarily
with transmitting his interpretations of a situation to the game's players in
an entertaining and educational format, the former must do more. The
professional wargame must be designed to allow the players not only to
learn, but to teach as well. The key questions for the designer of
professional wargames are the following:

• What does the sponsor want to learn from the players?

• What information does the sponsor want to convey to the players?
Specifically, in educational games, what does the sponsor want the
players to learn?
• Who are the players that should be involved in the game, who are
players that actually will be involved in the game, and what are their
interests or concerns?
 • How can the game best assure that the goals of the sponsor and the
goals of the players will reinforce each other?
• In particular, what information must the game provide the players, and
what information must the play of the game produce to meet the
sponsor's goals?
• Finally, how can the game be structured to make the necessary
information exchange possible, likely, and efficient?

Frequently, designers of professional games are drawn from the ranks

of active duty or retired military personnel, computer programmers, or
operations research analysts. Particularly for those in the latter two classes,
game design presents some insidious pitfalls. Programmers and analysts
have a tendency to address large and complex problems by breaking them
down into smaller, more manageable pieces. The analysis of each of the
subproblems is then integrated to address the overall issue. In the case of
the usual types of formalized problems dealt with in computer
programming or operations analysis, the links among the various
subproblems can be specified and controlled by the analyst himself, and the
unforeseen excluded, almost by definition. The unwitting game designer
who concentrates on getting the pieces right and expects them to fit together
to form a workable system almost as a by-product of the detailed modeling
is more than likely headed for a rude shock the first time the game is
played.
Models are not the game; they are not even the game system. They are
only small components of what is a complex and dynamic communications
process. To understand the fundamentals of game design, it is necessary to
explore that communications process in greater detail.

COMMUNICATION AND THE ART OF WARGAME

DESIGN
We have seen that whether it is a hobby game or a game for
professionals, a wargame is primarily a communications device. In a hobby
wargame, the communication is nearly always one-way, flowing from the
designer to the player. In a professional wargame, on the other hand,
communication is more complex, flowing from a sponsor through the
designer to the players, and from the players, through the analysts, back to
the sponsor. In either case, to understand the fundamental principles of
game design, the prospective designer must have a grasp of the basics of
communication.
Without getting too elaborate or philosophical, it seems clear that
communication requires someone (the sender) who for some reason (the
objective), wants to say something (the message) to someone else (the
receiver). To do so, he requires some means (the medium) to carry the
message, and some procedure (the process) to translate the message into a
form compatible with the medium. If a response is required, the entire
system must be able to work in both directions.
In a professional wargame, the sponsor operates through the game
designer to achieve either research or educational objectives (or both)
through the game. The participants of a professional wargame usually
include not only the players, but a host of observers, analysts, and "expert
witnesses", who are there to help the players or the control team and,
incidentally, to learn what they can. The message flow includes the
information provided to the players in the game’s scenario and data base,
and the decisions and feedback of the players. The tools used in the process
of game play and analysis include mathematical models, control
procedures, and the overall style of the game.
In a hobby wargame, the designer's goals are usually some combination
of educating and entertaining his players (and the almost inevitable game
reviewers). He, too, must provide his players with information and
decision-making opportunities, but he receives only limited immediate
feedback. As in professional games, the tools include the models,
procedures, and style of game play. Table 2 compares and contrasts hobby
and professional games as communications systems.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF WARGAME

DESIGN
Of Dunnigan's ten steps in the game design process, only the first five
can be considered part of game design proper. The remainder can be
considered elements of the development or analysis processes, which will
be described in later chapters. Although not identical to Dunnigan's first
five steps, the fundamental principles of wargame design are similar in
many ways:

• Specify objectives
• Identify players, their game roles, and the decisions they will be
expected to make
• Determine and collect the information they will need to make those
decisions, and, for professional games, identify the information
feedback required to achieve the game’s objectives
• Devise the tools needed to make the process
work
• Document the results of the effort

Let us now look at each of these principles in greater depth.

Table 2. Games as Communication Systems

Specify Objectives
Clearly, in both hobby and professional game design, specifying the
objectives of the game is fundamental to the design process. In hobby
games, the designer is usually relatively free to set his own goals. In
professional wargaming, this initial step is one in which sponsors,
designers, and game analysts must work together closely. They must not
only identify the game's objectives, but also define how and in what ways
the game will help meet those objectives. Often, the sponsor's initial goals
will be unclear, or the utility of gaming for achieving those goals uncertain.
The designer must play a major role in helping to sharpen the definition of
goals, and the game analysts must help identify what gaming can and
cannot contribute. Once the sponsor, designer, and analysts have agreed
upon the definition of the problem, and decided how it may be usefully
addressed through a wargame, the actual design work can begin.
The reasons for designing a hobby wargame can be almost as numerous
as there are game designers. However, virtually all hobby wargames are
intended as some form of intellectual entertainment, with a strong
educational component. Most published hobby games are marketed among
a small and relatively sophisticated audience having strong interests in
military history and current military affairs. The subject of a particular
game is usually chosen because the designer has some interest in a certain
period of history, a particular campaign, or a specific battle. Sometimes the
designer may choose a subject specifically to showcase a new design
concept (the so-called "system in search of a game"). In addition, many
games are designed by hobbyists for their own use, or for the use of a small
group of gaming acquaintances. Few such amateur games are ever
published, although some of the more dedicated and ambitious gamers have
succeeded in finding enough capital to produce their own game. Others may
find an existing publisher willing to take on a free-lance design. Such
"labors of love" result from the designer’s abiding interest in a subject, or
the designer's enjoyment of the design process itself.
In the professional world, the reasons for designing a wargame are
usually expressed in terms of two broad categories of objectives, education
and research. Educational objectives may be further characterized as
focusing primarily on providing an active learning experience of their own,
reinforcing lessons taught in a more traditional academic setting, or
evaluating the extent to which students have assimilated such lessons.
Research objectives may also be divided into three main classes; they may
focus on developing or testing strategies and plans, identifying issues, or
building a consensus among participants. Table 3 summarizes the various
classes of professional game objectives.
Whether research or educational, professional or hobby, each wargame
has its own unique set of objectives. These objectives are a blend of the
various types and classes described above. As a result, although it is easy to
state that a game's objectives play a critical role in its design, it is much
more difficult to describe precisely how that role manifests itself in any
general way. There is no recipe for translating a games objectives into its
mechanics. The principles described in the remainder of this chapter give
some hints about the process, but ultimately the designer's talent dictates
how and how well the translation from objectives to mechanics works.

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 Identifying Players and Decisions
Know Your Audience
As any writer, speaker, or performer is sure to understand, one of the
first principles of communication is "know your audience". In a real sense,
the players of a wargame are its audience, Its objectives are the messages to
be sent and received through the medium of the game, and the sponsor is
the initiator of the communication. The game's players are the sponsor's
correspondents in the process of learning and communication.
Understanding who the players of a wargame may be or should be is thus a
crucial step in the process of designing the game.

Table 3. Professional Wargame Objectives

One frequent source of confusion in discussing games and game

players is the fact that the term player actually has at least two popular
meanings. Each individual decision maker in a game is called a player. On
the other hand, the term is also used to refer to the numbers of independent
sides represented in the game (for example, the usual "two-player" game of
Red against Blue, or the "multi-player" games so frequent in the political-
military arena). Finally, the term player may even be applied to the various
game roles filled by participants (such as the "Blue-NCA player"). The
designer must understand each of the meanings of the word and the
distinctions between them. He must also distinguish between the roles and
activities of actual players (decision makers) and those of the control staff
and umpires.
The first step, then, is to know the people (or at least the characteristics
of the people) who are likely to play the game. In a hobby game, the
designer can often target a particular audience. He can design the game for
those unfamiliar with or new to the hobby, or for the hard-core experienced
wargamer (known in the hobby as a grognard, a French term meaning
"grumbler" and a popular nickname for veterans of Napoleon's Grande
Armée). Some hobby games are designed to appeal to a relatively wide
audience; others are designed for special-interest groups who concentrate
much of their gaming on particular periods or types of warfare.
Professional game designers seldom have the same luxury. It is often
the case that a game's objectives can best be achieved if particular
individuals are involved in particular game roles. For example, a game
dealing with the operations of a navy fleet may achieve its best results when
the fleet commander "plays himself" in the game. Unfortunately, it is just as
often the case that such individuals are not available to play. Thus, the
professional game designer must temper his design by a realistic estimate of
the background and experience (and rank) of those people who are likely to
actually be assigned to play the game.
To achieve the full benefits of a wargame's ability to thrust a player into
a simulation of a real-life operational role, the designer must identify those
roles most important to achieving a game's objectives. He must make the
roles given to the players consistent with the geographic and operational
scope and scale of the game. The most successful game designs provide
players with just such well-defined operational roles. The scope and scale
of the game gives them geographical and operational command
responsibilities commensurate with those roles, and the format and style of
the game provides them with the types and quantity of information
appropriate for carrying out their assigned functions. For example, in an
actual situation a fleet commander may usually receive reports from and
issue orders to his battle group commanders. In a navy wargame of such a
situation, the player representing that fleet commander should do the same.
The simplest example of the kinds of problems that may result when
player roles are not carefully structured to reflect actual operational
responsibilities can be found in an all-too-large number of two-player
hobby board games in which players are required to represent the supreme
command of an entire nation at war, but are also required to maneuver
individual divisions or ships in each theater of conflict. Such games force
the players to spend so much of their time worrying about detailed tactical
options that they must give short shrift to the strategic considerations on
which their real-life counterparts would spend most of their time. Of course,
the players could attempt to give adequate attention to all the various layers
of command functions the game's design imposes on them. Doing so,
however, almost inevitably results in the game's play dragging on for
inordinately long periods of time. Typically, the hobbyist's solution to
games that suffer from this affliction is to bring in more players to divide
the load (as was done in the War in the East game described earlier) or to
let the game gather dust on the shelf (the more frequent, and unfortunate,
solution).
The decision-making level of the players is inextricably linked to the
geopolitical scope of the game and to its scale of aggregation (both
geographic and organizational). All of these elements must, in turn, be
consistent with the game's objectives and with the number of player sides
and the number of people actually involved in representing each side.
Because most professional wargames are so detailed, complex, and
specialized, it is rare that a single individual can play a side in the game.
Typically, teams of several officers staff what are usually referred to as
game "cells". Such cells could represent the watch team in a combat
information center, the battle staff of a fleet commander, or the National
Security Council advising the president. The actual number of people
involved in playing a cell depends on the information processing and
communications requirements the game levies on the cells, and on the
wishes and resources of game sponsors, players, and facilities.
The key point for the designer of professional games is to assign player
cells to command positions of most interest and greatest importance to
achieving the game's objectives. Command levels above and below these
can be assumed by the game control staff. For example, a game focusing
on theater-level operations may demand player cells at fleet and battle-
group levels, with the control staff assuming the roles of the National
Command Authority and of individual ship commanding officers. The
difficulties of finding a single opponent, much less someone willing to
serve as an umpire, handicap hobby games in this respect, and are often the
source of the difficulties that plague the definitions of player roles in such
games.
 Keep Players Out of the Weeds
Another problem is the natural, indeed the inescapable, tendency for a
game's designer to include more detail than is really appropriate for the
command levels he is trying to represent in the game. What can make this
problem worse, especially in the hobby arena, is the fact that there is often
an even stronger tendency on the part of the players to desire greater and
greater levels of microscopic details. It is a well-known phenomenon
among hobby game designers that many if not most players want to exhibit
their tactical skills during the play of the game, and are not content with
demonstrating their strategic acumen. For such players, it is not enough to
order two battle groups to strike an enemy-held island—they often want the
pleasure of choosing the individual squadrons to make up each attacking
wave and the strike routes those squadrons will take.
A similar phenomenon can often be observed in the play of navy
wargames. The difficulties of getting senior officers such as fleet
commanders to spend the time required to play a wargame often result in
using junior officers to play such roles. Usually, these officers are
unfamiliar with their game roles, and sometimes may even be
uncomfortable with those roles as a result of that unfamiliarity. Unless the
game's design and control group work to overcome this problem, players
may naturally begin to exhibit more and more interest in aspects of the
game with which they are more familiar and comfortable.
This phenomenon of "getting lost in the weeds" is usually not only
inappropriate to the players' game roles, but often disrupts the flow of the
game. When a player who is supposed to represent a fleet commander
spends inordinate amounts of time discussing the ingress routes for a flight
of tactical strike aircraft or arguing about which evasive tactics such aircraft
should employ when bounced by enemy interceptors, it not only slows
down the pace of the game, but also prevents him from devoting the careful
thought to higher-level strategic issues that his role should require.
Once outside the game environment, designers and control personnel
frequently decry these tendencies. During actual play, however, they too
often feel compelled to bow to the player's wishes. Sometimes such lower-
level discussions and debates are useful and even crucial to achieving a
game's objectives. More often, however, success of a game will depend
strongly on avoiding too many such diversions. The first step in solving the
problem is identifying its true source.
Typically, players begin operating outside the bounds of their game
roles as a result of a failure of context and a subsequent decrease in player
enjoyment of the gaming process. Unless a particular command role is, in
reality, uninteresting or unchallenging, reproducing it will provide an
informative and engrossing game experience. If the re-creation of roles is
poor, however, it can leave a player with too little to think about and do, and
so force him to look for "fun" in other directions. Unless a game can avoid
this problem completely, it must provide alternative means of informing and
diverting players to prevent them from mucking about in the details of play.
In professional games, one frequently used approach is to schedule a series
of seminars to provide the players useful information during the periods
when they might otherwise find too little to do.

Give Players Synthetic Experience

There is another side to the coin of grasping and holding a player's
interest in performing his game role. It is simply not much fun and seldom
very informative for a player to be required to do things he simply does not
know how to do. If a player is unfamiliar with his game role, the designer
must design the game in a way that helps the player carry out his role
competently. The key to doing this lies in providing players a level of
information and a structure for game play that gives them, in a sense,
synthetic experience in their game roles.
The structure of the game provides the player with a framework for
understanding what decisions he must make, what factors he should
consider in making those decisions, and what form the decisions should
take. The information provided to the player should be organized in a way
that gives him a sense of the possible effects of the important factors, along
with enough extraneous details to make the task of sorting out precisely
what is important sufficiently difficult to be realistically challenging and
educational.
During its history, the board-gaming hobby has developed several
approaches to providing players with enough synthetic experience to allow
them to feel comfortable in their roles. The early games of the Avalon Hill
Game Company (the so-called Avalon Hill Classics) shared very similar
systems for movement and combat. Indeed, players of these early games
such as D-Day, Afrika Korps, and Waterloo, easily memorized the Combat
Results Table that dictated the outcomes of battles and was common to all
the games.
As a result of their virtually identical basic systems, players of the
Avalon Hill Classics found that certain fundamental tactics were essentially
transferable among the games—that three-to-one odds would guarantee the
destruction or displacement of the enemy and the "five-to-one, surrounded"
attack would automatically eliminate him. Similarly, the physical
characteristics of the hexagon grid dictated how to achieve the required
positions and concentrations of force. Once these fundamental tactics were
learned, players could focus their attention on the strategic and operational
contexts of the individual games. These latter could be discerned principally
by studying the victory conditions and the differences in relative force
capabilities, both between the opposing sides, and among the individual
units. Sometimes it even helped to know a bit of the history of whatever
operations the game represented.
Layered over this relatively straightforward underlying structure was
the "chrome", the little details added to try to represent some specific,
critical elements of the particular campaign or battle. For example, D-Day
added rules for Allied amphibious operations and airpower, and German
fortifications; Afrika Korps introduced detailed (for the time) supply
requirements and units representing supply trains and dumps. These
complications were attempts to introduce greater realism and provide the
players with new challenges from game to game, but they avoided
overtaxing the player's capacity to deal with too many new ideas at once.
The early Avalon Hill Game Company products remain prominent
examples of Dunnigan's two principles of "keep it simple" and "plagiarize".
They were extremely successful in their day, and remain popular even now,
despite, or perhaps because of, their relatively simplistic treatments. Those
early games created a hobby virtually from thin air.
Even in today's world of increasing complexity in its games and greater
experience and sophistication in its practitioners, the wargaming hobby
continues to find multiple games built around the same basic system an
attractive commodity. This fact is reflected, for example, in the popularity
of Game Designer's Workshop's Third World War and Assault series,
Victory Games's Sixth Fleet series, and the Avalon Hill Game Company's
Squad Leader and Advanced Squad Leader families.
Perhaps surprisingly, the company that Dunnigan built, Simulations
Publications Incorporated, took a different tack, one that seemed to apply
Dunnigan's principles to a lesser extent than exhibited by earlier Classic.
Simulations Publications, stressed the production of large numbers of very
different games about diverse topics ranging from tactical combat on the
Eastern Front of World War II (Tactical Game 3) to strategic operations in
the ancient world (The Fall of Rome). The fundamental systems of such
games, not surprisingly, tended to differ dramatically from one another.
To simplify the learning process, Simulations Publications tended to
focus more on similarity of form rather than substance. Under the influence
of art director Redmond Simonsen, Simulations Publications’s games
adopted a functional graphical style designed to simplify the player’s
information-processing problem. In many games, especially those published
in Strategy and Tactics magazine, players could find a discussion of the
historical background of the campaign or battle represented by the game to
give them an understanding of its real-life context. There were often
designer’s and player's notes provided to help the player understand the
rationale behind the game system and to provide him with some helpful
hints on playing the game.
While successful for a time at increasing the numbers of games
available to hobbyists and encouraging design innovations, the Simulations
Publications approach was less successful at bringing new players into the
hobby's ranks or at allowing experienced players to develop greater
expertise. Instead, the number and diversity of increasingly complex games
led to the formation of small, often isolated, pockets of specialists who
could play one or a handful of games very competently, but were totally out
of their element when trying to play something different. Experience
became less and less transferable.
 The end result of this process was that most games produced by
Simulations Publications, Incorporated were not played by most people,
even by those who bought the games through subscriptions to the Strategy
& Tactics game-in-a-magazine. The new approach had responded to player
demands for more games, on more topics, in more detail, but it had failed to
help the players assimilate what was needed to play the games well.
Wargames became even more elitist, and more work than fun. The almost
overwhelming levels of complexity of some of Simulations Publications’s
later games exacerbated the requirements that players adopt a multitude of
different command levels and roles during game play
The demise of Simulations Publications, Incorporated in the late 1970s
was followed by an increasing realization on the part of game designers that
realistic games could be designed so that players could and would play
them, but only by stressing their role-playing aspects. Many computer
wargame designs, prominently those of Australia's Strategic Studies
Group's Carriers at War and Europe Ablaze, and Simulations Canada's
Fifth Eskadra and Seventh Fleet, have stressed this "viewpoint oriented"
approach to design.
Unfortunately, computer-game designers, perhaps even more so than
their board-game counterparts who have a long-established body of
experience, often fail to provide players with the synthetic experience
needed to play the games competently. Often this failure results from the
designer's overly conscientious attempts to conceal from the player
information that, in real life, participants would not know, or at least not
know precisely. Computer-game designers tightly resist providing the
players with precise and detailed knowledge of the parameters and inner
workings of the game system and its models of reality. The design failure
lies in opting to provide players no information or "helpful hints" at all. As
a result, frustration levels can be high as players attempt to learn what does
and does not work in the game, suffering one embarrassing defeat after
another at the hands of the machine. While it is difficult to argue with a
philosophy that says players should not know more than their real-life
counterparts could, designers must also remember that most players have
not reached their command positions only after the years of operational and
exercise experience enjoyed by their real-life counterparts. The designer
who fails to provide his players with the synthetic experience needed to
play the game has not designed his game properly.
From the player's perspective, the play of the game must be
challenging, involving, and educational, but not impossible and frustrating.
Because the players are the critical elements of a game, the game's designer
must build his game to help the players suspend their disbelief, much as a
novelist would. But the game designer must go even further, getting his
players to contribute actively to building and participating in the fiction.
In order to accomplish this, the designer must, of necessity, make the
players want to play the game, or at least want to play it well once they are
involved. To accomplish this, in turn, the designer must work to help the
players play competently, if not well, as quickly as possible. He cannot
afford to allow the players to feel that they simply cannot cope with the
demands the game places on them, or they will simply stop playing. Thus,
the designer must understand his players, devise a means to help them
suspend their disbelief, provide them with the synthetic experience they
need to play reasonably well, and also give them the ability to assess their
performance during game play. He accomplishes these goals by providing
the players with the information they need, the mechanics for turning that
information into decisions, and the outcomes of those decisions.

Define Information Requirements

Good wargame design should enable game designers, sponsors, players,
analysts, and other participants to communicate with each other, often in an
iterative process. The designer begins this process by placing the players in
the midst of a situation that requires them to make decisions. This setting is
commonly referred to as the game's scenario. In addition to the setting,
players must also receive information about the people and objects their
decisions will affect. They must have data allowing them to estimate
friendly and enemy capabilities, levels of supply, and other important
elements of forces and physical conditions. They must also be able to form
some judgment about what might be the possible outcomes of various
decisions they may choose to make. These latter types of information
comprise the game's data base. Finally, there is other information, in the
form of updates on the status and operations of friendly and enemy forces,
that arises during the play of the game.

Scenarios

The term scenario has its origins in the theatrical world, where it
usually refers to an outline or synopsis of the plot of a play, novel, or other
work. Wargame scenarios set the scene for player decisions and provide for
specific updates in the situation during play in order to alter or influence the
developing situation and to elicit player responses to specific items of
interest. By defining the setting and scope of player decisions, scenarios can
direct the course of a game into either very narrow or fairly broad channels,
depending on the game's goals.
For example, a tactical, educational game dealing with the employment
of surface-to-surface missiles may use a simple scenario in which a single
friendly ship is tasked to engage a single enemy ship known to be operating
in a well-defined region. In such a scenario, geopolitics, war aims, and
other deep strategic considerations may be superfluous. A research game
exploring warfighting and strategy issues for a global conflict will require a
scenario focusing on just such high-level factors. Player decisions in the
first case will be limited to those required to maneuver against, target, and
destroy the opponent with surface-to-surface missiles. In the latter game,
players may have far greater latitude in choosing the theaters of military
action and the forces committed to those theaters.
Because the guidelines, bounds, and subtle influences of scenarios can
become straitjackets to players' decisions, the game designer must be sure
that the scenario allows the players enough decision-making flexibility to
let the game meet its objectives. Because a game's objectives should focus
on exploring the factors and reasoning that affect specific types of
decisions, scenarios should be designed to minimize artificial restrictions
and allow players as much freedom of choice as possible in making those
decisions.
For example, one goal of a game may be to study the factors affecting
the relative allocation of navy forces to the defense of sea lines of
communication and to forward offensive operations. In this case, the
scenario must at least define a potential threat to the sea lines of
communication and a potential benefit to offensive operations so that
choices between the alternatives may be made for strategic or operational
reasons, not merely by default. Similarly, if a game seeks to explore
operations in a global war with the Soviet Union, scenarios that assume
away the existence of tactical nuclear weapons may introduce severe biases
in player decisions. With no possibility of a nuclear threat, players may
operate their forces in ways that are highly unlikely if the threat of
escalation is a real one.
In hobby games, scenarios typically define the area of operations the
forces involved on both sides, and the victory conditions or objectives. In
historical games, particularly those dealing with situations that saw one of
the combatants wield a decisive and overwhelming advantage, designers
often include hypothetical or "what-if" scenarios to provide players with a
more balanced, competitive game. Often, these hypothetical scenarios
assume that some critical decision taken before the time represented in the
game had gone a different way. The designer then projects some estimate of
the effects of this change of decision, and designs his scenario to take these
effects into account.
One striking example of this idea is seen in France, 1940. In this game
of the German blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries, the
historical scenario proved as much of a cakewalk as the actual events. To
make for a more interesting game, designer Dunnigan included a wealth of
what-if scenarios, ranging from a French decision to forgo the Maginot Line
in favor of creating more armored divisions, to a commitment of greater
British air power to the campaign.
Designers of professional wargames have fewer opportunities to allow
the same group of players to replay a game under different scenario
assumptions. Nevertheless, research into the roles, desirable characteristics,
and evaluation of scenarios for professional wargames (and other types of
research, such as systems analysis) is ongoing.2 For game designers, the
most important elements of this research deal with identifying some of the
basic components of a scenario and defining some fundamental principles
of scenario design.
Simply stated, a scenario should include all essential information about
the game's setting and subsequent planned modifications to it, and should
contain no superfluous information. For example, a game dealing with
submarine tactics in the Arctic will seldom require a scenario that defines
the balance of land-based tactical air power in the Indian Ocean. The trick
for the designer is to determine what is essential and what superfluous.
The scenario is the common starting point from which sponsors,
players, analysts, and other game participants address the goals of the game.
As such, the scenario must provide a description of the context or
background from which it arises, including the general physical and
geopolitical situation. It should also include the attitudes, goals, and
intentions of the actors involved, whether friendly, enemy, or third-party. Of
course, such information should be limited in quantity and quality to reflect
real-world uncertainty and inaccuracy.
Hobby games, especially those dealing with the interaction of politics,
diplomacy, and military force, often include some provisions for the actions
of the players affecting the attitudes and activities of non-player nations or
forces. Designer Richard Berg is perhaps best known for his use of this
device, typically incorporated in a table of "Random Events" that may occur
to plague (literally) the unsuspecting player. One of his early games,
Conquistador, dealt with the European exploration of the New World and
included events such as:

• Costly European War Drains Treasury

• Graft and Corruption Rife
• Guile and Treachery Obtain "Rutter" (a Rutter was a set of sailing
instructions for traveling to a particular location; in the game, players
need a Rutter to sail their ships around Cape Horn)
• Natives Resentful of European Intrusion.

Other games, such as Third Reich, allow players to choose some

possible modifications to the historical situation, and the interactions of
their choices can have specific, and dramatic, effects on the game
conditions.
In Third Reich, ten numbered chits were used, from which the British
player and the German player each chose one, which could be played at
some time during the game. The meaning of the chits differed for each side.
For the Germans, chit number 7 read, in part "Turkey enters war on Axis
side as German Minor Ally provided Germany has invaded Russia and
currently has an advantage in combat factors on the Eastern Front." For the
British, the same chit read "Allied Strategic Bombing concentrates' on
German crucial industry," a contingency that doubled the effectiveness of
Allied strategic bombers. More interestingly, because there was only one
chit of each number, "if the British player selects option No. 7, he knows
and can relay to his Russian ally that there is no danger of a Turkish
invasion because the German will be unable to pick his own option No. 7.
This can be chalked up to successful espionage and intelligence efforts."3
In addition to background information, scenarios should also include
guidance to each player or cell about the specific objectives or missions that
those players may be called upon to pursue. Command relationships among
players and cells and between players and control should be clearly spelled
out, as should the assignment of forces and support. When updates to any or
all of these elements of a scenario are planned, such updates themselves
should be considered part of the scenario, though obviously they should not
be provided to all the players beforehand. Similarly, if the control team
must respond to player actions or requests (such as requests for nuclear
release) in specific ways for the game objectives to be met, such
instructions are considered part of the scenario.
Because most hobby board games are designed to be played by a single
person on each side, the modeling of command relationships is seldom
needed. Some games, however, have included command subsystems to
restrict the activities of units in the game in order to more accurately reflect
the limitations of the real world commander, despite the virtual
omnipotence of the player. Such systems (Frederick the Great, Terrible
Swift Sword, and Assault, for example) have been applied to all levels of
warfare. Miniatures gamers have also developed elaborate systems of
command and communications for their multiplayer affairs.
Hobby games have a fundamental difficulty with updating scenario
conditions during play, again because of the all-knowing position most
players enjoy. The major exception to this problem arises with computer
games. In games like Seventh Fleet, the player never knows when his
superiors will begin the war or even escalate it to nuclear levels. Without
such use of computers or human umpires, hobby games are limited in the
scenario flexibility they can achieve. The control staffs available to most
professional games alleviate much of this problem.

Principles of Scenario Design

The primary components of a wargame scenario are listed below.
Designing a scenario consists largely of tailoring the components listed to
create an environment in which the objectives of the game can be met.
Good scenario-design practice involves four fundamental principles:
understanding the problem, building from the bottom up, documenting
choices, and communicating results. The first and most basic principle—
understanding the problem—is perhaps the one most frequently violated,
possibly because it is so obvious. As with everything else in a game's
design' the scenario begins with the game's objectives. But just
understanding the objectives is not enough; the scenario designer must also
understand how those objectives are to be met in the game. He must
identify the kinds of player activities and decision-making opportunities
that are required to meet the game's objectives, and then he must ensure that
those activities and opportunities can arise.

Components of Scenarios
• Background
Situation
Attitudes
Intentions
Goals
 Physical conditions
• Objectives or missions
All players and cells
• Command relationships
Among players and cells
Between players and control
• Resources
Force structure
Available support
• Updates during play, and control team instructions

For example, in the surface-to-surface missile game described earlier,

possible game objectives of teaching proper radar-targeting procedures
require that the target can be detected. The scenario writer must choose a
physical and tactical environment to ensure this possibility. Placing the
target close to a shoreline so that it is difficult to distinguish its radar
reflection from the land clutter may teach valuable lessons about real-world
tactical possibilities but will make it difficult to achieve the radar-targeting
goals. .
Once the game's objectives and the means for achieving them are
thoroughly understood, the scenario writer may begin. to structure the flow
of game play to allow the means and ends to come together without forcing
the players to follow a single, rigid path. A critical node in the flow of a
game, at which a players decisions will lead inevitably down one or another
of several major alternative paths (to order a battle force into a fjord or to
hold it in the open ocean; to launch a strike immediately or await the
enemy's attack first), may be called a decision point. Such decision points
must be defined in enough detail to allow players to identify a realistic
range of alternatives while restricting that range to a reasonably limited type
or number so that the game's control personnel can be adequately prepared
to evaluate any player decision.
The key to this process is a bottom-up hierarchical approach. The
designer begins by identifying the specific sorts of decision points required
to meet game objectives. He then must step back in time to determine the
possible sequences of events that could lead to such decision points. In this
process, the designer seeks to identify critical events, decisions, or actions
that are required to reach the particular decision point and that are beyond
the control of the players. Such events are then incorporated into the
scenario. In many cases, these considerations shape both the scenario
updates during play and the control-team instructions.
As an example, consider a professional wargame designed to explore
global warfighting issues. A critical issue in any global war is the decision
to employ nuclear weapons in any form. It may be the case that allowing
such weapons to be used at all would be contrary to achieving many game
objectives or would make the combat-evaluation tasks of the control
personnel too difficult or speculative. One solution to this problem, and
unfortunately the one most frequently employed, is for the scenario to
explicitly tell the players that nuclear weapons will not be used. A better
alternative might be to acknowledge their existence and possible
employment in the scenario background information provided to the
players, but to instruct the control team to refuse nuclear release should
players request it. The overall effect, that nuclear weapons are not used, is
the same. However, the latter approach will allow both the investigation of
conditions under which nuclear release might be considered and the
exploration of effects such possibilities might have on planning and
operations during the period of conventional warfare.
The bottom-up approach allows the scenario designer to build in and
constantly monitor the completeness, coherence, and credibility of the
scenario. A complete scenario provides all those involved in the game and
its analysis with the information they require to carry out their roles. If a
theater commander is not given a mission, the scenario is incomplete. If an
analyst is not told why the war begins, the scenario is incomplete. In
addition, the completeness of the scenario allows participants and future
students of the game to "appreciate the objectives and scope of the . . .
[game] as well as the subtle issues it poses,"4 and to separate those issues
built into the game by the scenario from those issues arising during the play
of the game itself.
Coherence of scenarios means that the scenario assumptions must be
logically consistent, but it implies more than mere consistency. A coherent
scenario ties together all the elements of the game, from its objectives, to its
mechanics, to its analysis. If an important objective of the game is the
exploration of under-ice antisubmarine warfare operations, a coherent
scenario will assure not only that such operations will take place, but also
that they will take place in ways that can be handled by the game's
mechanics and that can be recorded and interpreted by the game's analysts.
Finally, a scenario must be credible in the sense that game participants
and later audiences for its results are willing to suspend their inherent
disbelief in hypothetical situations. The scenario represents a view of a
possible reality. That reality need not be the most likely one, but should
generally be a possible one. As Carl Builder suggests, the starting point
should be current reality, and the development of the scenario's fiction
should proceed logically from that reality according to the documented
decisions and assumptions of the scenario designer.5 Some elements of the
scenario world may be perceived as extremely unlikely, if not impossible
(as for example, the games played at the Naval War College between World
War I and World War II that pitted the U.S. and British fleets against one
another). However, if those elements most applicable to the objectives of
the game are perceived as important and in need of exploration, the
suspension of disbelief can still be achieved. (The need to study tactical
alternatives against a superior fleet using existing systems allowed players
to overcome their inherent skepticism about a U.S./U.K. war at sea.)
Throughout the scenario design process, it is important for the designer
of a scenario for a professional wargame to document his decisions. He
should record the reasons behind his choices of assumptions, the factors
included or excluded from the scenario, the use of particular sources of
information, and any other decisions he makes. Thorough documentation
allows the designer to be sure of just what went into the game, especially if
there are likely to be questions about what comes out of it. And thorough
documentation provides a solid basis for the final and (in many ways) most
crucial elements of the scenario process.
To be of any use, a game scenario must be communicated to the people
who will use it. There are basically five classes of users: game sponsors,
game-control personnel, game players, game analysts, and future audiences
for game reports or other summaries. Sponsors need to be sure that the
scenario will facilitate meeting the game’s objectives. Control personnel
need to understand the context of the game and the prerogatives and
limitations under which they must operate. Players need the same
information as control personnel, but it should be constrained to reflect their
less-than-perfect knowledge of their game world. Analysts need to know
not only the full story of what and why, the "ground truth," but also the
story as told to players and control, so that they may interpret the effects of
information constraints. Finally, the future consumers of the game's issues
must know not only the context of the game, but also how to distinguish
scenario input from game-play output. Communicating effectively to such
diverse groups requires not only literary and graphic skills, but first and
foremost the complete information provided by thorough documentation,
subsets of which can be tailored for particular groups.

The key elements of the scenario design process are listed below.

