“Wargames” are games in which war events are simulated. They have had great importance in military decisions for centuries and have recently become very popular again.
by Eugenio Cau
Almost all of the world’s militaries have people, often military officers and analysts, whose primary job is to play games. Just play, with the boards, the dice, the pieces, the cards to draw and everything else. And there are people who are responsible for always thinking and developing new games: even in this case they are part of the Ministries of Defense or linked to private entities operating in this sector.
These games are called “wargames,” a word that is simply translated as “war games,” but whose use makes sense since it is used that way by the entire international defense community. They are used by armies around the world to realistically simulate war scenarios and military actions: they are used to test strategies, imagine the development and use of new weapons and verify training and action methods in the field.
They are often similar to regular board games, with pieces and everything, although they are more complex and players apply specific rules depending on the context. Digital systems are also used, and there are wargames that are played in a completely digital environment, a bit like video games.
In some famous cases in the history of the last century, war games have helped develop war strategies that were then used on the battlefield. In other cases, they played an important role in governments’ decisions about what weapons to develop, where to invest their budgets, and what stance to take in the international context. They have not always led to positive results: it happens that they have contributed to making wrong decisions or making predictions that later turned out to be wrong, as in the case of the war in Ukraine.
The results of some of these war games (that is, specifically, how the games went) are considered secret by the states that commission them, that is, secret because they could reveal the operational strategies and tactics of their armies. However, others are open to the public.
However, the use and distribution of wargames varies greatly from country to country. In the United States, their use is institutionalized and involves hundreds of people, including employees of the Pentagon, i.e. the Department of Defense, as well as numerous study centers and universities, who are responsible for thinking about, creating and playing with them. In other countries, such as Italy, war games are far less common, although NATO has recently rediscovered their utility and importance.
Tactical instruction (other than actually a war game) in the British Army in 1934 (R. Wesley/Fox Photos/Getty Images)
Ask yourself the right questions
Becca Wasser is director of the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), one of the most important US research centers. The Gaming Lab is the office within the CNAS that is responsible for the conception, development and creation of war games that are then used in numerous studies within the study center itself or that are developed for then by the US Department of Defense, in collaboration with the CNAS to be used cooperated. To understand the importance of the topic, just remember that the Gaming Lab is an office that employs 23 people, including full-time staff, consultants and interns, and is just one of many involved in war gaming in the United States.
According to Becca Wasser, to understand what war games are, we must first start with the definition of “game,” a context in which “people make decisions in a synthetic environment and must deal with the consequences of the decisions they make.” Wargames are games in which the consequences of conflicts between armed forces are tested.
The most classic use of war games is the simulation of conventional war battles between two armies. But in reality, war games can simulate many types of events and situations, both military and beyond. Andrew Reddie, a professor at the University of California and founder of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab, says that the structure and form of a war game depends on the question being asked: “War games are useful when we need to answer a question and we don’t. “We lack empirical data for this.”
War games can be created to answer large strategic questions, such as “Let’s imagine how a war between the United States and China to defend Taiwan would play out,” or to answer more limited and tactical questions, such as ” What kind of air defense?”. is it better to use it in a particular context?”. Educational war games can be created in which the Department of Defense or a study center attempts to explain to people without military experience (e.g. politicians) what would happen if one decision was made instead of another. In any case, you imagine a game that is as realistic as possible and then play it to see what outcome would be most likely. Very often the same war game is repeated dozens of times to exhaust all possible alternatives.
Boards, game pieces, cards
Precisely because wargames are designed specifically to answer their customers’ questions, they can take many forms: in their most practical and common version, they are very similar to traditional board games, but very often also use digital media. The most advanced, but rare, also use sophisticated simulations, for example relying on virtual reality or augmented reality, while there are also very simple simulations designed to be played in front of a large number of people in a seminar, thus making them one PowerPoint presentation can be reduced.
A recent example of public wargaming took place in April at the US Congress, where the CNAS organized a meeting involving some representatives. The war game was more traditional: all participants gathered around a table on which there was a board and some game boards. Different pieces could move around the game board and the results of decisions were often determined by rolling dice.
The aim of the war game was to imagine that China would invade Taiwan – the island that has been ruled independently for over 70 years but which the Chinese regime considers its own – and that the United States would intervene to destroy it defend and block the invasion. Those in attendance were divided into a “red team” representing China and a “blue team” representing the United States. However, because it was a public congressional event, all representatives were part of the blue team, and the red team consisted of CNAS researchers and other staff.
– Also read: Why the United States Cares So Much About Taiwan
The MPs had to take on the role of advisers to the President of the United States and decide how to proceed, what type of attack strategy to use, where to position their assets and how to respond to the actions of China, i.e. the red team. The game is largely similar to Risk, but much more complex and, above all, designed to simulate a specific scenario.
This war game had, above all, an educational function and served to educate the representatives (i.e. the people who ultimately vote on the laws and the military budget) about what resources and what needs the American army might have at its disposal in order to respond to a possible attack by China to respond Taiwan.
This type of educational or demonstration games also carries a certain risk: it is not uncommon for war games to be used less as a means of analysis in the context of military decisions, especially in the financing of weapons and equipment, but rather to provide a predetermined answer that confirms a decision that has already been made. An example might be that of a general who decides that the American army needs to invest heavily in a particular type of weapon and has an ad hoc war game created to show the Department of Defense or Congress how important this is to the defense of the United States States is . finance exactly this type of weapon.
