At
professional wargaming conference Connections in September 2013 at Kings
College London, it was a little embarrassing to have the four British Army
representatives heavily outnumbered by those from foreign armies. The visitors
were perplexed where the centres of excellence were in using wargaming for
training. People asked about who ran the games at Sandhurst and they were
perplexed with the answer of no-one. All the other major military academies,
including China, are using wargames.
So the
great and the good, largely from the Army, were gathered at one of the homes of
innovation in British Armed forces at the Defence Academy at Shrivenham. It was
a day in the history of wargaming.
The problem
with wargames is they have an image problem for officers involving in gaming,
wargaming will never be cool, but will be necessary. Wargaming is technical and
requires understanding of the art of war. During the Cold War, there were many
innovations from games. Some of these large games, like 1940 Sea Lion by Dr
Paddy Griffith [see Sprawling Wargames published by this project] were major
events and had many beneficial spin offs.
Wargaming
helps develop agile leaders. The games are competitive and they help develop
the competitive instinct; war is all about winning. There is time pressure,
there always is, but as part of the review of the commissioning course at
Sandhurst, they are going to include a pilot study using wargaming for the
young officers. The officers will enthuse about such games, but the problem is
likely to be some of the permanent staff who will not engage.
Graham
Longley Brown then talked about what wargaming is and why the armed forces
should do it. In summary, effective training saves lives, it saves money but
currently not enough wargaming is being done, it is not being done well enough.
Although a
game, it is valuable. Peter Perla, the pre-eminent wargamer of our time, was
quoted as saying ‘a wargame is a warfare model…’ Those who dismiss wargames are
demonstrating their ignorance of military history and current practice in armed
forces around the world.
Although
many are obsessed with computer simulations, manual wargames are complimentary
to the PC based software. Manual wargames are cheap, flexible, transparent in
their assumptions and easy to modify. They can also game effects based
operations that are only poorly simulated using computers.
If you
trying to predict the future, there are many methods such as experts, unaided
judgment, committees… and games. Research has shown games are not that good at
prediction, but a game involving role playing the enemy gives double the
predictive accuracy of other methods of prediction. Wargames are twice as
accurate.
My own view
is that a problem with the British Army is that has become very effective
fighting a war in a mountainous country in some ways that the British Army of
the late 19th century would recognize. Now the commitment to
Afghanistan is winding down the Army needs to relearn some of the skills that
would be needed to fight a modern armed forces. One of those tools to help
develop the craft of the warrior is going to be wargaming.