Elements of Scenario Design

• Understanding the problem
Game objectives
How scenario affects achievement
• Building from the bottom up
Define decisions points
Hierarchy of information and assumption
Completeness, coherence, credibility
• Documenting choices
Reasons for assumptions and decisions
Sources of information
• Communicating results
Sponsors, control, players. analysts, audience

Data Base
As described above, a wargame scenario contains largely qualitative
information about the state of the world in which the game takes place. The
data base of the game contains the quantitative information about
capabilities of forces, levels of logistics, and relative likelihoods of the
occurrence and outcome of interactions between forces. The data base links
the scenario and the mechanics of the game. It must provide all the inputs
required to allow the game's models to reproduce the qualitative scenario
conditions and to generate outcomes of interactions.
But a good data base is more than raw, unprocessed inputs. Many
current professional games suffer from the fact that players are provided a
mass of raw data that contains much superfluous information. In turn,
important data are difficult to find or require detailed calculations that are
impractical for the player to carry out during the game. Players representing
a battle force or fleet commander seldom need to know the cruise speed of a
Harpoon surface-to-surface missile. On the other hand, they often want to
know the chances of a successful Harpoon strike against a group of enemy
ships.
The data base provided to the players should be tailored to their game
role, to the types of decisions they should be making, and to the types of
information they need to make those decisions. More detailed data are
required by control teams and umpires and can be made available to the
players if the situation warrants it. Furthermore, actual commanders are
likely to have access to quantitative analyses of raw data that would give
them estimates of capabilities or chances of success in many situations. The
shortage of similar capabilities in a game makes the player's job much
harder. The use of actual operations analysts to play their real-life roles in
professional wargames is one solution. Another is the use of extensive
preprocessing of raw data. Employment of either of these options makes for
a more realistic and more efficient decision-making process. Preprocessing
data can also greatly help in the suspension of disbelief. If players are aware
of the range of possible outcomes of their decisions and have some idea of
relative likelihoods, they will be more willing to accept an unlikely result as
the "fortunes of war" rather than a dastardly plot by the control team.
Most hobby games are, by their very nature, almost immune to this
problem because the players themselves must resolve all interactions and so
must have access to the pertinent data. Computer games can relieve the
players of this responsibility, but also deprive them of much of the data they
need to make informed game decisions. As described earlier, this approach
also deprives players of their needed synthetic experience and can lead to
many frustrating experiences. In a very real sense, board games provide
their players with the pertinent preprocessed data, and computer games
typically do not.
A simple preprocessing technique that can be applied in many areas of
both hobby and professional gaming involves developing graphs for various
types of interactions. These graphs can display the sensitivity of outcomes
to uncertainties in critical factors. Players can be provided with such graphs
and can make decisions based on their perception of the values of the key
parameters. This perception can be based on their own experience, on
analysis, and on information provided in the data base, or on a combination
of all of those. The actual interaction is then resolved using the same graphs
but with inputs selected by the umpire (or computer) using pre-chosen
values or pre-defined procedures.
For example, figure 7 shows a generic graph depicting aircraft attrition
against different levels of air-defense capability. For each level of
capability, a range of uncertainty is shown. The player may be planning to
strike a target that his intelligence personnel estimate to have a low
defensive capability. He can then determine that his losses are likely to lie
between X and Y. If the strike is made and losses of level Z occur, instead
of complaining about an unrealistic model, he may be led to believe that his
intelligence people underestimated enemy defenses.
Of course, preprocessing data in this manner requires a great deal of
preparation prior to game play. In detailed tactical-level games in which
there are large numbers of parameters to vary over wide intervals, extensive
preprocessing may be impractical. However, the computing resources
readily available to most professional wargaming facilities are powerful
enough that graphic displays for at least some aspects of game play can be
developed fairly easily and quickly. Such an approach reduces the actual
time spent playing the game by limiting the real-time use of complex
models, relegating those to the preprocessing phase of game design. Actual
game play would then only require random number draws to access specific
results, or special model runs for cases well beyond the bounds of the
preprocessed data. Similarly, hobby computer games might be adapted to
display some of their resolution routines in a similar form, allowing players
some reasonable amount of information about what they might expect.
 Devise the Tools
If the scenario sets the stage for the game, and the data base provides
the information required for players to make decisions, the game's
mechanics allow those decisions to be implemented and inform the players
about their effects. Wargame mechanics may be considered as two
interrelated systems: models and procedures. The models translate data and
decisions into game events. Procedures define in game terms what players
can and cannot
do and why, sequence the game events to allow for accurate recreation of
cause and effect, and manage the flow of information to and from players
and control.

Air Defence Capability

Figure 7. An example of preprocessed data for wargames.

Models
Wargames use models as representations of all the aspects of reality the
game may be required to simulate. These models may take various forms.
Many nineteenth-century wargames relied largely on the judgment of
experienced professional soldiers and sailors. Modern professional games
often employ complex mathematical expressions programmed into high-
speed computers. Modern hobby games use a combination of unit ratings
and tabulated battle outcomes (combat results tables) chosen by comparing
opposing ratings.
 A professional wargames models and the results they produce are best
considered as inputs to the game, devices to move game play along rather
than measures to evaluate player success or failure. Specific model needs
vary from game to game. Some of the broad categories of models most
likely to be required in wargames are the following:
• Physical environment
• Kinematics
• Intelligence collection and dissemination
• Command, control, and communications
• Sensors
• Weapons
• Logistics
No matter what the form or subject of wargame models, good ones
share the following key characteristics:
• They accurately reflect factors most prominent for player decision
levels
• They are flexible enough to deal with unusual decisions
• They are adaptable to changes in the data base
• They are stochastic to the extent reality is stochastic
• They are documented to allow others to understand assumptions and
algorithms

Chief among these characteristics is the need to reflect accurately the

influence of those factors most prominent in the decision processes of the
game's player roles. Other factors, many of which may be important to the
outcome of an actual event, are aggregated rather than assumed away. For
example, a battle-force commander may determine the size and
composition of an air strike. Attacker and defender tactics during the strike,
while critical to the outcome in the real world, are beyond the direct
influence of the commander and so may be aggregated in the wargame's
model of strike resolution.
There are two basic approaches to using models in wargames. The first
approach employs detailed models to preprocess data before the game is
played (as described in the previous section). Complex calculations or
judgments are used to prepare tables and graphs of outcomes as simple
functions of player decisions. These tables and graphs become the models
actually used during the game play. This approach was popular in
professional gaming before the advent of high-speed computers. For
example, a wargame employed during the late nineteenth or early twentieth
centuries might use data from fleet gunnery ranges, ballistics calculations,
and measures of armor penetrability to devise tables showing the
probability that a round fired from a battleship’s main battery would disable
the turret of an opposing ship at various ranges. This approach has the
advantage of transparency (players can easily see what the relative odds of
various outcomes are), ease of use, and direct applicability to player
decision making. It has the disadvantage of being limited to pre-calculated
cases, requiring umpires to interpolate or extrapolate from the given cases
when circumstances in the game differ from the assumed conditions.
Modern computing capabilities allow professional wargame designers
the option of using a second modeling approach. This approach uses the
complex models to calculate results during actual game play. If a battle
group is attacked by missile-carrying aircraft, the precise composition of the
opposing forces and their sensor and weapon capabilities can be entered
into a computer model. The model can account for battle-group formation,
attack spacing, and many other parameters. It can calculate losses to aircraft
and different types of damage to each target ship. The use of such detailed
models has the advantage of appearing to better replicate the precise
conditions of game play in the assessment of outcomes. Nevertheless, the
price to be paid is that the players can no longer see the relative odds
generated by the models and so find it difficult to incorporate expectations
about outcomes into their decisions. This is the problem seen so often in the
case of hobby computer games.
Another disadvantage of the use of detailed, complex models during
game play is often a severe slowing down of play. This phenomenon can
result from the need to provide detailed models with detailed inputs, which
in turn require more detailed planning on the part of the players. Inevitably,
such micro-modeling of reality results in more time spent on processing
interactions.
Thus, when surveying the models available for use or defining those
that need to be devised, the wargame designer must balance the advantages
and disadvantages of the two modeling approaches. Part of the art of game
design lies in choosing the best mix of approaches and models to maximize
advantages while playing down the problems. Often, however, the design
solution must go beyond the models themselves to the procedures through
which those models are applied to the play of the game.

Procedures

Scenarios, data bases, and models are all necessary components of a

wargame, but it is the procedures for their orchestrated use that set the game
in motion and keep it on track. These procedures are specified by what are
sometimes known as the game's rules, and in professional wargames are
usually monitored by a team of umpires, referees, or controllers. These
umpires and the procedures they employ have three main functions. These
functions, derived from Frank McHugh's seminal work, are listed below.6

Functions of Procedures and Umpires

• Monitor player actions
Translate player actions into game terms
Enforce the rules of the game
Prevent physically unrealistic actions or sequences of events
• Assess interactions
Use models, data, and rules
Use judgment when required
• Inform players about action outcomes
Employ realistic limitations
Introduce "fog of war"

Umpires and procedures translate player decisions into terms that can be
understood by the game's models. If a battle-group commander decides to
launch an air strike, there must be a procedure for determining which
aircraft are available for the strike and how long they will take to reach their
target. The umpires must enforce the dictates of the game's rules and
models. If the rules require a ship to lose its weapons capability after a
missile hit, the umpires must ensure that this requirement takes effect.
 Umpires and procedures must also prevent physically unrealistic
actions or sequences of events. Ships may not sail over land, nor may a
column of tanks cross a river before a bridge is built to carry them.
In carrying out these functions, however, umpires must avoid forcing
the players to play the game the way the umpire or sponsor would have
played it. Procedures must establish wide yet realistic bounds within which
the players must be free to try their own ideas. This is especially true for
most hobby games, which must be played without the benefit of an umpire,
forcing the designer to be far more imaginative in estimating possible
player actions and far more rigorous in defining procedures to resolve them.
Assessing the outcomes of game events is the second major task of
procedures and umpires. Player decisions about the movement and use of
forces, sensors, and weapons must be evaluated for the possible interactions
they might cause. Typically, the results of such interactions are assessed
using the game's models and the judgment of the umpires. Procedures for
determining model inputs and interpreting model results are often required
when special-purpose models are not developed for a specific game.
As an example of these effects, consider the basic system of battle-
damage assessment used at the Naval War College for many of their major
games in the early 1980s. The standard format for battle-damage
assessment revolved around a small team (generally no more than five
people) of battle-damage assessors, who used a combination of
microcomputer warfare models and look-up tables to produce outcomes for
all interactions in the game.
The method used by this battle-damage assessment (BDA) team is
relatively easy to describe in superficial terms, but is more difficult to
understand. Game controllers would initiate an assessment by bringing the
BDA team an interaction sheet, which described the forces, dispositions,
weapons, tactics, and any special conditions that applied to the engagement.
The BDA team then used their models, data, and professional experience
and expertise to evaluate the engagement and produce an outcome.
Sometimes the precise inputs to a model were skewed from those given
on the interaction sheet to account for the peculiarities of a particular
model, or for certain important operational or tactical factors not explicitly
incorporated into the model's mathematics. Sometimes the outputs of a
model were also skewed to account for the same sorts of factors. The final
result of the assessment was then presented to the game director for
approval. The director was responsible for ensuring that assessments were
reasonable and also consistent with the sponsor's objectives for the game.
This approach to assessment mechanics differs from the rule-based
systems typical of hobby board games. Although the assessors use rules,
models, and charts as aids, they rely on their own knowledge, beliefs, and
expertise to determine the outcomes of the engagements, and thus to control
and direct the experience of the game's players. This "free-Kriegsspiel"
style of assessment differs from the "rigid Kriegsspiel" philosophy, which
controls the experience of the players through a rigid set of objectively
applied rules and procedures that restrict player options and, within some
small range of random numbers, strictly determines results.
The War College approach has several advantages over the apparently
more objective and rigorous techniques seen more frequently in hobby
games. The assessors can respond appropriately to nearly any action the
players might take, even to unanticipated ones. This flexibility reduces the
need to place artificial constraints on the players, allows results to account
for a wide variety of special circumstances, and facilitates the easy
integration of the latest information and interpretation of data without the
need for massive updates of data bases and models.
Unfortunately, the approach also has some shortcomings. Because it
uses a small team of human experts, the technique requires a significant
amount of time to assess large numbers of interactions. The results of the
assessments are essentially not reproducible, nor may they be consistent
over the course of even a single game. The "model" it uses is difficult to
validate because it is not merely a collection of mathematical formulas, but
also contains that critical subjective element of assessor expertise,
experience and instinct.
The biggest concern about the free method of assessment may be this
tendency to produce results of uneven and inconsistent detail, sometimes
apparently incommensurate with the importance of an operation (simple
interactions being much easier to resolve in such detail than massive
battles). Because of the natural tendency to equate level of detail with
degree of importance, such effects could mislead players and possibly skew
their decisions and the overall outcomes of the game in ways difficult to
perceive. Fortunately, the damage assessors at the Naval War College
correctly perceive BDA as an input to the game and not an output.
Assessors, better than any of the other game participants, know that the
results of the game should not be measured by BDA box scores.
Unfortunately, the fact is that most players of professional wargames
must measure the success or failure of their decisions precisely by such box
scores, or at least by the broad results of the BDA. In this way, BDA
propagates through the game both in the effects it has on subsequent
decisions the players will make, and also on the players' attitudes toward the
"realism", and so the usefulness, of their game experience.
From the inside, the War College method is quite reasonable. The
players, however, almost never see things from the inside. Instead, they
must base their opinions and decisions on the results of BDA, the basis of
which they too often do not understand. The problem seems to center
around the difficulty players have in distinguishing unexpected results from
unrealistic ones. In some cases, the players simply do not understand the
capabilities of the systems or forces involved; in others, an "expected value"
mindset may make it difficult to accept results that are drawn from the tails
of the distribution.
Finally, players must be informed about the results of interactions. Most
hobby board games are open games. They provide players full information.
Hobby computer games and many professional games limit a player's
knowledge of the results of interactions in ways consistent with his ability
to learn about the actual situation. If there are no sensors available to
determine the effectiveness of a long-range missile strike, the players
should receive no information. If the main sources of damage reports for an
aircraft strike on an enemy surface force are aircrew debriefs, the potential
inaccuracies of such debriefs should be specified in the game rules and
applied by the umpires. Time delays for the acquisition, interpretation, and
communication of intelligence reports should be similarly specified in the
game’s rules.
Because actual military operations are often plagued by "the fog of
war", professional wargames generally attempt to be at least partially closed
in nature. Unfortunately, closed-game designs place heavy demands on the
control group. To restrict player access to information, a filter must be
placed between them and "ground truth", or game reality. The control group
must screen and modify information to delay, confuse, and in some cases
misrepresent what is actually happening in a manner approximating what
players might experience in actual combat. Such games require large, well-
trained, experienced control staffs, such as that at the Naval War College.
The control staff must be well practiced and disciplined at providing the
quality and quantity of information the players deserve. In addition, players
must be physically separated in a closed game, requiring greater space and
more extensive facilities in general.
Despite the difficulties of managing a closed game, there are many
important issues that simply cannot be explored with open gaming.
Obviously, there is little insight to be gained about the roles of command,
control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) from a game in which
players are given complete and perfect information.
Sometimes, however, good game design and good game players can
overcome some of the problems of open games. These latter are often easier
to execute, place fewer demands on the control group, and cause less
frustration to players. Although the uncertainties of closed games are
eliminated, open games are by no means useless. Indeed, for many training
and exploratory functions, open games can work quite well, so long as their
artificialities are kept in mind. In the end, the trade-off between open and
closed games may be dictated by the limitations of facilities and people, and
the designer must find a way to limit the negative influences such necessary
restrictions may have on the games' effectiveness.

System or Seminar Games

Although it would seem that system games, especially closed
system games, might be most appropriate in the defense arena, seminar
games do have certain important advantages that assure their long-term
popularity. First, seminar games allow a freer interchange of ideas among
participants. Thus, in many ways, seminar games may be better suited to
some training and educational goals than system games. For the same
reasons, seminar games tend to be more effective at helping groups of
people arrive at a consensus about the desirability or feasibility of certain
courses of action.
System games are more rigid and perhaps in some ways more realistic
than seminar games. However, there is a danger in system games that any
departures from reality, due to mistakes in modeling or input values, or
simply outdated structures, can be more difficult to detect and adjust than in
the more open forum of a seminar game. Balancing the rigor of a system
game with the flexibility of a seminar game to achieve the game's
objectives is thus a critical element of game design art.

The Role of Time

One of the most crucial of game procedures—management of time—
cuts across and affects all of the functions of procedures and umpires. Time
is a critical aspect of any wargame, and the effective treatment of time is an
essential ingredient in any good wargame design. There are two reasons
why this is so. First, in reality, timing and speed of execution are often
decisive in determining the success or failure of a military operation.
Second, time management in a game very often determines the extent of
activity that the game can explore.
In games such as chess, player activity is sequenced in a series of
alternating turns or moves. This same terminology is applied to wargames,
but in wargames, moves "represent definite periods of real-world time, …
[and the] length of a move is the interval of time for which decisions and
evaluations are made."7 There are three basic approaches to defining the
length of a move. One approach uses a game clock that runs continuously
and that may be set to run either faster or slower than real time. The other
approaches operate on blocks of time rather than on a continuous clock.
Strictly speaking, a continuous-time game does not really have moves
in the sense that term generally implies. In such systems, like the one used
by the Naval Warfare Gaming System, players give orders, and forces
attempt to execute those orders continuously. There are many advantages to
the continuous approach, especially because it appears to be more faithful
to reality and is more likely to produce the kind of dynamic interactions that
occur in real operations. The price lies in potential distortions, especially in
the planning process, when the game-time to real-time ratio (or game rate)
is not one-to-one. If game time is speeded up as is the usual case in
operational or strategic games, so that one minute of real time represents
several minutes of game time, players may find that realistic planning of
operations takes too long in game terms and is replaced by seat-of-the-pants
or reactive decision making. At the other extreme, if the game clock is
slowed down, as is most likely in tactical-level games, so that players may
study a situation more carefully before acting, a false impression of the
effects of time pressure may easily result. In large and complex games like
the Naval War College's Global War Game, some commands may be more
heavily engaged than others, requiring slower clock speeds. This
phenomenon can force overall game play to run at the slowest speed, or to
fragment into multiple "time-lines", thus making game control more
difficult.
Alternatives to the continuous-time approach define the amount of
game time each move represents and execute the move as a block of time
rather than in a continuous fashion. For example, a game may define a
single move to represent an entire day's operations; the sequence of events
within the day would then be evaluated by umpires or some other system
device. Most manual wargames, whether hobby or professional, have used
this approach.
There are two fundamental approaches to incremental time games. The
first approach defines "the smallest practical period of time . . . and all
moves in the game are of that length."8 This approach is standard in hobby
wargames, in which a game turn may represent any span from a few
seconds (in a game of tactical air combat) to three months (in a strategic-
level World War II game). This fixed-span approach is usually most
successful when the span of time each move represents corresponds to the
amount of real time the player roles would normally require to collect
information, interpret it, make decisions, and implement those decisions.
The second approach to time-increment moves is more flexible; moves
may represent varying amounts of real time depending on the importance
and intensity of activity expected during a given span. For example, a pre-
hostilities move may encompass ten to fifteen days of activity. The D-day
move of the same game may represent just a single day. Variable-length
moves may be predetermined in the game's design or dynamically defined
during game play. In the former case, the designer may use the scenario,
likely player actions, and play testing to decide on the length of each move.
In the latter case, the game director "estimates the time of the next critical
event and calls for a move of corresponding length."9 In some situations,
the second approach can be used even in fixed-move games. If moves are
specified to be one day in duration, but control personnel believe that there
will be little activity for several days, multiple moves may be conducted as
a block. Care must be exercised, of course, to prevent distortions whenever
play goes beyond the game's intended design in this manner.
Finally, there are two approaches for dealing with the amount of real
time players expend in making a move. Most navy games predefine the
time allocated to each move in order to assure the completion of all planned
moves. For example, two moves per day, one in the morning and one in the
afternoon, is a fairly standard scheme. The alternative, again frequent in
hobby gaming, allows each move to proceed at its own pace, some going
quickly and others moving slowly. Not surprisingly, fixed time allocated for
moves is often associated with variable-length moves; free time is often
associated with fixed-length moves.
All of these various approaches to event sequencing and time
management seek to balance the need to play the game expeditiously, both
to prevent player boredom and to explore slow-developing issues, and the
need to give players enough time to plan their actions and prevent
unrealistic time constraints. The choice of approach to defining moves and
allocating time to play them is a critical design decision. As with most such
decisions, a judicious use of all the available approaches is often necessary;

Document the Design

Those who have only participated in or observed the play of a wargame

may be excused for believing that the most difficult part of game design is
creating the mechanics that tie the data and decisions together to let the
players reproduce a version of reality. Game designers know better.
Although the design of the game system is often the most creative and
intellectually challenging phase of the game design process, for pure hard
work nothing
beats documenting that design, especially writing the rules. This is probably
more the case for hobby-game designers than for their professional
counterparts.
The quantity and quality of documentation of professional game
designs varies widely. In part this is the result of a surprising lack of
standards in the field. In part it is a result of the fact that few professional
wargames are designed by a single individual, as is often the case in the
hobby, and even fewer are built completely from scratch. Instead, the
various components of the game (scenario, data base, models) are
documented separately, by the different individuals or teams responsible for
their creation. Unfortunately, the step that is almost never documented is
that final act of picking the pieces to be used and devising how they will all
fit together. Indeed, much of what the professional community calls game
design can revolve around adapting scenarios and models to the long-
standing procedures of the particular organization responsible for carrying
out the game. In too many cases, these procedures are passed on from
generation to generation with little written documentation (or at least little
documentation of recent practices).
Such was the case at the Naval War College from the later 1960s, when
Frank McHugh published his major works on gaming. A big step forward
was made in the mid-1980s when the college's War Gaming Department
published some important papers on how to perform battle-damage
assessment and how to play the opposition side in War College games. The
designs for individual games, however, continue to be documented only by
a relatively short paper that outlines the game's objectives, overall structure
of play, and administrative schedules of events. From that point on, it is the
control staff that makes the game go; a solid and experienced team can
produce a useful and informative game with only minimal actual design
effort by the designer.
In the world of hobby games, experienced control staffs cannot be
packaged in every box. Instead, the designer must craft well-structured,
reasonably complete and easily understood (at least when compared to a
textbook in quantum physics) rules of play that people inexperienced with
the game system, or even with gaming in general, can use to play the game
correctly. It is no easy task, as the existence of a mountain of game errata
for nearly every hobby game ever published attests.
There are different ways to write rules for different communities within
the hobby. Although improving, rules for computer games—the new kid on
the block—are often the least rigorous, complete, and detailed because the
machine itself can act in many ways like an experienced and unfailingly
consistent umpire. Players can be told how to implement their decisions
without telling them how to resolve the outcomes of those decisions. By
taking the calculation of combat results (or battle-damage assessment
function) away from the players and giving it to the computer, such games
begin to approach the feel of a professional wargame.
Miniatures games, the grand old man of the hobby, must have more
complete and detailed rules than computer games, but they are, in fact,
seldom provided in the published rules themselves. Miniature game rules
have a long tradition of looseness (or flexibility, as miniatures aficionados
prefer to call it) and miniature gamers an equally long tradition of devising
"house rules" and agreed-upon interpretations of printed rules. Indeed,
many miniatures gamers begin with a set of published rules and so modify
them that a newcomer to the group would find the original rules
unrecognizable. The process of writing and rewriting rules that H.G. Wells
describes so eloquently in Little Wars is still accurate for today's miniatures
game designers.
It is in board-game design, however, that we find the most rigorously
demanding task for the rules writer. The board-game designer cannot rely
on the deus ex machina of the computer, nor on the tradition of debate and
compromise supplemented by a human umpire used in miniatures gaming.
In a board game, the designer's cards must literally be placed on the table.
Everything the players need to set up and play the game must be provided
by the components and rules. Not only must the players be told what they
can do, they must also be told precisely how to do it and how to resolve the
outcomes.
The complexity of board-game rules naturally grows with the
complexity of the situation the game portrays. Early board games like
Avalon Hill's Tactics II and Midway required only on the order of four 8
1/2" X 11" pages of basic rules and perhaps an equal amount of advanced
and optional rules. More recent games such as Victory Game's 7th Fleet:
Modern Naval Combat in the Far East have increased the number of pages
devoted to game rules by an order of magnitude.
Over the years many styles of writing rules have developed, some
associated with particular designers (such as the conversational style of a
John Hill), and some with particular publishers (such as the legalistic style
that became synonymous with Simulations Publications, Incorporated in the
1970s). The original Avalon Hill style was fairly loose, but accurate enough
for the relatively simple games of the early 1960s. Simulations Publications
led the way into the realms of greater complexity with a rigorous "case
system" structure and a dry, formal style of presentation that sought to
master the complexity of their rules by airtight legislation. Unfortunately,
this rigid style of rules presentation often made it difficult or impossible for
players to understand the rules as a whole. Reactions to the Simulations
Publications approach led Game Designers Workshop and the later Victory
Games group to a more balanced blend of tight structure and less-formal
wording, designed to allow the players to read more easily and understand
the rules while at the same time covering the multitude of situations that
could arise during play.
Ultimately, no matter what the format of the game or the style of
presentation, good hobby-game rules are based on some fundamental, and
fairly obvious, principles:

· Adapt the rules to the game, and not the game to the rules.
· Tell the players everything they need to know to play the game by
structuring the rules around the sequence of play.
· Provide plenty of examples to illustrate how the rules are supposed
to work, both individually and in concert.
· Explain the underlying rationale for particularly important or
especially unusual rules.
· Integrate the text explaining the rules with the graphical play aids
designed to help implement them.
 Nothing very surprising there, yet unfortunately the professional
gamers have for the most part failed to adapt these basic ideas to their
games. In too many professional games, the players are given no idea of the
rules at all. Certainly, the player in command of a fleet has little need to
know the computer code that implements a model of air-to-air combat, but
he could find it helpful to know what characteristics of a strike force make
it more or less vulnerable to enemy interceptors. Once again, the
professional wargamer needs to look to the hobby to find a more balanced
approach to documenting the design of the game and providing the key
elements of that documentation to the players so that they can improve their
play and their learning experience during the process.

War at Sea was an introductory naval board game dealing with the
Atlantic theatre of World War II. (Courtesy of the Avalon Hill Game
Company).

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 6: Developing Wargaming
WHAT IS WARGAME DEVELOPMENT?
The word development when applied to wargames is another example
of that unfortunate lack of precision that has plagued the terminology of the
field from its inception. If they thought about it at all, most people
unfamiliar with the board-wargaming hobby would probably assume that
"game development" refers to the entire process of producing a game, from
the initial gleam in the designer's eye to marketing the finished game. Board
gamers, on the other hand, associate the term with a specific major step in
that production process, a step that the hobby-game publisher ignores or
shortchanges at his peril, but one that is all too often neglected by
professional gamers.
The application of the word development to a specific phase in the
production of a game can be traced back to Jim Dunnigan’s tenure at
Simulations Publications, Incorporated. In issue number four of Moves
magazine, Dunnigan and his team described the development stage as the
one in which most innovations came about.1 The process involved one or
more "developers" and play testers. The designer, who had previously
integrated his research and the fundamental concepts of the game system,
presented the skeleton of the game to the developers, whose responsibility
was basically to turn that skeleton into a fully fleshed-out and, most
importantly, playable game.
Working with the designer (hopefully!) the development team first
debugged the game, making sure that it actually could do what the designer
said it would. After a round of play testing, the team prepared a revised
rules outline based on the designer’s first draft or rough notes. As additional
clarifications and explanations (and sometimes entirely new rules) were
incorporated, the outline was expanded and put in final form during another
series of play tests. Finally, the complete rules were drafted and edited, the
components sent off to the art department, and the final production phase
began. Thus, in the Dunnigan/SPI system, the roles of the game designer
and developer often overlapped (sometimes too much so!), particularly
during the documentation of the game's design.
Prior to Dunnigan's institutionalization of the game development
process, the testing and refining of a game design was pretty much a hit-or-
miss affair. Some games, like Dunnigan's own designs of 1914 and Jutland,
were very well designed, but lacked a real development stage. As a result,
they were, to many unsuspecting purchasers, quite difficult or impossible to
play. (As
an aside, my doctoral thesis adviser, a Ph.D. statistician, gave up on 1914 as
too complex!) The earlier Avalon Hill games, based largely on
the fundamental systems introduced by Charles Roberts in the late 1950s,
had, in a sense, been developed by the experience of their predecessors. As
newer games and more complicated concepts were introduced, the
development stage became much more specific, and
critical.

Yet, if Dunnigan can claim credit for the name, the importance of game
development was much earlier and more vividly described, once again, by
Mr. H. G. Wells. Little Wars gives a thorough description of the inception,
initial design, and subsequent development of Wells's game system.
As Wells described it, the game was born out of one of those happy
accidents when, after lunching in a room "littered with the irrepressible
debris of a small boy's pleasures,"2 an acquaintance of Wells, referred to
only as Mr. J.K.J., used a breech-loaded, spring-powered toy cannon to fire
a small wooden cylinder and knock over a toy soldier. He challenged his
friends to try their prowess, and by the end of the session someone had
proposed the crucial idea: '"But suppose,' said his antagonists, 'suppose
somehow one could move the men!' and therewith opened a new world of
belligerence."3
Wells soon built on this basic idea. He and his friends began using
volumes of the British Encyclopedia to construct a "Country" in which to
maneuver their forces of infantry, cavalry, and guns. They also devised a
basic system of alternating moves and hand-to-hand combat. The game
design, as we would call it today, was complete, but it had certain problems.
The hand-to-hand system used the flip of a coin to determine the
outcome, allowing occasions on which "one impossible paladin slew in
succession nine men and turned defeat to victory, to the extreme
exasperation of the strategist [dare one assume Mr. Wells?] who had led
those victims to their doom."4 This heavy effect of luck was combined with
allowing the guns so much freedom to move and fire that battles turned into
"scandals of crouching concealment," with the guns popping away at the
troops cowering behind their books.
Enter the development stage. In a flurry of creative activity, Wells
solved the bulk of the problems. The terrain was improved by using
cardboard and children's blocks to construct houses. The power of the gun
was reduced by allowing it either to move or fire (but not both) in a single
turn, and by demanding the presence of soldiers nearby in order for it to be
fired or moved at all. Another series of games was played using these rules,
and new ideas were introduced, this time with the professional assistance of
"Captain M., hot from the Great War in South Africa."5 Through this series
of rules proposals and play testing, Wells's game finally reached the final
form, whose rules he presented in Little Wars. A better description of the
process of game development is nowhere to be found.
At the risk of lapsing into cliché, then, we can summarize the
relationship of game design and game development in a simple phrase:
design proposes and development disposes. Just as any article, paper, or
book will benefit from a thorough job of editing before publication, even a
well-designed wargame will benefit from thorough development. Although
the process may be formal or informal, game development seeks to ensure
that the game design is complete, as realistic as possible or desirable, and
that is playable and capable of meeting the objectives specified for it.

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 THE GOALS AND ACTIVITIES OF GAME
DEVELOPMENT
A formal summary of the goals of the development process and the
principal activities involved in achieving these goals are listed below.

