In wargame jargon, an engine is a program that supports a wargame. Typically, a Blue team and a Red team decide what their next actions will be, and those decisions are fed into an “engine.” The software then estimates the net effect of both their actions. In reality, though, the engine of all wargaming is need. Necessity, or more precisely need, is not only the mother of invention but has also been the motivator for many advances in wargaming. The depth and breadth of that need is the engine for the depth and breadth of wargame use yesterday and today. Understanding how need has spawned new wargame applications in the past may help us anticipate application for wargaming tomorrow.
The depths of that need extents to the dawn of civilization. Wargames first appeared as tools to develop the minds of the children of kings and emperors, so they could defeat the children of neighboring rulers. Modern simulation wargaming began with a single set of tools used to educate the children of a single family, the royal family of Prussia. The continued need to outthink your opponents can be seen in the breadth of wargame use today. Wargames are used in dictatorships and democracies, in free market and communist economies. They are used by commanders-in-chief and fire-team leaders. This growth and evolution of wargaming sprang from many needs in many nations. In this chapter, I will discuss a few examples from recent US military history.
Losing a war is a great motivator. Prussia’s loss to Napoleon was one of the causes of Prussia’s invention of modern wargaming. Germany’s loss in World War I helped motivate the increase in depth and breadth of interwar German wargaming. Sometimes, though, doing poorly is motivation enough. During the Vietnam War, both the US Air Force and the US Navy were very concerned by their loss ratios in air-to-air combat against adversary fighters. In Korea, the United States had believed it held a huge edge in air-to-air combat, but if it was now losing about as many aircraft as the North Vietnamese, what would happen if the United States ever fought the presumably more advanced Soviet Red Army Air Forces?
First, the US military tried to figure out what had gone wrong since Korea. A study called “Red Baron” showed that most defeats were suffered during a pilot’s initial eight to ten missions. US planners concluded that our military was training its pilots how to fly but not how to fight. What air combat training that did take place was against other Americans flying the same type of aircraft and using the same tactics.
The US Navy acted first, setting up a live wargame within its Fighter Weapons School, a program better known as “Top Gun.” Instructor pilots flew aircraft of similar size and performance as contemporary Soviet aircraft. They also used Soviet tactics. The impact of the course was seen quickly: The Navy’s air-to-air loss ratio over Vietnam improved dramatically, while the Air Force loss ratio did not.
The Navy’s success prompted the United States Air Force (USAF) to act. The USAF also established a Fighter Weapons School and also trained “aggressor” pilots to fly aircraft with similar performance and size as contemporary Soviet aircraft. Then it did more, creating a mock enemy nation on the Nellis Range, complete with adversary radars, simulated air defenses, and ground control intercept operators trained in Soviet tactics. Then the USAF created “Red Flag,” which bough Air Force, Navy, and allied or friendly pilots from all over the world to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to participate in what has been called the “ultimate wargame.” Through Red Flag, the USAF ensured that all its combat pilots could periodically train against realistic threats. The next time American airpower engaged a hostile air force—in the first Gulf War—the loss ratio was roughly eleven to one in the favor of the United States.
This type of live wargame, pioneered by the US Navy and advanced by the USAF, has spread to other services, such as the US Army’s National Training Center, and to other air forces, including the Canadian, Israeli, and Indian.
Sometimes wargames identify a need, and at other times they help anticipate how to meet that need. An early example of this is the US Navy’s use of wargaming during the interwar years to identify the need for forward bases in any future war with Japan. Because the islands where those bases needed to be were in areas controlled by Japan, the wargames indicated that the United States would need to develop amphibious assault capability to take them. Though at the time it was widely believed that modern weapons had made amphibious assault obsolete, the US Marine Corps used wargaming, along with several other methods, to develop its amphibious warfare doctrine.
A much more recent example of this two-step use of wargaming followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since the late 1950s, the US government had been using a type of “pol-mil” (political-military) wargame to think through strategy options in the Cold War. After the Soviet invasion, a number of pol-mil wargames were conducted to examine the impacts of various actions the Soviets might take next. One Soviet option explored in was a drive by Soviet forces south from Afghanistan through eastern Iran and to the north shore of the Straits of Hormuz. The first pol-mil wargame exploring the feasibility and likely impact of such a Soviet drive concluded that such an action would be feasible and, in military, economic, diplomatic, and political terms, devastating. Since the first such wargame was played with relatively junior participants, it was repeated with much more senior players. If anything, this second wargame suggested that the consequences would be even more dire than originally estimated. As a result, the US military was directed to prepare a contingency plan to defend the north shore of the straits should a Soviet drive be initiated.
