December 12, 2024:
If you go to war, your chances of success are enhanced if you have better weapons than your opponents and your troops are better trained to use what they have. There are ways to ensure your troops and weapons are superior. This includes gaining knowledge of enemy weapons and the state of training and morale among enemy troops.
The U.S. has, for decades, monitored Russian progress in developing new military equipment. The Americans offered high prices for anyone who could provide access to current Russian systems. This included multi-million-dollar rewards and residence in the U.S. for pilots of Russian warplanes who would defect with their aircraft. A number of modern Russian fighters were obtained this way. An even more productive source was Arab governments who had been rearmed by the Russians after the disastrous, for the Arabs 1967 Six Day War with Israel. During this war the Israelis captured a lot of older Russian equipment the Arabs had obtained since the 1950s. After the 1967 defeat Russia offered to equip Arab states with the most modern Russian systems. This made a difference during the 1973 war, but the Arabs still lost. Israel captured a lot of new Russian gear and shared this bonanza with the United States, which was and still is a major supplier of military tech to Israel.
The Americans obtained even more Russian military tech after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and fourteen now countries were formed from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. The dissolution deal had each of these new nations inheriting any military gear on their territory at the time of dissolution. Troops could return to the part of the former Soviet Union they came from but the weapons remained, including ICBMs, nukes and thousands of the most modern Russian aircraft and other weapons in service. American technical intelligence personnel spent most of the early 1990s examining and actually testing this equipment.
The American foreign equipment evaluations exposed weaknesses in these foreign weapons and that allowed better methods to defeat these weapons and limit their effectiveness. This means that when U.S. troops go into combat, they know more about the strengths and weaknesses of enemy weapons than the enemy does. The United States has not been at war on a large scale since 1972 when the Vietnam War ended for the Americans. It went on for a few more years for the Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese defeated South Vietnamese not with superior weapons but with better trained and motivated soldiers.
The same thing has been happening in Ukraine since early 2022 when Russia invaded. The invasion was unpopular in Russia and the Russian soldiers who carried out the initial advance into northern Ukraine were not told they were entering a foreign country. The Russian soldiers and most of their officers believed they were carrying out a training exercise inside Russia. A few of the senior officers knew the real plan, which was to rapidly enter from the north and seize the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and install a pro-Russia government. The plan didn’t work because the Ukrainians were more alert, anticipated the Russian invasions and prepared a civilian militia armed with a variety of portable anti-tank weapons that could be used against the incoming Russian vehicles.
There were supposed to be three routes Russia used for the invasion. One of those routes, from Belarus, which shared a border with northern Ukraine, didn’t happen. Another advance was made from Crimea, Ukrainian territory the Russians had occupied since 2014. This advance alarmed the Ukrainians the most because there were not enough Ukrainian forces to stop this advance, which made the most progress.
The advance from Russia to the Ukrainian capital was defeated with hundreds of Russian tanks destroyed and many more abandoned because they were damaged or the crews panicked and fled from their vehicles. The attackers were largely civilians using their own vehicles for transport. These irregulars used portable anti-tank weapons to destroy enough vehicles, usually tanks, at the front and rear of a column to halt the column and trap it. This panicked the Russian soldiers who abandoned their vehicles and escaped back to Russia on foot or aboard one of the few Russian trucks that escaped the ambush.
This Russian defeat was another example of a technically stronger enemy being defeated by a technically weaker enemy because of the impact of higher morale and surprise on the part of the defending forces.
The Ukrainian victory was not surprising to many people in the United States because in the past commercial wargame publishers learned via surveys, focus groups and just chatting, that history was most quickly learned, understood and committed to memory when done via a historical game. This made sense and later academic research confirmed that film, lectures and reading about wars were far inferior to the interactive learning provided by wargaming.
The commercial wargames were historical games with an emphasis on accuracy and reproducible results. These were accepted by most users as an excellent way to learn history. Another interesting item the commercial wargame companies learned about was that their audience had more military, CIA and State Department personnel among their customers than were represented in the general public. The fifteen percent of customers in the military and CIA were also overrepresented by younger wargamers. While there were many military veterans among the wargaming population, it also turned out that, in addition to an intense interest in military history, wargamers became comfortable with using strategic thinking and quantifying problems and solutions. You also needed free time to try something new. That accounted for the overrepresentation of teenage wargamers.
Overall only a few percent of the population met those criteria, which was unfortunate for wargame publishers because it meant there was no mass market. But once you computerized wargames and made it easy to find the mathematical internals of the game system like scenario builders or level editors you had wargames that were very effective at teaching history, especially military history and could be used by a larger audience. These became known in the gaming industry as strategy games even though many of them were tactical or operational level games. What the strategy games meant was that these games were meant for a niche audience that demanded accuracy.
What did happen from the 1970s to the present was that more of the quickly promoted army officers received a better understanding of military history and wargaming and this paid off in a decade or two when the CGSC/Command and General Staff College and AWC/Army War College graduates of the history/wargame heavy curriculum moved into the senior leadership positions. Those gaming activities were successful and continue to be an asset.