Goals and Activities of Wargame Development

Goals ensure that:

· The pieces of the game do what the designer intends

· The necessary pieces are available
· The pieces fit together
· The entire game functions smoothly
· The sponsor's objectives can be met
· The game responds to expected actions in expected ways
· The game can deal with unexpected actions efficiently

Phases of development include:

· Model, data, and scenario validation
· Play testing
· Preplay
· Preparing the final rules

The first goal is to verify that the individual elements of the game
actually do what the designer expected and intended. Obviously this
requires that the developer understand the designer’s intentions. In some
cases the game designer may be responsible for the development of his own
game, thus reducing the problem of clearly communicating design
intentions to the developer. A separate developer does tend to force the
designer to be more specific and explicit in defining his expectations and
reduces the ever-present danger that unstated assumptions, already
internalized by the game's designer, will color the development and testing
of the game and make it difficult to perceive fundamental problems.
 The need to verify intentions and expectations is perhaps most
pronounced in the case of any mathematical data and combat models used
in the game. The accuracy of the data and the performance of the models
must be checked carefully to ensure that they reflect the designer's research
and are actually operating in accordance with the structures he has
specified. When such data or models are complex or computerized, this
verification process can be an involved one. Programs must be debugged
and many test cases run. Similar checks should also be carried out to test for
the internal consistency of scenario assumptions and, in the case of hobby
games at least, victory conditions.
Another major goal of development is to try to ensure that the game
design is complete. All the data and models likely to be needed for play
must actually be available. Even more difficult to verify, however, is
whether procedures or rules exist to cover all the possible situations that
might arise during game play. In professional games, all the foreseeable
political or higher-level military decisions that the control team may be
called upon to make should be specified along with general guidance to
cover unforeseen circumstances. Despite the best efforts of development,
however, it should not be surprising that at some time a situation will arise
that is not covered by the data, models, or instructions to the control team.
All development can hope to do is to reduce such occasions to the barest
minimum.
After making sure that the game's pieces work as the designer intended
(and that those intentions are reasonable), and after satisfying themselves
that all the needed pieces are available, the game's developers must then test
the game to be sure that all the pieces mesh into a workable system. A
mathematical model of engagements between combat-air-patrol and deck-
launched interceptors from an aircraft carrier and attacking bombers armed
with air-to-surface missiles might produce the number of enemy missiles
that penetrate into the surface-to-air missile defense zone. But if the model
dealing with the effectiveness of that part of the defense also requires the
time- and altitude-separation of the incoming missiles in order to calculate
results, the pieces do not fit together.
 In addition to making sure that the various parts of the game
system mesh, the developers should also attempt to polish the
game's mechanics so that the entire system functions smoothly
and efficiently. In a seminar game held by the Naval War College, for
example, players may be required to submit written instructions, both
general and specific, so that the control team can accurately execute and
assess the results of a given move. The game's designer may specify that the
"move sheet" contain a section outlining general intentions and also a
listing of the major units under the player's control and their movement and
mission orders. The game developers may add more detail requirement,
such as the depth of submarines or the altitudes of aircraft, to the move
sheets so that the orders may be more precisely evaluated using the models
available for the game.
But perhaps the most important and difficult task of game development
is to ensure that the game can meet its objectives. This is especially
important for professional games, whose objectives tend to be more specific
than those of commercial games. In addition, the distinction between the
sponsor of a professional game and the designer of the game may cause
some disconnects in the translation of objectives into game design.
Although designing the game to meet the objectives may seem an obvious
goal and one unlikely to elude the game's designer, it is not impossible for
the design process itself to obscure the purposes for which the project was
originally undertaken. The natural tendency, and often the requirement, for
the designer to spend much of his time working on the details of the game
system rather than on the broad outlines of what it should accomplish is
another strong reason for assigning someone other than the designer to take
primary responsibility for game development.
Finally, game development must exercise the game to see how the
system reacts to player decisions. Especially important is the system’s
response to unusual, unexpected, or extreme decisions players may make.
This is especially important for system games, particularly those controlled
by computer, in which the stabilizing influence of a human umpire is
missing. The player that "cracks the code" of the game may play the game
very successfully, but the educational value of his experience and the
operational insights to be obtained from his decision making may be
nonexistent because he is only taking advantage of a loophole that exists in
the game system but would not exist in reality.
Such effects are noticeable even in professional games. A veteran of
several Global War Games will have a pretty good idea of what the Red
Team will consider to be allowable strategies and tactics, and how Control
is likely to respond to certain suggested operations. In the hobby world,
loopholes can be much more dramatic. In a recent review of SSG's
computer game Russia, the reviewer revealed just such a loophole.6 The
game, a technical marvel dealing with various campaigns and the entire war
between Germany and the Soviets from 1941 to 1945, uses an artificial-
intelligence type system to allow the computer to play against a human
opponent. Unfortunately, the reviewer found that "artificial stupidity is a far
better expression for watching the computer constantly press forward in
useless attacks."7 By taking advantage of this quirk, the wily human player
can set traps no other human would ever fall into but which the computer
opponent embraces as heaven-sent opportunities for victory. Despite its
other successful, interesting, and educational features, such a loophole
leaves Russia an unfortunately flawed game.
As a result of the dangers lurking behind such hidden loopholes, the
game’s developers must not only try to play the game as the designer
expected or wanted it to be played, but they must also try to break the game.
Expected decisions should cause the game system to produce the expected
responses (although not necessarily the expected outcomes from stochastic
models). On the other hand, unexpected player decisions should not cause
the game system to self-destruct.
To achieve their objectives, game developers must carry out three
related but distinct activities: data, model, and scenario validation; play
testing; and preplay, or in the case of a hobby game, blind testing. Although
in some sense these activities are performed in the sequence listed,
validation and play testing, as described earlier in relation to Little Wars, are
continuous and iterative processes.
 VALIDATION AND GAME "REALISM"
One of the most important jobs of wargame developers is to assess the
validity of the game's results and processes in light of the real world.
Presumably the designer has tried to produce as realistic a game as possible,
given the design decisions and trade-offs he chose to make. The developer's
effort, by looking at the designer's product from a more objective distance,
can help to judge how successful those design decisions were. In order to
do so, however, it is necessary to understand what the terms results and
validity mean when applied to wargames, and also to develop an
appreciation for the uncertainties that underlie the results.
There are two types of game results of most interest. The most obvious,
and potentially most misleading, results are the game events themselves, the
outcomes of engagements, battles, and campaigns, or—most particularly in
the case of hobby games—the overall winner and loser of the game. Interest
in these kinds of "outcomes" centers around who won and how. The second
types of results, much more meaningful to professional gamers or to
hobbyists more interested in understanding than victory alone, are the
insights and issues that arise from the play of the game. Interest in these
types of results focuses on why the players made important decisions.
The validity of a game's results can best be thought of as the extent to
which those results reflect reality as opposed to the artificiality of the
gaming environment. This validity depends on the accuracy of the
mathematical evaluations of operational capabilities used in the models of
the game, and on how well the quantity and quality of information available
to the players of the game reflect the levels of information likely to be
available to their real-life counterparts.
The uncertainties that arise during the play of a game are similarly of
two types, and are closely related to the two types of results. Stochastic
uncertainties arise from the variations in the outcomes of similar operations
or engagements that come about as a result of the probabilistic nature of
some kinds of events (such as the probability that a torpedo will strike and
sink its intended target once it is launched). Such uncertainties are often
characterized as the "roll of the dice", and in hobby games are usually the
outcomes of precisely that. Strategic uncertainties, on the other hand,
revolve around the choice of options open to the players. For example, in a
modern naval wargame, there may be quite some amount of uncertainty
about whether the Soviets will actually commit submarines to attack the sea
lines of communication across the Atlantic or Pacific. Although
fundamentally different, these types of uncertainties usually affect each
other in profound ways; uncertainties over capabilities can affect the
choices of options that, in turn, affect the occurrence and nature of
engagements during the game.
One of the first things the developers must do is to determine whether
the course of game play and the experiences and insights the players may
derive from it are dictated primarily by the game's scenarios, assumptions,
and mathematical combat models, or by the decisions that the players are
capable of making. When the former dominates the latter, misconceptions
and errors in understanding can result. These are especially dangerous
problems in the world of professional gaming.
For example, a series of games was conducted in the early 1980s to
allow senior civilian and military decision makers an opportunity to explore
how the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could best act to deter war in a crisis,
and to defeat the Soviet Union if the crisis degenerated into a war. Although
this question is central to many navy games, this particular series had a
smaller and more select body of participants than the Global War Game
series, for example. Unfortunately, the conduct of the games fell into an all-
too-familiar trap. The strategic questions were already assumed to be
answered, for the most part, before play began. Player attention during the
game focused principally on lower-level operational issues, such as which
aircraft carrier was deployed where, and how many submarines were killed
on a daily basis. The decisions of the game players, who represented the
National Command Authority and various commanders in chief, seemed to
have little effect on the course and outcome of game events.
In essence, these games used senior officers and officials to make
"decisions" already preordained by scenario imperatives and assumptions of
military capability. This type of practice can lend unwarranted credence to
concepts of operations and models and estimates of systems effectiveness
that have not, in fact, received the thorough scrutiny and approval of
professional judgment that their use in such a game may imply. This
scrutiny is the developer's primary responsibility.
 But how is a developer to determine if a single mathematical model is
realistic, much less a large and interacting collection of such models? The
problem may be made even more difficult in a professional game (or even a
hobby game) dealing with a projected, rather than historical, scenario
whose own realism or even reasonableness may also be difficult to judge.
The debate about the validity and utility of mathematical models of
warfare is probably as old as the practice of devising them. In the
professional world, opinion ranges from one extreme to the other. For some,
the attempt to build mathematical models of warfare, especially of future
warfare, is hopelessly doomed. The modeler's "attempts at analytical rigor
are not empirical science but a priori modeling. They rest on analysts'
judgments as to what criteria are pertinent, which parameters are critical,
how the parameters interact, and what values they will take. … Or as
Keynes said of mathematical economics, warfare models 'are mere
concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assertions they rest on, which allow
the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependences of the real
world in the maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols."8 This attitude
basically reflects a belief that "it is impossible to quantify warfare without
having a war to quantify. Only then are there data embodying the true
complexities of combat."9
Others, who believe in the utility of mathematical models of warfare
under at least some circumstances, reject attempts at "the quantification of
psychological or human military qualities which are unquantifiable."10
Those who hold this position believe modelers should simply ignore
"psychological dimensions: their uncertainty, their variety, their
inconsistency and their lack of utility in modeling future conflict should
make one reluctant to expend resources pursuing them, leaving the
community the time and money to quantify better the quantifiable."11
To others, however, mathematical models and analysis are necessary
and useful tools, but only part of the equation: "'Descriptive' models
enhance our understanding. 'Predictive' models help describe temporal,
spatial, and organizational relationships."12 But modelers must temper their
work with an understanding of history and technology.
The real dangers in modeling lie in the "inability to cope with
uncertainty, and to place confidence limits on . . . findings. ... It means that
the battle models ... are broken reeds, a totally inadequate basis for the
advice operations analysts provide their military clients."13 Analysts
holding this view also must accept the fact that until modelers "tackle the
problem of bounding both the uncertainties in the inputs and their effects on
the outputs there is no salvation in improving models in other respects."14
Such may not be an easy task.
Physicists had to deal with the same source of difficulties in the
process of reconciling the various characteristics of subatomic particles.
"But if the models of physics, with all of their power of precision and
experimentation are confounded by inherent uncertainty, and if as some
physicists say, quantum mechanics cannot be explained except by analogy,
then surely [operations analysts] (and our critics) should be charitable in our
demands on our power to measure the quantities of war. In particular, where
is the research that will tell us the residual uncertainties in measuring (never
mind predicting) those quantities?"15
In time of war, as was the case during the birth of operations research
during World War II, actual data might be available to conduct such
research. During peacetime, the only potentially useful sources of data,
aside from infrequent and generally small scale low-order conflicts, come
from history. Indeed, in a recent study conducted for the U.S. Army, over
260 modern battles were investigated in an attempt "to provide a tool for
judging whether the results of simulated combat are consistent with
historical combat."16 Although only a start, such studies hold some promise
of producing some of the basic research necessary to put combat modeling
on a sounder footing.
But data alone are only a start. In the wargaming hobby, most games
deal precisely with past, historical combat. Even when data is available
about such combat, translating that data into an accurate or "realistic" model
of combat requires more than a little dose of experience, cleverness, and
talent. Although the quality and quantity of data varies, there is usually at
least some basis in fact on which the models of historical games can be
based. Even more importantly, there is the historical record against which
the results of the game system can be checked. It is in the interpretation of
the available information, and in its adaptation to the particular game
environment, that differences of opinion and of style may arise.
One of the hobby's most respected designers, Frank Chadwick, wrote
that "there are two distinct forms of accuracy: product accuracy and process
accuracy. The former, if viewed in complete isolation from the latter, is
typified by the 'it all comes out in the wash' school of thought. . . . The
latter, again in isolation, holds that the final outcome is irrelevant; what's
important is the feel of each turn."17 Although most hobby designs
obviously must incorporate elements of both philosophies, some designers
emphasize one approach to accuracy far more than the other.
The champion of the design-for-the-right-feel school is John E. Hill.
Hill's attitude is summarized in his belief that the "main problem with the
whole field of game design philosophy is that it is operating under the
mistaken belief that it might really be possible to simulate the chaos of war
with cardboard and paper."18 This attitude is at the foundation of Hill's
"design-for-effect" philosophy, a philosophy whose proponents "are not as
interested in 'what actually happened' as they are in the effect of that
event."19 The result is that a game becomes less a simulation of reality and
more a simulation of the designer’s interpretation of reality.
In his unpublished designer’s notes to the game Napoleon's Last
Triumph, William Haggart articulates the opposite viewpoint. For a "design
to be 'accurate,' a true model of historical reality, two points must be
demonstrated:
1. There exists a corresponding fact substantiating every cause-and-
effect relationship. . . .
2. The historical 'facts' presented as a basis for the accuracy of the
design must be verified, proven."20
 Of course, as Haggart realizes, merely researching the historical "facts
and interpreting them does not necessarily generate an accurate simulation,
even when done perfectly. The simulation still must duplicate the historical
data in play to be termed 'accurate.' After completing the design, [he] used
the following process to verify the game's integrity:
1. Each subsystem was individually played to ascertain whether all the
possible combinations and results would remain within the historical
limits set by the data.
2. The same testing was done by pairing two, then more subsystems ...
to determine the parameters.
3. The total game was tested against the actual events of the battle:
could the game re-create the original progression of [the battle] within
the rules? Were the casualties, combat, and leader performances close
to the real thing?
Changes were made at every level until the game system played
accurately and effortlessly, without a lot of 'special rules' and
exceptions."21
Hill's philosophy and Haggart's philosophy are as different as "a
painting and a photograph of a battle. The painter looks at the battle, and
decides which aspects he thinks are most important, either because they
interest him more or, if he is trying to give you a close picture of reality,
because they seem to him the essence of the scene. . . . The photograph
shows precisely what the battle scene looked like at one moment in time.
The obvious influence of the painter is eliminated, but the photographer can
insert his view nonetheless by selecting one photograph from many. … In
the same way, some designers pick the aspects of battles which they feel
were important to the outcome. No game can include every factor; the
designer must choose."22
It is in making this choice that the designer’s art and philosophy are
tested, and in evaluating the validity of the choice that the developer plays
his most important role. Professional operation researchers and systems
analysts debate the section of the model "validation" in endless and often
fruitless exchanges. In only the rarest of cases is any real sort of validation
possible, when actual present-day combat data is available to compare with
model results. The war between Great Britain and Argentina over the
Falkland/Malvinas Islands provided a limited quantity of such data, which
was used, for example, by Mark Herman to "validate" the tactical analysis
model of the Strategic Analyses Simulation. The analysis demonstrated that
the model could, indeed, produce results consistent with what occurred in
reality. In order to dos so, however, the "verniers" or scaling factors of the
model had to be adjusted correctly.
It is quite impossible in the hobby world or the professional world, to
build a wargame or combat model that is certain to reflect accurately the
reality of future combat for the simple reasons that we do not know what the
reality will be. But that is not the point.
The only realizable goal for a model of future warfare is to reflect, in
the most complete and coherent way possible, the analysts' (or the
analytical community's) beliefs and understanding of the key elements of
that combat. By exercising, testing, and modifying that model analysts and
wargamers can explore the implications, not of some unknowable future
reality, but of our current, restricted, and uncertain view of what that reality
might be like. We can do not better than to try to identify the hidden
connections and consistencies of our current thinking as objectively as
possible. But such a goal, as limited as it may appear to those who seek
crystal balls in computer code, is not only a worthy one, but essential as
well.
What is crucial for wargaming, with its focus on creating as accurate a
decision-making environment as possible, is that the models reflect our
best-available understanding of the factors and conditions that affect the
player's decision-making process and his ability to gather and interpret
information. Fabricating such an accurate environment is easier for some
levels and types of warfare than for others.
In hobby wargaming, for example, there is a strong body of opinion
"that certain levels of games (notably true tactical games and grand strategic
games) may by their very nature defy treatment as accurate as is the norm
for games in the operational vein. . . . The fundamental difference between
[the operational level] and both the true tactical and strategic level is that at
those levels the uncertainties in decision-making have to do with, to use a
game analogy, what the rules are."23 Yet, some of the effects of such
uncertainties can be factored into the games through the use of umpires or
randomization of those aspects of play beyond the influence of the player's
real-life counterpart.
The key to creating accurate models and systems, then, lies in the
ability of the design to incorporate as many of the elements important to
actual decision makers as possible while simultaneously minimizing the
number and effect of extraneous factors. Only by trying out the models and
their interplay and evaluating their ability to create as accurate a decision-
making environment as possible, both in its "feel" and in its intellectual
scope for command, can the developer "validate" a wargame's "accuracy".

PLAYTESTING
Although professional gamers are sensitive to both the need to validate
and the difficulty of validating models, they are often not quite as sensitive
to the requirement to validate the entire game system. This perception
contributes to the lack of serious play-testing of professional games before
the game is played "for real." (To be fair, the constraints of time play
another and often dominant role in the shortage of playtesting of
professional games. Indeed, as described later, some games are tested
during a preplay phase.)
In the hobby world, on the other hand, playtesting is a familiar concept.
It is, in fact, the principal tool of game development in addition to being
one of the process's major phases. As the word implies, playtesting
combines playing the game with thoroughly testing its functions and its
ability to meet its objectives.
It should not be surprising that the best way to determine whether all or
part of a game system works is to play it. What may not be so obvious is
that playing to test is significantly different from playing to enjoy or playing
to learn. In the latter cases the players are usually working with the game,
trying as much as possible to cooperate with the demands of the system.
Testing is much more of an adversarial relationship; the tester should never
give the game the benefit of the doubt. He should try his very best to make
the game fall apart. Only by doing a thorough job of trying out the various
alternatives provided by the game’s design can the testers be sure that
everything works as intended.
But playtesting is not just a negative process. Playtesting can often
suggest workable solutions to the problems it discovers. It can also point
out the importance of aspects of a situation that the designer overlooked or
chose to ignore. Just as importantly, it can often suggest easier to
understand, more efficient, or more exciting ways of carrying out the
functions of the game than those originally conceived by the designer.
Professional gamers sometimes seem to have the attitude that ease of play is
only of minor importance in their games. Yet the fact remains that the more
efficient a game's mechanics are, and the less attention the playtesters must
pay to the overhead of gaming artificialities, the greater the chance the
players will become more involved in the simulated reality of the game.
Excitement flows from this involvement, from the challenge of the
situation, and from the pace of this activity. Finally, involvement and
excitement produce the atmosphere of intense competition that can lead to
the development of original ideas so important to the value of the
professional gaming.
The professional community should take a leaf from the hobby book on
the subject of playtesting. Playtesting a professional game should involve
playing the game as the designer intends it to be played, but without the
actual participants. Instead, playtesters should assume the roles of those
participants and attempt to test the functioning and the limits of the game.
The integration of the various game elements can then be exercised and
refined. Not only must playtesters check to see if the game works as
expected, but they must also try their best to make the game break down. If
this process discovers problems with the system, procedures, or data, they
can then be corrected before the actual play of the game.
The importance of the testing aspect of the playtesting phase cannot be
overemphasized. Thorough testing cannot guarantee a problem-free game,
but insufficient testing almost certainly increases the chances of having to
cope with unforeseen difficulties during play. Unfortunately, thorough play
testing requires the allocation of more time to the entire game preparation
cycle and the commitment of more people to the play testing process.
 PREPLAY AND BLIND TESTING
The last step in the game development process is a kind of dress
rehearsal for the game. In professional wargaming this step is usually
referred to as preplay. The equivalent hobby concept is usually known as
blind testing.
At the Naval War College, preplay focuses on the mechanics of game
control and the availability of required information.24 Game-control staff
members play through the mechanics of the game in an abbreviated fashion
to familiarize themselves with their responsibilities and to prepare
themselves to handle some of the situations they may be called upon to
address during the upcoming play of the game.
Because of the great demands of thorough play testing, it is sometimes
necessary to combine play testing and game preplay. As practiced at the
Naval War College, preplay seeks not only "to check the NWGS computer
play file of information, to validate [the] data base and, most importantly, to
prepare the WGD control group personnel ... for the upcoming game . . .
[but also] to expose difficulties or omissions in preparation prior to the
arrival of the players."25 The War College has been remarkably successful
with this compressed approach, but the difficulties of adequately carrying
out both testing and preparation often leave the testing function to take a
back seat.
In the hobby, blind testing may be considered "nothing more than
having the game played without the designer or developer in attendance."
The intention is to give the testers "the closest thing to a finished version of
the game" in the hopes they will play it as if they had just purchased it in a
store.26 This is the final check, looking for the hidden bugs that experienced
testers may have missed because the game had become so familiar to them.

PREPARING THE FINAL RULES

 Throughout the development process, the designer's original set
constantly changes and evolves toward the finished product. Errors are
discovered and fixes are found. Holes are filled and wording made more
precise. Just as the designer documents his work in the draft of the rules
turned over to the development team, the designer and developers together
document the results of the development process during the preparation of
rules. All the rough notes, comments and suggestions made by playtesters
must be refined and rewritten into the text of the game's instructions.
A hobby game that has passed through a thorough, systematic
development and blind-testing program, and has had the results of that
program carefully crafted into its final rules, is as close to error free as a
game can get before publication. Yet it would be surprising indeed if there
were not still quirks that no one involved had discovered. The ultimate test,
and the ultimate proving ground, is in the playing.

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 7: Playing Wargames

ROLE PLAYING
There has been something of a debate in the gaming hobby about
whether the players of wargames, particularly of historical board games,
should be cast in the roles of specific real-life decision makers. Some of the
disagreement is sparked by the existence of what is known as the fantasy-
role-playing hobby, represented by its most notorious example, the games
known collectively as Dungeons and Dragons. The self-styled "real
wargamers," who are often aficionados of the study of military history or
technical minutiae (such as the ground pressure exerted by the Tiger tank),
sometimes feel uncomfortable if they are referred to in the same breath as
their "eccentric" cousins whose concerns center on the Characteristics and
fighting power of elves and goblins (central characters in most fantasy
gaming).
But if the essence of wargaming is decisions, then the essence of
playing wargames lies precisely in the player's ability to assume a
meaningful decision-making role. In other recreational games such as
Monopoly, chess, or poker, the only role of the participant is as a player in
the essentially abstract world of the game; his value system, resources, and
decisions reflect only that abstract reality. Such games are often excellent
pastimes and diversions; they may even be financially profitable to their
players (to some poker players, anyway). A wargame provides players with
the opportunity to assume the roles of military or political decision makers
in a simulated representation of the real world. To the extent that the game
reproduces the environment that the real decision makers must face, it can
provide its players not only with diversion, but also education, training, and
an increased understanding of the real world.
Well-respected historical-board-game designers such as Frank
Chadwick of Game Designers Workshop have argued that "all historical-
based games are role-playing games."1 In the last few years, computer-
wargame designers like William Nichols {Seventh Fleet and Long Lance)
have also come to the same conclusions. Nichols's games make use of what
he calls the "viewpoint oriented" approach, in which the players knowledge
and control over the situation is restricted to as accurate a representation of
the limitations of real-world command as the game's designer can devise.
Counterarguments to the role-playing interpretation lend to focus not
on whether players do, should, or must play roles, but rather on whether
they should be restricted to only one such role in a given game. In a board
game such as 6th Fleet, the highest level of player decision making is that
of the theater or fleet commander, yet the bulk of the playing (and
incidentally the fun and interest) of the game takes place at the battle-force
commander's level, and even sometimes at the level of the individual ship-
driver. Restricting the player to the role of the fleet commander would leave
him little to do and reduce the game's enjoyment value tremendously. The
price of introducing this additional source of fun, however, is that the player
has much greater control over the tactics and detailed dispositions of his
subordinate forces than any real-life commander ever enjoyed.
The key point in the debate is not whether players should play well-
defined roles (clearly they should) nor how many such roles a single player
should have (not many); the key point is whether the structure of the player
roles contributes to or is detrimental to the games realistic representation of
the operational situation, and also to the player's willing suspension of
disbelief. If the player's role is too limited in its scope for decision and
action, the player will lose interest and remember that "it's only a game,"
and not a very good one at that. If the player is overloaded with detailed
decisions that are not properly the responsibility of his principal role, he
may lose sight of his primary objectives or get bogged down in the details
of the game's modeling.
In the professional wargaming environment, the role-playing aspects of
the game are, perhaps surprisingly, more widely recognized and accepted.
Part of the reason tor these attitudes may lie in the fact that professional
gaming originated in the educational and training sphere, where role-
assumption is a fundamental feature of gaming's utility. Despite their
theoretical understanding of this facet of playing a wargame, however, once
players of a professional game arrive at a game site and the game is actually
underway, they often have trouble staying in their roles. Why? Typically the
problem centers around the second of the difficulties described above—that
of getting bogged down in detail.
As discussed earlier, most officers who play in a professional game
assume roles of commanders whose real-life ranks are higher than those of
the players. As a result the players are often less familiar and less
comfortable with their game roles than they would be if they were called
upon to perform the tasks involved in the positions they currently occupy or
have held in the past. If given the opportunity to become involved in issues
at these more familiar levels, most officers will tend to spend much of their
time and effort on those lower-order issues rather than on the less-familiar
tasks of their principal game role.
The most difficult time for players (and control staff, for that matter) to
keep to their roles usually occurs when control reports the results of damage
assessment, especially when those results differ significantly from player
expectations. If an air strike against enemy shore targets results in
extraordinarily high losses to attacking aircraft, the players (especially those
who are familiar with the kinds of mathematical models used in the game-
evaluation process) too often complain about the quality of the models used
to produce the outcome (or sometimes about the lineage of the damage
assessor) instead of inquiring about the possible operational explanations
for why the losses were so high.
Failures of reconnaissance, poor tactical execution, or mis-estimation
of the enemy are to be expected in warfare and should be reflected in game
play as well. So, too, will the extraordinarily favorable circumstances
players sometimes overlook when they are pleased with a successful
outcome. A well-designed game and well-prepared control staff will seldom
produce or report an assessment that is beyond the bounds of reasonable
possibility. Unfortunately, sometimes the game control staff contributes to
the problem by reporting results in terms of model outputs rather than
couching those results in terms of the outcomes of actual combat. Such
opportunities to break the spell and allow the players to return too far back
to real reality instead of remaining focused on game reality must be avoided
at all costs if the players are to continue suspending their too readily
resumed disbelief.

LEARNING FROM PLAYING WARGAMES

Because it emphasizes human interaction and role-playing, wargaming
can be a powerful learning tool. Participation in a game allows players to
"practice" the roles they assume in the game. Because wargames are not
real, however, there are significant limitations on the extent and validity of
what can be learned by playing them.
Admiral Arleigh A. Burke put his finger on the central artificiality of
wargaming when he said that "nobody can actually duplicate the strain that
a commander is under in making a decision during combat."2 In a wargame,
real forces do not deploy, real weapons do not engage, and real people do
not die. Wargames, like exercises, are only an imperfect image of real war,
no matter whether they are the paper and cardboard images of the hobbyist
or the sophisticated computer images of the professional. To understand
what can be learned from playing a wargame, it is necessary to understand
which game experiences are most like what goes on in actual combat
operations.
In an actual military operation, a commander is assigned a mission and
allocated the forces with which he is expected to carry out that mission. The
commander and his staff must plan how they will accomplish the mission,
communicate that plan to their subordinates, and then monitor the execution
of the plan by their forces. During the planning phase, the commander must
analyze his objectives and the alternatives for attaining them, assess the
enemy's capabilities and possible courses of action, and identify his own
strengths and weaknesses. He must then choose a concept of operations that
appears to have the best chance of success. In many cases, he must
understand not only military and technical factors, but environmental and
political ones as well, translating all of these into operational opportunities
and devising ways of exploiting those opportunities to accomplish the
assigned mission.
 Once the plan is complete, subordinates must be informed of their roles
and how they are expected to perform them. The commander must clearly
explain his concept and identify those decisions he reserves for himself and
those he delegates to subordinates. To control the execution of the plan, the
commander must specify what information he needs to make his decisions,
how he expects to receive, store, and access that information, and how he
plans to evaluate it. Once the operation is underway, the commander must
integrate the information he receives with his own tactical and operational
expertise to interpret events, weigh advice, assess the developing situation,
and modify his plans and orders as required.3
Many, if not all, of these same activities must occur in a wargame.
What differs, however, is the environment in which they take place. Aside
from the fact that actual forces are not maneuvering and shooting at each
other, perhaps the largest artificiality of the gaming environment is its
generally poor re-creation of communications and data-handling facilities,
and their effects on the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the information
available to the commander. Even the elaborate Naval Warfare Gaming
System uses only a relative handful of communications circuits, status
boards, and displays; and data-transfer rates are often deficient when
compared to high-speed, real-world systems. On the other hand, the
communications that are available in most professional wargames are
generally highly reliable and seldom interfered with by the enemy. These
problems are exacerbated in most hobby games because the number of
players available usually precludes the establishment of any sort of formal
command structure. Indeed, most hobby games are designed for two people
to play, one on either side. As a result, many of the key interpersonal
relationships of command are abstracted away from the players' experience
in the game.4
In addition, complete re-creation of the actual processes by which
commanders receive information in battle appears impractical in a
wargame, even in the most advanced professional types. Most obviously,
the commander can never go to the front line of his fighting forces or the
battle bridge of his ship and see things for himself. It may be feasible,
however, to re-create much of what the commander would be able to learn
about the situation, even if the details of how he learns it must remain
imprecise. For example, a battle-group commander may best learn about the
course and status of an antisubmarine warfare operation from information
provided by his staff or by monitoring the antisubmarine warfare
coordination communication circuit. By keeping track of the information
that might actually pass over such a circuit, as well as the errors and delays
associated with it, a wargame designer might be able to structure a game
system to allow the commander to obtain the appropriate information
without actually re-creating the circuit. Such "design-for-effect" techniques
can be useful when a detailed re-creation of precise mechanisms is beyond
the scope and capabilities of a game. (Such an approach is fairly common in
hobby gaming, with games such as Squad Leader and others designed by
John Hill being the principal examples.)
In a similar manner, complete re-creation of the entire staff and
command structure appropriate to a player's decision level is virtually
impossible in most wargames. As a result, to define the appropriate roles for
various participants, the game's designer must carefully consider the game's
objectives, scope, and level of player activity. A summary of the types of
tasks important to game play should be given to the players, although many
players will prefer to allocate tasks to their assistants as they see fit. Some
predefined structure of this sort can help players avoid overlooking critical
staff functions whose performance would be impossible to ignore or forget
during an actual combat operation. In hobby games, this structuring task is
accomplished by the sequence of play; in many professional games it can
be accomplished through the device of the "move sheet", by which players
report their decisions to the control team.
Although many artificialities limit the ability of a wargame to simulate
the decision-making environment of a combat situation realistically, there
are many aspects of a commander's operational activities that wargames can
reproduce with a surprising amount of fidelity. The intellectual experiences
that result from such activities often reflect many of the critical aspects of
similar real-world situations. Thus, a wargame can be not only a good
vehicle for teaching lessons about the job of a commander to those
inexperienced at it, but can also be an opportunity for commanders to
practice the intellectual skills they need to do their jobs well. The activities
for which a wargame can provide reliable experiences are listed below.

Areas of Activity Adequately Simulated in Wargame Play5

Operational
• Force selection and employment
• Integrating platforms to accomplish a task
• Tactical decision making (at appropriate levels)
• Exploiting platform and system capabilities
• Overcoming platform and system limitations
• Rapidly assessing operational and tactical situations
Command
• Delegating authority
• Articulating battle philosophy, directives, and orders
• Establishing information requirements for decision making
• Devising effective ways to display and evaluate information
• Assessing advice
• Crisis leadership
Scenario
• Exploiting geography
• Exploiting environment
• Exploiting international political relations

PREPARING TO PLAY
In a professional wargame, all the efforts of game sponsors, designers,
and developers are directed toward producing a game system. The game
itself takes shape only when the players enter the scene. The success and
value of the game revolves around the players and their decision processes,
a fact of which too many players of research games seem to be ignorant. To
fulfill this important place in the research task of the game, the players must
prepare themselves (and in some ways the game-control staff) for the job at
hand.
The game's sponsor or the agency conducting the game will typically
provide prospective players with preliminary information about the game's
objectives, scenario, forces, and any other relevant information as soon as
that information is available in convenient form. Players should study this
information and ask game personnel to provide more details or
clarifications about important or confusing areas.
As the date of a game approaches, those players assigned to principal
commands are usually asked to give the game control staff an outline of
their proposed concept of operations for the game's opening moves. The
control staff will use this concept of operations to help test the game system
and prepare the system and staff for actual game play.
Players are also well advised to give careful consideration to what types
and amounts of assistance they might require to carry out their game role.
When possible, the players should inform the game staff about the manning
levels they require or expect for subordinates or player staff, their
information needs and the preferred modes of receiving that information
both before and during game play (for example, a player may want to
receive daily intelligence briefs). If the players expect to need particular
reference publications, they should verify their availability at the game site
and make arrangements to send ahead or bring with them those materials
not available.
Finally, it can be very helpful to game-control personnel if players can
identify those types of decisions the players intend to reserve to themselves
and those they intend to delegate to the controllers. There are sometimes
conflicts between what the players expect and what the controllers are used
to, conflicts that can disrupt the play of a game if not ironed out ahead of
time.
Many professional wargame players and controllers may be surprised to
learn that even hobbyists must prepare for play, at least if they intend to
play seriously or competitively. The amount of preparation involved in
playing a hobby game has varied over time and with the type of game
involved, but there does seem to be a more pronounced tendency for the
more recent games to require far more preparation than their ancestors did.
It takes more than learning the rules to play a hobby game at all, and much
more to play it well. Yet even that most basic step of learning the game's
rules can require a great deal of time and effort.
The earliest hobby games, such as Wells’s Little Wars, had fairly short
and simple rules. The players could concentrate on figuring out what they
wanted to do, confident in their ability to translate their plans into the
mechanics needed to carry them out. The earliest board wargames shared
these characteristics. Although when compared to children's games like
Monopoly, the rules of an early wargame like Afrika Korps were complex,
they were still not very difficult by modem, standards. A few basic
mechanics of movement and combat were the heart of the game, and once
he had mastered them the player could concentrate on strategy.
As players and designers became more experienced, however, their
increasing desire for greater accuracy or realism in the games translated into
a drive for greater detail in game parameters and processes. The result was
longer and more arcane rules. Wargames such as 1914 stopped being just an
unusual form of adult game and became a specialized field of endeavor for
the experienced, "hard-core" wargame buff. This tendency toward detail,
complexity, and exclusivity became most pronounced in the genre known as
tactical games.
Tactical games deal with the actual battlefield performance, not of large
units whose ability to employ the full range of their weapons may be
subsumed in a single, simple "combat factor," but with much smaller units,
or even individual men or machines. In these games, the players had to
coordinate the detailed employment of their forces—which tank would fire
on the house, or which type of shot would be loaded into the broadside guns
of a ship-of-the-Iine. Strategy alone was no longer enough. The player now
had to learn how to make his forces fight effectively given the limitations of
their physical capabilities. It was one thing to "order" a task force to
bombard Midway Island; it was quite another to orchestrate the maneuvers
and firings of a long line of square-rigged frigates to break the enemy's line
of battle while tacking upwind. The former required only the understanding
of what needed to be done; the latter also depended on knowing how to do
it.
The general rise in the complexity of all games coupled with the
increasing popularity of the tactical level began to make the serious
hobbyist into an even greater student of history and military art and science
than he had been before. As the details of the process became more
important to the play of the game, the essence of successful play became
the need for experience, not just in the game’s rules and systems, but in the
underlying elements of reality that the game attempted to represent.
The difficulty for the game designer was to put together a system that
could translate the details and processes of reality into game mechanics
while preserving the player’s focus on reality. It is the same problem that
faces the professional community. Representing the processes of reality in
great detail requires complex models; forcing the players to deal with
complex models requires that they learn not only what works best in reality,
but also how to implement the real solutions, in detail, according to the
game's representation. This latter pressure tends to drive players, especially
players of professional games, to "game the game" when the latter's
representation of reality is, as it must be, less than perfect. In turn, this
attitude can lead to a loss of that critical suspension of disbelief, a dropping
of the players out of their game roles, and ultimately to a serious reduction
in the substance of what the game can accomplish.
There is a strong and in many ways healthy tendency on the part of the
professional wargame community to focus attention on the insights derived
from the play of a game, that is, its substance, and to limit discussion of the
game's mechanics, or process. It is important to remember, however, that
the game process is integral to the generation of its substance, and that the
former can affect the latter in at least three significant ways.
First, the limited amount of time available for playing the game will
determine how much of a battle, campaign, or war the game and its players
can explore. These time limitations may also distort the flow of decisions
and events by giving decision makers too little time to evaluate and select
from the many alternative courses of action that may be available to them
during the play of the game. Second, the fact that certain systems, tactics,
and operations may not be adequately modeled in the game's methodology
may constrain the players to make, or not make, important types of
decisions. Finally, the parameters chosen for modeling in the game system,
and the types, quantity, and quality of information available to the players
will largely determine the basis for their decisions, focus their attention, and
possibly even alter their evaluations of capabilities and methods of
operation in ways not entirely consistent with their experience or with
objective reality.

