Ender’s World

I knew Ender Wiggin very well. We were infantry captains together back in the day, stationed at the Marine Corps Warfighting Center during the Quantico Renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of course, that’s not true, the Quantico part anyway, although it might just as well have been.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, under the leadership of a visionary new Commandant, the US Marine Corps reinvented itself, adopting a radical new operational doctrine called Maneuver Warfare and implementing a bold and wide-ranging set of institutional changes to ensure it could execute that doctrine in war. Maneuver Warfare is based on tempo, surprise, boldness, trust relationships, ruthlessly attacking enemy vulnerabilities, and low-level commanders acting on their own initiative based on limited guidance from their seniors. (Dragon Army, anyone?) Given that a key tenet of Maneuver Warfare is leaders at all echelons exercising initiative on their own authority, developing those leaders became critically important. That period of change has sometimes been called the Maneuver Warfare Revolution, and because most of it revolved around Quantico, Virginia, it also has come to be known as the Quantico Renaissance. It was a heady time to be at Quantico, filled with intellectual energy and a compelling sense of purpose. I was there, a firebrand young captain who by good fortune had the opportunity to play a key role in those events.

Ender’s Game also played no small role in helping to produce the changes that occurred, while reflecting perfectly the zeitgeist of the Marine Corps at that time. Let me assert this: Ender’s Game, that brash little first novel about children by an author with no military experience, is an important work of military thought with much to offer the serious military professional. It is militarily significant because of what it has to say about three related subjects. First and foremost, Ender’s Game is a book about the development of skilled military leaders, a topic critical to the successful implementation of Maneuver Warfare, as I said. It has insightful things to say about how to develop those leaders and the kinds of traits desirable in tacticians and strategists. Second, it is a thoughtful treatise on the nature of leadership, providing numerous examples both good and bad. Third, it offers the most compelling and accessible illustration of the theory and practice of Maneuver Warfare that exists—though, for reasons that will become clear, it pains me to say so.

Any Marine officer today would instantly recognize Ender Wiggin as a fellow Marine, a product of the Marine Corps training and education system (almost certainly an honor graduate) that grew out of the Quantico Renaissance. Any Marine would appreciate his leadership style and would intuitively recognize his tactics. Simply said, Ender Wiggin was a master practitioner of Maneuver Warfare. For myself, I felt like he was a brother in arms.

I received my commission as an officer of Marines, a brand-new second lieutenant, in 1981. I joined the service in the middle of an intense institutional debate, mostly played out on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette, our professional journal, over how the post-Vietnam Marine Corps would approach the business of war. The Marine Corps had split into two opposing camps: the Maneuverists (who would eventually prove successful) and the Attritionists. The Maneuverists argued that the Attritionists favored mindlessly wearing the enemy down through firepower—the Vietnam “body count” mentality reborn. The Attritionists argued that the Maneuverists wanted to confuse the enemy to death, without actually fighting him.

After attending The Basic School and the Infantry Officers Course, I arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in 1982 as a rifle platoon commander. Maj. Gen. Alfred M. Gray had just taken command of Second Marine Division there. Gray was a colorful, tobacco-chewing, gruff-talking, unconventional former enlisted Marine. He was also the leader of the Maneuver Warfare movement, which in the eyes of many made him a threat to the institution. Gray immediately pronounced Maneuver Warfare the official doctrine of Second Marine Division. I became an instant true believer, not only because Maneuver Warfare, with its emphasis on initiative at the lower echelons, was empowering to junior officers but also because everything I had read about the chaotic, uncertain, fluid, and temporal nature of war argued that Maneuver Warfare was the best approach.

I progressed from second lieutenant to captain in Second Marine Division. After about four years, I was assigned in 1986 to the Marine Corps Doctrine Center in Quantico, a sleepy little command that, to my eyes, at least was better than recruiting duty. I was the only captain in a building filled with unpromotable majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels on their sunset tours. The debate over Maneuver Warfare was still raging, and I thought of myself as a Maneuver Warfare insurgent—I consciously did—within the belly of the beast, doing everything within my very limited power to reform the Marine Corps from the inside.

Then everything changed: in 1987, Al Gray—the outsider, the iconoclast, the threat to the institution—somehow got himself selected as the next Commandant of the Marine Corps. He immediately announced that Maneuver Warfare was the official doctrine of the Marine Corps and everybody had better get on board. Suddenly, everyone was a Maneuverist, and had been all along. Gray decided that he wanted a new manual to lay out his Maneuver Warfare philosophy. From my position of obscurity well down in the pecking order, I watched with amusement as colonels lined up around the block for a chance to audition for that gig.

