Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[Duckhunter]

Warfare has never been linear, and the number of variable is quantifiable. This is just irregular warfare as opposed to regular warfare. You merely have to replicate the Ends, Ways and Means in a form that delivers the product you want. FIGHTING Irregulars is not very different from Fighting Regulars. War gaming really only works at the tactical level, so I suggest that is the limit of your enquiry.

Do you mean "gaming" or simulation? What is the exam question? ( see REX ) Warfare today is no more complex than it was 3,000 years ago. If you assume it is, you've just backed yourself into a corner. Killing bad folks = gets points. Killing civilians = loosing points.
Irregular warfare generally requires greater discrimination in order to support the Policy = do not kill civilians.

I admit that I am new to this blog; however, I would like to respectfully disagree with Mr. Owen. I will start by saying that I am a current Army field-grade officer and CGSC student. Also, I have read many posts by Mr. Owen, and I find his comments to be largely lucid, intelligent, and well-said. Nonetheless, I feel obligated to disagree on many points in his post.

At first glance, there is nothing shocking (or shockingly wrong) with Mr. Owen's comments. However, as I read them more deeply, I think those comments are made without an appreciation for the complexity of a counter-insurgency.

First of all, he contends that

Warfare has never been linear.

Many historians argue that linear warfare was the norm until 1939, when the German blitzkrieg defeated Poland and essentially altered the nature of combat. This strategy (coined "third generation warfare" by the United States in 1989) focused on maneuver, speed, surprise, and synchronization to overwhelm the enemy. So, historically speaking, warfare was ENTIRELY linear before 1939.

When Mr. Owen states that

"Killing bad folks = gets points. Killing civilians = lossing [sic] points

I can't help but cringe a little. Clearly, killing civilians on a regular basis is not going to win any friends among the local population. However, "killing bad folks" is an oversimplification that borders on intellectual arrogance. First of all, how does one define "bad?" While this seems like an absurd question, there are countless levels of "bad," and not all of them should be solved with lethal fire. In many cases, it is actually preferrable to leverage lower-level criminals, insurgents, etc., as a way to glean more information about the higher-tier individuals. This is a fairly common practice in poorly-acted crime shows, but the fact is that it works on the ground in places like Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So, no..."killing bad folks" does not necessarily get points. In some cases, the losses grotesquely outweigh the gains.

Finally, I take issue with the claim that

Warfare today is no more complex than it was 3,000 years ago. If you assume it is, you've just backed yourself into a corner.

I'm certain that every generation of veterans believe -and justifiably so, in my opinion- that they are fighting a different kind of war. But at no other time in history have the lines between tactical, operational, and strategic warfare been so blurred. The actions of a few Soldiers on the ground can produce second and third-order effects that immediately impact upon national strategy. A good, albeit overused example, is the Abu Graib scandal. The level of complexity that young men and women deal with while deployed is significant, as are the repurcussions of their actions. The slightest mistake is leveraged in the information age by insugents looking to capitalize from the fog of war. As the first conflict since the explosion of the Internet, the War on Terror makes headlines, across the globe, within minutes. That burden is heaped on the shoulders of young officers, NCOs, and enlisted personel. I think, in response to Mr. Owen's claims, that if you assume warfare today is the same as it was for the Doughboys of WWI, then you have, in fact, backed yourself into a corner.

I apologize for rambling. Again, I respect 99% of what Mr. Owen says. However, I did feel the need to voice a different opinion on this one post. Thank you for listening.

[William F. Owen]

Nonetheless, I feel obligated to disagree on many points in his post.

...and you are obligated. T'is why you are here!

First of all, he contends that Many historians argue that linear warfare was the norm until 1939, when the German blitzkrieg defeated Poland and essentially altered the nature of combat. This strategy (coined "third generation warfare" by the United States in 1989) focused on maneuver, speed, surprise, and synchronization to overwhelm the enemy. So, historically speaking, warfare was ENTIRELY linear before 1939.