PLAYING THE BAD GUYS

Because so much of the learning derived from playing games is based
on the dynamic interaction of the competing ideas and wills of its players,
the wargame player needs an opponent (even if it is only himself, an
habitual problem with hobby gamers because of the shortage of live
opponents). Many of the insights derived from game play thus depend on
the abilities of the opponent. Sometimes it can be very difficult to
distinguish insights that might apply in general from those that result from
the specific circumstances of that specific game with that specific opponent.
In particular, how and why the opponent employs his forces as he does is
often the most critical element of learning, and also one of the most difficult
to interpret.
It used to be that hobbyists simply did not care about such things. After
all, the game was supposed to be fun, and the learning that could result
from playing it was to be found largely in its information content and the
manipulation of the player's own forces. The situation and opposing forces
were postulated by history or the game's designer, and how each player
used those forces in that situation was entirely up to him.
The professionals could not be quite so cavalier. A central concern in
any serious game is the extent to which players "mirror image" the
opposition. There is always an underlying uneasiness about the extent to
which an American can "play" a Soviet without simply using Soviet forces
and capabilities in the style of an American. As a result, the requirements
for accurate representation of "the threat" in professional games has become
a topic of some interest, generating a series of papers as well as conferences
on the subject.6
Playing non-U.S. or threat roles in a professional wargame is not really
much different from playing friendly or "Blue" roles. Playing the threat
well, however, requires special effort, and often special training or
expertise. "Red" players must understand not only the technical capabilities
of the opposition, but their tactical and strategic doctrine as well. To "play
Red", the player must learn to "think Red".
For this reason established gaming facilities usually have a special team
of Red players, typically drawn from the intelligence community. At the
Naval War College for example, there is a special detachment of the Naval
Operational Intelligence Center whose responsibilities include playing Red
in accordance with intelligence projections of enemy capabilities and
intentions.
Red players must be careful, however, not to restrict themselves to the
standard or accepted responses to every Blue action. Where uncertainties
and debates exist, different approaches can be used in different games or
even in different portions of the same game. When specific situations seem
to call for slightly more imaginative responses, Red players should
sometimes be willing to deviate from overly rigid interpretations of enemy
"doctrine." When they do so, however, they should carefully explain their
rationale and inform the players that what they did may not be in accord
with strict intelligence interpretations of likely threat behavior. Of course,
any such unusual actions must be consistent with the game’s objectives or
they are likely to be disallowed by the game's sponsor.
As hobby wargamers have become more involved in modern-era
games, there has been a greater emphasis on limiting player options through
the use of restrictive "doctrine" that requires players to deploy and employ
their forces in particular ways that are supposedly consistent with the actual
practices of the military service and nationality they represent. In some
ways, although perhaps more formally, the hobby is thus taking an approach
to "playing Red" that is quite similar to that of the professionals.
Unfortunately, this tendency may not be a positive trend in either
community. There is certainly a need to avoid mirror-imaging in order to
avoid misinterpreting both the capabilities and possible intentions of
potential adversaries. What is less clear is the efficacy of imposing rigid
restrictions on players as the means of achieving this goal. There is a
delicate balance between creating a reasonable representation of opposing
capabilities and doctrine and imposing an artificial constraint on the
imagination and creativity of the players.
The Western view of the Soviet military as one dominated by rigid
doctrine has made such approaches as described above acceptable to many
professionals as well as hobbyists. The danger of a too literal and
unquestioning acceptance of this view and its translation into wargame
mechanics or procedures is that it may lead to just as many self-fulfilling
delusions as the mirror-imaging approach. Nothing that forces, objectively,
bad or even questionable game play should be acceptable, and in fact will
not be acceptable to the players who are forced to operate under such
restrictions.
Whether it is a hobby gamer or a professional, to whom winning and
losing isn't supposed to matter, but inevitably and happily does, the player
who loses a game because in his eyes the system prevented him from doing
what he had to do to win learns nothing from the experience except that the
game is a bad one. Similarly, the player who wins the game learns how to
win the game, but not necessarily what is important to victory in reality.
The essence of the problem remains the need to provide the players
accurate information about their situation and forces, and synthetic
experience about how to use those forces in that situation. Artificial
doctrine that forces players to act in a certain way without making them
understand why that behavior is or is not appropriate is counterproductive.

POST-GAME COMMENTARY
Nearly all navy or other professional wargames conclude with a "hot
wash-up," during which some or all of the players are asked for an overall
assessment of the game and for specific comments about particular issues or
aspects of play. Some games, in addition, allow for an ongoing series of
such sessions during game play. Players should make the most of these
chances to influence directly what the game produces.
 Hot wash-up briefings and other commentaries are a player's major
opportunity to discuss the key elements of his decisions with the other
players and game analysts. They also give the player the chance to address
directly the sponsor's objectives for the game. Because of their importance,
players should attempt to base their presentations on notes taken during or
immediately after the heat of the action. Such a "battle diary" can help
players distinguish their actual thoughts and rationales during the game
events from post-event analysis and "hindsighting."
Comments about the mechanics or process of the game should also be a
part of the player's post-game commentary. If invited for open discussion,
such comments may be appropriate for a hot wash-up. In other cases,
players may be asked to fill out comment sheets. All such remarks are
helpful in the refinement and further development of games and games
systems. The most useful comments are usually those that can be related to
specific game situations and show the effects the process of play may have
had on the substance of game insights.
Hobby games, too, benefit from the reactions and comments of their
players. Although many game publishers include a card in their games
through which they solicit the responses of the players to a particular game,
most game feedback comes from direct, informal contact between a game's
designer and its players (such as at a gaming convention). In addition, there
are a number of hobby magazines published on a monthly or bimonthly
schedule that contain critical reviews of many recent and older wargames or
miniatures rules systems.

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 8: Analysing Wargames
Earlier chapters have described the principal duality of a wargame: in
its design or structure, it is a tool for the modeling and exploration of
human decision processes in the context of military action; in its play, it is
the use of the tool to carry out such research. Wargame analysis is similarly
split into two distinct but intertwined strands—the analysis of game design
and the analysis of game play.
In the world of professional wargaming, the focus is on the analysis of
game play. The evaluation of a game's design receives little attention unless
it is apparent that the structure of the game is having a strong influence on
the play of the game (recall the discussion of process and substance in the
previous chapter). Unfortunately, it is often the case that the game's design
or structure really is having such effects on the game's substance, but that
those effects go unnoticed.
Professional game analysis generally follows one of two approaches.
The first approach, and the one most likely to be fruitful, focuses on why
players made certain decisions and why, in turn, those decisions led to
particular sequences of game events. Such an investigation should examine
the important driving characteristics of the scenario, the rationale for each
side’s actions, and how alternative choices might have changed the course
of events. This focus on the decision-making process is clearly the one most
appropriate for analysis of the play of a professional wargame.
In some cases, however, wargame analysts attempt to treat each of a
game's events "as a source of scientific evidence on matters of research
interest, such as tactics, employment of new platforms or weapons systems,
and certain organizational or procedural ideas."1 This type of investigation
treats the outcome of each game event as a single data point arising from a
scientific experiment, and collects many such outcomes from many such
games into a single body of evidence.
Investigations that focus on decision making employ the techniques of
good analytical history and are most important and appropriate in
professional wargame analysis. Investigations that focus on outcomes are
often quantitatively oriented and more closely resemble scientific inquiry;
they are also less applicable to wargame analysis. In some cases, however,
analysts may gain valuable insights by evaluating a series of games, but in a
qualitative way. This approach is used at the Naval War College to "surface
issues" and identify developing trends.
In the gaming hobby, there is quite a body of analysis of game system
and design, but there is very little formal analysis of game play in the
professional sense. Although each hobbyist may reflect on his experiences
at the gaming table to derive some insights into the underlying realities the
games attempt to represent, there is little evidence of attempts to push such
informal personal analyses of hobby games in the direction of becoming a
serious tool for research into historical or contemporary military affairs.
There have been some rare exceptions, in which hobby games or
gaming techniques have received serious academic attention. For example,
Ms. Helena Rubenstein, former president of the West End Games Company,
designed a game dealing with Robert E. Lee's campaign into Maryland and
Pennsylvania during the summer of 1863 (culminating in the battle of
Gettysburg) as a substitute for a university thesis. A simplified version of
the game later appeared in print for sale to hobbyists (Killer Angels). In the
1960s, gaming techniques were used in many major universities, but
seldom as tools for historical research. The development of hobby-gaming
techniques over the past twenty years warrants renewed examination by the
academic community, especially now that experienced gamers are members
of that community[18]*.
Formal analysis of hobby-game play is generally limited to the type of
game-replay articles described in a previous chapter. Even in these
analyses, however, the emphasis is on improving the player's ability to play
the game, not on deriving insights about the reality the game is supposed to
represent.
The bulk of hobby-game analysis is found in articles dealing with game
criticism or review. Such analyses focus on the effectiveness of the game
design or game system as both a model of the real world and as a
recreational device. The two principal criteria by which reviewers judge
hobby games can thus be described as the two principal elements of
wargaming—realism and playability.
Hobby-game reviews provide, first and foremost, a sort of consumer’s
guide to the numerous games available to the hobbyist. The reviewer's goal
is to help the prospective purchaser decide whether the game is a good one,
one worth spending money on, or a bad one, which is better left sitting on
the game-store shelf than spread over a player's gaming table. To serve this
function, game reviews must provide the reader with certain basic
information: the topic of the game; the scope, scale, and level of play; the
type, number, and quality of physical components (or style of computer
display); and a summary of the game's principal mechanics. Because a
game is meant to be played, however, and not just read, the reviewer should
also impart a sense of the experience of play—the types and scope of
decisions, the level of excitement and intellectual challenge, the ease with
which the player can perform required tasks, and the amount of time
necessary to play the game to a conclusion. Above all, the reviewer must
address the question of whether the game works as a game.
But because wargames are not mere abstract diversions, the game
reviewer must also comment on its accuracy or "realism." In this case, the
goal is to evaluate how well the game re-creates the historical environment
of the events or situations it is attempting to portray. Such evaluations are
much more difficult because they require the reviewer to have a good
understanding of the historical background underlying the game. They are
made doubly difficult by the stress on how the game plays, because too
many designers, reviewers, and players operate under the false impression
that a wargame cannot at once be an accurate "simulation" and a playable
"game." Fortunately, an experienced reviewer, even though relatively
unfamiliar with a game’s historical setting, can still contribute to a player's
evaluation of the game's accuracy. By being scrupulously honest about his
own qualifications and carefully explaining his questions and opinions, the
reviewer can successfully point out those areas of the game he believes are
particularly successful or particularly unsuccessful at depicting history.
Most importantly, the reviewer must make the reader understand exactly
why he holds the opinions he does.
 In addition to making historical evaluations, experienced game
reviewers often find themselves in a position to comment on a particular
design's contributions to the "state of the art". The reviewer can discuss how
the game addresses the classic problems of player interaction, movement,
combat logistics, and command. He can discuss the new or innovative ideas
presented in the game and evaluate how well those ideas and systems are
integrated into a workable whole. Such "system review" can be the most
difficult of the game critic's tasks, and it is made even more so by the lack
of a "recognized consensus as to what the range of design approaches are,
what classes of variables there are to handle, and which of these are more or
less difficult to handle or process than others; whether it is better to
centralize or decentralize information; etc."2 To overcome this lack of
consensus, the reviewer must often define his or her own criteria and, again
most importantly, explain them and their basis clearly.
Ultimately, evaluating a game fairly and usefully demands that the
reviewer assess the designer's success in achieving his goals. To some, "a
reviewer can only determine if the goals set by the designer have been
achieved. That is the entire scope of a game critic's judgments about any
design other than his own."3 Such a viewpoint, though widely held,
especially by game designers, is far too constricting on the game critic and
depends far too much on the ability of a game designer to state his
objectives explicitly.
Critics have the responsibility not only to comment on whether a
designer achieved his objectives, but also on whether those objectives were
worth achieving. In addition, when the designer's goals are unclear, the
critic has the responsibility to attempt to discern them from the way the
game was designed. Such a process of divination will always produce
mistakes and misunderstandings, but as long as the reviewer is honest and
clearly distinguishes between fact, interpretation, and opinion, he can make
a significant contribution, not only to the game-buying public's data base of
consumer information, but also to advancing the state of the art of wargame
design. This discussion of hobby-game criticism is summarized below in
the form of a model outline for a game-review article.
OceanofPDF.com
 Model Outline of a Hobby Wargame Review
Introduction
• Subject of the game
• Scope, scale, and level of play
• Components
• Designer's focus
• Overall system description
The Game System
• Principal areas of reality represented in the game
• Important abstractions
• Intricacy of the system, and the mechanical ease of play
• Evaluation of the system’s success at achieving the designer's goals
and representing the real situation
• Contributions to the wargaming state of the art
The Game in Play
• Scenarios
• Player roles
• Types of decisions required
• Effects of the game system's mechanical requirements on the
player's decision making
• Evaluation of the player's experience
Overall Evaluation
• Does the game work?
• Is it a good game?
• Who would be most interested in the game?
• Is the game a good value?

The lack of a body of widely

available criticism of professional game designs and design practices
similar to that found in the gaming hobby may be the single most
significant reason that the state of the art of professional design is
advancing at a rate far slower than that seen in the hobby games. The
question of the realism of a game or particular aspects of it is often alluded
to during play. Game reports and briefings make frequent reference to the
artificialities of the games. Yet there have been precious few attempts to
evaluate the problems of even a single game, much less the entire field, in
an appropriate and coherent manner. Books such as Brewer and Shubik's
The War Game, Allen's War Games[19]*, or Wilson's The Bomb and the
Computer confuse games with other forms of research and conceal a few
valuable insights in a forest of irrelevancies and misinterpretations.
Individual game models have been subjected to detailed scrutiny by
operations analysts, but the games themselves are seldom carefully
evaluated as games.
The lack of serious, competent review and criticism of professional
wargames is a significant shortcoming, and one the community would do
well to contemplate as one potential factor in the cyclical nature of gaming's
popularity and utility in defense research. The lack of time and resources to
conduct thorough critical evaluations, driven by the shortage of funds for
doing more than actually running the games, is an all too unfortunately real
source of the problem. Yet, without such evaluations, the validity of the
games is always suspect and their real and potential value too easily
denigrated. For the value of a wargame as a tool in defense research, as in
academic research, is inextricably tied to its validity as a tool for studying
decision processes.

DOCUMENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF WARGAMES

Wargame Validity
Even the participants of a wargame often find it difficult to judge the
limits of its validity. For those who are not actually present, assessing a
wargame's validity is an even more difficult and complex question. The first
problem, simply defining validity, is also the most nebulous. As a start, a
wargame's validity can be defined as the extent to which its processes and
results represent real problems and issues as opposed to artificial ones
generated only by the gaming environment.
Given such a definition, assessing the validity of a wargame’s results
seems to require answering the following questions:

• How are the game's "results" defined by the participants (when

available) or by the available game documentation?
• What outcomes from warfare models define or quantify these
results, and how are they obtained?
• How and how strongly do "going-in" assumptions drive results and
interpretations; in particular, what is the possible influence of scenario
and unstated "subliminal" assumptions?
• How and how much does reliance on "accepted" interpretations of
enemy reactions drive the perceived principal lessons of the game?
• How do game mechanics, especially action and reaction capabilities,
affect the course of the game and its interpretations?
• How do mathematical models and analyses and the value of the
parameters they employ affect game play results and insights?
• How does the occurrence of low-probability events drive perceptions
of players during the game and conclusions reported about the game?

Clearly, specific games may require other more specific and technical
questions to be answered before the validity of their results can be assessed.
If non-participants in a wargame are to have a fighting chance of fairly
interpreting what that game has to say, however, they must be able to find
answers to the questions listed above. The answers to such questions must
be available in game documentation, and so these questions must also guide
game analysis and documentation from the start.

Wargame Documentation
Just as wargame analysis is closely related to analytical history, a
wargame report should more closely resemble an historical treatise than the
documentation of a campaign analysis. Just as good historical analysis
treats events as indicators of deeper underlying realities, good wargame
analysis and documentation treat game events only as indicators of the
decision processes of the players. Although game reports describe the major
events of game play they should focus on the underlying reasons for the
players' decisions that gave rise to those events. They should also evaluate
the extent to which those reasons were driven by realistic concerns or
effects rather than by the artificialities of the gaming environment.
The structure of a wargame report should reflect this relative
importance of events and causal factors. In general, a simple,
straightforward structure is best. It should begin with a short executive
summary that outlines the objectives and structure of the game and
highlights the key events and insights. Perhaps most importantly, the
summary should point out areas or issues raised in the game that require
further, more detailed, research.
The report should end with a brief appendix discussing the important
elements of the primary models used to support the game. The discussion
should explain the roles and relative importance of the various models,
describe inputs required, and identify those that drive the results. Where
possible, umpire variations of model inputs or outputs should also be
discussed, at least for major engagements or classes of engagements.
Finally, if models are documented, the appendix should provide references
to allow those interested readers a chance to explore the models in more
detail.
As shown below, the main body of the report should be builtaround
four sections: introduction or background, game play, insights or issues
raised, and conclusions. The introduction should relate the origins of the
game to its objectives and its structure or design. It should allow the reader
to understand why the game was played and how its results were expected
to provide information about specific questions or objectives. The summary
of game play should describe the scenario and its effect on play; specify the
number of actual players and their roles and commands; and describe in
broad terms the courses of events, focusing on player decisions and their
underlying reasoning. At times, assessments of the validity of these reasons
and the sources of such assessments may also be warranted. The sections on
insights derived or issues raised from game play should concentrate on
specific matters either pointed out during the course of play or raised in
discussion or "hot wash-ups". Where possible, such issues should be keyed
to specific game events or classes of events that gave rise to or illustrate the
importance of the issue.

Model Outline of a Professional Wargame Report

Executive Summary

Introduction
• Origins of game
• Game objectives
• Game design to meet the objectives

Game Play
• Scenario
• Player roles
• Key events and decisions, integrating the rationales for each

Insights or issues
• Driving factors
• Specific ideas, preferably keyed to major game decisions or events

Conclusions
• Broader insights into major underlying factors
• Topics for further research

Appendix
• Model roles and importance
• Inputs, outputs, and umpire modifications
• Sources of documentation

The first three sections of the report largely represent the historical
chronology and causal analysis. The concluding section should identify the
deeper factors that may underlie and relate several, possibly diverse,
individual insights and issues. Sometimes such themes are not to be found;
if discernible, however, such broad insights can prove to be the major
contribution of a game to the accomplishment of the objective. Finally, the
conclusions should also identify those issues raised by the game that are
both important enough and tractable enough to be addressed constructively
by further research. In this way, the game can help direct the attention of
other defense analysts toward high-priority topics.
Perhaps the biggest problem in wargame documentation is the need to
balance the speed with which a game report is produced and the amount of
time necessary to reflect on and assimilate the insights the game may
provide. The pressure to produce "results" quickly is similar to that
experienced in exercise analysis, and similar care must be used in game
analysis.4
In many cases, the purposes of the game will dictate the relative
importance of speed and depth of analysis. Training games clearly require
almost immediate feedback if they are to be most useful. Games conducted
more for the purpose of research may have the luxury of several months of
careful analysis before a report is required. Most games, however, are
probably well served by the same device seen in exercise analysis: a "quick-
look" report touching on the highlights and produced quickly, followed by a
more thoughtful and careful full-scale report.
Both quick-look and full reports should follow the outline proposed
above. Most of a game's primary objectives should be addressed in the
quick-look report. The follow-on report can cover those issues in more
detail, raise new ones in unexpected or tangential areas, and address other
topics resulting from additional reflection and analysis.
Sponsors of games played at the Naval War College can generally count
on the War Gaming Department to provide some support for the production
of a quick-look report. However, because the department is not staffed to
provide extensive analysis for every game, sponsors must supply their own
analysts if they want more detailed follow-on reports.

Wargame Analysis
Plans for game analysis must be made as early as possible in the
gaming cycle with a view toward producing a report structured as outlined
above. Ideally, the game sponsor, designer, and those responsible for game
analysis should jointly determine the objectives of the game, the overall
shape of the design that will allow those objectives to be met, and the data
and information that must be collected to meet those objectives. Early joint
discussions of objectives, mechanics, and analysis can help prevent the
potential problems of designing a game that addresses the wrong issues and
structuring a game analysis that focuses on the wrong measures.
Typically, those game participants responsible for analysis are the
game's only historians. During the course of play, analysts must record the
major decisions made by the participants, their rationales, and the game
events to which the decisions led. The analysts are also responsible for
cataloging the key insights that participants derive from game play and
discussion.
The functions of observer and data collector are only a part of the
analyst's responsibilities, however; in essence, observations and data
collection provide only the raw material for analysis and synthesis. The
analyst must go beyond merely what happened in the game to understand
not only the immediate causes of events, but also the deeper themes that
may underlie an entire chain of cause and effect. This analytical process
differs from the quantitative "scientific" analysis to which that term is most
often applied. The raw data of a wargame is the interaction of players and
their decisions; it is history, not science. The process of game analysis is
much more akin to exploratory research and historical analysis than to the
evaluation of physical experiments or systems analysis. On the other hand,
most wargames use the conceptual, if not always the mathematical, models
as often found in operations research or systems analysis approaches to
defense problems. Thus, the analysts must be well versed in the
characteristics, capabilities, and limitations of such models to understand
how well or poorly they represent the reality of military operations and how
appropriately they affect the play of the game.
To analyze the game effectively, the analyst must keep in mind the
entire gaming process, from the initial formulation of the game's objectives,
through design, play, and documentation, and even to the interpretation of
results by nonparticipants. Wargame analysis is a complicated process
requiring careful observation, questioning, thought, and synthesis of events
and insights; it is essentially the art of discerning order in the midst of
chaos. To do a credible job of game analysis, the analyst must have a
coherent idea of what to look for and why before being thrust into the game
itself. The appendix lists several questions that a wargame analyst may wish
to consider in his preparation for and participation in a game. These
questions are only a guide; there is no magic formula for doing good game
analysis. Each game is different, and what is important in one may be
unimportant in the next. Hopefully, however, the principles discussed in this
chapter and the questions in the appendix will help the new analyst sort out
which is which. Only good analysis and documentation can allow valid
interpretation of the game and application of its lessons to real-world
problems.

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 9: Integrating Wargames with Operations
Analysis and Exercises
Wargaming is one of the U.S. Navy's principal tools for educating its
people and for evaluating its combat capabilities. This latter process is
crucial today when so many weapons, systems, and ideas are untested in
combat. Short of actual military operations, the navy makes use not only of
wargames but also exercises and operations or systems analysis to help it
learn about the strengths and limitations of its strategies, concepts of
operations, and tactical and technical capabilities. Too often the layman will
equate all three of these tools (indeed, often referring to all of them by the
generic term war gaming). Just as often, it seems, the professional defense
specialist acts as if the roles of wargames, analysis, and exercises overlap to
a great extent; frequently such specialists seem to view those tools as
functioning independently of one another or even in competition with one
another.
Such a shallow view not only fails to distinguish the subtle but
important differences among wargames, analysis, and exercises, but also
impedes their correct use. Only by integrating the information that can be
extracted from the proper application of all three processes will the navy
and other elements of the defense community obtain a balanced and well-
rounded understanding of the potential problems and opportunities of future
combat. In order to perform such integration, it is first necessary to
understand how wargames differ from exercises and analysis, and to
explore the inter-relationships and complementary nature of the three
processes.

DEFINITIONS
Earlier we defined a wargame as a warfare model or simulation, not
involving actual military forces, and in which the flow of events is affected
by and in turn affects decisions made during the course of those events by
players representing the opposing sides. The key words in this definition are
players and decisions. Wargaming is an experiment in human interaction.
Without human players there may be a model, but there is no game. A true
wargame is best used to investigate the decision processes of its players and
how those processes interact; it is not well suited to the calculation of
outcomes of physical events.
Analysis or "operations research", on the other hand, has been defined
by two of its founding fathers as "a scientific method of providing [decision
makers] with a quantitative basis for decisions."1 Here, the key words are
scientific and quantitative. Because the field of analysis has grown so large
and diverse (including under its aegis systems analysis, operations analysis,
and even at times engineering and policy assessment), many other
definitions of it have been proposed. In a textbook written for use at the
U.S. Naval Academy this "more thorough modern definition" is proposed:
"Operations analysis is the application of scientific knowledge toward the
solution of problems which occur in operational activities (in their real
environment). Its special technique is to invent a strategy of control by
measuring, comparing, and predicting possible behavior through a scientific
model of a situation or activity."2
As discussed in chapter 3, modern defense analysis was born during
World War II when both the British and Americans made concerted efforts
to mobilize the scientific community in support of military operations, not
merely in the development of new technologies. The efforts of these early
pioneers, such as Morse and Kimball in the U.S. and P. M. S. Blackett in the
U.K., were directed at problems of antiaircraft operations, convoy
protection, and antisubmarine warfare.3 Wartime groups such as the British
Operational Research Sections and American Antisubmarine Warfare
Operations Research Group evolved after the war into formal analytic
organizations. Analysis received its biggest boost in the U.S. under
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early 1960s. Although the
influence of analysis has had its ups and downs since those early days, it
remains a major weapon brought to bear on both sides of many defense
debates. Despite the divergence of views on the nature and proper roles of
analysis, however, virtually everyone in the defense community agrees that
the fundamental characteristic of the discipline is its scientific and
quantitative nature.
Military exercises are fundamentally different from both analysis and
wargames. Exercises can be considered any activity involving the operation
of actual military forces in a simulated hostile environment. Here, the key
words are forces and simulated. The navy conducts many different kinds of
exercises to achieve different objectives, but all true exercises are
characterized by real-time operation of ships and aircraft, which often
expend real or simulated weapons against some "enemy" force. Oftentimes,
this "enemy" is represented by U.S. or allied forces tasked to play the role
of some hostile power.
It is clear from the above definitions that wargames, exercises, and
analysis are distinct approaches to studying military operations. Although
often related and in some ways similar, each of the three tools focuses
primarily on different aspects of warfighting reality. As a result, each
technique can be an effective device for learning about specific aspects of a
problem, but none gives a completely balanced view of reality.
The physical sciences are the paradigm of analysis. Analysis focuses on
the physical processes of reality, adopting a philosophy of approximating
those processes with mathematics that can, at least in some sense, be
"solved". Analysts build mathematical models of some major elements of
reality, make measurements to quantify the parameters of the models, and
then manipulate both the models and the parameters to learn about reality or
to find the best solutions to the problems it poses. Although the
mathematics used in analysis is objective, the choices of which models to
use and which parameters are most important, the assumptions that underlie
the analysis, and sometimes even the method of solving the mathematical
problem can all be subjective. As a result, it can be very difficult to translate
valid learning about the model into valid learning about reality. In making
the translation, analysis must simplify and often discard much that is not
reproducible or readily predictable—including at times, human behavior.
Wargames, on the other hand, focus precisely on human behavior,
particularly on human decision making. The learning that comes from
wargames comes both from the experience of making decisions (playing)
and from the process of understanding why those decisions are made (game
analysis). The outcomes of game decisions are frequently defined by the
results of mathematical models that are often similar or identical to those
used in analysis. In a wargame, however, these models are used in a
fundamentally different way. The models used in a wargame are typically
stochastic in nature—that is, they may produce a variety of outcomes, and
the specific one that occurs for any use of the model is determined by some
chance device that reflects the probability distribution of the various
outcomes. Thus, the "roll of the dice" provides a wide range of possible
results or snapshots of reality with which the players must deal. It is in this
sense that model results should be considered inputs to wargames, whereas
such results are more often considered the outputs of analysis. Wargames do
not do very well at producing quantitative measures because they are often
little more than a single realization of a complex stochastic process. Instead,
the value of a wargame lies in qualitative assessments of why decisions are
made. Thus, to exploit the power of wargaming, the physical sciences must
give way to a new paradigm, that of history. People and decisions become
paramount.
Exercises focus on doing. They are primarily tools for training and are
usually designed with training goals uppermost in priority. Operational and
tactical decisions are sometimes constrained because of requirements to
exercise systems and train personnel. Even unscripted free-play exercises
are usually restricted because of safety requirements or geographic limits on
the exercise operations area. Exercises are often viewed as experiments that
can provide reliable data about how things "really are" so that the models
used in analyses or games can be calibrated or made more realistic. In many
cases, such a view is a useful one, but it is one that requires care in the
process of interpreting numbers whose origins and import are sometimes
difficult to judge. There is no generally accepted way to accurately adjust
the results of an exercise to reflect its artificialities. Thus, in order to focus
on the execution of orders and tasks, exercises must often restrict the range
of physical parameters and processes that can be explored and limit the
potential decisions the participants can make. As with analysis and
wargaming, the actual results or outcomes of the execution of exercise
activities (particularly combat activities) can only be approximated.
Exercises, too, are not real.
 WARGAMES AND EXERCISES
As indicated in earlier discussion, perhaps the easiest way to
distinguish between a wargame and an exercise is that the latter involves the
actual movement and operation of military forces. An exception to the rule
is the command-post exercise or CPX. The individual services, the joint
chiefs of staff, and even the civilian elements of the National Command
Authority conduct command-post exercises to test procedures and identify
potential problem areas that could arise in an actual crisis. Major command-
post exercises like Nifty Nugget may see some movement of small units or
even individual reservists recalled in a test of the mobilization plans, but
most CPXs do not involve ships putting to sea or army battalions deploying
to wartime positions.4 In fact, the careful scripting of the major events in
such exercises makes them very similar to the types of one-player
wargames described in Chapter 4.
A true exercise requires military units to operate as if they were in a
real-world situation, with obvious differences. The principal focus of an
exercise, as described earlier, is on training the participants to function more
coherently as a team. An aircraft carrier battle group that is about to leave
U.S. home waters to deploy overseas will usually go through a battle-group
evaluation exercise, to practice coordinated operations and identify areas
that may require additional training before deployment. Although each
exercise is an opportunity to conduct operational research, and military and
civilian observers and analysts usually record and reconstruct the major
exercise events to identify important "lessons learned" or new operational
insights, for the most part research efforts must take a backseat to training.
Wargaming has also played a major role in training and education.
Indeed, much of the early emphasis on wargaming at the Naval War College
centered around its ability to provide players a taste of the intricacies
involved in maneuvering large battle fleets, an opportunity that few would
have in peacetime. Yet even between the world wars, and especially since
1945, wargaming has become more and more popular as a tool for
exploring a broad range of strategic, operational, and tactical questions,
especially those focusing on the decision-making process.
 In addition to this different balance of training and research emphasis,
there are other differences between wargaming and exercises. The major
differences can be summarized in terms of cost, time scale, flexibility, level
of play, nature of the participants, and characterization of results.
Compared to the cost of running an exercise, a wargame is usually quite
inexpensive. The actual play of the game seldom involves more than a few
dozen officers and some number of supporting technicians, clerical
workers, umpires, and analysts, and only for a few days. Although pregame
planning and postgame analysis efforts may require several months of
work, they involve only a relative handful of people. A major exercise, on
the other hand, usually involves thousands of military and civilian
personnel, from the technician who mans the radar to the public relations
officer who explains the goals of the exercise to the press. It also requires
the operation, logistical support, and maintenance of large numbers of
ships, aircraft, and other equipment for periods of up to several weeks. As a
result, the costs of a wargame and an exercise that deal with the same
general topic can differ by several orders of magnitude.
A somewhat dated but still valid example of such cost differentials is
given by Hausrath. Based on various government estimates, Hausrath
concluded that the United States had spent about $246 million per day
during World War II, and about $16 million a day in Korea. During the
Vietnam conflict, the cost had ranged from $5.5 million a day in 1965 to
about $70 million a day in 1968. "The daily cost of operating a game that
would be representative of conflict of the type described above amounts to
about $500 to $4,000."5
As for maneuvers and exercises, considering only additional costs
incurred above normal operating expenditure, Hausrath listed costs for four
exercises. These costs ranged from just over $541,000 for a two-week
command-post exercise (nearly $40,000 per day for a full fourteen days) to
a high of some $60 million for a massive army-air force exercise in 1964
called Joint Exercise Desert Strike (roughly $4 million a day).
Because a wargame does not employ actual military units, the control
group can regulate the advance of time during the play of the game to run
much faster or much slower than real time. A game such as the Naval War
College’s Global War Game, which explores the strategic options in a long,
worldwide war, may have the game time advance at a rate ten times that of
real time. (That is, one day of game play represents the activities of ten days
of war.) Alternatively, a game such as NAVTAG, which explores the
tactical options available to the commanders of individual ships or battle
groups during a few hours of combat, may slow time down so that one hour
of game play represents only a few minutes of real time, thus providing the
players more of an opportunity to analyze and appreciate a complex tactical
situation. Exercises, for the most part, must be carried out in real time.
Some "time jumps" between phases of an exercise are possible, but the
actual activities of the units involved can seldom be done at anything other
than real-time rates.
Because of the administrative, logistical, and sometimes even political
complexities of staging large exercises, they are typically carried out at the
lower levels of battle groups or individual platforms (or army divisions or
battalions). Theater or major operational level exercises like the navy's
FLEETEX (involving multiple battle groups, submarines, and land-based
aircraft) or NATO REFORGER (involving many divisions from all of
NATO, including air and sea transport of reinforcements to the Continent)
are held only infrequently. Wargames, on the other hand, can be played
easily at any level of force or violence—up to and including that of the
National Command Authority and global strategy and policy in a
worldwide NATO/Warsaw Pact war.
Unfortunately, because senior civilian and military leaders can seldom
absent themselves from their real-life responsibilities for any prolonged
period, active participation in exercises is usually restricted to lower-
ranking military officers, seldom including fleet or theater commanders.
Political background and diplomatic decisions are often simplified or
assumed away in such exercises. In many wargames, on the other hand,
civilian players are involved. Their representation of political authorities (as
opposed to military men acting as politicians) can often add new and quite
different perspectives to those of the military participants, with sometimes
surprising and at times frustrating results. (For example, an elaborate
military plan to operate fleet units in the territorial waters of a NATO ally
prior to the opening of hostilities might be frustrated by the political
decision of a civilian "president" who finds the military reasons for
adopting such a plan insufficient to counterbalance the potential diplomatic
problems its implementation could entail.) Unfortunately, the same
difficulties that prevent most exercises from enjoying the prolonged
involvement of senior decision makers plague wargames as well.
Finally, as discussed in detail earlier, the results of wargames are best
characterized as qualitative assessments of why and how decisions were
made. Exercise results are more often characterized as quantitative
summaries of unit performance. Wargame analysis documents decisions.
Exercise analysis measures operational parameters such as system
availability, speed at which orders are transmitted and executed, the number
of detections made as a fraction of opportunities, the percentage of targets
engaged, or others. Table 4 summarizes the comparison of exercises and
wargames.

WARGAMES AND ANALYSIS

On the surface, wargaming appears to have even more in common with
systems or operations analysis than it does with exercises. Both wargames
and analysis are, in some sense, an intellectual abstraction of warfare
without the bother of maneuvering real people and machines over real
terrain or oceans. Both wargames and analysis use scenarios to set the
ground rules for and structure the research. Data bases provide both
wargames and analyses the basic information they need about the physical
parameters and processes of the situations likely to be of interest. To
simulate how these parameters and processes interact in the real world, both
wargames and analyses employ mathematical models and some set of rules
and procedures that assure the logical flow of cause and effect. Despite this
surface similarity, however, in both their goals and their operation,
wargames and analyses differ significantly
In the defense community, the term analysis usually connotes systems
or operations analysis. As described earlier, such analysis may be
characterized as a collection of techniques for quantifying and manipulating
quantitative information about physical parameters to calculate the
quantitative outcome of physical processes. Wargaming, on the other hand,
is a tool for exploring the effects of human interpretation of information
rather than those of the actual information (or data) itself. Wargames focus
on the decisions players make, how and why they make them, and what
effects they have on subsequent events and decisions.

