Wargaming

Wargames, or conflict simulations, are games that recreate historical and hypothetical wars, campaigns, and battles. Military and government personnel play wargames to practice skills, rehearse for real conflicts and crises, and explore the impact of new technology and weapons. Hobby wargamers play for fun and to learn about military history. Educators use wargames to introduce students to the problems encountered by historical figures.

There are four main categories of wargames: miniatures games, computer simulations, live-action events, and board wargames. The first three types were originally developed for and by military organizations, but all have commercial entertainment applications. In live-action games, players decide what to do as individuals in a particular battle scenario (although they are often guided by a coach). The other formats cast players in the role of commanders who make decisions for all battle units. Professional wargames of all types are usually more elaborate and sophisticated than their commercial counterparts.

Wargaming traces its origins to chess, itself a stylized and abstract representation of medieval warfare. Enthusiasts have long tinkered with the rules of chess to represent real-life combat more “accurately,” adding terrain effects, scaled movement rates, ranged weapons, special units, and other “realistic” features. In the early 19th century a Prussian junior officer proposed that the army should use one of these chess-based games for training. His chief of staff was so impressed that he ordered a Kriegspiel (“wargame”) kit for every regiment. The original Kriegspiel was a miniatures game, played with wooden blocks that represented units on a sandtable sculpted into a landscape. Combat was originally resolved by a roll of the dice, but “free” Kriegspiel, introduced in 1876, used referees. The many Prussian military successes between 1864 and 1870 prompted other armies and navies to adopt wargaming. Most used adaptations of the original Kriegspiel at first but soon developed their own games, adding rules for logistics, political factors, and advances in military technology and doctrine.

In both world wars and many other 20th-century conflicts, most of the belligerents relied on tabletop games to work out strategic, operational, and technical problems before committing their forces. American admiral Chester Nimitz observed in 1960 that, with the exception of the Japanese kamikazes, every aspect of World War II in the Pacific had been anticipated through wargaming. However, admirals and generals sometimes failed to apply what they learned from wargames. During World War I, the Russians played wargames to test strategies for their advance into Prussia. During these games, they identified several potential problems and developed solutions for them. Yet in the actual campaign, they repeated the mistakes, but not the corrections. Leaders sometimes also drew erroneous conclusions from wargames. While preparing for their 1914 invasion of France, the Germans used wargames to refine their plans. These games almost always predicted a German victory—especially when Kaiser Wilhelm II was playing.

Both the Soviet and American governments and armed forces continued to employ wargames throughout the Cold War, seeking the best ways to fight in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and other conflicts. However, Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, discovered a new application for them. Long a proponent of scientific management techniques, McNamara relied on wargames to determine the cost-effectiveness of new weapons systems. However, wargames are only as useful as the assumptions made when designing them. Many of McNamara's simulations modeled budgetary factors alone and failed to account for political and other issues not easily quantified.

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