Which historians? So the Greek Persian Wars were linear? Hannibal's campaign against Rome was linear? Wellington's campaign in Spain? The Spanish conquest of South America? The English Civil War? The US Civil War? ...and what does "linear" mean anyway? The first common and enduring use of the phrase "Front lines" - in Theatre terms - appears in WW1. It was never used in the same context before that.
There never was anything called "Blitzkrieg". It's baby talk, and the Germans never used the word. German operations in 1939 were based on tactical doctrine written in 1922/3 and that in turn developed from the Artillery Tactics of WW1 - often wrongly coined "Stormtrooper."

However, "killing bad folks" is an oversimplification that borders on intellectual arrogance. First of all, how does one define "bad?" While this seems like an absurd question, there are countless levels of "bad," and not all of them should be solved with lethal fire.

Killing the folks who oppose your policy is why you fight. "Bad" means exactly that. Warfare is about the breaking of will, via violence. All else is diplomacy.
Warfare requires killing. Killing is instrumental, so must be applied against the right people for the right reasons. Who you need to kill is why you have intelligence. FIND, FIX, STRIKE, and EXPLOIT works in all warfare, regardless of the enemy or the policy - and even Galula could not avoid that fact - he just couldn't admit it!

But at no other time in history have the lines between tactical, operational, and strategic warfare been so blurred.

Why are they blurred? What do you not understand?
a.) There is not an "operational level of war." There is tactics and strategy.
b.) Operations are those things an army does to ensure tactical action occurs in the time and place best suited to the political aims required.

The actions of a few Soldiers on the ground can produce second and third-order effects that immediately impact upon national strategy.

I submit winning the Battle of Waterloo (tactical action of a "few soldiers") had strategic effect!
300 Spartans did the same (in myth anyway).
5-10 Bombs dropped by 5-10 men, won the Battle of Midway.
One U-boat captain sinking the Lusitania provided the US with a pretext for War.

A good, albeit overused example, is the Abu Graib scandal.

Explain the actual strategic out come of Abu Graib? Give me facts. What did it actually change?

The level of complexity that young men and women deal with while deployed is significant, as are the repurcussions of their actions. The slightest mistake is leveraged in the information age by insugents looking to capitalize from the fog of war.

How is this new? WW1 was started by one assassination. What about a mistake by Nuke Boat driver in the Cold War?

As the first conflict since the explosion of the Internet, the War on Terror makes headlines, across the globe, within minutes. That burden is heaped on the shoulders of young officers, NCOs, and enlisted personel.

No it isn't. This is a myth. - and the internet and conflict existed well before 2001! War on terror? War on an abstract noun? It may be more complicated because Presidents do no understand the instrumental nature of strategy.

I apologize for rambling. Again, I respect 99% of what Mr. Owen says. However, I did feel the need to voice a different opinion on this one post. Thank you for listening.

No apology required. First call me Wilf and second, voice away.
-Point is, you seem to have brought into all the comforting myths of modern warfare that forgives folks not studying military history both in breadth and in depth. It is incredibly arrogant of the modern generation to assume they have it tougher or more complex.
It is simply without evidence. Confusion born of ignorance (no offence intended) does not mean "complex." Warfare has always been about the most complex human affair on the planet.
Loosing on Iwo Jima or Okinawa would almost certainly have had far greater strategic consequences than defeat/withdrawal in both Iraq or Afghanistan.
Washington loosing his entire Army in one administrative river crossing at Trenton would have had similar effect.

[ScottDC]

I'm new here, and will apologize in advance for any faux pas I might commit. After reading John's post, I got to thinking about models generated by the nature of stability and conflict, and was just wondering what everyone thought about the possibility of changing the "rules" of wargaming by changing (expanding) some of the underlying assumptions. For instance, what if stability happens on a spectrum, with the US on one end of that spectrum and a destabilized county-in-conflict on the other.

There have to be factors responsible for the stability of this country (although they may be hard for us to spot because we live here), that the other country is lacking. What if conflict itself were not the driver here, but was a symptom of the underlying issue. That is, what if lack of conflict is not evidence of stability.

Could a wargame in which conflict is one outcome/phenomenon (one that requires a response) include non-military variables, such as economic factors, governance factors,etc (I have a few ideas on this but will withhold them for the sake of brevity).

Could such a wargame create a more meaningful and holistic set of variables and shorten or make more effective any military solution?

Is it still a wargame if war isn't the reason for conducting the game?