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Table 4. Comparison of Exercises and Wargames

In the diverse world of analysis, the type that most closely resembles
the scope and form of wargaming is what may be called classical campaign
analysis. Thus, a comparison of these two techniques best highlights the
differences between wargaming and analysis.
A campaign analysis, not surprisingly, analyzes a campaign, defined as
a sequence of tactical encounters between opposing forces, with the results
of each encounter determining the potential numbers and types of forces
available for the next. One of the most frequently analysed campaigns in the
1970’s was that for control of the Atlantic sea lines of communication
during a NATO/Warsaw Pact war. In such a campaign, Soviet submarines
and long-range bombers were opposed by NATO land-based fighters and
antisubmarine warfare aircraft, aircraft carrier battle groups, nuclear and
diesel submarines, and convoy escort groups of surface ships and
helicopters. Various Soviet strategies for deploying their forces were
opposed by different combinations of allied antisubmarine barriers,
sweeping operations, and convoying policies. Complex mathematical
models represented everything from the ability of a sonar system to detect a
submarine to the results of a coordinated attack of several missile- and
torpedo-firing submarines on an Allied convoy protected by fixed-wing
aircraft, submarines, helicopters, and surface ships in a layered defense in
depth. A large bookkeeping model kept track of the types and numbers of
forces lost on both sides over the course of a ninety-day campaign. The
army and air force employ similar campaign analysis techniques to examine
the course of a war on NATO's Central Front, or the balance of power in the
air.
When carefully structured and thoroughly carried out, such campaign
analyses might be expected to yield valid insights about the following:

The feasibility of alternative and opposing strategies

Areas of strength and weakness in combat power and sustainability for
both sides
Factors and parameters that critically affect the results of the campaign
and the sensitivity of the results to such factors
How different types and numbers of forces can be used to best
advantage
The relative contribution of the various types of forces to the overall
outcome of the campaign

The process of carrying out such a campaign analysis usually requires

the analysts to define a sequence of events—often simply a string of
sequential engagements—and to calculate the expected (or average)
outcome of those events based on the postulated mathematical models and
information about forces and capabilities. The overall campaign outcome is
a set of numbers representing the expected losses to each type of force over
the course of the campaign. In rare cases and for special types of forces like
aircraft carriers or AWACS aircraft, a probability distribution for the
numbers lost may replace or elaborate on the single mean number.
The problem is that the assumptions that led the analysts to define the
initial allocation of forces and sequence of events may have been faulty, and
so may result in a set of outcomes that would be patently absurd in real life.
For example, if all the Soviet submarines that attempted to attack aircraft
carrier battle groups were sunk without damaging a carrier, the analysis
might be restructured to have fewer submarines allocated to such suicide
missions, or to prohibit such attacks after some initial period of war (during
which, presumably, the Soviets would learn of the futility of such efforts).
Through trial and error, the analysts go back through the event sequences to
determine what changes in strategy or tactics could result in a more
balanced outcome. The old sequence is then discarded and replaced by a
new one. This iterative procedure goes on until the analysts are satisfied
that both sides are employing nearly optimized strategies. This final
sequence is then used to run the campaign to an analytical conclusion. The
final results, usually defined in terms of the expected attrition suffered by
both sides, becomes the basis for assessing feasibility or identifying critical
factors, and for comparing variations of the assumptions underlying the
analysis. For example, the "base case" analysis may assume that all allied
military shipping runs in slow but heavily defended convoys, while a
variation may allow the ships to sail independently along "protected lanes."
Results are then compared to see which strategy had more ships sunk, or
which delivered more material earlier.
Wargames allow for the continual adjustments of strategies and tactics
by both sides in response to the developing situation and outcomes of
specific engagements; such adjustments are not seen in campaign analysis.
Wargames afford their players a measure of control over events through the
decisions they make during play. Unlike a campaign analysis in which
changes in strategy occur as a result of calculating the outcomes of
implementing the strategy, wargame decisions are not based on a clear and
complete understanding of all the facts (much less the results) but rather on
how the players view the facts through a cloudy and possibly incomplete
frame of reference that is often distorted by preconceived notions, poor
information, and the pressure of time—in other words, the fog of war. In a
campaign analysis, a strategy that leads to disastrous losses is simply
discarded; in a wargame, most decisions cannot be recalled after they have
been made. (In some cases, however, a player may make a particularly bad
decision that results in a situation that would prevent further play from
achieving the objectives of the game. In such cases the control staff will
usually turn the game clock back to the time before that decision was made
and allow the player to try again, not, however, before the point has been
made about why that decision was such a poor one.)
Although immediate outcomes of wargame decisions are sometimes
defined by mathematical models (such as the result of an air attack on a
carrier battle group), the true effects of those decisions ripple through all
subsequent game decisions and events. What and how much is lost in a
particular wargame engagement or campaign is far less important for
interpreting the insights the game can provide than how and why those
engagements occurred as they did.
The end product of a classical campaign analysis can look deceptively
like the outcome of a single wargame. But it is a game in which all
decisions are premade, poor decisions are self-correcting, uncertainty
eliminated, and chance averaged away. Such campaign analysis (and other
forms of analysis) can provide important insights into the effects that
systems and tactics might have on the outcomes of combat operations in the
particular circumstances assumed by the analysis. Yet, it has enormous
difficulty in capturing the dynamic elements of warfare or in illuminating
facets of reality not already incorporated into its assumptions and
mathematical models. Because analysis tends to focus on the quantifiable
and reproducible, on the mean rather than the outlier, it can provide little
insight into why and how a brilliant hunch or incredible blunder, a bold
gamble or paralyzing indecision can turn carefully crafted plans into
beautifully executed fiascos, or ad hoc operations into decisive victories.
There are no Chancellorsvilles in campaign analysis.
While analysis focuses on systems, the true value of wargaming lies in
its unique ability to illuminate the effect of the human factor in warfare. By
their very nature, wargames seek to explore precisely those messy,
"unquantifiable" questions that analysis must ignore. Wargames teach us
what we didn't know we didn't know.
To accomplish that, however, wargames must give up any vain hope of
achieving the detailed mathematical structure and rigorous calculation
characteristic of analysis. A wargame is not and will not ever be a
mathematical experiment whose initial conditions can be re-created
precisely and varied at will. The fundamental initial conditions of a game—
the knowledge, talent, character, and experience of the players—changes as
players change or as they play the game more. Unlike analysis, such
parameters are not physical and not mathematical and may not be varied
readily over a wide spectrum of possible values.
There is another important difference between analysis and wargames.
Because analysis requires highly technical and quantitative training, most of
its practitioners are civilians, despite the recent increase in the number of
military officers who have earned advanced scientific degrees. Although the
best of these civilian analysts work closely with their military clients to
keep their analyses militarily sound, it is rare indeed to find an analysis in
which all major decisions about force employment, missions, and operating
concepts are made by active-duty military personnel. Except for that
minority of wargames used by civilian analysts for strictly exploratory
purposes, most military wargames cast military officers in the military
decision-making roles. The differences in perspective and experience can
sometimes result in significant differences between how a civilian might
address a military problem and how the same problem is handled by
someone in uniform. As mentioned in the earlier discussion of exercises, it
can also be misleading to have military officers play civilian roles, for all
the same reasons.

Table 5 summarizes the comparison of wargames and campaign analysis.

SYNTHESIS
This comparison of wargames to exercises and analysis highlights some
of the major similarities and differences among the three principal
techniques of learning about defense issues. It also demonstrates that
placing complete reliance on any one or two of these techniques can result
in a skewed impression of the critical features of the reality of warfare. To
gain a balanced view of that reality, it is necessary to integrate the insights
available from wargames, exercises, and analysis along with the experience
of history and current operations.
The first thing to remember is that wargames, exercises, and
analysis involve no actual fighting. Because this is the case, none of these
tools can capture all of the human elements of real combat. Military history
is full of examples in which courage, fear, morale, and leadership provided
the decisive determinants of defeat or victory. Wargames and exercises, by
requiring participants to process information and make decisions in the
presence of uncertainty and under the pressure of time, provide greater
opportunities for exploring some of these factors than does analysis, but
even their ability to re-create the stresses of combat is limited. The daily
hours of play for a professional wargame seldom exceed those of a normal
working day, and the players know that at the end of the day they will be
back in the real world, and at the end of the week or the month they will be
back at their normal duty stations. Even exercises, in which the physical
conditions of operation and the physical activities of the participants are
more similar to those of actual warfare, can only produce a fraction of the
real pressures that affect people’s performance when actual weapons may
be fired in anger.
Similarly, the effects of such weapons can only be simulated during
peacetime. Even live firings of things like surface-to-air missiles take place
under controlled conditions that cannot replicate the actual environment of
combat. As a result, wargames, exercises, and analysis must all rely on
mathematical models, which can only partially account for the effects of
weapons on the men and machines of war. The outcomes of engagements,
from a submarine-versus-submarine duel to a large-scale air attack on
massed battle forces, are assessed by using these models, and interpreting or
modifying their results on the basis of military (or analytical) judgment.
Unfortunately, because many modern weapons have seen limited or no use
in actual combat, models and judgments are seldom based on a substantial
body of hard data.
Finally, there is a tendency, most pronounced in the mathematical
world of analysis but extending to a lesser degree even to exercises and
wargames, to seek the ultimate truths of combat in "typical", "expected", or
"likely" results. Yet, if history teaches us anything, it should remind us that
in war the unexpected is commonplace. Too often the highly detailed
engineering or expected-value models that are touted by their creators and
users as reflecting every important factor in combat actually obscure what
Samuel Eliot Morison called "the tremendous influence of luck in all
warfare, especially naval warfare."6
Although there are many other artificialities and shortcomings of
wargames, exercises, and analysis, our goal is not to catalogue all of them.
Practitioners of each of the techniques are (or should be) well aware of their
individual artificialities and strive to improve their ability to overcome or
minimize them. What is too often missing in such efforts is the synthesis of
all of the techniques.
Alone, wargames, exercises, and analysis are useful but limited tools
for exploring specific elements of warfare. Woven together in a continuous
cycle of research, wargames, exercises, and analysis each contribute what
they do best to the complex and evolving task of understanding reality.
Contrast this philosophy of integration, illustrated by "the cycle of research"
at the top of figure 8, with a philosophy of separation symbolized by the
more traditional "spectrum of analysis," illustrated at the bottom of the
figure.
 Figure 8. The cycle and the spectrum

Rather than using each of the tools in isolation, a great deal more can
be accomplished by employing wargames, exercises, and analysis to
address the individual pieces of a problem for which they are best suited,
and then integrating and interpreting their separate results into a combined
picture. The process for doing so is difficult and requires special
combinations of experience, insight, and training. There is no magic
formula, but an example may illustrate some of the possibilities.[20]*
A question of great interest to the navy centers on whether aircraft
carrier battle groups can operate usefully and effectively in specific
geographic areas when opposed by a particular type of Soviet submarine
threat. Analysis can construct models and devise methodologies to describe
the effectiveness of ASW barriers, direct carrier battle group defenses, and
submarine attack capability. These models would be mathematical functions
of sensor and weapon performance based on the best available theoretical
and experimental data. Measures of effectiveness, such as the probability of
an attacking submarine's being killed before firing at a carrier, can be
defined and calculated on the basis of the assumed parameter values, and
the effects of changes in those values can be quantified through the changes
in the measures of effectiveness. In this way, the analysis might identify
critical physical parameters.
Informed by the results of the analysis and possibly using models
adapted from it, the navy could conduct a wargame to explore the concept
further. The game could include not only military commanders who might
have to execute the operation, but civilian decision makers as well, thereby
yielding different points of view and value judgments. Such a game could
shed new light on the political ramifications of deploying or not deploying
carrier battle groups to the region, the availability of specific force levels
under a variety of conditions, the rules of engagement under which those
forces might have to operate and how those rules might change over time,
and the possibly unexpected reactions of an enemy whose perceptions differ
from our own. Similarly, the dynamic environment of a game may cause
players to react differently than assumed by a static analysis.
However imperfectly large-scale political and operational decisions are
modeled in a wargame, they can sometimes have more important effects on
the conduct and utility of an operation than the detection range of a sonar or
the probability of accurate weapons placement given detection. Yet, without
the understanding of the latter factors provided by good analysis, the
decisions can be too abstract, too sterile, and their effects assumed rather
than assessed. The gaming and analysis pieces must fit together.
Exercises conducted in the area of interest by forces similar to those
envisioned in the proposed concept of operations can often help illuminate
how those pieces ran or should fit together and also supply some missing
pieces of the puzzle. Careful observation, reconstruction, analysis, and
interpretation of exercise events and system and unit performance can
provide the insights and data to improve the form of mathematical models
and the quality of parameter estimates. In addition, the physical execution
of maneuvers and procedures required to carry out the operation can help to
identify important operational opportunities or potential problems that the
analysis and wargaming may have downplayed or failed to consider at all.
In such an integrated approach, each of the tools strengthens and
supports the others. Analysis provides some of the basic understanding,
quantification, and mathematical modeling of physical reality that is
required to assemble a wargame. The game presents some of the data and
conclusions of the analysis to its participants and allows them to explore the
implications that human decision making may have for that analysis. It can
illuminate political or other non-military, non-analytical assumptions and
points of view, raise new questions, and suggest modifications to existing or
proposed operational concepts. An exercise can allow the navy to test those
concepts at sea with real ships, aircraft, and people, in order to measure the
range of values that mathematical parameters may actually take on, to
verify or contradict key analytical assumptions, and to suggest even more
topics for gaming, analysis, and follow-on exercises, thus continuing the
cycle of research and learning. It is only by integrating the techniques, not
by isolating them from each other, that the navy and the rest of the defense
community can hope to gain a better and balanced understanding of the
potential reality of future warfare.

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PART III PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
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 10: Navy Wargaming Today
SCENE 1
The office of a navy research organization. Two civilian analysts study
a map of the Mediterranean, which is overlaid with a grid of hexagons and
cluttered with stacks of small colored cardboard squares. Each of the
squares is decorated with several numbers and the silhouette of a ship or
aircraft. One of the analysts is carefully calculating the chances that a
squadron of F/A-18 strike aircraft will be able to penetrate the air defenses
of a Kirov battle group; the other searches the map for another Victor SSN
to deploy to the Straits of Messina.

SCENE 2
The wardroom of a navy destroyer at sea. Four officers are seated
around a large table on which rest three microcomputers. Two of the
officers are typing commands into their computer, maneuvering their DDGs
to detect, target, and attack their opponent before he does the same to them.
One of the other officers is watching the screen on the third computer,
noting the orders each of the players is giving and contemplating what he
will say about the quality of those orders when he makes his postgame
assessment. The fourth officer, following a long and respected tradition, is
giving advice to all the others.

SCENE 3
A large conference room at fleet headquarters. Fifty officers, from flag
ranks to ensigns, fill the room, about a third of them seated at a long table.
There are several charts on the walls and on smaller tables, but little other
equipment is visible. What is apparent is the intensity of the discussion as
the logistical difficulties of supporting a marine landing are explained and
potential solutions to the problems are debated.

SCENE 4
 Sims Hall, the Naval War College. The building is bursting as some 500
military and civilian participants of the annual Global War Game wrestle
with the strategic, operational, political, and economic problems of waging
a world war in the 1990s. Army officers study a map of western Europe that
is spread out on a Ping-Pong-sized table, looking for reserves to counter a
new Red offensive thrust toward the Channel. Air force officers consult
smaller charts and microcomputer data bases as they plan strike packages
for the next day's operations. In over twenty command centers, navy
officers consult their status boards and their alphanumeric and graphics
computer displays as they transmit their orders to widely dispersed fleet
units. Downstairs, the large game floor of the Naval Warfare Gaming
System hums with activity as the communications from each command
center reach the duplicate terminals where umpires translate orders into
action.
These are all examples of how the U.S. Navy, and the civilian
organizations that support it, use wargaming to help identify and solve the
many problems facing today's military forces. From orienting new
operations analysts to the complexities of modern naval warfare with the
help of a hobby wargame or helping junior officers try out some of the
tactics they may one day be called upon to execute, to sorting out the
procedures for integrating forces in joint and combined operations or
exploring the global ramifications of maritime strategy, the U.S. Navy has
been putting the principles of the previous chapters into operation as
wargaming becomes an increasingly important tool in its efforts to
understand its current capabilities and limitations, and to identify its future
opportunities and obstacles.
The navy's links to wargaming's past and its leadership in wargaming's
present make it an informative guide to wargaming's future. Current navy
uses of wargames include both educational and research purposes, and
employ all of the techniques described earlier, including commercially
available hobby board games, microcomputer games, seminar games, and
games supported by large mainframe computer systems.

EDUCATIONAL USES OF WARGAMING

 During the early 1980s, one of the navy's principal independent
operations research centers, as part of a project in support of navy
wargaming research, used several commercial hobby board games to
educate and train new analysts. The game Flat Top (published by The
Avalon Hill Game Company) was used to educate these analysts about the
origins of U.S. aircraft carrier tactical doctrine in World War II. The game
Sixth Fleet (published by Victory Games, Inc.) brought them forward into
the modern era at the same level of action (theater). Moving up to the realm
of global maritime strategy, the game Seapower and the State (published by
Simulations Canada) allowed them to explore broader issues. Finally, to
help them put maritime power into the perspective of a NATO-Warsaw Pact
war, they were introduced to the problems of ground warfare on NATO's
Central Front with the help of Third World War: Battle for Germany
(published by Game Designers' Workshop). The use of these hobby games
not only facilitated the orientation of these new analysts (whose
backgrounds were in chemistry and industrial administration) to military
problems, but also helped them in their subsequent analysis of navy
wargames.
At the Surface Warfare Officer School in Newport, and at the Naval
Academy in Annapolis (as well as other locations, including on-board ship),
naval officers and midshipmen can study the fundamentals of tactics using a
microcomputer gaming system known as the Naval Tactical Game. Better
known as NAVTAG, the game was "designed to be interesting and
enjoyable for the participants. This was done deliberately to encourage
shipboard officers whose time is at a premium to use the system both as the
keystone of a locally structured training program and as an almost [!]
recreational device during off-duty hours."1
NAVTAG was originally designed as a manual game by Lieutenant
Commander Neil Bryne, USN, and introduced in 1978. The updated,
computerized NAVTAG uses three video displays supplemented by a hard-
copy printer. Each player and the game director have a video display. The
game is played in turns, each of which represent one minute of real time.
During a turn, "each Player will assess his situation after reviewing
selectable status reports and receiving information from a geographic plot.
Additionally, model disclosures and intelligence notes may be provided by
the Game Director. The Game Director assesses the overall situation,
monitors the display of Player commands and their consequences, and notes
those events, actions, and situations upon which he will comment during the
postgame critique."2
The game focuses on the very tactical level, allowing players to
command individual ships or entire battle groups. Tactical systems and
capabilities are modeled in great detail, drawing on not only mathematical
analyses, but also on the results of systems tests and fleet exercises.
Although not claimed as a panacea, many, including Admiral Thomas
Hayward as CNO, saw NAVTAG as an important weapon in the arsenal of
educational devices needed to help navy officers keep their tactical skills
up-to-date.
Seminar-style games, a mainstay of navy research gaming, have
become increasingly popular in the educational realm as well. These types
of games are relatively free-wheeling and flexible and have become a
widespread and popular forum for facilitating the exchange of information
and ideas.
In a recent application of gaming techniques to the education and
training of operational commanders and staffs "on the job" as opposed to
being in formal schools, battle-force staffs conduct imaginary operations
from their ships while tied up in port. Such exercises employ the facilities,
data systems, and even communications that would be used in an actual
situation. This Battle Force In-port Training concept is a navy version of
what the army and air force are trying to accomplish in the Warrior
Preparation Center.3
The Naval War College is still the navy's principal center for
educational gaming. As part of their annual schedule of nearly fifty games,
the War Gaming Department usually conducts about a dozen games in
support of courses given at the college. In addition, several games are run in
cooperation with the other service war colleges, and the naval war colleges
of various South American and European navies. The remainder of the
Naval War College's games are conducted to support the various fleet
commanders in chief, subordinate commanders, the coast guard, the joint
chiefs of staff, the chief of naval operations, and others. Many of these
games are educational in spirit, but most also contain many of the critical
elements of research games.

RESEARCH USES OF WARGAMES

Unfortunately, the details of most navy research games are classified
and may not be discussed here. It is possible, however, to give a general
description of some of the navy's principal uses of research gaming.

Exploring Operational and Tactical Issues

The Central Front/Maritime Option wargame was a seminar game

conducted at the Naval War College. During this game, the navy explored
several types of operations that could be used to support the defense of
NATO's Central Front directly in the event of a major war. Most of the play
of the game took the form of extended discussions of situations and options.
Two sets of opposing teams were used to explore possible phases of the war
in two different ways. One team was constrained at the beginning of each
phase by the results of the preceding phase, in the manner typical of most
wargames. The second team was not so constrained; they were encouraged
to examine each phase of the war in light of what naval forces could
contribute under the most favorable of circumstances. The discussions of
the possible courses a Central Front war might take, and of the role of
maritime forces in each case, helped to identify important insights into
several operational, tactical, and logistical issues involved in such navy
support. Game analysts synthesized many of those insights into a list of
potential options for the use of maritime forces to affect the course and
outcome of the fighting ashore.
For over fifteen years, the Atlantic Fleet has conducted a series of
wargames as part of its Tactical Command Readiness Program. These
games are designed to exercise the commanders and staffs of various
components of the fleet. The thirty-first game in the series used the Naval
Warfare Gaming System at the Naval War College to explore the
prospective fleet concept of operations alluded to at the end of the previous
chapter. Players of the game included the commander of the Second Fleet
and many of his subordinate battle group and supporting commanders. The
game play was centered in the Norwegian Sea during a period of rising
tensions, which ultimately led to the outbreak of global war. The game
provided the players useful insights into the importance of mutual support
between naval and land-based forces. It did not, however, allow complete or
balanced judgments about whether or not the overall effect of the operation
was worth the risks entailed in carrying it out. It also paved the way for
further exploration of the feasibility of executing the concept through the
conduct of actual at-sea exercises, and the running of several analytical
studies.

Investigating Program or Systems Issues

In addition to exploring such operational and tactical issues, the navy
has broadened wargaming's application to investigating specific program-
and system-related issues. The navy office for Tactical Employment of
National Capabilities conducted a computer-assisted seminar wargame to
explore issues related to the navy's exploitation of space-based capabilities.
The game examined the effects of the existence and potential use of anti-
satellite weapons on the decision-making processes of navy operational
commanders. The play and analysis of the game also provided insights into
the contributions that space surveillance systems could make to fleet
decision making.
The Program Objectives Memorandum War Game series is the most
ambitious navy wargame exploring program and system issues. The
Program Objectives Memorandum itself is an important document in the
navy's Planning, Programming and Budgeting system. The game, while not
an integral part of preparing that document, has had a certain amount of
influence in pointing out particular navy programs of great importance,
which the Program Objectives Memorandum usually addresses. The game
itself typically looks at the entire spectrum of future navy systems in the
three major theaters of a global war (the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Mediterranean). The game uses a seminar format to identify and examine
programmatic issues to improve the Naval Warfare Appraisal (another
major document prepared in support of the navy’s budget development
process) and to highlight selected issues that may require additional study,
analysis, and gaming in the next year's cycle.

Developing Insight and Consensus about Strategic Issues

Just as the Program Objectives Memorandum wargame series is used
by the navy's director of Naval Warfare as a catalyst for high-level
discussions of warfare-related systems issues, other wargames serve as
forums for the exploration of broader issues of strategy and policy. Each
year since 1981, the chief of naval operations has appointed several senior
navy commanders and captains, as well as Marine Corps officers of similar
rank, to the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College. This group
has a charter to investigate important issues in navy strategy and concepts
of operations. Wargaming is an important tool in the Strategic Studies
Group's efforts to refine and develop the navy's Maritime Strategy. The
chief of naval operations himself has employed wargaming directly in his
conferences with the navy commanders in chief to help build a consensus
among the highest navy leadership about the strategic direction the service
should pursue.
The largest and most visible of the navy's strategic-level games is the
Global War Game series, held each summer at the Naval War College. The
series is concluding its tenth year and its second cycle of five games. The
last five games explored the capabilities of the United States and its allies
and enemies in a global war set in 1990. Particular emphasis in the Global
series is placed on identifying issues requiring further study and attention in
the planning of global strategies and, in the most recent games, strategies
for prolonged conventional war.
Because of the wide-ranging and complex objectives of the Global War
Game series, the structure and format of the games has been similarly
complex. Red and Blue teams have been headed by a National Command
Authority, representing the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union or the
United States. Military commanders have been played from the level of the
Soviet General Staff or the U.S. Joint Chiefs down to the level of theater or
fleet commanders. Play at the level of a navy battle group, army corps, or
below has generally been handled by game controllers. In addition to the
principal Red and Blue teams, a Green team has played all nations other
than the U.S. and USSR, and has also represented international
organizations like the United Nations.
In the Global War Game, each game day represents about two days of
actual war-fighting time. The three-week duration of the game limits the
number of days of war that can be played in a single year, preventing the
exploration of important issues of a long war. To get around this problem,
the designer of the current five-year series of games, Mr. O.E. "Bud" Hay,
adopted an approach that linked the last four games of the series together.
With minor modifications, the ending situation of one game became the
opening situation for the following year's game. Despite the potential
difficulties of such an approach over a prolonged period of time, the game
has remained a successful and influential one.
The nature of the Global War Game series has made it an important and
effective device for helping the navy explore its own strategy in the context
of the national military strategy, and in concert with the concepts of its
sister services and allies. The participation of experts in fields ranging from
international monetary policy to highly advanced technologies have helped
to make the Global series especially rich in the number and types of issues
it can raise. In fact, in early 1987, Mr. Hay briefed insights from the Global
War Game series to the Senate Armed Services Committee as part of their
review of the development of U.S. military strategy and policy.

SUMMARY
The previous chapter argued that the future of professional wargaming
must be based on the integration of wargames, exercises, and analysis,
along with historical insights and operational experience, into a coherent
approach to the study of current and prospective military problems and
opportunities. The United States Navy, in its continuing efforts to use
wargaming as a forum, a classroom, and a laboratory, has played the
principal role in laying the groundwork for such integration. In its attempts
to build a complete and balanced understanding of future maritime realities
through an ongoing process of modeling, testing, trying, and evaluating, the
navy reveals the path for others to follow.
OceanofPDF.com
 11: What of the Future?
But where does that path lead? Even more importantly, where should
it lead? Part I showed that both hobby wargaming and professional
wargaming stand poised on the brink of another serious downturn in their
stature and popularity. Part II outlined some guiding principles of
wargaming in hopes of helping both hobby and professional wargamers
reverse that trend and at last smooth out the up-and-down cycle that has
plagued wargaming for so long. The time seems ripe. Never before have
wargamers enjoyed such a wide variety of powerful and effective tools and
techniques. Yet never before has such an overabundance of technology so
threatened to fragment the community of wargamers and frustrate their
fondest hopes. Wargaming's delicate balance once again threatens to topple.

A QUESTION OF BALANCE
Wargamers have always struggled to maintain a balance between
realism and playability. Some gamers believe the source of the problem is
the supposedly inherent tension between those two facets of wargaming's
dual nature, between detail and simplicity. They are, at best, only partially
correct. Realism is not the same thing as minute technical detail, nor is
playability equivalent to abstraction or simplicity.
One reason for the debate between those who emphasize realism and
those who stress playability is that they are really disagreeing about
something else, the balance between the game system and the game player.
Too often game designers fail to consider the player and his role adequately.
Instead, they try to produce realism by designing a game system that
explicitly accounts for everything that could physically affect a situation.
That is an admirable goal, but only up to a point. The critical point is
reached when making the system work demands too much artificial
behavior from the player. Each added artificiality distorts the player's
perceptions of and psychological reactions to the very reality that the game
is trying to re-create. Tactical-level games, for example, cross the line when
players must spend an hour or more deciding how each individual unit will
operate, totaling terrain modifiers, and calculating combat odds in order to
represent a thirty-second span of real time.
Realistic games allow players to behave naturally. Intricate, specialized,
unnatural systems make the players more concerned about keeping track of
rules and carrying out mechanical operations than experiencing the realities
of decision making. On the other hand, overly simplistic, artificial systems,
which justify "fudging" realism with the convenient excuse of increasing
playability, rob the player of the opportunity to make decisions on the basis
of his or her own perception of the critical elements of a real situation.
This relationship between what goes on in the mechanics of the game
and what the player actually experiences during play is one that too often
does not receive enough attention. What, after all, is the point of a wargame
if not to give its players as realistic an experience of military decision
making as possible? Unfortunately, designers, developers, controllers, and
others involved in creating and facilitating the play of wargames sometimes
become too concerned about giving the customer what he wants or expects,
even when those expectations may be historically or realistically inaccurate,
or entail what can only be described as an illegitimate use of gaming.
These latter problems are reflected in the tendency of hobby wargames
to give the player too much control over his forces (the chess syndrome)
and to exaggerate well-known effects so that players think the game is
accurate because it corresponds with what they expect to see. Bill Nichols,
designer of Long Lance and other games, was kind enough to point out this
latter problem to me. His example was that every good wargamer knows
that a German 88-mm antitank gun was very effective, much more so than a
76-mm weapon. His perception was that many designers over exaggerate
the differences because gamers expect the "88" to be orders of magnitude
better than anything else.
The same tendency can be seen in some professional games, in which
too much stress is placed on numerical outcomes and measures. In many of
its tactical games, the U.S. Army collects detailed data concerning
"killer/victim" scores—that is, the number of each type of enemy unit killed
by each system. How often do such scores become results used to proclaim
"answers" rather than signposts that warn of problems or suggest topics for
further exploration? Far too often, especially with the ever-present pressure
from the customer to produce "statistically significant" proofs of one point
or another.
The key to realistic wargaming lies in balancing the player's experience
in his decision-making role with as accurate a representation as possible of
the physical outcomes of his own decisions, his opponent's decisions, and
the objective dynamics of combat. Achieving this balance is difficult
because realistic decision making requires giving the player realistic
information and accurately representing the realistic effects of time.
Both information and time can be difficult factors to incorporate
accurately into hobby wargames. Typically, the player has too much
information available, of too high quality, and can spend too much time
processing that information and arriving at a decision. As described above,
this problem is particularly noticeable in tactical-level games. In higher-
level games, the problem mutates into one of correctly scaling the pace of
play to reproduce the appropriate lags in reaction time.
For example, gaming the entirety of World War II in the Pacific has
always been a difficult task for hobby designers. That war was
characterized by long months of relative inactivity followed by short days
and hours of intense and decisive carrier combat. Games using moves of
many months (such as GDW's Pearl Harbor or Hobby Japan’s Pacific
Fleet) have difficulty capturing those dynamics, just as games using shorter
time-steps (like SPI's venerable USN) make the inactive periods seem
interminable. In his Pacific War game, Mark Herman achieved some
success with a telescoping time scale to reflect the conditions more
accurately.
 Modern boardgames allow wargamers to explore conflict from the
dawn of civilization to World War II, Korea and beyond. (Courtesy of
Victory Games Inc.)

Professional games have a significant advantage over hobby efforts at

simulating the flow of information and time because they often have ready
access to human umpires to oversee the necessary mechanics.
Unfortunately, professional games have problems of their own. Umpires
can limit the information they give to players and "muddy the waters" with
false or inaccurate data. Umpires can also be arbitrary and inconsistent in
their handling of such factors. Similarly, there is a strong tendency for
human umpires to lapse into reporting information in game terms rather
than real terms. In professional games, as in hobby games, the flow of time
can be a problem because battle-damage assessment often employs complex
mathematical models, which require game-control staffs to expend a great
deal of time and effort to produce results.
Because wargames must so often rely on such mathematical models, the
growing power of electronic computers, especially of small, portable ones,
has been a boon to hobby and professional wargamers alike. In many ways,
computers may hold the key to solving the problems of information and
time, and thus may hold the key to balancing the player’s experience and
the game's dynamics.
Computers can store large quantities of detailed, multidimensional data
easily, and can access and manipulate them in complex ways far more
quickly than any human player or umpire. Computers can help simulate the
unfolding of events continuously over time, placing players under more
realistic pressure to decide in time. Computers can also be programmed to
limit the information available to the players in a consistent and realistic
way. The power of computer assistance for wargaming, however, can be
pushed too far, particularly when the computer begins to replace the real
intelligence, stupidity, and emotions of human players with the pure logic of
artificial intelligence.

COMPUTERS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:

THE INHUMAN OPPONENT
One of the most prominent applications of artificial intelligence to
wargaming can be found in the Rand Strategy Assessment System (RSAS).
RSAS grew out of Andy Marshall's search for new and better techniques to
assist in the process of net assessment. It was designed "to make wargaming
more efficient, rigorous, and analytical. . . . [and] involves the use of
artificial intelligence techniques to produce computer models able to
replace some or all of the human teams. This speeds game play, allows
[analysts] to examine many scenarios, and very importantly imposes a
rigorous discipline requiring statements of assumptions and rationale."1
This last point is, indeed, a very important one, and the real source of
RSAS's value. It is an excellent tool for exploring the potential implications
of assumptions.
The basic approach of the RSAS is built around four main ideas. The
most obvious and well-known is the notion of "automated wargaming," in
which "human players [are] complemented by or largely replaced by
computer models acting as automatons or 'agents.'"2 The key clement in this
approach is the use of rule-based models to represent the player-agents. The
final two pieces of the puzzle are the use of campaign analysis and
interactive force operations modeling to support the play of the game. In its
fully automated mode, however, RSAS ceases to be a wargame and
becomes merely another analytical computer model. Unfortunately, the
principles of artificial intelligence that underlie the RSAS's philosophy are
becoming more and more a part of gaming.
Even when the computer is used only to provide human players with a
ready-made opponent, artificial intelligence has its dangers. Wargames are
best played between human competitors, and the differences between the
viewpoints, experience, and behavior of different players are what make
wargaming such a rich source of insight. Artificial opponents in the shape
of computer programs limit the human players of a game to contending
with a single opponent, the designer of the computer program.
The danger is not in artificial intelligence itself, but in using it to
replace the human player. The "computer opponent" is valuable, It allows
the human gamer to explore situations and possibilities on his own, to
"practice", and gain directly the synthetic experience needed to play a game
well. The mistake lies in playing only against the machine; that is a
potentially misleading and eventually sterile practice.
Unfortunately, especially in the wargaming hobby, it is a practice that
has taken hold. Hearsay and informal surveys (as well as the author’s own
personal experience) indicate that over 90 percent of the hobby wargames
played on the computer are played solitaire. The dangers of such exclusive
"playing against the system" should be clear. In many ways it hearkens back
to the Naval War College's experience in the 1930’s.
During those games, the "system" was so ingrained into the
perspectives of the players that they found themselves unable to think
originally enough, to ask enough of the right questions, and as a result the
tactical games proved incredibly poor reflections of actual wartime
experience in surface combat. Some of the NWC's errors are attributable to
poor technical estimates—for example, the underestimates of the range,
speed, and lethality of the Japanese Long Lance torpedo. Others were errors
in the representation of the workings of command.
Interestingly, hobbyists are about to get a chance to experience a taste
of the Naval War College's tactical gaming system of the 1930’s in an as-yet
unpublished computer game, designed by Commander Alan Zimm, USN. A
comparison of Zimm’s original design and the work of Bill Nichols’s games
that deal with many of the same actions, is instructive of two directions in
which hobby and professional gaming may go in the future.

