In February 2020, Russia launched a nuclear attack on U.S. forces in Europe, and the United States responded with tactical nuclear weapons of its own. Fortunately, this did not happen in real life; the events in question instead took place during a simulation, a military war game used to model a potential future interaction with Russia.
For a casual observer, the words “war game” evoke a game of Risk, a way to idly pass the time. In this context, the fate of Kamchatka or Siam could not matter less, and life returns to normal once the dice and plastic armies are packed up. For the military, though, war games play an important role across multiple sectors. “I have an entire report on that,” joked Yuna Wong, the co-director of the RAND Center for Gaming, in an interview with the HPR. On one level, the military uses war games for training and educational purposes. On another level, the military uses them to define broader aspects of strategy. “They use them to refine operational plans, to explore concepts and to look at different capabilities [they] want to develop,” she explained.
And military war-gaming can be a lot more complicated than board games. In a modern war game, officers on separate teams — often divided into “Blue” to represent the United States and “Red” to represent its adversaries — head into different rooms to make their moves. A “control cell” feeds those moves into a computer and informs the teams of the results. These simulations can be complicated: One wargame, Millennium Challenge 2002, cost $250 million, took two years to prepare and eventually involved more than 13,500 personnel.
When done right, these massive investments in money, time and personnel can pay off. As strategy pioneer Thomas Schelling once put it, “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” However, as history demonstrates, if the military launches war games only to validate predetermined strategies, then it loses out on the manifold benefits that war games bring.
War-Gaming Yesterday
After World War I, the Naval War College had cemented itself as the Navy’s intellectual hub, and it soon turned its attention to playing war games to simulate the next armed conflict. Although naval war games initially designated Great Britain as the main adversary, gamers soon focused on War Plan Orange, which foresaw Japan as the next war’s main enemy. Smaller games and tactical exercises in each course for naval officers culminated in a “Big Game,” always fought against Japan; this compartmentalized approach allowed strategy to evolve over time. These games were procedurally similar to today’s games, except the control cell plotted each move by hand, rather than by computer.
Initially, the tactics in these games followed great naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had proposed a scheme that Naval War College officers had nicknamed the “steamroller” strategy: While the U.S. Navy steamed out to meet the Japanese navy head-on and defeat it in a major fleet engagement, land forces in the Philippines would fight a delaying action to prevent defeat. However, that strategy failed repeatedly, as Japanese fleets routinely destroyed U.S. warships, far from bases for repair and reliant on an increasingly strained logistics network. In addition, the Japanese routinely took Manila before naval reinforcements could arrive.
Even though those shortcomings became evident by 1933, war games that tested the steamroller strategy still continued. At the same time, naval aviation, amphibious warfare and expeditionary logistics — tactics previously relegated to the sidelines of the steamroller strategy — came to the fore; all three would prove key in the U.S. military’s success in the Pacific during World War II. By the middle of the decade, the Navy had shifted its strategy to a more cautionary one that did not rush a naval force across the Pacific to defend Manila. In the end, these Naval War College simulations demonstrated the effectiveness of war games: They allowed military planners to test new technologies and realize the error of previous strategies without having to suffer massive casualties in real war.
However, in practice, the steamroller strategy took a long time to change, in part because policymakers with a vested interest in it would oppose the changes the war games recommended, as Reed Pauly, a professor of political science at Brown University, told the HPR. “If you change the strategy, people like Leonard Wood come out and say, ‘No, no, no, you can’t get rid of the defense of Manila. I’m the governor-general of the Philippines, and I’m not going to go tell the Philippine people that we’re not going to defend them,’” he said. “There are plenty of other variables that will affect what the strategy is, some of which will be organizational bias.”
The military next embarked on a major series of war games in the Vietnam War’s first stages. Doubting the Johnson administration’s decision to mount a graduated escalation in Vietnam, the military organized a game dubbed “Sigma I-64” to test that strategy. It eventually concluded that such graduated escalation would lead to increased North Vietnamese raids on South Vietnam, that a sustained bombing campaign would have little effect, and that public opinion would react violently against an ongoing campaign in the country. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution only ensured U.S. escalation, the military ran another game, Sigma II-64. Again, the game forewarned of the plight in which the United States would later find itself in Vietnam. As the author Jonathan Keats wrote in Nautilus, “After ruling out an American nuclear attack, the teams role-played their way to a quagmire, in which the North Vietnamese countered every U.S. move in spite of lives lost and ruined infrastructure. The games forecast political crisis in the U.S., with no plausible path to American military victory.”
However, those insights did not reach the administration, largely due to organizational bias. “Lyndon Johnson didn’t really use the National Security Council bureaucracy the way that other presidents have,” Pauly explained. Johnson tuned out the Joint Chiefs of Staff, relying on more informal Tuesday lunches with close friends and confidants. As the Joint Wargames Agency relied on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to communicate its evaluation of American policy to the president, Pauly concluded, “It’s not clear, then, that those recommendations make it to the White House.” That institutional disconnect worsened as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who controlled information flow between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House, resolved to keep any negative policy assessments out of Johnson’s ears.