For reasons I still don’t understand—given that he didn’t know my name—Gray picked me. I was going to work closely with the Commandant to capture his thoughts. Only it didn’t happen that way. I never got any actual guidance. I met with Gray only twice, and each time he refused to talk about the book. Instead, he told sea stories. If I asked him a direct question, he’d tell me another sea story. He worked in parables. “Let me tell you a story about little Al Gray…,” he’d growl. It was later that I realized he was actually practicing Maneuver Warfare: he was explaining his intent through those stories, but he was leaving it up to me—and expecting me—to figure out how to accomplish the mission. He was using what we called trust tactics, much as Ender did with Bean and other trusted subordinates.

The product was Warfighting, published in 1989. It described in seventy-seven pages the Marine Corps’ view of the nature and challenges of war and how to win it. It was more a philosophy book than a typical military manual. Warfighting synthesized the works of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and John Boyd. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, wrote The Art of War around 450 BC. Clausewitz, the Prussian high priest of military theory, wrote On War after the Napoleonic Wars. Those works remain the two most important works of military theory in history. John Boyd, who died in 1997, was the most important American military theorist of the twentieth century.

Warfighting was well received. (It made my career and got me promoted to major two years ahead of schedule.) In his foreword to the 1991 edition of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card graciously called it “the most brilliant and concise book of military strategy ever written by an American.” It became a centerpiece of instruction in all Marine Corps schools. It was translated into numerous foreign languages, including Chinese, which I always found ironic, given that so much of it was inspired by Sun Tzu. It was taught in foreign military academies. It has been published commercially several times, including as a leadership guide for business managers. (Because there had never been any public interest before in Marine Corps doctrinal publications, the Marine Corps did not bother to copyright it, so it was in the public domain.) You can buy it on Amazon. (I don’t get a cent.)

The similarities between Warfighting and Ender’s Game are manifold and uncanny: tempo, surprise, formlessness, ruthlessly attacking the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities, exploiting fleeting opportunities, trust and implicit understanding between senior and subordinates, acceptance of risk, decisiveness, boldness, seizing the initiative, decentralization of authority, understanding the enemy and learning from him, knowing and inspiring your people—they are all there in spades.

Warfighting became probably the most lasting symbol of the Maneuver Warfare Revolution. The revised version (which I wrote in 1997) remains Marine Corps doctrine today. Looking back, I still feel pretty good about that book. I think it is a solid and readable description of Maneuver Warfare. In fact, I think there is only one book that captures Maneuver Warfare better: Ender’s Game.

It was none other than John Boyd who turned me on to Ender’s Game. A man of brilliant and hyper-disciplined intellect, Boyd was the intellectual powerhouse behind the military reform movement, and his theory provided the conceptual foundation for Maneuver Warfare. Boyd was a frequent lecturer in Quantico in those days. Although he had been an Air Force officer, the Air Force never really got him, and it was in the Marine Corps that his ideas really took hold. (Boyd’s personal papers now reside in the archives at the Alfred M. Gray Research Center in Quantico.) Boyd’s ideas came from everywhere—from history, literature, mathematics, classical and postmodern philosophy, sports, business management, economics, thermodynamics, quantum physics, and information theory—and, importantly for our purposes, science fiction.

So when John Boyd told me to read Ender’s Game, though I did not think much of space opera as a rule, I dutifully went out and bought a copy. (So did a lot of other Marine officers: the book was a cult classic in the Marine Corps long before it reached the universal popularity it enjoys today.) I can’t say I began to read it with super-high expectations, however. Needless to say, that changed pretty quickly.

This was 1989, shortly after I had written Warfighting. As soon as I started reading Ender’s Game, I realized it was brilliant—and absolutely relevant to what was happening in the Marine Corps at that time. I felt an instant connection, like Orson Scott Card had taken the ideas of Warfighting and converted them into a novel. About that time, Brig. Gen. P.K. Van Riper, one of Gray’s leading revolutionaries, was transforming the Marine Corps University (MCU) from a collection of staff training schools teaching planning procedures to a genuine university developing thinking leaders. One of the first steps was to offer a series of evening courses to anybody stationed at Quantico. I decided to teach “Introduction to Maneuver Warfare” or Maneuver Warfare 101. I targeted junior officers and enlisted Marines. I ran the course as a seminar, based on a lot of practical decision exercises rather than a lot of reading. I assigned only three books: Warfighting (of course), Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and Ender’s Game.

