Professional wargaming
One of these was Georg von Reisswitz, the creator of Kriegsspiel and the father of professional wargaming, but he stuck with the word "game" because he could not think of a better term.
As professional wargames are used to prepare officers for actual warfare, there is naturally a strong emphasis on realism and current events.
[10] Commercial wargames are under more pressure to deliver an enjoyable experience for the players, who expect a user-friendly interface, a reasonable learning curve, exciting gameplay, and so forth.
By contrast, military organizations tend to see wargaming as a tool and a chore, and players are often bluntly obliged to use whatever is provided to them.
One is the conceptual models that describe the properties, capabilities, and behaviors of the things the wargame attempts to simulate (weapons, vehicles, troops, terrain, weather, etc.).
If a player makes a bad decision, it should only be because of poor strategic thinking, not some forgotten rule or arithmetic error, otherwise the game will yield less reliable insights.
In a naval wargame, the players need not wait days for their fleets to sail across the ocean, they could just advance the time-frame to the next decision they must make.
A tactical-level wargame that has very cumbersome computations might take longer to play out than the battle it represents (this problem afflicted the original Kriegsspiel).
Wargamers can experiment with assets that their military does not actually possess, such as alliances that their country does not have, armaments that they have yet to acquire, and even hypothetical technologies that have yet to be invented.
When Germany began openly rearming in 1934, its officers already had fairly well-developed theories on what armaments to buy and what organizational reforms to implement.
Another issue that can produce "wrong" predictions is that a commander may do things differently in the field precisely because he was dissatisfied with the decisions he made in the wargames.
Wargames can help players master through practice certain routine skills such as how to discuss ideas, share intel, and communicate orders.
[18] Wargames can help a military determine what armaments and infrastructure it should acquire (there is substantial historical evidence to support this particular assertion).
[19] For instance: In the 1920s, American military planners believed that America could win a war with Japan quickly by simply sailing an armada across the Pacific and knocking out the Japanese navy in a few decisive battles.
The game modeled the capabilities of the units realistically using data gathered by the Prussian army during the Napoleonic Wars and various field exercises.
Reisswitz's manual provided tables that listed how far each unit type could move in a round according to the terrain it was crossing and whether it was marching, running, galloping, etc.
Vernois advocated dispensing with the rules altogether and allowing the umpire to determine the outcomes of player decisions as he saw fit.
The first Kriegsspiel manual in English, based on the system of Wilhelm von Tschischwitz, was published in 1872 for the British army and received a royal endorsement.
[37] Wargaming was brought to the Naval War College by William McCarty Little, a retired Navy lieutenant who had likely been inspired after reading The American Kriegsspiel by W.R. Livermore.
In 1933, the Navy's Research Department reviewed the wargames played from 1927 to 1933 and concluded that the fundamental problem was that the armada over-extended its supply lines.
[47] After this, the wargamers at the College abandoned the old doctrine and instead developed a more progressive strategy, which involved building a logistics infrastructure in the western Pacific and making alliances with regional countries.
In this formation, as it was used in World War II, an aircraft carrier was surrounded by concentric circles of cruisers and destroyers.
[51] The Treaty of Versailles greatly restricted the size of Germany's armed forces and outright banned certain weapons such as planes, tanks, and submarines.
[52] By the time Germany began openly rearming in 1934, its officers already had fairly well-developed theories on what armaments to buy and what organizational reforms to implement.
[61] The Soviets launched a massive effort to compile data from the war on the Eastern Front to make their wargames more valid.
[62] During the Cold War, the Soviets allowed officers from other communist countries to attend its military schools, and wargaming was part of the curriculum.
The Sigma I-64 and II-64 games, conducted in 1964, were designed to test the proposed strategy of gradually escalating pressure on North Vietnam until it gave up out of economic self-interest.
One reason was that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not appreciate the methodology of the games, which relied on subjective evaluations by the umpires (even though these men were seasoned officers and diplomats).
[73] The Johnson administration went on to apply their strategy of graduated pressure in Vietnam, and the outcome of the war proved very similar to what the wargames had foretold.
[74] In their post-mortems of the Vietnam War, numerous historians have cited the dismissal of the Sigma wargames as one of many important failures in planning that led to America's defeat.