US doctrine suggests that wargaming should be used twice while developing a plan, time permitting. Once to help anticipate the advantages and disadvantages of a number of possible courses of action (typically three) and a second time when planning is nearing completion, to help identify any problems in the plan and identify options to improve it. While the first wargame tends to involve only a few members wargaming each course of action for a few hours each, the second wargame tends to be quite large, involving the subordinate headquarters who would command part of the operation if the plan was ever put into effect. Many are so large that they are named “exercises” and are reported on in the press.
In the case of planning to blunt a Soviet drive on the Straits of Hormuz, the wargame at the end of each (typically) two-year planning cycle was called “Gallant Knight.” Early Gallant Knights indicated that the Soviets would be able to reach the north shore of the Straits of Hormuz faster and with more combat power than the US military could; the outcome forecast was the piecemeal destruction of American forces. However, each Gallant Knight planning cycle would conclude with lessons learned as well as an Integrated Priority List (IPL) of forces, supplies, or infrastructure that, if purchased, would likely improve the odds of the United States for victory. Gallant Knight 85 indicated that the US forces needed more ramp space to park their aircraft, the prepositioning of relatively heavy, cheap supplies (like bombs) so that America’s limited lift assets could be used to get more forces into the theater sooner, and pipe to supply gas to defenders in the mountains inland from the coast, where we would be harder to dislodge. (In 1997, as a young captain, I served as an adjudicator during Gallant Knight 87. I did not learn until decades later that Gallant Knight 87 was the first time US forces were assessed as having not been overrun.)
The Gallant Knight series of wargames had both fairly immediate and long-term consequences. Preparations justified by Gallant Knight laid the foundation of the Coalition victory during the first Iraq War. Arriving US aircraft had enough room to park, and due to prepositioning our limited airlift was able to get more military personnel into theater sooner because they needed to deliver fewer supplies. Even the pipe was used, to help fuel the shift of forces to the west before the air/ground counteroffensive.
Still, Gallant Knight’s greatest effect may have been long-term. Its effectiveness prompted all US commands to wargame more rigorously. It had long been US doctrine to include rigorous wargaming in planning cycles. However, in practice some planning was “pencil wiped,” with only the date of two-year-old plans being updated. It is unlikely we will ever be able to establish how widespread pencil wiping was, but in the mid-1980s the author saw one plan that still listed an aircraft as being at a base that had converted to a different aircraft six years earlier. At best, during a planning cycle the Time Phased Deployment Plan (TPDP) element of the overall plan was checked for deactivated units and updated only as necessary. Gallant Knight demonstrated how useful rigorous wargaming could be—even when they assume the wrong Red, attacking from the wrong direction. With a little help from other wargame success stories from Europe and Korea, Gallant Knight ushered in the current US emphasis on improving plans and preparations through big rigorous wargames.
Sometimes wargames answer the need to demonstrate relevance. During the interwar period, US Army airmen complained that the army was designing their wargames in order to minimize the impact of airpower. Later, through a wargame series that began in 1979, the Navy used wargaming to demonstrate the continued relevance of sea power.
During the late 1970s, factors that included diminishing hard feelings about Vietnam, news reporting on the “hollow force,” an increased appreciation of the Soviet threat, especially in Central Europe, and a somewhat strengthening economy came together to produce growth in the US defense budget. A series of wargames demonstrated just how desperate the first days and weeks of a war in Europe would be and how much increased funding to the army would help. These wargames indicated that the Navy was of little if any relevance to the fight on the “Central Front”; hence, it had little or no call on any of the new money coming to defense. However, many in the US Navy, especially faculty members at the US Naval War College, felt that the US command was dangerously fixated on too small an area and over too limited a time. If war came with the Soviet Union, it would be a global war, and that war would be decided not in days or weeks but in months or years. These naval leaders needed to find a way to convince defense leaders and Congress of what they saw as obvious.