I also decided, as soon as I had read Ender’s Game, that I needed to bring Orson Scott Card to Quantico. The question was how to find him. Remember, this was in the days before people searches on the internet. I guess I could have written to his publisher, but I didn’t have that kind of patience. That was okay, though, because I knew where he lived. Recall that when Ender graduated from the Battle School after defeating Griffin and Tiger armies without a fight, they sent him to Greensboro, North Carolina, for rest and relaxation with his sister, Valentine. On page 133 of my copy, I have written “Greensboro!!!” in the margin. I looked up the area code, called directory assistance, asked for Orson Scott Card’s number, and, before I knew it, was being connected.

I hadn’t figured out what I was going to say when he answered. I stammered out an introduction and launched into some spiel about the military virtues of Ender’s Game. Capt. John Kuntz, a colleague, walked in. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said: “I can’t believe I’m talking to Orson Scott Card about Ender’s Game.” Unbeknownst to me, Scott was on the other end telling his wife, Kristine: “I can’t believe I’m talking to a Marine captain about Ender’s Game.”

It turned out Scott was teaching a writing workshop in the DC area soon and was able to extend his trip to drive down to Quantico for a day. The Marine Corps does pomp and ceremony like nobody’s business. We gave Scott quite the reception. First stop was a meet-and-greet with the faculty of the Command and Staff College, the senior school of the Marine Corps University—Gen. Van Riper and about fifteen to twenty lieutenant colonels and colonels, each with his own copy of the book to be signed. Imagine a bunch of tough-as-nails Marine officers gushing over a science fiction writer. We immediately launched into a discussion of the book, which I don’t think Scott was expecting. Speaker for the Dead had come out in paperback by that time, and a lot of the faculty had read that too, so we jumped into a discussion of it as well.

We made the rounds of the other schools—the Amphibious Warfare School (AWS, for captains), The Basic School (TBS, for all lieutenants, where they learned how to be Marine officers before moving on to their specialty schools), and the Staff NCO Academy (for senior enlisted Marines). Each place we visited, it was the same: the Rock Star Treatment.

The highlight of the visit was the seminar with my Introduction to Maneuver Warfare class that evening. The group was twice its normal size, as a lot of other faculty, including Gen. Van Riper again, sat in for an extremely animated discussion on Ender Wiggin as a military leader and tactician. We attacked that book like…well, like a platoon of Marines assaulting a hill. We took no prisoners. It was Scott’s first exposure to US Marines, and I don’t think he was quite prepared for what he got. He put up a good fight, but in the end, as I recall, he was just overrun.

One of the fundamentally important ideas in Ender’s Game is the notion of games as an instrument for training military commanders. The soldiers in Ender’s Game are children, and children naturally play games, so this might seem like a trivial insight. But I think it is actually a profound thought. Play can be serious business, as Ender’s Game captures very well. This idea is also part of the Maneuver Warfare philosophy.

The most important training tenet of Maneuver Warfare is that exercises (our name for war games) should be free-play—that is, neither side is constrained in what they can do—just as the war games at the Battle School were. This replicates the fundamental nature of war as a clash between two hostile and independent forces unconstrained by any rules. As Mazer Rackham tells Ender the first time they meet: “And the only rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you.” You would think this would be obvious, but it was not how the Marine Corps approached training Before Gray. Typically, a training exercise involved an exercise force, which was the unit being trained, and an OPFOR, which was there to serve as training aids for the exercise force. The OPFOR was always outnumbered. It was not allowed to do anything unpredictable but instead was expected to fall back—fall back and eventually die in place. In other words, the OPFOR was expected to cooperate in its own defeat, which meant that the exercise force did not need to think about tactics but could just focus on getting its own procedures right. This led to an inward focus, which was the opposite of Maneuver Warfare’s outward focus on the enemy.

The other games connection between Ender’s Game and Maneuver Warfare is what the Marine Corps came to call Tactical Decision Games (TDGs for short, because everything in the military can be reduced to a three-letter abbreviation, including “three-letter abbreviation” or TLA). TDGs are concise (less than five hundred words), deceptively simple scenarios that build up to a tactical dilemma requiring an immediate command decision. They start with the words “You are the commander of…” to drive home the point that you and nobody else is responsible. (Moral, as well as physical, courage is a critical attribute of command.) TDGs include a simple map showing the terrain and where your forces are. You are given a mission. You are given some information about the enemy situation but never as much as you think you need. Then, usually, something unexpected happens, rendering your orders obsolete, so you have to come up with a new plan on the spot. A good TDG has built-in time pressure, usually severe—for example, if you do not act within two minutes, an approaching enemy patrol will spot your whole formation and you will lose the element of surprise. If a TDG is designed well, your instinctive reaction is a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and the thought: “What the heck do I do now?”