The war with China
Recently, a possible war between the United States and China to defend Taiwan was the subject of another much-discussed war game organized earlier this year by another American study center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). therefore was not played demonstratively for members of Congress, but by professional analysts. The war game again imagined that China would attack Taiwan and that the United States would go to war to defend it. The game was repeated 24 times to cover all possible scenarios and the conclusions were remarkable.
The CSIS website states: “In most scenarios, the United States, along with Taiwan and Japan, succeed in repelling an amphibious invasion by China and maintaining Taiwan’s autonomy.” But this defense comes at a very high cost. The US and its allies lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft and tens of thousands of soldiers. Taiwan’s economy is devastated.”
This does not mean that the outcome of a war between the United States and China is predetermined or that the CSIS war game can actually predict how it will turn out. For example: CSIS imagined that Japan would go to war against China alongside the United States and Taiwan, but it is entirely possible that in a real-world scenario it would choose to remain neutral instead.
The point is that wargames are analytical tools that help you better understand your weaknesses and strengths. If war games show your side would lose, “that’s not a problem,” says Becca Wasser of CNAS. “It means we have to find a different strategy. “Wargames serve precisely to create a system in which, unlike real war, there is no risk of failure.”
The war game
We can say that war games are very old. The game of chess itself, invented in India in the sixth century, is actually a war game in the sense that it simulates a war situation. There are even older war games, such as the Chinese Wei Hai, which is similar to modern Go and was developed thousands of years ago.
The first modern version of war games was adopted in Prussia in the early 19th century by Baron von Reisswitz, an army officer who, in search of strategies to defeat Napoleon’s French army, developed a war game in which miniatures represented the army units and moved on a table on which the territory on which the units had to move was reconstructed as realistically as possible. The game was designed so that Prussian officers who played it had the same information (about the enemy’s positions, its armament, etc.) as on the battlefield. Within a few decades, all major European countries and the United States began organizing war games and making their use compulsory for officers.
The most famous wargaming campaign in history was the “War Plan Orange”, developed between 1919 and 1941 at the Naval War College in the United States, thanks to a very long wargaming campaign that took place in several phases over decades. War Plan Orange imagined a war against Japan in the Pacific Ocean (an interesting detail is the fact that in 1919, when the United States began simulating a war with Japan, the two countries were allies): American officers took turns, They played either on the side of the Japanese (who were the orange team) or on the side of the Americans (who were the blue team), simulating all possible scenarios.
When the war began and the United States declared war on Japan as part of World War II, its attack strategy had become clear, which called for liberating all the Pacific islands captured by the Japanese one by one, rather than attacking Japan directly as the most convincing thanks to repeated War Plan Orange -War games.
Some time later, U.S. Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz said that “the war with Japan was simulated in the wargaming rooms of the War College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was one Surprise was: absolutely nothing, apart from the kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war. We didn’t foresee that.” In reality, War Plan Orange underestimated many important problems that arose during the war, but it is true that the plan, in its most important aspects, was the one that emerged during the war games.
After World War II, war games continued to be popular, especially in the United States, where they became very important in setting nuclear strategies in the Cold War and in competition with the Soviet Union. The RAND Corporation, a think tank founded in 1946, became the place where the bulk of the study on the subject was concentrated and where game theory began to be applied to strategic and military decisions, often with a fairly aggressive stance. Game theory is the branch of mathematics dedicated to the study and analysis of the decisions that each subject makes when interacting with others in order to achieve the greatest possible profit. Around this time, Herman Kahn, a leading RAND member, served as the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name.
“Many conceptual innovations of recent years and past decades that have been adopted by the American armed forces arose after war games,” says Andrea Gilli, a researcher at the NATO Defense College.
Today, wargames remain very widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world, but much less so in continental Europe, although things are changing: NATO, for example, has started a fairly intensive wargaming program and launched the so-called Wargaming Initiative two years ago , a major conference bringing together wargaming experts from around the world. The second edition of this event took place in Rome in June.
A war game at the US Naval War College in the 1950s (Wikimedia)
False predictions
After the Cold War and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, war games experienced a decline related to the fact that much of the Western world believed that the start of a conventional war (i.e. a war between armies) would become increasingly rare and unlikely, but they still remained widespread.
Furthermore, wargames are linked to numerous war events in recent history, and not always in a particularly successful way. During the first Iraq War in 1991, for example, wargame simulations significantly overestimated the readiness of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army and predicted large casualties that never materialized.
Wargames also played a role in the US’s – incorrect – predictions about the war in Ukraine.
In the weeks before the invasion, as the Russian army was massing on the Ukrainian border, American newspapers wrote that U.S. intelligence was very pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances of resistance. Most forecasts assumed that the powerful Russian army would be able to occupy the capital Kiev “in two days,” overthrow the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and easily sweep across the entire country.
This prediction – which was consistent with Russia’s, among other things – was based at least in part on simulations carried out in the Ministry of Defense using war games. Of course, war games were not the only tool used to make this prediction, but they still played a role. However, the American prediction turned out to be decidedly wrong.
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