"You are in Command" Or "You are in Control" a case

study

In 1987, Simulations Canada published Long Lance, designed by

William Nichols. The game presented the players with the tactical level
scenarios of the surface battles in the Solomon Island region during 1942
and 1943, the very battles that showed the failures of the war College’s
tactical games, Long Lance, and its follow-on game In Harm’s Way, present
the players with "the viewpoint of the senior naval commander present for
each side. As such, they are responsible for planning their ships' missions
before the battle, and commanding their forces in action against the
enemy"3 Players organize their forces into individual action groups, plot
their initial course, and define the rules of engagement and battle doctrine
(within strict limits) when the force contacts the enemy. Once the firing
starts, the players must exercise command from the confines of his flagship.
His knowledge of the conditions on other ships, and is direct control of their
actions are restricted by the uncertain mercies of the radio.
In his designer’s notes to Long Lance, Nichols outlines the heart of his
design problem and the soul of his solution: "The command problems were
so intimidating that at first I feared the game could not be done. How could
one simulate this lack of control in a game, yet satisfy the players' proper
desire to be more than a mere bystander?. . . [The solution lay in] the
importance of battle doctrine and communications. … in allowing the
historical commanders to control their forces. … By giving the player the
ability to create his own doctrine, which can guide his ships' actions when
they are not under his direct control, the historical 'fog of war' could be
preserved while giving the players a challenging input. . . By simulating the
ship-to-ship radio, the player is able to react to unforeseen events, but this is
not a panacea."4 Indeed, in the heat and confusion of battle, orders go
unheeded, and the most precise plans and neatly arranged formations soon
disintegrate. The result can be frustrating in the extreme, but it seems to do
a very good job of capturing the flavor and confusion of the Solomon’s
battles.
Commander Zimm’s game (whose working title as of this writing is
Action Stations!) places far less stress on the problems of fleet command.
Instead, Zimm focuses on reproducing the physical environment and
dynamics of the engagement. Although the player does have overall
command of his force, the system also gives him the ability to control the
maneuvers and fire of each individual ship. As a result, the command,
control and communications problems that lead to confusion and disarray
are lacking.
What is not lacking is a detailed re-creation of the complexities of
naval warfare during that period. The game forces "a commander to make
critical decisions constantly. How do I distribute my fire? Should I lay
smoke? Can I stay on a steady course to optimize my gunnery performance,
or is the torpedo threat too high? Should I illuminate? How can I get to a
torpedo launch position without losing all my destroyers? Stack gasses are
interfering with my fire—should I slow? Should I change course and
present my armor at an angle to his fire for additional protection? What will
that do to my closure rate? That cruisers got a jammed rudder—should I
abandon or protect it?"5 The player thus faces both fleet-level and ship-level
decisions. At the fleet-level, however, the player can make decisions with
the assurance that his subordinates will carry out his intentions perfectly.
Although aware of the skewed view of fleet-level command this
approach gives the player, Zimm was concerned that the lack of solid data
about the performance of World War II navigation and communications
systems, as well as the changing roles, importance, and capabilities of radar,
would make any attempt to introduce those considerations difficult at best
and mere guesses at worse. Instead, the player is presented with a picture of
the tactical situation in a form similar to that employed by the Navy's NTDS
(Naval Tactical Data Systems). The result is an interesting and challenging
game of battles in all theaters and all phases of the war. It presents the
players with a reasonable picture of the role of the ship's captain, but does
not give as good a feeling for fleet command under conditions of limited
control over subordinate units.

WHO WANTS ROLE SIMULATION ANYWAY?

Nichols terms his design style in Long Lance "viewpoint oriented."
The more widely used hobby term is "role simulation." The role simulation
places the game player in a well-defined role and attempts to re-create that
role's decision-making responsibility. It also tries to restrict the information
the player receives as well as limit his control by the C3 limitations of his
real-life counterpart.
The goals of the designers of role simulations are worthy ones, well in
keeping with the value and principal purposes of wargaming. Unfortunately,
role simulations have been received in the hobby with something less than
overwhelming enthusiasm. When Frank Chadwick articulated the ideas of
role simulation in the early 1980s, he was to some extent, at least, rebuffed
by certain elements of the wargaming community. One gamer wrote: "Most
games present much more than the view from a certain participant's point of
view. . . . Nor do I feel that role-playing adequately covers the extensive
amount of information found in . . . games. . . . Granted, role-playing is a
fine generalization to describe wargames to a beginner but it does not nearly
define the things I expect to get out of any wargame I purchase."6
Today, there seems to be a definite split in the hobby, particularly
among computer-game designers and players, between those who prefer
"games" and those who favor "role simulators." The distinction, in the
clearest hobby terms, is that "with a 'game' you move the pieces around, and
in a 'role simulator,' you order them to move around themselves (something
they may or may not do). . . . The differences between the two approaches
have become so distinct . . . that one finds battle lines being drawn and
heated discussions about which is the 'valid' use of a computer in
wargaming."7 Despite the perception of some within the hobby that "neither
side is having trouble selling games, in other words, gamers want and
appreciate the values of both approaches,"8 Nichols believes that those who
prefer to control all of their forces all of the time are in the majority, or, at
least, that such games are more marketable. This, from one of the chief
standard bearers of role simulation, may seem a distressing trend for the
future.
Others, myself included, disagree with Nichols's pessimistic
assessment. What the players really want, have always wanted, are games
that are interesting, challenging, fun, and "good players." And, incidentally,
they want some taste of history—some players more, some less—but nearly
all will take as much as they can get without destroying the interest of the
game as a game. The failure of the role simulators in capturing a greater
share of the hearts and minds of the players, if indeed they have failed to
any great extent, has been in their execution, not in their concept.
Professional games, not surprisingly, tend to be better at role simulation
than hobby games. The professionals understand the nature of military
command roles better than most hobbyists. They are also more sensitive to
the nature, importance, and workings of the chain of command. The
professionals, especially, understand the critical importance of
communications, and of standard operating procedures for dealing with
situations that occur when communications are interrupted. Unfortunately,
that awareness does not by itself guarantee better designs. Indeed, one of
the most ubiquitous criticisms of the Naval Warfare Gaming System has
been its poor representation of communication systems and employment.
Professional gamers, as well as hobby gamers, must work harder to re-
create the commander's role and point of view.
Craig Besinque, a hobby board-game designer, outlined some of the
key principles of role simulation.9
· Obscure the situation by concealing as much as possible about it unit
capabilities, unit locations, future events such as the arrival of
reinforcements or supplies, enemy capabilities, and enemy intentions as
defined by specific victory conditions.
· Obscure the mechanism by limiting the player's ability to predict
precisely the likely outcome of combat or other operations, and by
rewarding rational decisions in the face of such uncertainty.
· Simulate command pressures by forcing players to make compromises
between the speed of their reactions to events and the quality of those
reactions, by creating doubt in the player's mind, and by designing the
game so that players may attempt to understand and manipulate the
psychology of their opponents.
· Simulate command effectiveness by limiting the span of control of the
player and his subordinates (as represented in the game system), as well
as allowing for varying degrees of determination and intensity in the
performance of combat units.
· Simulate command psychology by accurately representing the
capabilities and limitations of the player's forces and position. allowing
him to experience some of the pressures caused by confidence or doubt
about the ability of his force to handle the enemy successfully.
· Simulate, the scope of options by freeing the player's choices from the
restrictions of historical or doctrinal hindsight.

The use of those principles can sometimes be carried to extremes,

especially when designers so obscure the situation and system that the
player can have no synthetic experience by which to guide his actions.
Nevertheless, they succinctly summarize some of the most important areas
of required research and experimentation for future wargaming.
Relatively few games in existence today have succeeded in following
the principles listed above. (Besinque's own Rommel in the Desert is one of
the more effective ones, and it is a board game!) Part of the difficulty,
especially for board-game design, is the almost certain need for a live
opponent. Manual gaming poses almost insuperable difficulties, especially
in the psychological elements of command.
Another problem is the difficulty and possible arbitrariness that may
enter into techniques for preventing the player from exerting too much
control over his forces. In Panzer Armee Afrika, for example, Jim Dunnigan
included a "panic" provision that prohibited a player from moving any units
in hexes whose grid numbers ended in a specific set of digits, which were
chosen by a die roll. This problem is not insoluble, however, and even
solitaire-board-game designers have come up with clever concepts for
making things work at least reasonably well. (Jon Southard's recent Tokyo
Express, a board game of the Solomon’s naval battles, is an excellent case
in point.)
Computers again offer an important addition to the tools of role
simulation. Computers can easily restrict the player's information or provide
inaccurate or imprecise information. They can be programmed to represent
the player's subordinates or even his superiors. Here is where the true value
of artificial intelligence lies in wargaming, especially when it is carefully
linked to a system of "doctrine definition" that allows the player to "train"
or prepare those subordinates to act as much according to his wishes as is
reasonable.
The danger, in the hobby at least, is that designers, publishers, and
distributors will yield too easily to the pressures of a marketplace somewhat
wary of the relatively unsophisticated higher-level role simulations
currently available. An overwhelming emphasis on the "electronic board-
game" approach may stifle the creativity of the very designers who could
make role simulators excellent games also. In some ways, the role-
simulation approach to wargame design faces the same problems Charles
Roberts did when he designed Tactics. It presents players with a new way of
playing, a new way of thinking, one that prospective players will have to
adapt to and learn how to play properly. Yet if Roberts could create a hobby
almost out of thin air, it seems little enough to ask today’s designers to help
shape that hobby's future course in valuable directions.
The popularity of "first-person" games shows that the market potential
for role simulation exists. Games like Silent Service and the more up-to-
date Red Storm Rising and Battlehawks (a high-resolution color-graphics
game of air-to-air combat in the carrier battles of the South Pacific during
World War II) show that role simulation can work. The key to these games
is their representation of what the player can reasonably expect to control.
They give the player a chance to practice and gain synthetic experience.
When something goes wrong, the player can usually understand why and
sometimes can take action to correct it. To a very great degree, the player's
fate is in his own hands.
Re-creating higher-level roles requires creating the same options for
investigation and correction while reducing the player's complete control.
Adapting some of the ideas of first-person games, especially the personal
clement of a true player's point of view, is an as yet unexplored possibility
in higher-level games. With increasing computer power and sophistication
it may become possible to combine the detailed representation of physical
events seen in Zimm's Action Stations! with the command perspective of
Nichols's Long Lance, supplemented by the personal, and sometimes visual,
perspective of a Red Storm Rising. Such a game would truly represent the
best of all worlds.

NETWORKING AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING

Another potentially valuable future direction for wargaming lies in
networking, tying together multiple computers, possibly from separate
remote sites, to play simultaneously in a single game. Not surprisingly, the
professionals, with their greater facilities and funding, lead the way in the
use of networking and distributed processing for wargaming.
One of the most impressive examples of the approach is JANUS, an
interactive computer wargaming system developed and managed under the
aegis of the U.S. Army's Conflict Simulation Center at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. JANUS is a two-sided wargaming/analysis system,
hence the name. (Janus was the Roman god of portals with a face on the
front and back of his head allowing him to look both inside and outside the
home at the same time.)
JANUS was designed to allow analysts to explore the effects of
individual weapons systems in some detail, but in a more realistic, dynamic
environment than that provided by purely analytical models. The emphasis
on detail requires the user to specify three-dimensional terrain data, ground
cover, and other special features. Other basic inputs are the characteristics
of each system and vehicle (including details like vehicle dimensions).
Nuclear, chemical, and even futuristic "beam weapons" can be simulated in
addition to the more usual conventional types.
JANUS uses "high-resolution graphics, intelligent work stations,
istributed processing, and real time scenarios [to help] analysts . . . look at
the effects of new weapons and tactics. Commanders and their staffs wanted
to be able to refine the decision making process while developing and
testing realistic operations plans."10 JANUS gives its players a continuous,
map-like display of their forces and those of the enemy they have contacted
or about which they have intelligence information. In addition, the player
can access detailed status reports about the current strength and missions of
his units and the status of the logistical situation.
The system can handle up to eight players on each side. The
players may control up to 8,000 individual military sub-units, ranging from
infantry fire teams, to tanks, to helicopters. The system can represent
combat between a Blue brigade-level unit and a Red division-sized force.
The players command and control their forces using the system's interactive
graphics features, and the computer resolves activity and combat using an
event- sequenced stochastic simulation, which resides in a VAX mini-
mainframe computer. The players interact with the simulation in near-real-
time through the use of as many as eight graphics work stations. These
"intelligent workstations" preprocess the players' graphically entered
commands to feed the main simulation. They also translate the results and
display them to the players, thus allowing the main computer to concentrate
on processing the simulation. This distributed approach combines the ease
of graphical input for the players with the speed of a dedicated processor for
simulation.
Despite its popularity and success as both an analytical tool and a
training device, JANUS is limited in the types of problems it can address. It
currently does not include models for tactical air support (beyond
helicopters) or explicit C3l systems. Its design began in 1978 and so the
system is behind the state of the art in some ways, especially in its ability to
assist the player in controlling the multitude of individual elements he must
command. It does, however, hold out the promise of better things to come
in real-time or near-real-time, interactive, networked wargaming.
Recently the hobby has also begun to take its first faltering steps in the
direction of multi-machine games. One of the first and currently most
impressive examples of hobby computer games to allow simultaneous play
is Panther Games's Fire Brigade. Fire Brigade is a ground-battle game set
in the Soviet-German war at the end of 1943. Two players, one representing
the commander of the German Fourth Panzer Army and the other the
commander of the Soviet First Ukrainian Front, can connect their IBM-PC
or Apple Macintosh computers through a modem or direct cable link and
give their orders and monitor results simultaneously.
Computer networking holds out the promise of restoring the balance
between the computer as a tool and aid for the player, and the computer as
the inhuman opponent. Players can use systems like Fire Brigade to play
solitaire against the computer for practice and to explore options. When
linked to other machines, possibly hundreds of miles away, systems like
JANUS allow the computer to enhance the experience of playing against a
live, human opponent. Again, the best of both worlds may soon be within
the wargamer's grasp.

THE FUTURE OF MANUAL AND SEMINAR-STYLE

WARGAMES
The practical as well as philosophical need for human opposition
remains critical in manual wargaming, even when some computer
assistance is available. This will remain important in the future because
there are still some things that manual games (and professional seminar
games) do better than strictly electronic ones.
Manual games seem to be particularly effective at representing the
higher-level operational and strategic situations. The player’s ability to see
physically the entire playing surface at once and to make visual judgments
of the overall situation is still difficult or impossible for most computers to
provide at such high levels of play.
Manual games have other advantages as well. In the hobby they are
often more appealing physically and aesthetically. On a more practical
level, handling the counters and seeing the map in its entirety often can help
the player feel that he has a better grasp of the overall situation and that he
understands what he is trying to accomplish.
Manual games are also more direct in their person-to-person
interaction. For this reason, among others, the professional seminar game,
either in a strictly manual mode or with computer assistance, remains a
popular and powerful tool for both research and training purposes.
The problems with manual wargames today remain the classic ones.
How does one reproduce enough of the physical reality without so
overburdening the player with game artificialities that his experience of
play only vaguely resembles real-life command? Unfortunately, there are no
easy answers. There are, however, some clever ideas that point the way
toward improved solutions.
First, manual games must help develop synthetic experience in their
players. They must teach the players the fundamental mechanics in easy
and effective ways before burdening them with the more demanding tasks.
This applies not only to individual games but, in the hobby at least, to the
entire set of available games. It is far more difficult for a novice wargamer
to become a true hobbyist today than it was twenty, or even ten, years ago.
"To have a good chance to enter the hobby successfully these days, a
beginner . . . needs help in choosing the right games, learning the rules, and
learning play techniques and strategies."11 In other words, he needs
synthetic experience, provided either by the games themselves or, better yet,
by the right combination of game and personal help from a veteran
wargamer.
Secondly, designers must make a more concerted effort to produce what
Mark Herman calls "natural" game systems. Natural systems allow the
player to operate in as natural and free a manner as possible. Although a
game must have some formal structure, that structure should seek to exploit
the nature of the real-life situation represented in the game to simplify the
player's task rather than try to impose an artificial structure on reality to
simplify the designer's problem.
In Gulf Strike, for example, Herman devised a system for re-creating
the complex interactions of air, sea, and land power in a modern setting by
the simple, but virtually untried, expedient of allowing the player to conduct
operations with units of any type at any time during his turn. In Pacific War,
the telescoping time scales give a good feel for the changing focus of high-
level commanders from considerations of grand strategy to the details of
launching strikes. In Trial of Strength, designer Dave O'Connor helped
players master a wealth of detail at the strategic level by creating a
comprehensive system that made use of another novel approach to
reflecting the time required to conduct operations.
Such gaming devices, traditionally considered to fall into the realm of
improvements in playability, are at last beginning to be recognized for the
crucial role they play in creating realism. Indeed, the importance of the
hobby-board-game designer's art of structuring understandable, flexible,
and workable systems has led to a much greater involvement of
experienced hobbyists with the defense professionals than Charles Roberts
ever envisioned while he was trying to sell the U.S. Army Game/Train.

THE HOBBYIST AND THE PROFESSIONAL

It is quite impossible to list all of the wargaming hobbyists who are
now working in defense-related activities. It is difficult enough to do so for
just the major hobby "personalities" like Jim Dunnigan and Mark Herman.
One of the earliest to "turn pro" was Randall Reed, head of Avalon Hill's
research and development staff in the late 1970s, who left the hobby to
work on wargaming for the U.S. Marine Corps. James Dunnigan is a well-
known independent consultant, and Mark Herman is working on gaming
and simulation for a major defense-consulting firm.
In fact, Herman and Victory Games were instrumental subcontractors
in the development of a major gaming system for the Net Assessment
section of the office of the secretary of defense and other clients, including
the National Defense University. The game, the Strategic Analysis
Simulation (SAS) was discussed briefly in chapter 3. It is a prime example
of how the hobby and professional worlds can and should interact.
SAS and its companion Tactical Analysis Module (TAM) combine the
professional's understanding of critical elements of reality with the
hobbyist's talent for designing usable systems. The design of the system
combined the professional's judgment and experience with the hobbyists
traditional questioning attitude and well-developed "BS-detector"[21]*. As
a result, SAS/TAM is a much better and more accurate system than it would
have been otherwise. At the same time it is far easier to play and interpret
than many other larger and less-elegant systems for global-level
wargaming. Once again, it reflects the importance of a balanced view, this
time between that of the hobbyist and that of the professional.

A VISION: OR IS IT JUST A GLEAM?

This chapter has tried to present a brief sketch of some of the more
important or interesting elements of today's state of the art in wargaming.
Of necessity, it has left out or glossed over much of interest and value.
Similarly, the author has tried to avoid lapsing into either black despair
about wargaming's uncertain future, or rosy prophecy of its brighter
tomorrows. The bright tomorrows are possible, but it is going to take a lot
of work by a lot of folks achieve them.
The reasons for the recurring declines in wargaming's popularity and
use are many and complex. Most of them can, however, be categorized
into two major sets. First, games that had little resemblance to the real
world and that could not help people address real problems quickly lost
their appeal because they seemed merely poor abstractions of what they
promised. Second, overly complex games with highly specialized rules
and procedures proved too time-consuming to learn and too artificial in
play to produce useful and realistic insights into the very problems their
complexities were theoretically designed to address. When the balance is
lost, so too is the game.
 Where then is the secret to the balanced wargame? This book has spent
an enormous number of words presenting an historical perspective on
wargaming, outlining its guiding principles, and exploring its future
prospects. After all that, the reader might expect that the author could
answer such a simple question. He cannot. The only secret lies in the
experience, imagination, and talent of the wargamer and in the quantity and
quality of the data on which his game is based. Chapter 3 referred to the
Israeli belief in Sun Tzu's philosophy that, of the three elements of war—
people, weapons, and wisdom—wisdom is the most important. So it is with
wargaming. So must it be with wargamers.

HOT WASH-UP
The game is over. The hot wash-up begins. The players, controllers,
observers, and analysts gather together one last time before they return to
their duty stations and work-a-day jobs. They try to determine just what
actually happened during their bloodless conflict and struggle to discern
what it all might mean for the prevention or efficient termination of a future
"real thing".
Wargaming's tools have progressed enormously over the centuries,
from the smooth stones and simple wooden board of Wei Hai to the high-
resolution color graphics of JANUS. Yet the origins of the gaming instinct
and the motivations of the gamer have changed surprisingly little. The
wargame gives us a chance to play at one of the most terrible creations of
the hand of man, a creation capable of destroying all we have ever built
and, at the last, the very world on which we live. It also gives us a chance to
reduce the terrifying dimensions of this monster of our own making to a
more human scale. More importantly, it gives us a chance to reduce some of
our terror of the beast long enough to bring to bear against it the one
weapon that, ultimately, is our final and only defense—our reason.
In the millennium to come, perhaps mankind may at last find itself
prepared "to study war no more". To hasten the arrival of that time,
however, the exact opposite must be the case. For it is only by studying war,
in all its real gore and false glory, by understanding its causes, its
conditions, and its consequences, that men can find within themselves the
weaknesses that lead to war's downward-spiraling staircase and the strength
to avoid taking the first, fatal steps.
Wargames are not merely convenient aids and adjuncts to such a study.
They are essential tools without which that study is doomed to risk
potentially disastrous failure. The dry calculation of costs and benefits,
relative casualties and destruction, of mere pencil-and-paper analyses of
nuclear war take on a different aspect when a human player must weigh the
decision to "nuke the bastards," even if it is only a game. I will never forget
the somber atmosphere of a Global War Game when the U.S. president
player discussed the prospects of nuclear escalation. It was only a game, but
it made the chasm into which we all stare seem far too real.
The history of wargaming has revealed the strengths and limitations of
the tool, both when it is wielded by the defense community as a means to
shape strategy and policy, and when it is exercised by the amateur as a
means to increase his understanding of the past, present, and future of war
and peace. A wargame is not real, it is not repeatable, it is not a panacea. It
is an exercise
in human interaction and the interplay of competing wills. Its strengths lie
in its ability to explore the role and potential effects of human decisions on
the human ability to make war. Its weak nesses lie in its inability to re-
create the actual physical conditions under which such decisions must be
made or the actual consequences, of those decisions. Then again, perhaps
those too are strengths.
Over the years, the recurring failure of both wargamers and decision
makers to understand the utility and the limitations of their tool has led to
periods of great and unwarranted popularity, followed by periods of equally
great and equally unwarranted disfavor. These wave-like cycles have
affected both the professional wargame and the hobby wargame. In recent
years we have experienced the up side of wargaming's manic-depressive
tendencies. But just as Andrew Wilson's 1969 book The Bomb and the
Computer heralded the last great wargaming depression, Thomas Allen's
War Games seems to present once again the specter of wargaming's
imminent decline.
 This must not be. It is time, far past time, to put an end to the futile and
destructive cycle of wargaming's rise and fall and rise and fall and . . .
Whatever this book's author may be, prophet or fool, sage or charlatan, or
simply a wargamer, he does not delude himself into imagining that his book
alone will solve the problem and calm the waves. No one book, no one
wargamer, can do that. But the entire community, the wargaming
professional and wargaming hobbyist, the operations researcher and
systems analyst, the pundit and soldier, sailor and scholar, the entire
community just might be able to pull it off.
War is too important to ignore and too deadly to misunderstand.
Temporary protection, if not eventual salvation, lies in achieving a balanced
understanding of what war is, how it is waged, and what it is all about. In
the end, the key to achieving that balance lies in perceiving the implications
of a simple truth about all wars: systems and weapons destroy things and
kill people; man wages war. And it is man who is, after all, the ultimate
object of wargaming's legitimate explorations.

OceanofPDF.com
 So a Wargamer and a Black Swan Walk into a Bar . .

This paper is a slightly modified version of a presentation I gave as

part of the keynote Panel for the Connections Wargaming Conference, a
subset of the third Defense Modeling and Simulation Conference, held in
Orlando from 10 to 14 March 2008. It grew out of a series of projects I
directed at CNA in support of the Wargaming Department of the Naval War
College. I presented an earlier version of this material at the MORS
Workshop on Wargaming and Analysis held in October 2007.
We are well into the mythical 21st century, now nearly a decade gone.
The close coincidence of the change in the calendar with the change in the
global geopolitical system and an increasing belief in some fundamental
changes in the physical climate has resulted in enormous pressures to cast
all new work in terms of transformation and, at the very least, evolutionary
change—if not, indeed, revolutionary change—in virtually every facet of
defense policy and operations. Change is a wonderful thing. Except,
perhaps, to a well-entrenched community of political pundits and defense
demigods who long to apply “tried and true” (that is, old) modes of thinking
to new, and a few not-so-new, problems. I am going to resist the almost
overwhelming temptation to fire repeated broadsides at such slow-moving
targets. Instead, I am going to focus on the positive contributions a very old
technique—wargaming—can make to our understanding of and operating in
the new world of the new century. Profiting from these contributions will,
nevertheless, depend on our ability to break free from the shackles of our
old ways of thinking about and doing wargaming.
My goal in this paper is to ground our thinking in some basic ideas
about what wargaming is and is not, to discuss why we need it more than
ever to help us prepare for the challenges of the 21st century, and to propose
how we can apply wargaming in ways that are most likely to help us
produce workable solutions to the challenges we face in the coming years.
Some of the most important of those challenges are events and
situations we cannot even foresee from our vantage point of today. In the
words of a best-selling book which swept the financial world—of all things
—in 2007, these events are Black Swans.[22] Before I attempt the daunting
task of trying to boil down the meaning and ideas associated with the Black
Swan, however, let’s start by discussing the subject nearest to my heart.

OceanofPDF.com
 What is wargaming?
Too often, people in our business—the business of defense analysis
writ large—use the term wargaming loosely, to refer to any type of warfare
modeling, including exercises, campaign analysis, and computer
simulations without players (or CSWP, pronounced Kaz-whip, as I like to
call them). A more precise definition is:

A wargame is a warfare model or simulation that does

not involve the operations of actual forces, in which the
flow of events affects and is affected by decisions made
during the course of those events by players representing
the opposing sides.[23]
This definition excluded anything that involved the use of actual
military forces carrying out military evolutions in the real, physical, world
—activities which I have characterized in the past as exercises, not
wargames. But over the last few years I have come to recognize that some
real-world activities, particularly the training evolutions at the National
Training Center, can be what I would call “true” wargames. The really
decisive point is that wargames first and foremost center on human beings
(players) making decisions and dealing with the consequences of those
decisions as the events of the game unroll. So, my new and improved
definition is this:

A wargame is a warfare model or simulation in which

the flow of events shapes, and is shaped by, decisions
made by a human player or players during the course of
those events.
And, of course, when I say players, I mean people.
 This is a picture of a team playing InfoChess at a Connections
Conference way too many years ago. If you don’t know about InfoChess, it
is a clever extension of classic chess designed to educate people about some
of the fundamental concepts of information warfare. It added to normal
chess ideas like deception, reconnaissance, surveillance, command and
control, and asymmetric operations. In addition to your array of pieces—
which might not be the standard set of chess pieces, by the way—you
received a supply of InfoChips, which you could use to buy those new
information warfare capabilities. But, of course, you never had as many
chips as you might want. In the picture, you can see a small pile of
InfoChips on the table near the chess boards.
Anyway, in this particular game I had the inestimable pleasure of
playing on the team opposing our heroes pictured above. This team was led
by Colonel John Warden, USAF. John had risen to some prominence as the
author of the book The Air Campaign,[24] and creator of the Instant
Thunder campaign plan, which would ultimately evolve into the Desert
Storm air operation. At this time, John was the commandant of the Air
Command and Staff College and instrumental in the origins of Connections.
To make a long story short, our team won the game in three or four moves,
mainly because John played the players as well as the game. He knew that
at least one of our opponents was a rated chess player, and John expected
that he would approach the game from a chess player’s perspective. We
realized that such an approach might well be vulnerable to a prompt,
unconventional, surprise attack using the oldest trap in the book, Fool’s
Mate, but only if that attack were well concealed and covered by a heavy
application of Info Operations. It worked; we executed our plan and won
the game in three or four moves. That game was the best representation of
the cognitive aspects of asymmetric warfare and information operations that
I have ever seen. It was all about understanding the mental models of the
key decisionmakers, and how to exploit them to win.

Wargaming is NOT analysis!

One of the most difficult hurdles for most experts in the defense
analysis community to overcome when thinking about wargaming is a
tendency for the analysts to look at wargaming as bad analysis; analysis that
is not rigorous enough, or is based too much on assumption and not enough
on “hard” data. This is more than just semantics; it affects fundamentally
attitudes about the way wargames should be designed and used.

To understand the differences, let’s look at a definition of analysis:

Analysis is a scientific method of providing decision makers

with a quantitative basis for decisions.

This definition is drawn from one of the foundational works of military

OR, Morse and Kimball’s Methods of Operations Research.[25]

There are those who would argue that this definition of analysis is too
narrow, but the DoD Dictionary of Military and Related Terms, Joint Pub 1-
02 defines operations research in these terms:

operations research — The analytical study of military

problems undertaken to provide responsible commanders
and staff agencies with a scientific basis for decision on
action to improve military operations. Also called
operational research; operations analysis. [26]
You can see that the key word found in both these definition is
“scientific,” and if science is involved, quantitative data, calculations, and
reasoning is usually not far behind. So I contend that wargaming is not
analysis in this classic sense. Can a wargame be an “analytical” tool?
Certainly, but it is not the same sort of tool as a Markov chain model or a
Monte Carlo simulation, and wargaming (the art and science of devising,
playing, and applying wargames to derive useful insights) is about players
and decisions, not about science and mathematics.

Wargaming is not . . . a lot of things

Nor is wargaming real. Sounds obvious, but I am continually surprised
at how many professionals seem to remember this fact only when a game
does not support their preconceived political positions.
Games can be good experimental testbeds, but they are not themselves
the equivalent of Monte Carlo experiments. They are not duplicable; they
are not replicable. You cannot iterate a wargame changing only the random
numbers. The initial conditions can never be precisely the same. The
players will never be identical, even if they are the same persons. Once you
have played the game you have learned and experienced something that
changes your “state of nature.” And at its heart the game is the decisions the
players make—decisions that are as variable and difficult to predict as any
other human activity. A single wargame is more like a single “run” of a
psychological experiment, and has the strengths and limitations of such
tools, not the nicely reproducible artificiality of a Monte Carlo model.
As a result of what it is and what it is not, wargaming is not universally
applicable. It is best used to explore the role and potential effects of human
behavior and human decisions. Other tools, such as classic operations
research techniques, are better tuned to deal with the more mundane,
technical, and predictable aspects of reality. This is why it is critical to
integrate wargaming with those other tools if we are to gain a well-
grounded and well-rounded understanding of the problems we face.
On the other hand, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these
characteristics, wargaming may be our best hope for looking long enough
and deeply enough into the uncertain and unpredictable future to help us
prepare to encounter the Black Swans waiting for us there—before they bite
us in the butt!

Beware the Black Swan

 What is a Black Swan? Some of you may know the book The Black
Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb is an unlikely mix of philosopher
and Wall Street quant, a fallen probabilist and a successful trader. James F.
Dunnigan himself a legendary wargame designer[27], author, and Wall
Street trader/analyst tells me that the guys on the Street who agree with his
ideas are known as the Taleban. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Anyway, a Black Swan, as Taleb defines it, is a highly improbable
event that has three prime characteristics: it is unpredictable; it has
enormous effects on things; and once it has happened we work hard to
delude ourselves that we could have predicted it if only. The term itself
originates from the fact that for centuries Europeans believed that all swans
were white—for the simple reason that no European had ever seen a black
swan. Until they did—in Australia. The black swan story is an example of
one of the human race’s major cognitive flaws—we are too ready to believe
that the past is always a good predictor of the future; that absence of
evidence is the same as evidence of absence. Not so much.
We behave as if Black Swans do not exist; as if we live in what Taleb
calls Mediocristan, when in fact we live in Extremistan. Human nature is
not programmed to accept the existence of Black Swans, at least not as the
“normal” state of things. We prefer reasoning and thinking linearly. We
have been fooled by the large number of phenomena that usually are well-
behaved, and we tend to think of extremes as not only unlikely but also
inconsequential. Linear relationships are easy to grasp; nonlinear ones are
confusing, especially because once you break out of linear relationships, the
number of nonlinear possibilities becomes nearly infinite.
The classic example of this flaw in human cognition revolves around
the difference between physical qualities of human beings, like weight, and
non-physical qualities like wealth. If you weigh a thousand human beings,
adding the heaviest human you can think of will have a fairly
inconsequential effect on the average weight. This is Mediocristan. If you
total the income of a thousand human beings and then add that of Bill
Gates, the latter will exert a huge leverage on the average, far exceeding
that of other observations. This is Extremistan. When we behave as if we
are in Mediocristan when in fact we are in Extremistan, we become
vulnerable to the most serious of Black Swan consequences. Bankers are
well known for being conservative, in dress as well as behavior. But they
tend to act as if they live in Mediocristan. One result of this blindness is
that in 1982, the simultaneous default of loans by South and Central
American countries caused large U.S. banks to lose nearly all the money
they had ever made—cumulatively in the history of American banking—
everything. Indeed, this was “an event of an exceptional nature.” In other
words, a classic Black Swan.
But if we cannot predict Black Swans—because by definition they are
unpredictable—what can we do to protect ourselves from, or even profit by,
their occurrence? The answer is that we can prepare for them. We can do
that by being intellectually and emotionally ready to respond to the
unexpected. By being observant, flexible, and adaptable. And the best way
to train your mind to handle unexpected and complex situations is to
practice dealing with lots and lots of unexpected and complex situations of
all sorts.
Enter The Logic of Failure, another thought-provoking book I
recommend to you.[28] In it, Dietrich Dörner, a German psychologist,
explores human decisionmaking in complex situations. He argues
persuasively, and in a manner similar to Taleb’s, that the human
decisionmaking apparatus is simply not well adapted genetically to dealing
with the kinds of complex situations that are the breeding ground for Black
Swans (although Dörner doesn’t use that term). He proposes that the most
valuable tools for learning how to think about such situations are interactive
simulations and games. But you cannot simply play the game and expect to
hone your skills. You must also reflect on the game, through careful post-
game analysis about what happened during the game and why—what we
would call a hot wash-up. So, to help DoD prepare to deal with potentially
world-changing Black Swans, we really need to use wargaming to create
and build what I have called the synthetic experience we need to respond
effectively to the unpredictable.