Your solution has to take the form of the actual orders you would issue to your units, plus a sketch of your plan. In other words, there’s no academic discussion about this or that course of action; you have to take responsibility and act. The important thing is not the actual tactics you use, although some are better than others. The goal is to improve tactical decision-making, so the important thing is why you did what you did. TDGs are best done in a small-group setting, led by an experienced tactician, where you can discuss these things and benefit from other people’s decisions. We also developed “double-blind” TDGs, a more interactive, turn-based version in which two teams each solve the same tactical problem from opposing sides, with a controller moving between the two teams presenting each team with a new problem based on the other team’s last decision. We have since developed interactive, online versions.

But back then we were still figuring out the basic uses and mechanisms of TDGs. Here, my own professional journey intersects the narrative. Before being assigned to Quantico, I had had the good fortune to command two different infantry companies in Second Marine Division. I was still a junior captain when I wrote Warfighting, and I fully expected to get another company when I returned to the operating forces. I thought of myself as a company commander, as a tactician. As I was writing Warfighting, I remember thinking: “With everything I’m learning, I’m going to be one hotshot company commander when I get back to the Fleet.” Only it didn’t work out that way. Don’t get me wrong; writing Warfighting was an unbelievable education. But I realized pretty quickly that none of it was making me a better company commander. The deeper I dug into the theory, the more abstract it got and the further away I got from actual application. From a very personal point of view, I needed something to make Maneuver Warfare more concrete. My circle of insurgents at MCU was dealing with a similar dilemma: how to make Maneuver Warfare theory more accessible to most Marines. We just hadn’t broken the code yet.

There was another group of Maneuver Insurgents that used to meet in the evenings at the Marine Barracks in Washington, DC, and I sometimes made the drive up from Quantico. One night, Bill Lind, one of the leading civilians in the broader military reform movement on Capitol Hill, invited Brig. Gen. Hasso von Uslar, the military attaché from the West German Embassy, as a guest speaker. At one point during the evening, we were debating some tactical issue (I don’t recall what it was anymore). As a way to ground the discussion, von Uslar pulled out a map, indicated a couple of positions, and said: “How would you do it on this piece of terrain?” It was a revelation to me. It had instantly turned the abstract discussion concrete. It was a proto-TDG at best, still with the format and mechanics to be worked out, but I realized immediately we had found what we were looking for. I drove home that evening and worked into the night to draft what became the first TDG, “Enemy Over the Bridge.” It is reproduced in the adjacent sidebar.

My cabal of insurgents back at MCU debated what to call this new invention. Normally, in the military such training activities are called “exercises.” There are field exercises (FEXes), map exercises (MAPEXes), and command post exercises (CPXes). But we decided we wanted a different vibe. We wanted to market these things as fun, so Marines would be encouraged to do them, to play them. So we very deliberately decided on Tactical Decision Games. (We all had read Ender’s Game by that time; I don’t recall that the book, and its title, actually entered into the discussion, but I have no doubt it influenced us subconsciously at least).

We formed The TDG Group at MCU. With Gen. Van Riper’s permission, we quit work early every Friday afternoon and met in the conference room to play TDGs for a couple hours. Sometimes he joined us. Everybody was invited. We got mostly officers, but some enlisted Marines and even some civilians showed up. Each week, two or three people were responsible for bringing new TDGs for the group to play and leading the discussion on their own scenarios. We experimented with different formats for presenting a scenario and different techniques for leading the discussion. Then we started exporting TDGs to the various schools, teaching the instructors how to author them and lead the discussions. The Basic School took the desks out of one of their large classrooms and replaced them with sand tables so brand-new lieutenants could do TDGs on three-dimensional terrain. I made TDGs the centerpiece of my Maneuver Warfare 101 course.

I submitted “Enemy Over the Bridge” to the Marine Corps Gazette, not sure what the editors would make of an article that wasn’t really an article. They published it in the April 1990 issue and solicited solutions from the readers. We got more than a hundred submissions. One was sketched on a C-Ration carton, as it might expediently have been done in the field. TDGs had struck a nerve. They became a regular feature in the Gazette, with a new game published each month and selected solutions published two months later. The Gazette’s editor-in-chief, Col. John Greenwood, became a regular member of The TDG Group. To this day, TDGs remain an integral part of Marine Corps culture and one of the most indelible reminders of the Maneuver Warfare Revolution.

