"Historical wargaming for training military officers" Topic

Dr Nick Murray of the US Army's Command & General Staff College (CGSC) has written this short article in CGSC Foundation News, about how he and his colleagues use wargames as case studies to help officers to learn about how to make decisions in an uncertain environment:

PDF link

(Go to page 9.)

One of the case studies he uses is Froeschwiller, from the Franco-Prussian War, using the BBB scenario and rules.

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
link

Excellent find, thank you.

I've been doing similar things with ROTC cadets for the same reasons. We started a tactics club once a month where the cadets or cadre run various games to improve their team building and decision making skills. We've used Bolt Action to simulate small unit actions, and played larger strategy games like Axis and Allies (Pacific and Europe combined). Last Friday a handful of cadets set up 8 Xboxes and ran 4 Vs 4 in Battlefield 4. I charged a couple of them with developing a training plan that they could execute in game. I'm excited to see where that goes.

Some years ago, I know a bunch of folks sponsored a wargaming club at Ft. Monmouth for the West Point Prep School.

My club has been conducting annual officer professional development events for a signal battalion in the DC area for several years. See bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=3350 for a recent account.

The idea of using war-games to support officer training dates back before Cluaswitz. To me the interesting thing is that the games don't have to be expensive or use computer to be effective.

Buck Surdu

The naval commanders prior to Pearl Harbor wargamed all of the possible attack scenarios that the japanese might use including the one they did attack with.
Back in the 1970s, Tank Officers (AOBC and AAOC) used Dunn Kampf for training. Eventually they sent copies to every military base. GHQ got the contract to provides castings for the game and thus later at most SimCenters.
In college ROTC we were sent six copies to playtest for Infantry command. We recommended SPIs 'FIREFIGHT".
So this is nothing new.

Rudy:

In fact, Firefight was designed for the US Army, but they eventually decided not to adopt it. There are some interesting Jim Dunnigan anecdotes, some of which may be apocryphal, about the development of the game.

Buck

Hi Buck,

Yes, I saw your own recent post along these lines. Good work.

I fondly remember playing your pirates tavern brawl game a few years back. Do you use that one to train the enlisted men? ;-)

Chris

Just got a second-hand copy of Contact!, which is a Cold War land-based set of rules for Canadian military training.

Apparently, it's based off the old WRG set, and the author mentioned that a lot of the vehicle values and other things in the rules were found to be pretty close to "reality".

I read recently that Sandhurst had stopped doing wargames as an aid to learning for British officers. Apparently, foreign military present at a recent conference were astonished.

1987, Infantry Officers Course, USMC. Many wargames of USMC combat teams against USSR forces, using rules and having officers in other rooms using radios and field phones to communicate. Instructors would cut comm, deliver the wrong supplies, suddenly move or remove your flank. Intel says your reinforced company has to defend against a motorized infantry battalion and a tank regiment shows up and they have air superiority and paras just landed on your MSR and oh go into MOPP as your NBC alarms are going off.

Welcome to the real war 2nd LT. Oh yes your life expectancy in 6 second and you are on second 7. What are you going to do?

Loved that training.

In 1981 I was the S4 of a Military Intelligence Battalion who controlled the Fort Riley Simcenter. It was a blast to have access to all of the miniatures, actual German terrain boards. I had the keys so wargaming on the weekend happened often. We had on the property books only three copies of Firefight but 6 copies of Dunn Kampf.

At Fort Hood (1977-1980), the SimCen manager was my next door neighbor. They had 6 copies of Firefight. They had used the counters from firefight and Westwall Bunker microarmor. The rules were a modified version of Dunn Kampf.

Chris mentioned my article. Where I used to work, (that is the US Army), does not do anywhere near as much of the type of war gaming I describe in the article as used to occur. The Manoeuver Center of Excellence (Fort Benning) has apparently broadened what it does (there were a bunch of reforms recently), but where I used to work until last summer (the Army Command and Staff College) the amount of that type of war gaming is minimal. There are a few people who run wargames like that as elective classes, but the majority of wargames are not what the average wargamer has in mind. They really are more like a tool to practice a process rather than a decision making mechanism. That being said their is an excellent group of people at their leader development center who do some very good game design and game mastering.

As Chris said, I did use BBB to help the officers learn about war fighting in the 19th century. For that they were excellent. The officers would be given historical orders and a situation report, they would then write orders for their divisions, corps, armies, etc., and we used the rules as a tool to fight through their ideas in a live environment. That is, against a human opponent who was not working to a script. Furthermore, if they screwed up they had to deal with it rather than being able to reset the computer.

I now work for the Navy, and have not yet restarted this class with them. I hope to do so this autumn, and I am hoping to do some similar things with one or two of the local schools (at least with officer training programs at MIT and hopefully elsewhere). Nothing is certain, but fingers crossed.

The relationship between the miniature/board wargame hobbies and the military is an old, old story.

Beginning with Avalon Hill and Simulations Publications in the early 60's and 70's, the US military found wargamers in uniform as well as employing hobby designers to create wargames for the military. And the Military have returned the favor such such designers as John Prados.

On the other hand, a good number of mechanics first used by von Riesswitz's Kriegspiel in 1812-1824 are still used in most all tabletop and board wargames.

The British Army approached H.G. Wells to create a military version of this "Little Wars" rules. He writes about it when he publishe his rules.

There were many times throughout my career when I used miniatures and wargames as a part of unit traning. As a company commander I used miniatures to have my leaders walk through the SOP, like occupation of the assembly area. When they had completed that, I would have them do the same with members of their platoons. Also as a Rear Battle Operations Officer I used it to train both my ops people and G2 staff. There are many usful applications. There are times when I would set up s soviet regiment at 60%, tell them the unit was at 90% strength and then template for me the remaining forces. I could go on and on with other examples as well.