Wargaming the swan hunt

But what kind of wargaming? In the research that I and my colleagues

at CNA and the Naval War College have been doing over the last few years,
we have identified three distinct approaches to wargame design: what we
call the Analyst, the Artist, and the Architect.[29] Most actual designs
incorporate elements of all three approaches. Think of them as the axes of a
three-dimensional coordinate system, which you can use to locate different
game designs according to how much influence they exhibit from each of
the three “pure” approaches.
The first of these approaches we call the Analyst. The Analyst uses
data and theory to model the real world, including the players as elements
of the model. It is very similar to other techniques of modeling and
simulation in the defense community. In a game designed along the Analyst
dimension, players are just another element of the model. You may often
hear this approach described as “human-in-the-loop” modeling or
wargaming. The model is the main point of emphasis in design and interest
in play. For this reason, it tends to dominate the view of most defense
professionals when we talk about wargaming. But it is not the most useful
approach to most of the problems we face under current conditions. Our
models, at their best, predict the past; Analyst wargames tend to imprison
their players too tightly in that past for them to lift their eyes high enough to
see the circling Black Swans.
Like the analyst, the Artist bases his game on real data, and lots of it.
But instead of using that data to build a clock-work model—as the analyst
does—the Artist uses data to build an immersive storytelling environment.
The Artist is the storyteller, and he crafts the game’s story to engage and
affect the players both intellectually and emotionally, by communicating his
own creative point of view on the subject matter. Within the constraints of
that point of view, he invites the players to wander freely through the
storybook world he has created. At its best, the Artist approach allows the
players freedom to surprise themselves, but it can sometimes be difficult for
them to surprise the Artist himself. Indeed, the Artist-designer has more to
say to the players of the game than the players have to say to the Artist.
This can be a good way to communicate insights that the players need to
experience to open their own perspectives to new possibilities. It can show
them that some specific Black Swans are lurking around that corner and in
so doing awaken their consciousness to the possibility of others that are not
represented explicitly in the game.
The Architect-designer is also trying to produce a story, but it is not a
story of the Architect’s own creation. Instead, it is a story the players tell to
each other as they live through the game. The Architect uses data, as all
designers do, but he uses that data to create a representation of the game
universe in which the players will live and work, but only to the level of
detail and completeness necessary to allow the players to focus their
attention on what the designer (and other stake-holders in the game) deem
to be most critical. The Architect distills the data of the real world into a
form that is more readily accessible to the players for making decisions in
that universe. The decisions they make may be restricted somewhat to those
the Architect’s research indicates are the most critical. Game dynamics
revolve around those key decision points, not around a central story thread
or perspective, as in the Artist’s game. The Architect’s game is less
demanding of time and engagement from the players than is the Artist’s
game. It presents the players a somewhat more restricted range of decisions
than might be available in the Artist’s approach, but in the context of
allowing the players more freedom to develop their own overall story line.
The Black Swans arise organically from the players themselves, stripping
away their instinctive defense that somehow “Control” manipulated them
into a trap.

Looking ahead
So where does all this leave us? Analyst games embody the classic
analytical belief that we can model, predict, and explain the real world,
including human behavior and randomness, with the precision of a physicist
calculating ballistic trajectories. With Black Swans lurking in the bushes of
21st-century warfare, however, these confident beliefs in old techniques
will not always help us when we confront the really hard and most world-
changing questions of the future. Those questions will be of many types.
What should we buy to face the future dangers and opportunities we see?
How shall hedge against what we can’t see? How should we train our
people to work in that uncertain future, whether in the cold, cruel world of
acquisition, or the hot, crueler world of combat? Most of all, how can we
help all of them—accountants and analysts, wonks and warriors—learn
how better to think about the possibilities that the things we know, the
things we don’t know, the things we don’t know that we know, and the
things we don’t know that we don’t know all present to us in an uncertain
future clouded in randomness? It is in this reorientation of how humans
think about the future—in every domain of such thinking—that wargaming
can have its most profound effects.
If we want our decision makers in all fields of defense and security to
prepare better to face those unknown unknowns, we must help them
experience examples of Black Swans. Black Swans of all types and in all
functional environments. To do that, DoD needs new and revolutionary
applications of wargaming, making more use of the techniques of the Artist
and Architect to supplement those of the Analyst. Only a creative
combination of every tool we can lay our hands one, whether new or old,
can give us real hope of avoiding disaster and, instead, profiting from the
positive opportunities that await us as we confront the Black Swans of the
21st century.
“Where you from?” says the wargamer.

“Extremistan,” says the Black Swan. “You?”

“I’m a wargamer.” is the reply. “I don’t know where I’m from, but I do
know where I’m going.”

“Really?” says the Swan. “Where is that?”

“Back to the future,” says the wargamer.

“Oh,” the Swan replies. “I guess I’ll see you there.”

“Not if I see you first,” says the wargamer.

Ba dum.
OceanofPDF.com
 Afterword
I asked my friend and colleague Albert A. Nofi for permission to use
the paper below as an afterword for this edition of the book. Al is well
known as an historian, analyst, and game designer to both hobby gamers
and to the professionals of the U.S. Navy based on his published books and
games and on his work at CNA, particularly his years as the CNA
representative to the CNO’s Strategic Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War
College. His recent book, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet
Problems, 1923 – 1940, published by the Naval War College Press in 2010,
details a practical example of how wargaming was integrated with at-sea
evolutions to create an understanding of real-world combat requirements
that proved critical in battle—in this case, to the U.S. Navy’s operations in
the Pacific during World War II. It is a prime illustration of my concept of
the Cycle of Research. In the essay below, Al points to lessons from this
past experience that the current U.S. Navy (and the navies of other nations
as well) should consider as they think about the uncertain and potentially
dangerous future we all face. Thank you, Al.

—Peter Perla

Some Lessons from History about Wargaming and

Exercises[30] By Albert A. Nofi
Building upon a long history of fleet maneuvers beginning in the
1880s and lasting until the First World War,[31] between 1923 and 1940,
the U.S. Navy conducted a series of twenty-one major maneuvers known as
“Fleet Problems” that were, in the words of Secretary of the Navy Claude
A. Swanson, “of the utmost value in training the personnel of the
fleet.”[32]
 The Fleet Problems examined strategic, operational, and tactical
problems related to the development and execution of War Plan Orange.
[33] “All Hands” efforts, involving most of the major combatants in the
fleet in trans-oceanic operations, the Fleet Problems tested the Navy’s skills
in all areas of naval warfare. Genuine free maneuvers, there was no
scripting and commanders were encouraged to adopt innovative solutions to
the situations confronting them. In the words of Admiral James O.
Richardson, the Fleet Problems were “fought with zest and determination”
limited only by considerations of safety.[34] Undertaken after vigorous
debate over processes and procedures, the Fleet Problems concluded,
Richardson observed, by being "vigorously refought from the speaker's
platforms," as officers offered frank, open criticism and discussion of
actions taken and lessons learned.[35] They were closely linked to
wargaming at the Naval War College.
The Fleet Problems provided the Navy (and particularly its senior
commanders and their staffs) with the most realistic training possible short
of war. They tested war plans, operational instructions, and tactical
doctrine under realistic conditions, allowed experiments in tactics, doctrine,
procedures, and technology, and familiarized the fleet with operating
environments ranging from the arctic to the tropics.
During the Fleet Problems, the Navy perfected most of the tools
and doctrines that it has been using since 1942, including the carrier battle
group, underway replenishment, amphibious operations, and its
communications expertise, and much more. The problems also helped
create the highly trained commanders and staffs that went on to lead the
“naval force” during the Pacific War.[36]

The U.S. Navy is presently entering upon a new era of

technological and organizational innovation and restructuring—based on
the ideas expressed in Navy concepts for SEAPOWER 21 and FORCEnet—
which will initiate changes in the way it conducts operations that are at least
as far reaching as did the developments during the interwar period, and in a
threat environment in many ways far more complex than that which existed
in those decades. The full development of SEAPOWER 21 and FORCEnet
will require an experimental process equal in rigor and duration. But the
Navy can today no longer conduct experiments the way it did during the
inter-war period.

The Navy, Then

A number of unique factors influenced the success and value of
the Fleet Problems and other maneuvers and exercises during the interwar
period.[37]

· The bulk of the operating forces of the Navy were organized

into a single command, the United States Fleet, based in
CONUS, which permitted almost total commitment of assets and
focus of effort to the exercises.
· Mahanian “Command of the Seas” was essentially the Navy's
only mission.
· The fleet was not involved in any real-world operations and did
not deploy overseas, and thus could devote all its time to
training.[38]
· Facing no immediate threat, the service had the leisure to
conduct extensive experiments, as these did not interfere with
operations or readiness.

· Because the only likely enemy was Japan, the Navy could
focus on the long-term study of a possible Pacific war.
· Although they were experimenting with new tactics and
technologies, it was within a familiar force-on-force industrial
 age model of warfare.
· Virtually all line officers were Annapolis graduates, which
meant that they all shared a common background, training, and
experience, and quite often were personally well-known to each
other as well. [39]

· There was essentially only one warfare “community,” the “Big

Gun” navy, with everyone sharing a common understanding of
operational and tactical procedures, materiél, and “culture.”[40]
· Senior officers were deeply involved in planning, executing,
and critiquing the problems.[41]
· Personnel turbulence was extremely low and longevity high,
which resulted in very professional, highly experienced
personnel.
· Most personnel were assigned to the fleet, and although not
deployed, the fleet generally spent most of its time at sea, so that
all hands developed a very high degree of seamanship.

· Money was severely constrained, forcing considerable

improvisation.[42]
· The Fleet Problems were conducted over 18 years, which
permitted a lot of time for analysis, reflection, and re-testing.

· The demands of “Jointness” were not a problem.[43]

· The public was interested, without being highly critical.[44]

The Navy, Now

 The Navy today is vastly different from what it was in the period
between the world wars. Indeed, virtually none of the conditions that
prevailed then are still in force.
· The Navy is broken up into regional fleets that have developed
deep-rooted individual personalities.

· Mahanian Command of the Seas must compete with the Navy's

new missions of participating in the land campaign, supporting
strategic deterrence, securing the homeland, and so forth.
· Much of the fleet is operating, and a high proportion of the
Navy’s assets are often on distant deployments, so that
operations and readiness necessarily limit extensive
experimentation.
· There are many threats, including niche capabilities,
asymmetric competitors, non-state actors, and possible near-peer
enemies, which must all be considered when planning for the
future.
· New ways of war are emerging, so that the Navy must consider
how to cope with innovative tactics and technologies, while still
being prepared for the traditional force-on-force industrial-age
model of warfare.

· Officers come from a variety of commissioning streams.

· The Navy has many communities, which compete for
resources, personnel, and influence, making difficult the
development of a common understanding of strategy and
operations, materiél, and culture.
· Senior officers are mired in administrative, organizational, and
political detail, and usually removed from planning, executing,
and critiquing exercises.
· Personnel turbulence is moderate, but careers are by no means
as long as they were in prior years
· Most personnel are not at sea most of the time.

· Money is not a significant obstacle—although perhaps a

handicap—because inter-war innovation was often done on a
shoe string.
· The Navy is constrained from doing naval experimentation and
exercises by the increasing requirements for jointness.
· An enormous bureaucracy of consultants, analysts, and
technical specialists—military as well as civilian—has developed
to collect, organize, study, and analyze information derived from
wargames, exercises, and experiments, which results in reports
that take months to complete, and often bury valuable lessons in
mountains of extraneous data.
· Given recent experiences, the public is frankly suspicious of
military experimentation and new technologies.
So the Navy is clearly not the same Navy that it was between 1923
and 1940. And it certainly has lost the knack of conducting genuine
wargames on the pattern of the Fleet Problems.

The State of Wargaming

Maneuvers, wargaming, exercises, and experiments by the U.S.
Armed Forces have become rather notorious for their lack of rigor. Of
“Millennium Challenge ‘02,” Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), who
commanded the defending “third world” forces, said,[45]
Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the
joint forces commander advertised it was going
to be, it simply became a scripted exercise.
 They had a predetermined end, and they
scripted the exercise to that end.
This “failure is not an option” approach to maneuvers, wargames,
exercises, and experiments has been around for a long time.[46] Over the
past few years the Navy has engaged in literally hundreds of “exercises”
and “experiments,” including many that are joint or coalition.[47] But as
with Millennium Challenge, these seem mostly to be either training
practices – exercises in the sense the term was used between the wars – or
demonstrations, rather than free maneuvers. Nor have many of them been
experiments in a genuinely scientific sense. “There is growing concern that
many of the activities labeled experiments being conducted by the DoD
have been less valuable than they could have been.”[48]
Naval maneuvers have evolved into something other than free play
tests of the fleet’s abilities, becoming scripted programs intended to
showcase the Navy’s equipment and training.[49] Moreover, these are
increasingly being replaced by joint training exercises. So-called Title X
wargames, testing the joint force, are not much better, and often neglect
proper attention to vital naval missions, such as undersea warfare, while in
most cases “The Blue team generally emerges as the ultimate victor . . .
.”[50] In fact, no one even seems to know what the term maneuvers means
any longer; a search of the Joint Doctrine, Education, and Training
Electronic Information System’s Universal Joint Task List (UJTL) database
provides no definitions for maneuvers or wargaming, and uses exercises
only in the narrow sense of training practice or “show of force
demonstrations.”[51]
So neither the Navy nor what passes for wargaming, exercises,
experiments, and maneuvers are today what they were between the wars.
Does this mean that we can learn nothing from the Fleet Problems? Not
necessarily. But it will not be easy, and there are several steps that will be
required.
Back to the Future: Toward a Renaissance of Naval
Wargaming
First, we have to restore the concept of free play to our fleet
maneuvers and exercises, and the frank, open criticism and discussion of
actions taken and lessons learned. One purpose of the Fleet Problems was
to reveal relationships, limits, and opportunities that were counter-intuitive.
Naval Historian Tom Hone recently observed that
. . . the Naval War College games under the
leadership of officers such as Rear Admiral
[William V.] Pratt suggested some insights that
were counter to the intuition and training of the
officers who staged them. The best of these
officers could then take the next step and propose
that a variation on the War College game be a
scenario for the next Fleet Problem. But this
means that at the War College, and then, later, in
the Fleet Problems, the participants had to be
willing to be shown wrong. There had to be room
for the argument that even errors might show the
way to “truth.” But this tolerance for error,
obviously, is difficult to do, and it’s made even
more difficult when promotion is at stake.[52]
Restoring this cultural attitude is probably the most important step
that needs to be taken in order to restore genuine objectivity to the fleet’s
maneuvers and wargaming. And it will require considerable leadership and
major cultural change.
Secondly, we have to rethink the way we conduct maneuvers,
wargames, exercises, and experiments. To begin with, it’s important to
realize that although the terms maneuvers, exercises, and wargames are
often used carelessly, even interchangeably, they are very different things.
In the interwar period, they had fairly specific meanings. The Fleet
Problems, for example, were essentially maneuvers, that is they pitted
portions of the fleet against other portions in unscripted, free play sham
campaigns, usually with some operational or strategic goal in view, and
winners and losers were not pre-determined; indeed, in several cases the
outcome was essentially a draw, and in one the fleets proved unable to even
find each other.[53] Wargames did much the same thing, but used models
or counters on maps and game floors to simulate the movements and
actions of ships and aircraft under the guidance of a complex set of rules.
On the other hand, exercises were practices—training sessions—designed
to hone the skills of portions of the fleet in their particular specialties, and
were thus sometimes scripted. We need to return to this model, combining
genuine free-play maneuvers, supplemented by equally free-play
wargaming, exercises, and experimentation.
Next, one of the great strengths of the maneuver, wargaming,
exercise, and experimentation process between the world wars was the
continuous interaction between the Fleet Problems and wargaming at the
Naval War College. Ideas developed or problems encountered on the game
floor were analyzed by students and often tried out in the Fleet Problems,
usually after some practical experimentation in the fleet and during routine
exercises. Likewise, questions that arose during the Fleet Problems were
often incorporated in an NWC game, of which there were some 200 in the
period.[54] As this process developed, the rules for both the Fleet
Problems and the NWC wargames were continuously revised and updated.
This kept the gaming process honest, because, as Rear Adm. Edward C.
Kalbfus, President of the Naval War College, cautioned in 1936, “we can
make any type of ship work up here, provided we draw up the rules to
fit.”[55] This practice must be restored.
 This may not be as difficult as it may seem. In the past few years
a number of developments have occurred that make possible the resumption
of something like the interwar fleet maneuver-exercise-wargame cycle.
During the 1920s and 1930s the fleet had only two methods of
testing ideas, maneuvers, of which the Fleet Problems were the most
important, and the NWC wargames. Today we still have these tools, but
they are supplemented by many more tools as well. Wargames, for
example, have become enormously sophisticated. Whereas the NWC
basically had one type of wargame, played with miniature ships on a large
floor, today’s wargames can range from simple, very rationalized board
games to highly complex computerized ones.[56] Computerized
wargaming allows for much greater control, repetition, and documentation
than was ever possible when playing on the game floor in Pringle Hall.
And we can still play on the game floor.
Moreover, the development of computers has led to a
multiplication of the tools of modeling and simulation (M&S). As SSG XX
observed, M&S “can systematically examine concept and trade space, assist
with experimentation, and determine optimal solutions. M&S allows an
experiment to focus on key test points, reduces testing permutations, and
focuses effort into the most fruitful areas.” Of course, as with wargames,
M&S is only “an approximation of reality and is not the experimentation
panacea. M&S does not capture operational nuances and issues with at-sea
evolutions, physical exertions of at-sea operations, incomplete
planning/conceptualization of issues, nor invaluable fleet feedback.”[57]
So we will still have to take our ideas to the fleet. Just as during
the inter-war period Naval War College wargames required verification
through the Fleet Problems, today’s wargames and, modeling and
simulation tools will also require “calibration” by the fleet. We largely lost
this capability in the Cold War. During the Cold War, although the fleet
was much larger than it is today—or, indeed, than it was during the interwar
period—virtually all of its fleet assets were either preparing for deployment,
on deployment, or standing down from deployment. Nevertheless, we did
not entirely lose the concept of genuine free play exercise and experiments,
for some did exist, and not only in the Navy.

The Navy’s Top Gun School.[58] During the early part of the
Vietnam War, naval aviators were turning in a dismal
performance in air-to-air combat against enemy MiG-21
fighters, attaining a kill ratio of only 1:1.[59] Recognizing a
problem, in 1969 the Navy created its Top Gun air combat
school. Here Navy pilots practiced air combat against fellow
pilots trained to fly and fight using Soviet doctrine and tactics,
in aircraft whose performance characteristics most closely
matched those of Russian equipment, rather than against pilots
using the same tactics and aircraft that they themselves were
flying. A marked improvement in the performance of Navy and
Marine Corps pilots was quickly noticed; by 1972, the overall
Navy-Marine Corps kill ratio against all types of enemy fighters
for the entire war had risen to 5.6:1. Since then Top Gun has
been a powerful resource underpinning the nation’s naval
power.[60]

The Army’s National Training Center (NTC).[61] In 1980, the

U.S. Army opened the NTC at Ft. Irwin, which featured a new
training system that used weapons that “fired” non-lethal laser
bursts and electronic sensors that were fitted to troops, vehicles,
and other equipment. Thus, the NTC is a wired battle area on
which all the action can be recorded and reviewed later. Army
line battalions rotate into the NTC regularly to engage in
periods of mock combat with troops organized and equipped
like a reinforced Soviet-style mechanized infantry regiment.
The result is that the visiting troops get very realistic training, as
has been demonstrated in both wars with Iraq. The key to the
 success of the NTC was that the performance of troops—and
their commanders—was openly discussed. This caused some
stir at first, because commanders were not used to having their
mistakes aired before their subordinates, but the policy was
sustained at the highest levels in the Army, and has led to a
significant increase in readiness.

As with the Fleet Problems, we need to take the Top Gun and NTC
models and apply them fleet-wide to produce ambitious training,
experimentation, innovation, and critical debrief with no fear of failure. We
have a unique opportunity to do this as a result of post-Cold War
developments. The end of the Cold War and the rise of trans-national
threats that led to the Global War on Terrorism in the post-9/11 world have
caused changes in the organization and strategy of the Navy that support the
resumption of genuine, large scale free maneuvers. The most important of
these is the institution of the Fleet Response Program.

Developed by Deep Blue,[62] the Fleet Response Program (FRP)

is intended to help the Navy best meet its requirements under the 1/4/2/1
strategy.[63] It is designed to improve fleet readiness and the Navy’s
ability to surge strike groups forward in response to a crisis overseas. The
FRP accomplishes this by reducing maintenance time through the use of
“laundry lists” for maintenance requirements by ship commanders. Carriers
improve their response time by moving up carrier landing qualifications on
the timeline. The FRP works on a 27 month cycle of readiness: six months
in the yards, six months of initial sea trials, and 15 months of full
readiness. Strike groups will be able to surge forward during the readiness
phase for deployments of up to six months.
The FRP breaks with the forward deployment pattern that the U.S.
Navy grew accustomed to in the half century following World War II. [64]
One result of the FRP is that under normal circumstances a significant
proportion of the fleet—approximately half—will be available in home
waters at any particular time. We could leverage this availability to conduct
large scale maneuvers, exercises, and experiments in the spirit of the Fleet
Problems.
So we have the examples of the Fleet Problems, Top Gun, and
even the NTC, on which to build a robust free-play gaming and exercise
program, and we have the opportunity presented by the FRP. We also
should—and must—leverage the expertise of several organizations.

· Deep Red .[65] Proposed by SSG XXII, Deep Red is

envisioned as a permanent “red team” for the Navy-Marine
Corps team, to provide it with insights into potential adversaries
and the development of warfighting, as well as to train personnel
to play Red in wargames. Composed of “selected people to
provide needed diversity of perspectives and experience,” Deep
Red would be an invaluable partner in developing challenging,
honest models for wargames, exercises, and experiments. To be
really effective, Deep Red should include select retired personnel
and civilian wargaming specialists. It should work closely with
Joint Forces Command or any similar successor agency,[66] the
Army’s “Red Franchise”[67] and any similar agency that might
be established by the Air Force, to insure that wargaming and
exercises have an adequate joint component.

· The War Gaming Department of the Naval War College.[68]

The oldest continuously operating wargaming department in the
world, the WGD has the skills and experience to run wargames
from the simplest and smallest (small teams engaged in seminar
discussions) to the largest and most complex (the Global series,
free play games at the operational level involving hundreds of
players distributed around the world and using dozens of
complex computer models). The department’s Research and
Analysis Division is intended to apply wargaming to the
 changing world order, improve best practices of wargaming, and
rigorously analyze wargames for validity and value. The
Wargaming Department, and the ONI detachment that provides
Red Cell support to it, are natural partners in attempting to bring
vibrant gaming and exercises back to the fleet.
· Commander Fleet Forces Command (CFFC). Created in 2001,
CFFC is responsible for overall coordination, establishment, and
implementation of integrated requirements and policies for
manning, equipping, and training Atlantic and Pacific Fleet units
and the naval elements of NORTHCOM. CFFC is thus naturally
suited to have sponsorship of naval wargaming, exercises, and
maneuvers on the style of the Fleet Problems.

· Naval Warfare Development Center (NWDC).[69] NWDC is

chartered to take a long focus and champion Navy warfare
innovation, Operating Concepts, and Concept of Operations
development in a naval, joint, and coalition environment. It is
also tasked to coordinate planning and implementation of the
Fleet's SEA TRIAL experimentation process, under the aegis of
CFFC. As such, the NWDC is another necessary partner in the
reintroduction of robust wargaming and fleet maneuvers.
Putting it All Together.
An effective program of fleet exercises, wargames, and
experiments, will require an independent monitor, to supervise inputs,
purposes, execution, and analysis. [70] “Deep Red” would certainly
qualify for such a role. “Deep Red” could define the nature of the
undertaking—i.e., is it a free play maneuver such as the Fleet Problems
were, or perhaps merely a demonstration or an experiment or some other
activity? This is perhaps the most critical aspect in the development of an
effective game plan; without a clear understanding of the nature of the
“game” it is impossible to develop a plan that will yield useful results.
 The Name of the “Game” [71]
Demonstrations: The use of technologies or other
innovations in a specific context developed to
“illustrate” their utility.
Exercises: Repetitive practice runs or simulated wartime
operations involving planning, preparation, and
execution, carried out for the purpose of training and
evaluation.
Experiments: Repetitive objective testing of a focused set
of questions under controlled conditions.
Maneuvers: Unscripted, free-play tactical and operational
exercises with actual forces carried out in imitation of
war—essentially what the Fleet Problems were.
Modeling & Simulations: Any mathematical imitation or
other representation of the operation or features of a
potential situation or process.
Wargames: A warfare model or simulation in which the
flow of events shapes, and is shaped by, decisions
made by a human player or players during the course
of those events.

Determining the type of “game” one wishes to “play” should be

rooted in an objective and critical analysis of the goals, objectives,
priorities, contribution, capabilities, and commitment of each stakeholder,
and the state of the ideas or capabilities being proposed. Modeling and
simulations can be used to explore some of the implications of capabilities
and ideas that have not yet been developed. Wargames—whether
computerized, seminar, sand table, or cardboard—are useful for evaluating
these ideas and capabilities against a thinking and reacting opponent.
Demonstrations are valuable for showing how new ideas or capabilities are
supposed to work. Experiments are needed to determine if the proposed
ideas or capabilities will work under controlled, repeatable conditions. A
free maneuver is essential to see how the idea or capability will mesh with
existing ideas and capabilities in a real world environment against a
resourceful opponent.
Thus, if our purpose is to determine whether a certain technology
or other innovation may work, then the need is for models and simulations,
followed by experiments that stress the technology or idea under rigorous
controlled conditions. If our purpose is to familiarize the troops with a how
a technology or idea can add value to military operations, then the need is to
conduct a demonstration. If our purpose is to make the troops proficient in
the use of the new technology or ideas, then the need is for exercises. But if
our purpose is to see how the new technology or other innovation works in
an environment simulating actual war as closely as possible, that calls for
free play wargames and actual maneuvers with troops. This analysis will
permit the development of objectives for the event, which will underpin the
development of a game plan outlining the purposes of the exercise, defining
the boundaries of the problem, and determining the metrics upon which it
will be evaluated.
This preliminary analysis will also determine who the players
should be. While maneuvers and exercises are usually conducted by the
officers who would actually command in war, wargames, experiments, and
demonstrations are often conducted by subordinates, often relatively junior
subordinates at that. If they are being used to develop doctrine, tactics, or
procedures, games must be played by the person most likely to be in
command in real conflict.[72]
Deep Red could also oversee the implementation of the game plan,
to ensure adherence to the parameters established and to support the
collection of data for analysis. Together with its partner organizations,
Deep Red must then undertake an immediate evaluation of the each
exercise, with inputs from the actual players. This must be done in a timely
fashion. Proper assessment of the results in relation to the objectives is the
most important product of any wargame. If the analysis is not appropriate
to the nature of the wargame, then it becomes data collection without
purpose. It is not the wargame, maneuver, exercise, or experiment that is
itself important, but the analysis that results from it; the analysis is the most
important part of the undertaking.
One the analysis has been completed it will be up to the
appropriate organizations—notably the NWC, NWDC and CFFC—to
implement the lessons learned.
This process would not be difficult to implement. All it takes is the
will to make it so.

OceanofPDF.com
 Appendix Questions for Wargame Analysis
PREPARATION
· What information was provided to participants prior to their
arrival?
· How are game objectives defined in preliminary briefings?
· What information is briefed to participants before play begins?
· How and to what level of detail is the scenario described? What is
it?
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
· What is overall game structure and style?
· Who are the players?
· Is there a team structure?
-From what commands do team members and leaders come?
-What are the names and real-world jobs of the principal players?
-How many sides are there in the game (one, two, or many)?
-What are the decision levels of the players, and how do they
communicate?
-What are the responsibilities and limitations of the players, and how do
these correspond to their roles?

· What are the roles of control?

-How are command levels above and below the players represented?
-How do players and controllers/umpires communicate?
-What are controller/umpire responsibilities, powers, limitations?

· What is the formal analysis plan?

- How many analysts are there, and where are they assigned?
- What are analysts told to look for?
 - What other instructions are the analysts given?
- Who has overall responsibility for analysis?
- How frequently do analysts meet?
- What are topics of discussion at analyst meetings?
- How will analysis be integrated, when, where, and by whom?

PLAY
· What data and displays are available to the players?
- What information is provided?
- What types of displays are employed (books, charts, computers)?
- What are the sources of the information?
- Are there any questions about the accuracy of the data?
- Are the data available and the players' access to it appropriate for the
command level they represent?
- Is the detail of data available commensurate with
its importance or merely driven by
availability?
- How often, easily, and well do the players make use of the data
displays? For what reasons?
· During the course of play, what decisions are made by the players, and
which are left up to others (control, umpires, etc.)?
- How detailed are decisions regarding force employment?
- What sort of control do players have in combat situations?
-How well do players control reconnaissance and intelligence assets?
- Are players' questions focused on what they should do, what they
can do, what they must do, what they will do, or how can they do?
· How are game events defined?
- What are players told about what is happening and when?
- What do control and the umpires not tell the players?
· How are events sequenced?
- What defines a move (time, activity, other)?
 - How is game time controlled relative to real time (steps or clock
speed)?
- How do players' decisions construct sequences of events.
- What is the level of player interaction and response to developing
situations?
· How does battle-damage assessment (BDA) or event resolution work?
- Who does BDA? When?
- What techniques, models, data do they use and how?
- How do they receive instructions and information about events to
resolve? From whom? When?
- What are the factors critical to individual resolutions, or classes of
actions?
- How do umpires/ BDA translate player decisions into force
movements, interactions, etc.?
- How are players given BDA results? With what frequency, time
delay, and accuracy of reporting?
- Is the "fog of war" appropriate for player decision levels?
- How does BDA affect later decisions?

ATTITUDES
· What are players' feelings about their roles and ability to influence
events?
- What is the source of those feelings?
- What do the players see as the good points of the process?
- What do they see as the problems?
- What critical decisions did the players make? Why did they decide as
they did?
- What are the critical factors, understanding, and prejudices affecting
decisions?
- What special insights and ideas did the players bring to the game, and
how has the play of the game affected them?
· What are the attitudes of control?
- How does the sponsor feel about the course and value the game?
- Does this feeling change? What influences it?

- How do controllers/umpires feel about their role, and how well they
are carrying it out?
- How do attitudes of the sponsor and control group about the course
of the game and its smoothness or value compare to the attitudes of
those in the trenches? What appears to be the source of any
disagreement in these attitudes?

OceanofPDF.com
End Notes
INTRODUCTION

1. Team Yankee Game Rules, p. 2.

2. "1987 F&M Readers Poll," Fire & Movement, No. 56, p. 11.
3. H. G. Wells, Little Wars, p. 97.
4. James F. Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook, p. 109.
5.Stephen B. Patrick, "The Rommel Syndrome or Wargames as a Snare and
Delusion," Moves, No. 1, p. 4.
6.Redmond A. Simonsen, "Walter Mitty Strikes Back! or Just Call Me
Erwin," Moves, No. 1, p. 5.

CHAPTER 1. THE BIRTH OF THE WARGAME

1. Alfred H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, Business, and Politics, p.
3.
2. Abe Greenberg, Captain, U.S. Navy, "An Outline of Wargaming," Naval
War College Review, p. 93.
3. Francis J. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-1.
4. Farrand Sayre, Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides, p. 6.
5. The description of Helwig's game is taken from McHugh, Fundamentals
of War Gaming, p. 2-3.
6. Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 6.
7. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-5.
8. John Clerk, An Essay on Naval Tactics, Systematic and Historical.
Quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-42.
9. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 1-78.
10. The discussion of Venturini's game is based largely on McHugh,
Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp. 2-3 – 2-5.
11. Quoted in Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 6.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. See Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 5.
14. "Reisswitz the Elder," Militair Wochenblatt, No. 73, unpublished
translation by William Leeson.
15. General der Infanterie z.D. Dannhauer, "Das Reisswitzsche Kriegsspiel
von seinen Beginn bis zum Tode des Erfinders 1827," (The Reisswitz
Wargame from the Beginning to the Death of Its Inventor, 1827), Militair
Wochenblatt, No. 56, unpublished
translation by William Leeson.
16. General von Muffling, "Anzeige" (Notice), Militair Wochenblatt
(Berlin), No. 42, unpublished translation by William Leeson.
17. Lt. G.H.R.J. von Reisswitz, "Anzeige" (Notice), Militair Wochenblatt
(Berlin), No. 42, unpublished translation by William Leeson.
18. See Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 10.
19. Ibid., p. 12.
20. Julius von Verdy du Vernois, A Simplified War Game, p. 8.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., pp. 8-10.
23. C. W. Raymond, Major, U.S. Army, Kriegsspiel. Quoted in Sayre, Map
Maneuvers, p. 15.
24. Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 28.
25. Ibid., p. 29.
26. H. G. Wells, Little Wars, p. 110.
27. From The Engineer, vol. 86, 9 December 1890, p. 581. Quoted in
Donald Featherstone, Naval War Games, pp. 145-46.
28. Fred T. Jane, "The Naval War Game," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings,
p. 661 and p. 602, respectively.
29. Ibid., p. 601.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Featherstone, Naval War Games, p. 147.
33. Jane, "Naval War Game," p. 602.
34. Featherstone, Naval War Games, p. 148.
35. Ibid.
36. A.P. Niblack, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy, "The Jane Naval
Wargame in the Scientific American," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
37. Featherstone, Naval War Games, pp. 149-50
38. Niblack, "Jane Naval Wargame", p. 581.
39. See Thomas B. Allen, War Games, p. 124.
40. Ibid
41. Friedrich Helfferich, "From the Dawn of Wargaming: Schlactenspiel
and Wehrschach," Fire & Movement, no. 48, p. 13.
42. Ibid.
43. Rudolf Hofmann, War Games.
44. Ibid., p. 7.
45. Generaloberst Franz Halder, in his foreword to Hofmann, War Games,
pp. ix-x.
46. Ibid., p. x.
47. Hofmann, War Games, p. 7.
48. Ibid., p. 30.
49 Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Memoirs, Ten Years and Twenty Days, pp.
32-33.
50. Hofmann, War Games, p. 16.
51. Ibid., p. 20.
52. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp. 2-18.
53. Louis Morton, "Japan's Decision for War (1941)", in Kent Roberts
Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions, p. 69.
54. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp. 2-18.
55. Morton, "Japan's Decision for War," p. 73.
56. Mitsuo Fuchida and Okumiya Masatake, Midway, The Battle that
Doomed Japan, p. 52.
57. Ibid., pp. 95-97.
58. Quoted in Gordon Prange, Miracle at Midway, p. 36.
59. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 31.
60. Ibid., p. 32.
61. Quoted in ibid., p. 32.
62. Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 24.
63. Ibid., p. 25.
64. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 23.
65. See Sayre, Map Maneuvers, p. 21.
66. Quoted in Andrew Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, p. 12.
67. Philip H. Colomb, "Le Duel ou Jeu de la Guerre Naval," Revue
Maritime et Coloniale, and A. Colombo, "Giuoco di Guerra Navale,"
Revista Marittima (Roma).
68. Wilson, The Bomb and Computer, p. 26.
69. Ibid., pp. 26-27.
70. Ibid., p. 26.
71. Ibid., p. 32.
72. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 33.
73. W. R. Livermore, Captain, U.S. Army, The American Kriegsspiel, p. 26.
74. William Chamberlaine, Major, U.S. Army, Coast Artillery War Game.
Quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-34.
75. "The War Game and How it is Played," Scientific American, p. 470.
76. The Solution to Map Problems. Quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals, p.
2-37.
77. See McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-38.
78. General von Cochenhausen, "War Games for Battalion, Regiment, and
Division", Military Review, Mar. 1941.
79. Quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-38.
80. Ninth United States Army Staff, Conquer, The Story of the Ninth Army,
p. 141. Quoted in Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 34.