The impact this could have was noted early on. For example in late 1972 a commercial historical game called Year of the Rat was published covering the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam earlier in the year and why that offensive failed while the later 1975 invasion one didn’t. This game got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames. Year of the Rat was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, another wargame did just that, accurately predicting the outcome of the 1973 Arab Israeli war. This game, called Sinai, was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation who was a wargamer had watched the game in development, and was assigned to frequently visit the publisher's premises while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting and why that accuracy actually helped during the war in progress. Israel continues to use these games, but that process is kept secret, except for the American wargamers that created the game and continue to talk about it among themselves, on the internet and even on television.
There weren't many wars to practice these predictive techniques on after that, until 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. As soon as the invasion took place in mid-1990 the senior American political leaders wanted to know, from their military commanders, what was possible and what could be done to deal with the situation. Because commercial historical games were still a big thing there was a recently published wargame that, like the Sinai game in 1973, covered the Iraq/Kuwait situation.
At that time the army had some more extensive computerized simulations that took weeks to generate any results. Many senior officers in the Pentagon knew that a recently published commercial game called Gulf Strike was accurate enough and that there were experienced wargamers available in the form of contractors, active duty officers and the Gulf Strike game designer himself who could have the game in action and able to deliver a reliable assessment of what could be done and do it in 24 hours. That’s what happened.
The use of a commercial game for this analysis, which predicted the course of the 1990-91 war in detail as well as its outcome, was kept classified for years although in commercial wargaming circles it was known to have happened and it was not considered surprising. A lot of officers who had attended the AWC in the 1970s and 80s were generals now and it was already accepted that military history and the commercial wargames were valuable.
In addition to Gulf Strike, another commercial wargame appeared months before the Coalition counterattacked in 1991. The game was called Arabian Nightmare and it predicted everything that happened in greater detail, including the low Coalition casualties. Like Gulf Strike this later game used unclassified sources but concentrated on a real battle that was about to be fought. Because of that the media got wind of it, and the game was featured on the TV show Nightline in October 1990 and other news shows after that. This didn't cause much excitement with the general public; it was just some more strange news item on TV. For the CGSC and AWC grads it showed that the shift to more study of military in the 1970s had paid off and would continue to do so.
Then came 2001 and the war on terror. From a wargamer perspective, it was not a difficult conflict to simulate. International terrorists are nothing new, and if you know how to work out the media impact on this, you've got yourself a wargame. Actually, you can do most of this stuff on a spreadsheet, which is a good vehicle for many types of predictive analysis. Same with the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan. Both countries are behaving as they have for centuries. Anyone familiar with the history of these two places won't be surprised with what's going on there now, or how it's all going to turn out. Forget the media, they haven't a clue, and don't need one to stay in business. If it bleeds it leads and that’s what is discussed on TV news shows.
The key point here is that the wargamers are also historians and most wargames are history based. The designers and users of these games look at things from a historical perspective, and immediately apply an analytical breakdown to any event they are studying. First thing they think of is; who has what, what they can do with it and what are the goals of the different factions? The Afghan tribes have issues, always have, and always will until the tribal system fades away. In Iraq, the Sunni Arab minority wanted to be in charge, and some of them were willing to fight on to avoid war crimes trials and confiscation of the oil money they stole. Al Qaeda was yet another attempt by Islamic conservatives to conquer the world. The Turks kept them in check for centuries, but thousand year old dreams die hard, especially in a culture that has found so many ways to fail.
Wargames and the predictive analysis that Sinai, Gulf Strike and Arabian Nightmare successfully demonstrated convinced even more commanders to use this tool. Some of these officers had attended classes in the 1970s and 1980s where civilian wargame players and designers showed how quickly a wargame could be created to fit any situation. By the 1980s students and staff at the CGSC were doing this themselves, creating wargames, especially computer based ones, that became part of the curriculum. Some recent AWS grads even used locally designed wargames by troops who volunteered when the brigade commander called for experienced wargamers to work on a wargame to assist training and planning.
One of the more notable examples of this occurred in 1995 when the CINC/Commander IN Chief, a four star general of SOUTHCOM that monitored military events in Latin America was faced with a potential war between Peru and Ecuador. The Pentagon and the White House were looking to this CINC for a quick analysis of the situation. Fortunately for him, the officer who designed Arabian Nightmare was in the area. This reserve officer came to the attention of a colonel on the CENTCOM staff, who remembered seeing some of his wargaming work earlier. The reserve officer did his thing by creating a Peru-Ecuador wargame overnight, so they could put together an analysis for the CINC.
It was done, and when the CINC briefed the Joint Chiefs, he used the hastily created wargame, and its analysis. It was noted that the CINCs' wargaming resources were more effective than anything the CGSC, AWC or Pentagon analysts were able to come up with and much faster as well. The CINC gave his wargame designer a commendation medal and subsequently told all the other senior officers how it was done and a lot more senior generals realized that there were a lot more of these capable wargame designers in the military and it was just a matter of being aware of that and putting that resource to work when needed.