In 1979, the US Navy War College took advantage of a slow time right after graduation to conduct the first “Global” wargame. The budget was next to nothing, and many of the participants were students who had not yet departed for their next assignments. Yet, even this first Global demonstrated the impact naval forces would have on the overall course of a war with the Soviets.
Over the next decade, Global steadily increased in size, budget, sophistication, and influence. More and more members of Congress and congressional staffers gave of their time for the sake of national defense and agreed to spend two weeks in Newport, Rhode Island, in July. Actually, the Navy wargamed out a war with the Soviet Union only twice during the 1980s. Each year it would fight the war for two weeks in July, advancing the time in the wargame a few weeks to a few months. At the end of a five-year series, the Navy had wargamed the conflict from before the hostilities through to the issues related to ending the war. Both five-year cycles indicated the same thing: The Soviets could not win a short war, and in a long war they would be buried by the vastly larger output of the free world’s economies.
Global also had both near-term and long-term consequences. Many credit—or blame—Global for the Navy’s receiving a large share of the “Reagan buildup” increases in the defense budget. Others claim that the insights generated by Global gave US leaders increased confidence when dealing with the breakup of first the Warsaw Pact, and then the Soviet Union itself. Long-term, Global demonstrated the value to all the US services of wargames that take a overall look at how they can best accomplish their responsibilities under Title 10 of the US Code: to organize, train, and equip their forces. This appreciation led to each service establishing “Title 10” wargames during the 1990s. These wargames remain influential tools for anticipating the force needed in the future.
Finally, sometimes a service’s greatest need is not insight or even money, but simply recruitment. Since the Civil War, the United States has typically met such needs through a draft; however, since Vietnam it has not been politically possible to institute one. So in the late 1990s, with individual wealth growing faster than at any time before or since, low unemployment, and budget surpluses promising continued prosperity, the US Army was finding it harder and harder to recruit soldiers. In the 1970s, the Army had lowered standards to attract more recruits, but that had not worked well the first time, and now war was even more high-tech. The Army was able to get more and more money from Congress for TV commercials, but increased funds did not seem to be producing a proportional increase in recruits. One problem was that the generation the Army was trying to recruit from was increasingly turning away from TV and toward the Web and video games.
With 20–20 hindsight, the solution seems obvious: go to where the folks you want to recruit are. Spending a hundredth of the amount it was spending on TV ads, the Army adapted a commercial computer wargame to demonstrate its mission and values and called it America’s Army (2002–). Made available online for free, America’s Army became extremely popular. More important, from the Army’s point of view, it generated a hundred times more hits on its recruiting website than did its TV ads. (While press reports were generally favorable, some critics asserted that it was unethical or unseemly to recruit using a wargame. These same critics typically were silent on the ethics or seemliness of running recruiting TV ads during football games.)
What are the short- and long-term impacts of America’s Army? It is hard to say. In the short term, a downturn in the economy and an increase in patriotism following the 9/11 attacks made it much easier for the army to recruit. In the long term, America’s Army has at least demonstrated how adapting an existing commercial wargame can be done at very little cost. Such an adapted wargame retains the user-friendly interface that permitted its commercial success in the first place. Hezbollah, Russia, and China have either already produced or announced that they will produce an adaptation of a commercial wargame.
In little more than two hundred years, the engine of need has propelled modern wargames from a tool for the education of the children of one royal family to tools used by governments and militaries around the world. This spread has not been steady. Sometimes ignorance or fear of not being taken seriously—to be seen as playing children’s games—has prevented needs from being met. Still, it seems likely that wargaming will become still more pervasive during the next two hundred years. Today’s young adults spend far more on computer games than on movies. They do not see all games as childish. While commercial wargames make up only a small slice of the huge and rapidly growing recreational software industry, they benefit from the hardware and software advances of the total industry. There is every reason to believe that need will continue to drive the future evolution and growth of wargaming. Kings may no longer be fighting over land, but competition has endured and will continue to endure, and so will the need for games used to gain an advantage.
Matthew B. Caffrey Jr. is the Air Force Material Command’s (AFMC) integrator for Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Wargaming. A retired colonel in the Air Force Reserve, he was a professor of wargaming and campaign planning at the Air Command and Staff College. He is a frequent speaker on wargaming at the German War College and the Pentagon. Coauthor of the Gulf War Fact Book, he has also written many book chapters and articles; his book On Wargaming will be published by the Naval War College Press.