Finally, the Millennium Challenge 2002 war games, which simulated an attack against an unnamed Middle Eastern country, presented an insight into the military’s thinking on the eve of the Iraq War. In line with President Bush’s military doctrine at the time, the blue team (the United States) launched a preemptive invasion, but Gen. Paul van Riper, in charge of the red team (the Middle Eastern country), refused to sit still. His forces launched a surprise attack on the blue team’s invading navy, using a signal from a minaret instead of a conventional one. Speedboats loaded with explosives performed kamikaze attacks, and van Riper’s forces launched missiles from low-flying planes to avoid the blue team’s radar. The red team had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the blue team at a moment when it was least expected. However, the blue team had other ideas in mind. The control cell refloated the sunken Navy ships, prohibited the red team from firing at landing C-130 cargo planes and gave control of the red team’s chemical weapons to the blue team, even though the red team had successfully hidden them. Unsurprisingly, the blue team won the new simulation.
Although the exercise demonstrated to military officials that they could not rely on advanced technology to defeat a Middle Eastern enemy, civilian decision-makers such as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had expected the exercise to validate their strategies, and the contrived victory gave these policymakers a false sense of security. That sense ruptured when Iraq turned into a mare’s nest and Iran used fast speedboats to attack the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. Jacquelyn Schneider, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, blames situations like Millennium Challenge on the prevailing sponsorship system, in which the Department of Defense will fund a game “with a prior [idea] about what they want the outcome of the game to be,” as she told the HPR. “Sponsors like to use wargames as evidence to justify new authorities or to justify new doctrine,” and war game designers often craft war games to fit those needs.
War-Gaming Today
Sponsored or not, war games lost much of their luster for the decade following Millennium Challenge. Indeed, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work reviewed the Department of Defense’s war-gaming procedures in 2015 and found the “absence of any direct link between the insights gained from war-gaming and the department’s programmatic action,” among other problems. That year, the military created a national repository of war games and the Wargaming Incentive Fund, which devotes $10 million per year to war games to rectify these problems.
Today’s war games largely fall in two categories. First, many war games have focused on two powers challenging the United States in the great power arena: Russia and China. On that front, the U.S. military has not fared well. As one headline put it, the United States “gets its ass handed to it” in war games. U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers are perfect targets for Russian and Chinese smart missiles, meaning that advanced warplanes such as the F-35 (and U.S. command and control infrastructure) are sitting ducks. To respond to this mismatch, the Rand Corp. proposed a $24 billion budget that would focus on U.S. missile inventories rather than expensive hardware.
New technologies have also figured heavily in this new era of war-gaming. Wong helped to evaluate one of Rand’s recent war games surrounding the impact of unmanned systems in a potential conflict with China. As she told the HPR, three major insights from that game emerged. First, allies often did not perceive unmanned systems as major assets in this game. Second, artificial intelligence often led to significant escalation as machines made quicker and quicker moves. Finally, autonomous systems did not send clear signals, partially because so much more happens in a “black box.”
“We might want to evaluate the escalatory potential of new systems and new operating concepts with AI and autonomous systems,” Wong recommended. “It could be the case that even though a new concept could give you a lot of operational advantages, you might not actually want everyone to use it in real life because of the potential escalatory effects.”
The military has also explored the cyberspace realm in war games. Like artificial intelligence, cyber tools largely did not achieve their strategic ends. For instance, one set of games concluded that cyberattacks are not very appealing because once the military uses a cyber tool, the enemy will be able to patch its vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, in a separate series of war games meant to investigate the impact of cyber tools on deterrence, Schneider observed that the players actually did not use those capabilities very often, especially when they wanted to avoid escalation. “Sometimes we’re trying to avoid war just by picking weapons that we think provide the most calibrated response,” she said. “Cyber, in that regard, was not a very effective signalling tool.”
War-Gaming Tomorrow
In all, the growing importance of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence in military conflict will make war games an even more critical component of military strategy. After all, the Naval War College’s war games successfully allowed the military to realize the benefits of aircraft carriers in naval strategy, as Pauly noted. However, Schneider argued that gaining new insights around new technology will prove difficult if the Department of Defense continues to inject its bias into war games. “I’m pessimistic that the DOD will be able to do good work on this unless they take their hands off it,” she said. “I think the sponsor-focused games create a strong bias, and it’s hard to get to a place where you can just ignore something long enough for people to do good work.”
Additionally, both Wong and Pauly emphasized the importance of seeking patterns in a series of war games instead of drawing insights from only one game. Rand’s cyberdeterrence game only represented “one potential future,” said Wong, and war gamers investigating cybersecurity should continue war-gaming potential scenarios. Again, current policymakers should look to the Naval War College games, which gave the Navy insights that one game alone could not. In short, the military should not rest on its laurels or rely on existing war games; it must continue to use war games as tools for playing out the future. Otherwise, the future might play out in a way the military does not particularly like.
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