In the 1990s the existing army wargame and analysis systems were still dominated by older ideas and technologies. The cheaper, faster and often more accurate history based wargames and analysis were slowly taking over, especially when lives were at stake. The commercial games, most of them involving conflict, did not appeal to a large commercial audience, which was about five percent of the general population but in the military and related agencies like the CIA and State Department the percentages were much higher. And until the 1990s most of these wargames were manual and considered a variation of chess. They were easy to create and put to work. When computers became the main medium for these games in commercial markets the manual games continued to find a niche audience, especially in the military where it was essential that effective wargames be created and put to work quickly. As was demonstrated many times in the 1990s and later, military and intelligence professionals continued to use manual wargaming techniques to get results quickly. This process continues to the present.
The CIA used wargames to get a better sense of the big picture but found that this pointed the way towards developing computerized predictive analysis tools that led to obvious, in hindsight, techniques for effectively dealing with terrorist networks. The Israelis refined and applied these techniques first, in 2000, when the Palestinians rejected a peace deal and declared war. The Palestinian terrorism campaign was defeated and contained within five years and similar techniques were used in Iraq. Historical games provided less popular solutions for the endemic unrest and bad government in the Middle East that caused the outbreaks of Islamic terrorism. The historical games showed that effective solutions would, at best, take several generations instead of several years. This was a hard sell to Western governments. Fast and cheap solutions are always more popular but were not always available.
Meanwhile the study of military history and applying it via historical games and more powerful forms of analysis, like Operations Research, caught on in the CGSC and AWC. The younger officers at the CGSC were particularly enthusiastic, and they came to be known as the Jedi Knights, mainly because the analytic skills obtained from playing lots of wargames gave them a seemingly magical ability to find flaws in war plans. That led to the creation and use of Red Teams staffed by these CGSC Jedi. Ideally the Red Teams were composed of combat experienced officers who knew how the enemy operated and were told to come up with ways to get around the new security devices like sensors and associated equipment as well as new tactics, or even new tactics that the enemy had not thought of, or tried out, yet. The Red Teams did just that.
In 2008 the Red Teams were given a new task. Senior commanders sent Red Teams down to brigade headquarters to test the war plans at that level. Often the Red Teams found that these war plans were pretty solid, mainly because the commanders and staffs had used wargaming to develop their own plans, and to work out the flaws that an adroit enemy would exploit once it was too late to do anything about it. The Red Teams all reported to the head of the army, which ensured that none of the commanders they were working with tried to pull rank. The Red Teams gave the Chief of Staff of the army regular reports on how effective the many war plans developed in the army combat units were holding up to scrutiny, which is a unique capability in the military world. Since then the Staff School at Leavenworth Kansas has established courses for training Red Team members, some of the courses are 18 weeks long.
The wargame developers could also use these tools to predict developments in the design and use of wargames. Just such an occasion occurred in 1977 when the Department of Defense held a conference on the deplorable state of Department of Defense wargaming that was attended by government wargame contractors and commercial wargame developers. It was the first of many efforts to find some solutions. A senor Department of Defense expert in the area of predictive analysis and net assessments kicked off the proceedings by telling the traditional wargame developers that you people have never given me anything I could use. He then called on one of the commercial wargame designers and publishers for some ideas because the commercial games had already demonstrated their worth.
One commercial wargame designer, who was one of the few people there that did not work for the government, delivered a combination of good news and future news. Having published two commercial games, Year of the Rat and Sinai, that proved useful, the designer of one of them pointed out that the manual games obviously had uses but those uses were limited. Left unsaid was the fact that most government contractors were not interested in manual wargames because they were too inexpensive to develop and too easy for the Pentagon analysts or military commanders to test. But then the commercial publisher pointed out that it was inevitable that the current wargames would eventually be available on inexpensive computers.
One aspect of commercial wargaming in the 1970s was that many of the users and designers were engineers, doctors, computer engineers and programmers who were already discussing how to get wargames working on the newly available personal computers. This would make such games available to a larger audience but what was needed was a wargame that a senior commander could quickly learn and use on his own. The commercial publisher explained that such a device was decades away but when available it would be capable of not only using historical data and experience to accurately portray warfare by demonstrating how it was done. By allowing senior commanders to experiment, and make mistakes in private, the most effective solutions could be found more quickly. Not just by the commanding general but by staff officers and subordinates who could pass the data file onto the boss for his private perusal. What this future development implied was a merger of historical data and a simulation system. As time went on it became common for computerized wargames to include help capabilities that cited historical examples and further references. No one was talking about the World Wide Web yet although work on the basic Internet was already underway.
The point here is that the CGSC decision to spend less of their limited instructional time on history instruction and more on wargames was a natural development of the use of military history. It was all foretold, more than 50 years ago. Sometimes you just have to listen and be patient. It all comes together eventually.