Reading also was a critical part of the Maneuver Warfare Revolution. All Marines now were expected to read regularly as part of their professional development. One of my final duties before being transferred from Quantico in the summer of 1990 was to help put together the Commandant’s Reading List, which assigned titles by rank and category (strategy, tactics, logistics, leadership, etc.). I edited what became known as the Book on Books, a catalog of all the titles, with a synopsis of each. One of my first acts was to make sure Ender’s Game got on the list. This is the entry I wrote for the first Book on Books:

This is the story of the development of a military genius in the guise of clever, brash, exhilarating, and extremely enjoyable science fiction. Even if you do not like science fiction, you will love this book—and you will learn a lot in the process. Alien “buggers” have already unsuccessfully attacked the earth and are coming back for another try. Outnumbered and ill-equipped, the earth leaders know the only hope of survival rests in finding a military genius who can outfight the buggers. They choose young Ender Wiggin, and his intense training comes in the form of space-age war games. Ender thinks he is but one student among many, but the administrators of the battle school have a particular curriculum in mind for the young soldier, who will be put to the severest test. The tactics Ender develops in his training are based on fluidity, adaptability, tempo, deception, ambiguity, and a keen appreciation for the enemy. If this sounds remarkably similar to maneuver warfare, it is.

I like to think I was personally responsible for the sale of thousands of copies of Ender’s Game. It is hard to find a Marine of my generation who is not intimately familiar with the book, and to this day, if you were to describe someone as “an Ender,” you would be hard-pressed to find a Marine who did not know exactly what you mean. The term has found its way into the professional jargon.

The Marine Corps University has produced no less than three discussion guides for leaders to use while discussing Ender’s Game in a group setting as part of a professional military education program in their units. Two are available online at:

I quote from the third of these to provide an idea of the professional topics that Marines explore through Ender’s Game:

Leadership: How many different kinds of leaders can you find in the book? What advantages and disadvantages do they have? What is it about the most effective leaders in the story that seems to set them above the rest of the pack? Does this reflect your experience? How do we define leadership and evaluate some of the leaders in the book such as Colonel Graff, Mazer Rackham, Bonzo Madrid, Rose the Nose, Petra, Bean, Peter, and Valentine?

Training and team-building: What is different about how Battle School does training and education than what we see in the military? Why is this? What features of military training and education should be in Battle School? What features in Battle School should be in the military? How is conflict between leaders and followers, between leaders, and between followers handled? What seems to be the glue that holds cohesive teams together and makes them effective inside and outside the Battle Room? What tears teams apart?

Maneuver Warfare/Tactics: What is it about Ender’s method that contributes to his tactical success in and outside of the Battle Room? Why do other armies and leaders fail when he succeeds? Card has much to say about the role of “extra practice,” trust between leaders and team members, innovation, and non-formulaic approaches/unpredictability.

As that discussion guide notes, “Ender’s Game is about more than the difficulty and excitement that competition provides in preparing for combat. There are lessons in training methodology, leadership, and ethics as well. Such richness in range and treatment has made Card’s book an oft-read and re-read title for many years; Ender’s Game has been a stalwart item on the Marine Corps Reading List since its inception.”

That evening in Quantico in early 1990, when Scott Card visited, my Maneuver Warfare 101 class broke Ender Wiggin down as a commander, analyzed the heck out of him. I argued that the essence of what made him a great commander was that Ender, a “Third,” combined the dominant traits of his two older siblings. Obviously, all three Wiggin children were extremely intelligent, which always helps. But what was critical was that Ender merged Peter’s ruthless cruelty with Valentine’s extreme empathy. Alone, each trait was disqualifying, and so Peter and Valentine both eventually were deemed unsuitable as potential commanders. But the merging of those traits in Ender was the critical element for potential greatness.

Always very self-aware (another valuable trait in a commander), Ender comes to recognize that trait in himself. Granted leave back in Greensboro after graduating from the Battle School, he has an exchange with Valentine. He says:

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them—”

“No, you don’t understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”

(In perhaps the most famous line from The Art of War, Sun Tzu says: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”)

That short exchange between Ender and Valentine, I argued, was the central revelation and the most important passage of the entire book, in which you get the essence of what makes Ender Wiggin a brilliant commander. (You also, of course, get the starting point for Speaker.)

Even Ender’s name is revealing of this character trait. We are told that Andrew Wiggin is called “Ender” from a very young age because Valentine mispronounces “Andrew.” That is a nice literary device, but I always felt it was more than a little transparent. “Ender” is not merely a name; it is a fundamental description of Wiggin as a tactician. He is very much an ender: exploiting that gift for utterly ruthless empathy, he goes decisively for the heart of each situation to finish it quickly. “Ender” is fundamentally both who and what he is.

After Ender has defeated the formics in the climactic battle, Mazer Rackham says: “You made the hard choice, boy. All or nothing. End them or end us.” [Emphasis mine.]

As Sun Tzu said: “Hence what is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations.”