Scott
student, naval war college

[marct]

Hi Scott,

Welcome aboard. If you can, could you toss up a bit of a "Hi, this is me" post over on this thread? Knowing some of people's backgrounds makes things much easier in an online forum ?

I'm new here, and will apologize in advance for any faux pas I might commit. After reading John's post, I got to thinking about models generated by the nature of stability and conflict, and was just wondering what everyone thought about the possibility of changing the "rules" of wargaming by changing (expanding) some of the underlying assumptions. For instance, what if stability happens on a spectrum, with the US on one end of that spectrum and a destabilized county-in-conflict on the other.

Well, I would argue that "stability" is actually a collection of different factors that are all along continua. For example, resource distribution is one factor that can be looked at as a key component of what we broadly call "stability", but that system has several parts or sub-systems - cultural (how it SHOULD be done), social (how it IS done), and infrastructural (how do they do that?). No individual nation state is perfect by any stretch of the imagination (consider health care in the US as an example....).

There have to be factors responsible for the stability of this country (although they may be hard for us to spot because we live here), that the other country is lacking. What if conflict itself were not the driver here, but was a symptom of the underlying issue. That is, what if lack of conflict is not evidence of stability.

This is going to sound a bit harsh, but the idea that stability = -conflict is, IMHO, a ridiculous ideologically driven illusion that comes from a completely insane (in the technical sense of privileging ideas over reality) view of the world in general and the concept of "stability" in particular. First off, none of the G20 are "stable" countries; we are all in moderately stable vectors of socio-cultural change, but we are not "stable". The associated idea that "stable" just means "no conflict" is also silly, since all G20 countries, which are supposedly "stable", have conflict both internally and externally. This conflict may, or may not, be what most people would call warfare, but it is there.

Could a wargame in which conflict is one outcome/phenomenon (one that requires a response) include non-military variables, such as economic factors, governance factors,etc (I have a few ideas on this but will withhold them for the sake of brevity).

Could such a wargame create a more meaningful and holistic set of variables and shorten or make more effective any military solution?

Is it still a wargame if war isn't the reason for conducting the game?

The short answer, at least IMO, is Yes to all. Most of the older wargames, both board and RPG, included so-called "non-military" factors, usually via something related to production systems. I used to spend a lot of time playing (and running and designing) these types of games, and most were not solely "military".

Were a lot of the current games fall apart is, IMHO, they rely on sets of assumptions that are just wonky. I remember sitting in a session talking about designing a COIN game where the designers admitted that their game could not allow tactics that have been around for 30 years. Most of the modern games I have seen suffer from serious cases of what Freud called "projection"; the designers, or the organizations they worked for, projected their assumptions about "reality" into the operational rules of the game. Reminded me of stories my godfather used to tell me about the British generals he had to deal with at the start of WW I who kept pushing for more cavalry!

[marct]

Hi Duckhunter,

Welcome aboard. If you get a chance, you should intrioduce yourself a bit more over here.

At first glance, there is nothing shocking (or shockingly wrong) with Mr. Owen's comments. However, as I read them more deeply, I think those comments are made without an appreciation for the complexity of a counter-insurgency.

First of all, he contends that Many historians argue that linear warfare was the norm until 1939, when the German blitzkrieg defeated Poland and essentially altered the nature of combat. This strategy (coined "third generation warfare" by the United States in 1989) focused on maneuver, speed, surprise, and synchronization to overwhelm the enemy. So, historically speaking, warfare was ENTIRELY linear before 1939.

Well, Wilf and I have had our go arounds, but I have to agree with him on this point. Let me just raise three examples that demolish the silly idea that maneuver warfare is something "new":

• the M'aryanni explosion in ~1850 bce
• the Barracks Emperors period (3rd century) in Rome
• the Mongol wars of Gengis

In the first example, we have a volkeswanderung that started around 2100 bce or so, went over the caucuses and resettled in the lake Van area. After a couple of hundred years of hiring out as mercenaries ("sutu" in the terms of the time), they decided to take over pretty much everything from what is now Iraq to Egypt - and succeeded. Why? Simple; six spoked, light chariots with bow and spear. They could, and did, annihilate every "conventional" military they went up against.