CHAPTER 2. WARGAMING AND THE U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

1. For a brief and fascinating account of this period, see "The Parable of the
Ships at Sea," chapter 8 in Elting Morison, From Know-How to Nowhere.
2. Report of the Secretary of War, 1890. Quoted in Spector, Professors of
War, p. 5.
3. Spector, Professors of War, p. 10.
4.For more on the history of the Naval War College, see John B.
Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson III, and John R. Wadleigh, Sailors and
Scholars: the Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College.
5.Anthony S. Nicolosi, "The Spirit of McCarty Little," U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings, p. 74.
6. See ibid, and Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, pp. 26-27 for descriptions
of these exercises.
7. Nicolosi, "McCarty Little," p. 74.
8. A. Colombo, "Giuoco di Guerra Navale" (Naval War Game), Revista
Marittima (Roma).
9. From Harpers Weekly, Feb. 1895, quoted in Francis J. McHugh,
Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-47.
10. Letter from Little to Luce, quoted in Spector, Professors of War, p. 74.
11. Quoted in Spector, Professors of War, p. 74.
12. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-49.
13. War College Rules for 1902, quoted in Spector, Professors of War, p. 78.
14. Francis J. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, p. 50.
15. Francis J. McHugh, "Eighty Years of Wargaming," Naval War College
Review, p. 89.
16. See Spector, Professors of War, and Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars,
for a full discussion of this subject.
17. James A. Barber, Jr., Commander, U.S. Navy, "The School of Naval
Warfare", Naval War College Review, pp. 89-96.
18. W. McCarty Little, "The Strategic Naval War Game or Chart
Maneuver," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, pp. 1228-1229.
19. Ibid., p. 1213.
20. Ibid., p. 1230.
21. See Spector, Professors of War, p. 81.
22. Nicolosi, "McCarty Little", p. 78.
23. Little, Strategic Naval War Game, p. 1223.
24. Quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 2-48.
25. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 49.
26. Quoted in Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 113.
27. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 51.
28. William S. Sims, Admiral, U.S. Navy, in World's Work, Sep. 1923,
quoted in McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp. 2-53–2-54
29. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 51
30. Ibid., pp. 50-51.
31. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 120.
32. See Michael Vlahos, "Wargaming, an Enforcer of Strategic Realism:
1919-1942," Naval War College Review.
33. See, for example, Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 127, and Vlahos,
"Wargaming," p. 7.
34. Chester W. Nimitz, 1923 Naval War College thesis, excerpted in Naval
War College Review, Nov.-Dec. 1983, pp. 12-13.
35. Vlahos, "Wargaming," pp. 18-19.
36. Ibid., p. 19.
37. T. J. McKearney, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy, The Solomons
Naval Campaign: A Paradigm for Surface Warships in Maritime Strategy,
p. 187.
38. Quoted in Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 143.
39. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 4-17.
40. McKearney, Solomons Naval Campaign, pp. 111-12.
41. Ibid., p. 114.
42. Ibid., p. 115.
43. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, pp. 164-78.
44. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 52.
45. Ibid.
46. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 187.
47. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 53.
48. Ibid.,pp. 52-53.
49. Ibid., p. 53.
50. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 237.
51. Ibid.
52. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, chapter 5.
53. Richard S. Brooks, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy, "How It Works
—The Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator," U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings, p. 147.
54. Ibid., p. 148.
55. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," pp. 54-55.
56. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 5-31.
57. Brooks, "How It Works," p. 147.
58. McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College," p. 53.
59. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp. 5-32–5-33.
60. Ibid., pp. 5-33–5-35.
61. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Office of the Assistant for War
Gaming Matters (OP-06C), The Navy War Games Manual, p. I-1.
62. Ibid., p. III-2.
63. McHugh, Francis J, "War Gaming and the Navy Electronic Warfare
Simulator," Naval War College Review, p. 29.
64. "NEWS for the Fleet!" Naval War College Review, p. 2.
65. McHugh, "War Gaming and the Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator," p.
30.
66. Ibid., p. 31.
67. Ibid., pp. 31-32.
68. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
69. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, p. 5-49.
70. Abe Greenberg, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy, "Wargaming: Third
Generation," Naval War College Review, p. 72.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 73.
74. Ibid., p. 74.
75. Ibid.
76. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 254.
77. Ibid., p. 264.
78. Ibid., p. 272.
79. Ibid., p. 276.
80. Ibid., p. 278.
81. Quoted in ibid., p. 287.
82. Ibid., p. 297.
83. Julian J. Le Bourgeois, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy, "President's Notes,"
Naval War College Review, p. 2.
84. The description of the Naval Warfare Gaming System comes from the
brochure Naval Warfare Gaming System, published by Computer Sciences
Corporation. (No date given.)
85. The discussion of the Tactical Command Readiness Program is based
largely on a conversation between the author and Mr. Erv Kapos, who was
instrumental in the design of the program and its subsequent development.
86. Personal letter to the author from J. S. Hurlburt, Captain, U.S. Navy
(Ret.).
87. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, pp. 312-13.
88. Ibid., p. 313, and Robert J. Murray, "A Warfighting Perspective," U.S.
Naval Institute Proceedings, p. 68.
89. Murray, "Warfighting Perspective," p. 68.
90. Ibid., p. 74.
91. Garry D. Brewer and Martin Shubik, The WarGame, p. 125.
92. Murray, "Warfighting Perspective," p. 74.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
95. W. F. McCauley, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy, "Fight Smart", Phalanx:
Newsletter of Military Operations Research, p. 10.
96. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, p. 75.
97. Murray, "Warfighting Perspective," p. 75.
98. Ibid., p. 79.
99. McHugh, "Wargaming at the Naval War College," p. 55

CHAPTER 3. WARGAMING AFTER THE WAR

1. Philip M. Morse, and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations
Research, p. 1.
2. Keith R. Tidman, The Operations Evaluation Group, pp. 66-67.
3. Ibid., p. 67.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 68.
6. Alfred H. Hausrath,- Venture Simulation, pp. 40-44.
7. Ibid., p. 40.
8. Ibid., p. 43.
9. Quoted in ibid., p. 42
10. Ibid., p. 40.
11. For more on this subject, see: Garry D. Brewer and Martin Shubik, The
War Game; Thomas B. Allen, War Games; Andrew Wilson, The Bomb and
the Computer; Hausrath, Venture Simulation; and Tidman, Operations
Evaluation Group.
12. Dr. Lincoln P. Bloomfield, "Political Gaming," U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings, p. 59.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 55.
15. Ibid., p. 61.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 62.
20. Ibid., p. 63.
21. Ibid., p. 64.
22. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 265.
23. Robert Mandel, "Political Gaming and Foreign Policy Making During
Cris es," World Politics, p. 631.
24. W. M. Jones, "Getting Serious about Serious Games for Serious
Problems," talk presented at the symposium Serious Games for Serious
Questions, U.S. Department of State, 3-4 March 1988, Washington, D.C.
25. The Avalon Hill Game Company History, p. 3.
26. Ibid., p. 4.
27. The staff of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Wargame Design, pp. 10-11.
28. The Avalon Hill Came Company History, p. 4.
29. Ibid.
30. The staff of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Wargame Design, pp. 11-12.
31. Ibid., p. 13.
32. The Avalon Hill Game Company History, p. 4.
33. The staff of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Wargame Design, p. 13.
34. The Avalon Hill Game Company History, pp. 5-6.
35. The Avalon Hill Game Company History, p. 9.
36. Ibid., p. 11, and a personal letter to the author from James Dunnigan.
37. Ibid., p. 11.
38. Ibid., p. 12.
39. For a discussion of this topic, see John Prados, Pentagon Games, pp. 13
ff.
40. Ibid., p. 14.
41. Ibid., p. 61.
42. Allen, War Games, p. 194. The following discussion of the Sigma game
series is based largely on Allen, pp. 193-208.
43. Ibid., p. 194.
44. From the Sigma II-64 game records, quoted in Allen, p. 200.
45. For a striking comparison of the game and reality, see Allen, p. 206.
46. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, thoroughly documents the contributions
of the Research Analysis Corporation.
47. Ibid., p. 253.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 254.
50. Ibid.
51. Wilson, The Bomb and Computer, p. 210.
52. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 275.
53. Ibid., p. 276.
54. Ibid.
55.The staff of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Wargame Design, p. 17.
56. Ibid., p. 27.
57. "Designers Notes", Moves, no. 23, p. 27.
58. Nicholas Palmer, The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming, p.
126.
59. Taken from ibid., p. 187.
60. Rodger MacGowan, "Firing Line", Fire & Movement, p. 2.
61 The staff of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Wargame Design, p. 34.
62. Don Greenwood, "The Russian Campaign: Developer's Notes," Fire &
Movement, p. 30. Written in response to Richard F. DeBaun and Frank
Aker, "The Russian Campaign: Battle Report," Fire & Movement.
63. Hal Hock, "Tobruk Designer’s Notes," Fire & Movement p. 28.
64. Mark Saha, "Close Up: Tobruk", Fire & Movement.
65. Allen, War Games, p. 295.
66. Ibid., p. 303.
67. For a description of other meetings between Dunnigan and Marshall,
see ibid., pp. 93-95.
68. Richard D. Lawrence, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army, "Playing the
Game: The Role of War Games and Simulations," Defense/86, p. 8.
69. Allen, War Games, p. 310.
70. Ibid.
71. U.S. Army War College, McClintic Theater Model, Volume I: War
Game Director’s Manual, p. 1.
72. Ibid., pp. i-ii.
73. Ibid., p. 2.
74. Ibid., p. 4.
75. Kurt Nordquest, "Sophisticated Jutland," The Avalon Hill General, p.
26.
76. Ibid.
77. Redmond Simonsen and Dave Robertson, "SpiBus: SPl's Newsletter of
Microcomputer/Conflict Simulations Applications, nr
0001", Moves.
78. Ian Chadwick, "SpiBus: Why I'm Really Buying a Microcomputer and
What I'll Play When It Gets Here," Moves.
79. Ian Chadwick, "SpiBus: Why I'm Really Buying a Microcomputer and
What I'll Play When It Gets Here, Part 2," Moves, p. 29.
80. Dr. Ed Bever, "Board Wargames and Computer Wargames: A
Comparison", Fire & Movement, p. 52.
81. Ibid.
82. Kirby Arriola, "Carriers at War," The Grenadier, p. 49.
83. Ibid.
84. Reiner Huber, from the talk "Gaming and Simulation—A German
Perspective," presented at the symposium Serious Games for Serious
Questions, U.S. Department of State, 3-4 March 1988, Washington, D.C.
85. Ibid.
86. J. P. Wood, from the talk "Prospects for Land Combat Modelling,"
presented at the International Symposium on Improvements in Combat
Modelling at RMCS Shrivenham, 4-7 Sep. 1974.
87. Dr. G. P. Armstrong, from the talk "Advantages of Manual Wargaming,"
presented at the International Symposium on Improvements in Combat
Modelling at RMCS Shrivenham, 4-7 Sep. 1974.
88. The discussion of the Israeli gaming experience is based on a
presentation made by colonel Ya' Achov D. Herchal, IDF, at the symposium
Serious Games for Serious Questions, U.S. Department of State, 3-4 March
1988, Washington, D.C.
89. Much of the discussion of Soviet gaming is based on John Sloan, Ali
Jalali, Goublem Wardak, and Fred Gressler, Soviet Style Wargames.
90. Ibid., p. 3.
91. Ibid., p. 4.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., pp. 5-6
94. Ibid., p. 6.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid

CHAPTER 4. THE NATURE OF WARGAMES

1. Quoted in Bill Nichols, "CRT", The Grenadier, p. 22.
2. H. G. Wells, Little Wars, p. 101.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5. DESIGNING WARGAMES

1. James F. Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook, pp. 235-36.
2. See, for example: Carl H. Builder, Toward a Calculus of Scenarios, and
Dr. Dale K. Pace, "Scenario Use in Naval System Design," Naval Engineers
Journal.
3. Third Reich First Edition game rules, pp. 26 and 27.
4. Pace, "Naval System Design", p. 63.
5. Builder, Calculus of Scenarios, pp. 20-21.
6. Francis J. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, pp.3-25–3-28
7. Ibid., p. 3-11.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

CHAPTER 6. DEVELOPING WARGAMES

1. "Designer's Notes", Moves, no. 4, pp. 1, 28.
2. H. G. Wells, Little Wars, p. 11.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4.
Ibid., p. 15.
5. Ibid., pp. 22-23.
6. Alan Emrich, "Russia: A Breakthrough or Just Another Steppe Closer?"
Fire & Movement, pp. 48-55.
7. Ibid., p. 53.
8. Center for Naval Analyses Annual Report 1986. Quoting from John
Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 298.
9. Ibid., p. 14.
10. Dr. Allan L. Gropman, "In Pursuit of the Holy Grail," Phalanx: The
Bulletin of Military Operations Research, p. 1.
11. Ibid., p. 16.
12. Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics, Theory and Practice, p. 5.
13. J. P. Wood, from the talk "Prospects for Land Combat Modeling,"
presented at the International Symposium on Improvements in Combat
Modelling at RMCS Shrivenham, 4-7 Sep. 1974.
14. Ibid.
15. Wayne P. Hughes, "Attention!" Phalanx: The Bulletin of Military
Operations Research, p. 14.
16. Robert McQuie, Historical Characteristics of Combat for Wargames
(Benchmarks), p. iii.
17. Frank Chadwick, "My Two Cents", The Grenadier, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 28.
18. Quoted in Bill Stone, "Game Designers' Census," The Grenadier, p. 9.
19. John E. Hill, Squad Leader, First Edition Game Rules, p. 31.
20. Bill Haggart, Napoleon’s Last Triumph, unpublished designer's notes, p.
3.
21. Ibid., p. 5.
22. Nicholas Palmer, The Best of Board Wargaming, p. 39.
23. Chadwick, "My Two Cents", p. 29.
24. James Euliss, Commander, U.S. Navy, "Wargaming at the U.S. Naval
War College," Naval Forces, p. 103.
25. Ibid.
26. James F. Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook, p. 232.

CHAPTER 7. PLAYING WARGAMES

1.Frank Chadwick, "My Two Cents," The Grenadier, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 28.
2. Quoted in Frederick D. Thompson, Beyond the War Game Mystique:
Learning from War Games, p. 6.
3. Frederick D. Thompson, "Beyond the War Game Mystique", U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, p. 84.
4. Ibid., pp. 84-85.
5. Adapted from ibid., p. 85.
6. See, for example, Lloyd Hoffman, "Accurate Adversarial Play", Phalanx:
The Bulletin of Military Operations Research.

CHAPTER 8. ANALYZING WARGAMES

1. Frederick D. Thompson, "Beyond the War Game Mystique," p. 95.
2. Randall C. Reed, "Game Reviewing Biases," Fire & Movement, p. 19.
3. Bill Haggart, "Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds," Fire &
Movement, p. 17.
4. Frederick D. Thompson, "Did We Learn Anything from that Exercise?
Could We?", Naval War College Review discusses some aspects of the
problem.
CHAPTER 9. INTEGRATING WARGAMES WITH OPERATIONAL
ANALYSIS AND EXERCISES
1. Phillip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations
Research, p. 1.
2. Operations Analysis Study Group, United States Naval Academy, Naval
Operations Analysis.
3. See P.M.S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional.
4. Thomas B. Allen, War Games, pp. 257-62.
5. Alfred H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 92.
6. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in
World War II, Vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic, p. 2.

CHAPTER 10. NAVY WARGAMING TODAY

1. Naval Tactical Game [NAVTAGj Training System, Device 16H3A,
Executive Summary, p. 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Colonel John M. Vickery, "Training for Today and Tomorrow: The
Warrior Preparation Center," Journal of Electronic Defense.

CHAPTER 7. PLAYING WARGAMES

1. Frank Chadwick, "My Two Cents," The Grenadier, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 28.
2. Quoted in Frederick D. Thompson, Beyond the War Game Mystique:
Learning from War Games, p. 6.
3. Frederick D. Thompson, "Beyond the War Game Mystique", U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, p. 84.
4. Ibid., pp. 84-85.
5. Adapted from ibid., p. 85.
6. See, for example, Lloyd Hoffman, "Accurate Adversarial Play", Phalanx:
The Bulletin of Military Operations Research.

CHAPTER 8. ANALYZING WARGAMES

1. Frederick D. Thompson, "Beyond the War Game Mystique," p. 95.
2. Randall C. Reed, "Game Reviewing Biases," Fire & Movement, p. 19.
3. Bill Haggart, "Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds," Fire &
Movement, p. 17.
4. Frederick D. Thompson, "Did We Learn Anything from that Exercise?
Could We?", Naval War College Review discusses some aspects of the
problem.

CHAPTER 9. INTEGRATING WARGAMES WITH OPERATIONAL

ANALYSIS AND EXERCISES
1. Phillip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations
Research, p. 1.
2. Operations Analysis Study Group, United States Naval Academy, Naval
Operations Analysis.
3. See P.M.S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional.
4. Thomas B. Allen, War Games, pp. 257-62.
5. Alfred H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation, p. 92.
6. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in
World War II, Vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic, p. 2.

CHAPTER 10. NAVY WARGAMING TODAY

1. Naval Tactical Game [NAVTAGj Training System, Device 16H3A,
Executive Summary, p. 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Colonel John M. Vickery, "Training for Today and Tomorrow: The
Warrior Preparation Center," Journal of Electronic Defense.

CHAPTER 11. WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

1. Paul K. Davis and James Winnefeld, The Rand Strategy Assessment
Center, p. v.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. William Nichols, Long Lance game rules, p. 1.
4. Ibid., p. 5.
5. Alan Zimm, Commander, U.S. Navy, Action Stations! unpublished game
rules.
6. Taken from a letter from John G. Alsen published in Frank Chadwick,
"My Two Cents," The Grenadier, no. 6, pp. 8-9.
7. Dr. Jay C. Selover, "Firing Line," Fire & Movement, p. 8.
8. Ibid.
9. Craig Besinque, "Role Simulation," Fire & Movement.
10. Allan R. Vannoy, "JANUS: The U.S. Army's Tactical Warfare Computer
Simulation System," The Wargamer, p. 51.
11. Jon Southard, "Introductory Games: Problems and Analysis," Fire &
Movement, p. 14.

CHAPTER 11. WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

1. Paul K. Davis and James Winnefeld, The Rand Strategy Assessment
Center, p. v.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. William Nichols, Long Lance game rules, p. 1.
4. Ibid., p. 5.
5. Alan Zimm, Commander, U.S. Navy, Action Stations! unpublished game
rules.
6. Taken from a letter from John G. Alsen published in Frank Chadwick,
"My Two Cents," The Grenadier, no. 6, pp. 8-9.
7. Dr. Jay C. Selover, "Firing Line," Fire & Movement, p. 8.
8. Ibid.
9. Craig Besinque, "Role Simulation," Fire & Movement.
10. Allan R. Vannoy, "JANUS: The U.S. Army's Tactical Warfare Computer
Simulation System," The Wargamer, p. 51.
11. Jon Southard, "Introductory Games: Problems and Analysis," Fire &
Movement, p. 14.

OceanofPDF.com
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Simonsen, Redmond A. "Walter Mitty Strikes Back! or Just Call Me
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Ibid., and Dave Robertson. "SpiBus: SPl's Newsletter of Micro-
computer/Conflict Simulations Applications, Nr. 0001." Moves,
no. 44, Apr.-May 1979.
Southard, Jon. "Introductory Games: Problems and Analysis." Fire &
Movement, no. 51, Aug.-Sep. 1988.
Stone, Bill. "Game Designers' Census." The Grenadier, no. 10, Jul. 1980.
Thompson, Frederick D. "Beyond the War Game Mystique." U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, Oct. 1983.
Ibid., "Did We Learn* Anything from that Exercise? Could We?"
Naval War College Review, Jul.-Aug. 1982.
Vannoy, Allan R. "JANUS: The U.S. Army's Tactical Warfare Computer
Simulation System." The Wargamer, vol. 2, no. 7, Aug. 1988.
Vickery, Colonel John M. "Training for Today and Tomorrow. The Warrior
Preparation Center." Journal of Electronic Defense, May 1985.
Vlahos, Michael. "Wargaming, an Enforcer of Strategic Realism: 1919-
1942." Naval War College Review, Mar.-Apr. 1986
Von Reisswittz, Lieutenant G.H.R.J. "Anzeige". (Notice). Unpublished
trans by William Leeson, Militair Wochenblatt (Berlin), No 42, 1824.
"The War Game and How it is Played," Scientific American, 5 Dec
1914.

For further information on the development of wargaming see the

History of Wargaming Project at www.wargaming.co.
 [1] Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

[2] A game involving political as well as military factors.

[3] American Department of Defence

[4] Reprinted by the History of Wargaming Project 2009

[5] Reprinted as part of the History of Wargaming Project www.wargaming.co

[6] Engineering troops who build bridges using boats.

[7] To be republished in 2010 as part of the History of Wargaming Project

[8] Also see chapter 1 on the Russian pre-WWII wargames in Thunder on the Dneper by Bryan
Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky
[9] For a recent discussion of the interaction of Newport wargames and the Navy’s Fleet
Problems of the inter-war period, see To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems,
1923-1940, by Albert A. Nofi
[10] The “Flaming Datum Problem” is a classic anti-submarine warfare problem in which the
presence of an enemy submarine is discovered only when a friendly ship has been attacked. The last
known position of the enemy submarine (the datum) is somewhere in the vicinity of the flaming
friendly hull. The other escorts immediately converge on the datum, and the enemy submarine
immediately begins evasive activities so that it does not become flaming datum.
[11] Charles Roberts passed away 20 August 2010.

[12] Such as Fletcher Pratt (1943)

[13] Reprinted by the History of Wargaming Project

[14] Dr. Strangelove was a person who ruthlessly considered and planed a nuclear war, from the
character in the 1963 film of that name.
[15] Author of Paddy Griffith’s Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun and Sprawling Wargames both
published in 2009 by the History of Wargaming Project.
[16] In February 2010 Fire and Movement has become an online magazine based off the
Decision Games website. The requirement for speed of reviews reaching the consumers (the
wargamers) meant that a print magazine was no longer viable.
[17] Also see analysis by those in the hobby who blamed TSR's failure to honor 30,000 existing
subscriptions to Strategy and Tactics as being key in TSR’s inability to retain the good will of the ex-
SPI customers (and sales to them). See http://www.wargaming.co/wargamearticles/homepage.htm
[18] See Paddy Griffith (2009) Sprawling Wargames Multiplayer Wargaming for an example of
wargames being used for academic research.
[19] Reprinted as part of the History of Wargaming Project, 2009.
 [20]For a discussion of the way the U.S. Navy learned from the interplay of Newport wargames
and the inter-war Fleet Problems, see Al Nofi’s magisterial book, To Train the Fleet for War.
[21] Ability to detect the inadequate

[22] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. New York: Random House. (2007)

[23] Perla, Peter P. The Art of Wargaming, Annapolis: The Naval Institute Press. (1990)

[24] Warden, John A., III. The Air Campaign. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University
Press. (1988)
[25] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. New York: Random House. (2007)

[26] DoD Dictionary of Military and Related Terms, Joint Pub 1-02, 12 April 2001 (As
Amended Through 04 March 2008. Available on-line at
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf
[27] Dunnigan, James F. The World War II Bookshelf: 50 Must-Read Books: Fifty Must-Read
Books. New York: Citadel Press. (2004)
[28] Dörner, Dietrich. The Logic of Failure. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. New York:
Metropolitan Books. (1996)
[29] CNA Research Memorandum CRM D0016768.A1/Final, 21st-Century Wargaming:
Returning to Our Roots, by Peter P. Perla, ED McGrady, and Michael C. Markowitz, Oct 2007
[30] This paper owes much to my experiences as a member of Strategic Studies Groups XX-XXIV in
2001-2004, which sparked my interest in the Fleet Problems, leading to my book, To Train the
Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press,
2010). In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Perla and Prof. Stephen Downes-Martin, of the
Wargaming Department, Naval War College, for reading and commenting on this paper, and
LCDR Leon R. Jablow, for providing access to his essay, “Proposed Solutions for Systemic War
Game Problems.”
[31] For these earlier exercises, see Peter M. Swartz, Sea Changes: Transforming U.S. Navy
Deployment Strategy, 1775-2002 (Alexandria, Va.: The CNA Corporation, unpublished paper,
2002), p. 79.
[32] Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1939 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1939), p. 11.
[33] On which, see Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan,
1897-1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991)
[34] James O. Richardson’s On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor: The Memoirs of Admiral James O.
Richardson, U.S.N. (Ret.), as told to George C. Dyer (Washington: Naval History Division, 1973),
p. 44.
[35] Richardson, p. 46.
 [36] The very apt term “naval force” is borrowed from Thomas C. Hone, e-mail, September 2,
2002.

[37] On the Navy between the wars, see Thomas C. Hone and Trent Hone, Battleline: The United
States Navy, 1919-1939 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006); James W. Hammond, Jr., The
Treaty Navy: The Story of the U.S. Naval Service Between the Wars (Victoria, BC: Wesley Press,
2001); F.D.R. and the U.S. Navy, edited by Edward Marolda (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998);
Patrick Abbazia, Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy: The Private War of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, 1939-1942
(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975). 262. Richardson’s On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor
provides a valuable look at the organization, administration, and routine of the fleet in the period.
[38] Aside from a cruise to Australia and New Zealand in 1925, the overwhelming bulk of the fleet
never departed from its normal routine until the formation of “Neutrality Patrol” in 1939; see Nofi,
To Train the Fleet, pp. 80-81, and Abbazia, passim.
[39] Of the approximately 510 admirals and commodores on active duty during World War II,
although many staff and restricted line officers were not Annapolis graduates, apparently only
about ten line officers were not Academy alumni; see, with some caution, E. Manning Ancell and
Christine M. Miller, Biographical Dictionary of World War II Generals and Flag Officers
(Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1996). .
[40] Officers in the period often had experience in several “communities”. By 1941 Chester Nimitz
had commanded submarines, a submarine division, a destroyer division, a heavy cruiser, a cruiser
division, a battleship division, and a battleship-carrier task force, while Ernest J. King had
commanded several destroyers, a submarine division, an aircraft carrier, and then the Atlantic
Squadron. Less famous officers often had similar careers: John A. Snackenburg (USNA, 1921),
began his career as an airshipman and by 1945 was commanding a heavy cruiser, while Wilder D.
Baker (USNA, 1914), commanded several submarines and destroyers, and ended his career
commanding a battleship.
[41] A good example is NWC Archives, Carton 56, L. McNamee, U.S. Fleet Umpire Instructions,
1932: Suggested Changes; for a discussion of a particularly thorny rules problem, the adjudication
of air attacks against ships, see Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, pp. 34ff.
[42] Fleet maneuvers scheduled for 1922, which would have been Fleet Problem I, were cancelled
due to a shortage of fuel (Annual Report, 1922, p. 39), while the initial plans for Black in Fleet
Problem IX (1929), had to be scrapped (Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, pp. 24, 111). And both of
those events took place before the Great Depression caused even deeper cuts in the budget.
[43] Although there were occasional “joint maneuvers” with the Army, these were essentially “inter-
service” undertakings, as there was no joint doctrine and the services paid only slight attention to
what each other was doing; see, for example, Nofi, To Train the Fleet for war, pp. 104-105, 282-
283, etc.

[44] Correspondents often accompanied the fleet, and coverage was extensive and generally
friendly, though accidents often were given considerable play; see, Thomas B. Buell, Master of
Seapower: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. (Boston: Little, Brown. 1980), p. 93;
 Robert E. Coontz, From Mississippi to the Sea (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1930), pp. 424-429;
Harris Laning, An Admiral’s Yarn, edited by Mark Russell Shulman et al. (Newport: Naval War
College Press, 1999), p. 362.
[45] Julian Borger, “War Game Was Fixed to Ensure American Victory,
Claims General,” The Guardian, August 21, 2002,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,778070,00.html.
See also Sean D. Naylor, "War games rigged? General says Millennium
Challenge 02 ‘Was almost entirely scripted’," Army Times, August 16,
2002, http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1060102.php;
“Ex-General: War Game Rigged,” Associated Press, Saturday, August 17,
2002, www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28161-2002Aug16;
“Julian Borger, 'Millennium Challenge' War Game: General Doubts US
Military Capability, The Guardian, September 6, 2002,
http://www.rense.com/general29/soubts.htm; Michael Schrage, “Military
Overkill Defeats Virtual War: And Real-World Soldiers Are the Losers,
Washington Post, September 22, 2002,
http://www.cndyorks.gn.apc.org/news/articles/overkillvsvirtualwar.htm.
Van Riper was formerly Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat
Development Command, and one of the authors of How to Conduct
Training, Marine Corps Reference Publication 3-0B (25 November 1996),
available at https://www.doctrine.usmc.mil/signpubs/r30b.pdf. Van
Riper’s name does not seem to appear anywhere on the JFCOM website;
Cf., the JFCOM “Millennium Challenge” website, archived at
http://web.archive.org/web/20070928005405/http://www.jfcom.mil/about/
experiments/mc02.htm.
[46] SSG XX, Final Report, Vol. 2, Chapter 5, Appendix A, p. A-1

[47] Cf., Global Security.Org “Exercises”, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ex.htm and

“Exercises – Navy,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ex-navy.htm

[48] David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes, “Code of Best Practice for
Experimentation,” DoD Command and Control Research Program, p. 1-
1. Interestingly, this work makes no reference whatsoever to the Navy’s
 Fleet Problems or the series of Army maneuvers held on the eve of World
War II, of which the most well-known are the “Louisiana Maneuvers” of
August and September of 1941, and which have not been subject to
comprehensive critical historical study.
[49] Cf., Global Security.Org, “Exercises,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ex.htm

[50] Robert P. Haffa, Jr., & James H. Patton, Jr., “Wargames: Winning and
Losing,” Parameters, Spring 2001, pp. 29-43, http://carlisle-
www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/01spring/haffa.htm
[51] http://jdeis.cornerstoneindustry.com/JSPportlets/ujtl_demo/ujtl.jsp.
Strictly speaking, there is a definition for “maneuvers,” but it refers to the
adjusting the movements of satellites.
[52] Tom Hone, email, 10 Sept. 2002.

[53] Fleet Problem V (1925), of which CINCUS Robert E. Coontz wrote (p. 446), “In some respects
it was a most interesting problem, as it showed that fleets might pass each other unawares.” See
Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, pp. 73ff.
[54] Cf., Michael Vlahos, The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919-
1941 (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1980), pp. 166-178.
[55] NWCA, Records Group 25, General Subjects, Kalbfus to Capt. J. W. Wilcox, Jr., 17 February
1936.
[56] For a look at what can be done with even a simple computer wargame, see the “Team Trackless”
Project, in which a group of military officers, analysts, and gamers adapted the TacOps computer
wargame to examine potential tactics for the Army’s new “Stryker Brigades,”
www.strategypage.com/tt/msiepage.htm. Designed as a training tool by I. L. Holdridge, Major,
USMC (Retired), TacOps became a commercial success, and was adopted for use by both the
Navy-Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center and also by the Army’s Armor School at Ft.
Knox. For TacOps, see www.battlefront.com/index.php?
option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=114&Itemid=163.
[57] SSG XX, Final Report, Vol. 2, Chapter 5, Appendix A, p. A-1

[58] Some of what follows is adapted from portions of James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi, Dirty
Little Secrets of the Vietnam War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). See also, Naval Strike and Air
Warfare Center, http://www.fallon.navy.mil/NSAWC.HTM.
[59] Of course, compared with USAF this was outstanding; during 1964-1969, MiG-21s were
attaining a 3:1 ratio (that is, one of theirs lost to three of ours lost) against USAF fighters.
[60] In contrast, USAF instituted some minor improvements in training and equipment, which did
increase performance, but not by much: the overall USAF kill ratio for the war was only 2.4:1.
Not until 1975 did the Air Force institute its own version of Top Gun , the “Red Flag” program,

[61]What follows is largely derived portions of James F. Dunnigan, How to Make War (New York:
William Morrow, 2003) and Albert A. Nofi, “The Army in An Era of Geopolitical and Strategic
Change, 1975-1996, in Maurice Matloff, American Military History, 2, 1902-1985 (Conshohocken,
Pa.: Combined Publishing, 1996). See also, the NTC website, http://www.irwin.army.mil/.

[62] Nicknamed “Deep Blue,” the Navy Operations Group is an agency of the Office of the Chief of
Naval Operations. Consisting of naval officers and civilian scientists and analysts, it investigated
innovative ideas in organization and technology that can be quickly introduced in the service, to
make Navy “better than what we started with." See James W. Crawley, “The Pentagon Revises
Battle after Fighting in Afghanistan,” Copley News Service, February 08, 2003; Roxana Tiron,
“‘Deep Blue’ Searches for Innovation In Anti-Terror Tactics, Technology,” National Defense,
October 2004; etc.
[63] The “1/4/2/1” strategy holds that the mission of the armed forces is to, defend the United States
(1); maintain forces capable of deterring aggression and coercion in four critical regions: Europe,
Northeast Asia, Southwest Asia, the Middle East (4); maintain a capability to combat aggression in
two of these regions simultaneously (2); and maintain a capability to "win decisively"—up to and
including forcing regime change and occupation—in one of those two conflicts "at a time and
place of our choosing." (1). See Joint Chiefs of Staff, “National Military Strategy of the United
States of America, 2004”, www.defense.gov/news/mar2005/d20050318nms.pdf.
[64] Arguably we could have done this a decade earlier, in the aftermath of
the end of the Cold War, but the point is not when we should have adopted
a more flexible deployment pattern but that we have adopted one.
[65] SSG
XXII, “Coherent Adaptive Force: Ensuring Sea Supremacy for
SEA POWER 21,” January 2004, p6-2
[66] See, for example, United States Joint Forces Command, “The Joint
Operational Environment—Into the Future,” October 2003. Although JFC
is being disestablished as a command in 2011, its training functions will
move to other commands within the Joint structure.
[67] Established within TRADOC in 1999, “Red Franchise” is intended to
guide Army training, concept and force development, experimentation,
and transformation. Cf: Defense Science Board, “The Role and Status of
DoD Red Teaming Activities” (Washington: Office of the Under
 Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2003),
pp. 19-20.
[68] Due
to its age, the NWC gaming department uses the older “War
Gaming” rather than the more common modern term “wargaming”.
[69] Cf., http://www.nwdc.navy.mil/

[70] In this regard, reference should be made to the useful essay by LCDR
Leon R. Jablow of SSG XXII, “Proposed Solutions for Systemic War
Game Problems,” November 29, 2002.
[71] Definitions adapted from DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms and Alberts and
Hayes, “Code of Best Practice for Experimentation,” pp., 3-2, 4-4.
[72] This, of course, does not apply to games being used as instructional tools, such as historically
has been the case at various war colleges.

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