This idea of ending, which Card captures so compellingly as a character trait, continuously occupies every military commander and theorist as a matter of military theory, namely: how best to take apart an enemy? Sun Tzu said: “Should one ask: ‘How do I cope with a well-ordered enemy host about to attack me?’ I reply: ‘Seize something he cherishes and he will conform to your desires.’” Clausewitz called it the center of gravity:

[O]ne must keep the dominant characteristics of both belligerents [i.e., the two opposing sides] in mind. Out of those characteristics, a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed.

While Clausewitz explores the source of a combatant’s strength, Warfighting chooses to approach from the direction of a combatant’s weakness, using the term critical vulnerability:

So we seek to strike the enemy where, when, and how he is most vulnerable…Of all the vulnerabilities we might choose to exploit, some are more critical to the enemy than others. It follows that the most effective way to defeat our enemy is to destroy that which is most critical to him. We should focus our efforts on the one thing which, if eliminated, will do the most decisive damage to his ability to resist us.

I think this formulation is the one closest to Ender’s own thinking. This thought always seems to be foremost in his mind whenever he is in a fight. Granted, he offers a rational explanation for acting this way in each case, whether through his inner thoughts or later explanation, but I believe that is mere rationalization. I think ruthlessly exploiting the critical vulnerability is an intrinsic part of his character. He does it time and again. It is, literally, who he is.

Scott insisted he had none of these ideas in mind when he wrote Ender’s Game. Right.

After that long day at Quantico, when the faculty at the Marine Corps University treated Scott Card like a rock star and my Maneuver Warfare 101 class had the privilege of dissecting Ender’s Game with the author, Scott signed my marked-up, dog-eared paperback copy. He wrote: “To John Schmitt—A man who understood Ender better than I did—Scott.”

Nice of him to say, although manifestly not true, of course. Still, I consider it one of the finest compliments of my professional career.

John F. Schmitt was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Marines after graduating from North-western University in June 1981. He spent four years as an infantry commander in the Second Marine Division in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. In 1986, he was assigned to the Doctrine Center in Quantico, Virginia, where he wrote the keystone Marine Corps doctrinal manuals Ground Combat Operations, Warfighting, and Campaigning. He left active duty in 1993 and is self-employed as a military consultant and writer. He resides in Champaign, Illinois, with his wife and three children.

TDG 90-1

“ENEMY OVER THE BRIDGE”

The following is an example of a tactical decision game like those in use at the Marine Corps University as a tool for developing military judgment and decision-making ability. The basic idea behind these deceptively simple games is to create a hypothetical battlefield dilemma of some sort and require the players to develop a solution under pressure of a time limit. The games work best in groups of up to about a dozen, where Marines can argue the merits of various plans. The games are designed to teach students how to think rather than what to think, the rationale being that because each situation is unique, it is futile to try to provide the right answer in advance for every conceivable situation. There are no absolute right or wrong answers. As long as a solution reflects the tenets of Maneuver Warfare, it is the “right” answer.

THE SITUATION

You are the commanding officer, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines. Your battalion consists of a scout platoon, two tank companies (A and C), and two mechanized infantry companies (B and D). Friendly forces hold the bridge and the riverline to the west. (Intelligence reports the river is unfordable.) Friendly reconnaissance elements are operating west of the river. Tomorrow morning the division begins a major offensive west across the river, with the division’s main effort in Sixth Marines’ zone. Your battalion will spearhead the regiment’s attack.

You are to occupy the assembly area south of Hamlet in preparation for the morning attack across the river commencing at 0400. You are moving northwest toward the assembly area as shown. At 2000, your scout platoon, which is forward reconnoitering the route, reports enemy infantry occupying your assembly area in strength and continuing to reinforce. The size of the enemy force is unknown but estimated to be at least a company. Further, the scout platoon commander reports he has just met an allied reconnaissance team that was operating west of the river but has been forced east across the river under fire. The reconnaissance team leader reports there is no sign of friendly forces holding the riverline or the bridge and that enemy infantry with some light vehicles and tanks has been moving across the bridge for at least thirty minutes. This is all the information your scout commander can tell you.

Originally published in Marine corps Gazette, April 1990. The scenario has been simplified slightly from the original.

As the battalion commander, what will you do?

REQUIREMENT

Within a five-minute time limit, give your solution in the form of the fragmentary order you will issue to your subordinates—to include the intent behind your plan—and support it with an overlay sketch.

ONE SOLUTION TO “ENEMY OVER THE BRIDGE”

This was my original solution to “Enemy Over the Bridge,” published in the Marine Corps Gazette, with three other solutions, June 1990.

