On February 3, US General Mark Milley — the highest-ranking officer in the US military — issued a warning that Ukraine would be over-run in 72 hours in the event of a Russian invasion.
The US had strong intelligence on Russia’s intentions, but some of Gen Milley’s prediction was informed by Pentagon-sponsored war games, many of which he had been involved in during the run-up to war.
Some of these ‘games’ are expensive computer simulations. However, others are literally games, played with dice, playing boards and counters, sometimes augmented by computers and expert adjudicators, to identify weaknesses in future conflicts and train officers.
In the past 200 years, some of these war games have helped change the fate of nations, from the fall of France in the Second World War to the 1991 Gulf War and quite possibly, the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The origins of war games
The practice goes back to the early 19th century and the work of a Prussian officer, Lieutenant Georg von Reiswitz, who convinced his seniors that war could be re-created on a map, using red and blue counters for opposing forces, rules and dice.
“War games are well-understood models that integrate terrain, forces, weapons, space and time, and they are invaluable to turn knowledge into understanding,” says John Curry, a senior lecturer at Bath University, specialising in games development, who has worked with the UK Ministry of Defence and the Pentagon on war-gaming.
“Operational analysis gives us clear guidelines on rates of advance, daily casualties, the effectiveness of armour in towns,” he says, referring to analysis that models these aspects of war using historical and contemporary data.
That data can then become the basis of a game.
Cheaper than holding full-scale military exercises, war-gaming soon became commonplace by the turn of the 20th century in officer-training schools across Europe, the US and Japan, where the practice was introduced by German advisers.
War games have sometimes been spookily accurate in predicting outcomes but for many, their main role is not prediction, but training.
“There is a strong interest from the military to use war-gaming as part of their curriculum due to both cost and flexibility,” says David Freer, chief executive of commercial war-gaming company, Wargame Design Studio.
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