BATTALION COMMANDER’S ORDER

“The battalion attacks immediately to seize the bridge in order to cut off the flow of enemy forces east and to secure a bridgehead for the division’s attack at 0400 tomorrow. Scout platoon: Move west toward Wharton Farm to clear the engagement area and determine enemy dispositions along that axis. Charlie will be attacking from your rear, so imperative you clear the vicinity of the assembly area. Alpha Company, with Delta in trace: Attack the bridge as rapidly as possible via Engmont Farm to sever the enemy movement east and secure the bridgehead. You are the main effort. Charlie: Probe west in order to determine size of enemy force and contain it in the assembly area. Develop the situation based on your estimate, but do not become decisively engaged. Most important, keep the enemy force fixed where it is. Bravo: You are reserve. Take up position near Engmont Farm, prepared to reinforce Alpha and Delta or attack south toward Hamlet to destroy the enemy.”

EXPLANATION

Occupying the assigned assembly area is no longer relevant since the situation has changed dramatically. Although the enemy in the assembly area may be the immediate problem, the more critical problem is the situation at the bridge. To keep a potentially bad situation from getting worse and to facilitate the division’s offensive launching on time, I must secure the bridge. The situation in the assembly area is too obscure to commit to a decisive engagement—nor is it important at this stage to do that—although I do want to develop the situation there. My scout platoon is a problem: they are caught between the enemy and Charlie Company with a fight about to break out. I have to extract them without exposing them to Charlie’s fire. By pushing them west, I get them out of the way and I use them for their primary mission of gaining information about the situation. I soon will have information about the situation on the northern flank from Alpha and Delta; I have no other means of getting information about the situation on the southern flank. The location of my reserve, Bravo Company, at Engmont Farm protects my route to the bridge and allows me both to reinforce quickly toward the bridge and to attack toward Hamlet, although I realize it is out of position if I need it in the south.

Q. There is another side to the story I’ve wanted to know. What is the story behind the pilots and officers of the invasion force in Ender’s Game? As a reader, knowing Ender, Bean, Dink, Petra, and the others, it would be extremely interesting to see the battles from the invasion force’s point of view. Was the faith of the other pilots shaken when Petra’s group was temporarily paralyzed by her meltdown? What was going through the pilots’ minds when faceto-face and hopelessly outnumbered in their last encounter? All of them more or less plummeted to the formic home world without regard for themselves.

A. Remember that the pilots in the final battle had information that the pilots who fought the early battles did not: they had seen Ender win battle after battle. By this point they had absolute faith in his ability.

At the same time, they also knew that the other pilots’ victories in all the previous battles meant nothing if this last fleet was beaten at the formics’ home world.

They could see how many formic ships there were; they could imagine a fleet like this surrounding Earth. Though everyone they knew back home was already old or dead, they still had loyalty to the world and the human race they had so recently left, and whose only protection they were.

There are many examples of courageous soldiers making assaults like this one, with little chance of individual survival, for the sake of carrying the overall battle. Countless examples of small groups fighting to the last man to buy time for a larger group to get away, regroup, or prepare to counterattack.

At the same time, we have plenty of examples of otherwise brave soldiers openly mutinying rather than obey orders that would lead to pointless slaughter. The 1917 mutiny in the French Army in World War I arose because the poilus were sick of being commanded to charge machine guns, using the same bankrupt tactics over and over to the same empty end.

Yet in thinking of that mutiny, it is good to remember that it took place in 1917—after nearly three years of the same pointless massacre with every assault against the German lines. The poilus did not mutiny until they had seen more than a million of their comrades die or get maimed or gassed in previous assaults. How many times did they obey those absurd, wicked, wasteful orders with great courage, before they finally said, Enough—stop wasting our lives.

So it was that combination—a knowledge that they were the last defense and hope of the human race, and a trust that if anyone could make their sacrifice amount to something, it was Ender Wiggin—that motivated them to “go over the top” in the face of overwhelming enemy fire.

They also knew what weapons they were carrying. They knew that if they got close enough to the massed fleet, the M.D. Device would create a destructive field that would feed on the mass of every ship it destroyed, and leap from ship to ship, perhaps all the way around the planet. They did not realize that Ender hoped to destroy the planet itself, and create a field that would wipe out everything, so there was no hope of the formics ever rising again from the cinders of this world. But they did understand that they had the capability of devastatingly effective attack. So they knew that Ender Wiggin was not throwing them against the enemy “machine guns” just to demonstrate courage or honor; this was no charge of the light brigade. They knew that if they got the M.D. Device into the midst of the enemy, victory might be achieved.

There was also no anonymity. No one could slip away unnoticed, even if inclined to do so. Therefore any lack of courage would also bring open shame in the eyes of friends who were obeying orders.

Under such circumstances, such men will and do sacrifice their lives, and have done so many times in the past. In this I know human nature well enough, and have enough history behind me, to feel absolute confidence that well-led soldiers will act as these soldiers acted, without a single man holding back or refusing to go.

—OSC

Q. Some would argue that Ender’s Game encourages critical thinking within the military, others argue that it glorifies war. Response to both?

A. The former is absolutely true; the latter absurdly wrong.

Peacetime military organizations promote bureaucrats to high command. It usually takes failures and defeats to identify the deadwood and get rid of it. Think of Lincoln’s search for a competent commander for the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War. Everyone thought he had that commander in Mcclellan, but in fact Mcclellan was the ultimate peacetime general: all training and maneuver, but unwilling to commit to battle. It took a long time to realize that Mcclellan was not a war commander and to replace him with someone who was.

Military organizations get themselves locked into mindsets that they cannot break free of. The “cult of the offensive” in World War I killed millions of soldiers by running them up against machine guns; not until Churchill’s tanks, and the fresh American military, changed the equation did victory become possible, and even then, most generals on both sides had utterly failed to learn the obvious lessons being taught in blood and horror on the battlefield.

In Ender’s Game, Graff and the others committed to Battle School understood that peacetime and doctrinaire commanders could not be weeded out in combat; they had to be weeded out in advance. This is part of what Mazer and Graff work out in the story “Mazer in Prison.” Victory will not be possible if the commander is chosen according to the normal pattern; creative, risk-taking leadership must be in place from the start, because there will be no time, no slack, in which to discover the real commanders after a few failures. There can be no failures.

This is much of the reason why military readers respond well to Ender’s Game. No one understands better than soldiers and officers how hard it is to get the right commander in the right place to achieve victory. Only a military that is able to self-criticize, learn from mistakes, and replace misplaced commanders has any chance of achieving its goals, especially when facing an opponent that does recognize errors, learn from them, and move incompetent leaders out of positions where lives and outcomes depend on their decisions.

As to “glorifying war,” what is invariably meant by this is that I show excellent soldiers as good people worthy of respect. The kind of people who complain about “glorifying war” are almost always people who think they’re “antiwar,” when they’re merely ignorant of history. When an aggressive enemy is determined to make war on you, then the only choices are to resist militarily or accept the aggressors as your overlords.

After the fall of France in World War II—a fall that was not necessary, had the French been competently led, for the Germans could have been defeated at several points after the breakthrough in the Ardennes—there were still many among the governing elite in Britain who, because of their hatred of war, were prepared to make peace with Hitler. It was only Churchill, who understood the indomitable will of the people, who kept britain from surrender. Any other likely candidate for Prime Minister at that time would certainly have sued for peace.

What would have been the result? Quite possibly a Europe dominated even today by either Nazism or Stalinism, or their successors. There are worse things than war. to recognize this is not “glorifying war”—it is recognizing that the best way to avoid war is to appear irresistibly strong and resolute to those who consider attacking you.

A resolute Britain, led in 1935 by the “warmonger” Churchill or one of the few who agreed with him, would certainly have avoided World War II and brought about the fall of Hitler at very little cost. It was the people who hated war and refused to arm for it who allowed Hitler to rise to domination of Western europe.

It is tragic but true that war can never be avoided by the unilateral decision not to arm or fight. The only result of such a decision is that the other side will win.

However, it is also true that there is such a thing as glorifying war—as witnessed in the attitude of many nations prior to World War I. But in this case, they were delusional about what war is: they had in mind the quick German victory in the Franco-Prussian War, or the tidy little colonial wars Britain had a habit of winning at very little cost (though the Boer War should have been a wakeup call, as it was not tidy nor quick nor low-cost).

Even then, what was needed was not an anti-military attitude, but a cold-blooded understanding of the brutal and terrible cost of war and a sharp eye toward what the goals of war should be. The fact is that not one of the nations that began World War I had anything meaningful to gain by victory, and all of them had much to lose through defeat.

Ender’s Game does not glorify war in the way that it was glorified in the imaginations of those who decided to move ahead toward war in 1914. On the contrary, if anything, Ender’s Game shows with brutal clarity just what war costs those who fight it, so that even when war is necessary, only a fool goes into it joyfully.

Yet when war cannot be avoided, when the cost of not-fighting becomes too high to be borne, one hopes that the military has been treated with respect and given the resources and training that allow them to serve their purpose and go to war with a reasonable prospect of victory. That is respecting and supporting the military, not glorifying war. It is unfortunate that many short-sighted people confuse the two ideas.

—OSC

Q. Was there any particular reason you assigned Dragon Army the colors grey, orange, grey?

A. No.

—OSC