In the second example, a lot of the "revolts" were semi-spontaneous expressions of what we would now (inaccurately) call "nationalism" (e.g. Palmyra under Zenobia). What we actually have, at least from what we can get out of the archaeology and the records, is an ongoing, multi-sided civil war with spontaneous tribal insurgencies breaking out for about 80 years. Totally freakin' messy, and driven, in part, by the development of some fairly sophisticated cultural engineering technology in the 1st century ce which made it easier for local generals and leaders to revolt. All in all, and incredibly "fluid" situation which makes Iraq and Afghanistan look like a model of "stability" and predictability.

The third example, the Mongols under Gengis, is pretty well know. I would have to say that, given the technology available in the 12th century, being able to co-ordinate the movements of 100k+ men over a 200+ mile front, moving upwards of 60 miles a day over a wide variety of terrain just isn't "linear warfare".

When Mr. Owen states that I can't help but cringe a little. Clearly, killing civilians on a regular basis is not going to win any friends among the local population. However, "killing bad folks" is an oversimplification that borders on intellectual arrogance. First of all, how does one define "bad?" While this seems like an absurd question, there are countless levels of "bad," and not all of them should be solved with lethal fire. In many cases, it is actually preferrable to leverage lower-level criminals, insurgents, etc., as a way to glean more information about the higher-tier individuals. This is a fairly common practice in poorly-acted crime shows, but the fact is that it works on the ground in places like Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So, no..."killing bad folks" does not necessarily get points. In some cases, the losses grotesquely outweigh the gains.

That is a point, but it also highlights one of the problems with ongoing discussions. Everyone, and this does seem to be a species "habit", tends to create verbal shorthands, and Wilfs "bad folks" is one such.

Finally, I take issue with the claim that I'm certain that every generation of veterans believe -and justifiably so, in my opinion- that they are fighting a different kind of war.

Different in specifics, maybe, but hardly different in its nature. I don't know if you ever talked with anyone who fought in both WW I and WW II, but the ones I have talked with would talk about both the similarities and the differences.

But at no other time in history have the lines between tactical, operational, and strategic warfare been so blurred. The actions of a few Soldiers on the ground can produce second and third-order effects that immediately impact upon national strategy.

Exactly the same thing happened, albeit with a lower speed of propagation, in the Barracks Emperors period, in the 5th century resettlement of the Goths (which lead to Adrianople; another great maneuver warfare example), and in the Wars of the Roses in England.

A good, albeit overused example, is the Abu Graib scandal. The level of complexity that young men and women deal with while deployed is significant, as are the repurcussions of their actions. The slightest mistake is leveraged in the information age by insugents looking to capitalize from the fog of war. As the first conflict since the explosion of the Internet, the War on Terror makes headlines, across the globe, within minutes. That burden is heaped on the shoulders of young officers, NCOs, and enlisted personel.

What the 'net changed was the velocity and volume of information that can be spread. It also shifted the dominant mode of communications from a centralized, state-supporting, broadcast technology model to an interactive analog technology model (cf, by way of example, The Soft Edge by Paul Levinson). This was a change in "rate", not "kind" similar to the shift brought about by moving from an 8 spoked chariot to a 6 spoked chariot. What is "different" about the spread of the 'net is that the information war, as an area of operations, is now highly interactive and capable of supporting major combat operations without relying on a major infrastructural investment. This change is piggy-backed on to the previous state from Vietnam where you still have a fairly widespread, broadcast capability that can be manipulated. If you want some of the precursors to this, look at the Great Bauermkrieg in the 16th century with the spread of inexpensive printing presses coupled with the development of the Thurn und Taxis mail system (originally Imperial couriers, then a post system).

I think, in response to Mr. Owen's claims, that if you assume warfare today is the same as it was for the Doughboys of WWI, then you have, in fact, backed yourself into a corner.

Well, I've never talked with any of the Doughboys, just some of the folks who were in it from the start (and do you know why they were called Doughboys ?).

Leaving that aside, you could, and I have, talked with people who were in WW I from different regiments, and the war wasn't "the same" for them. You are getting caught up in a logical fallacy that says if the experience was different then the "nature" of the event must be different. The problem with that, however, is that experience is individual while "nature" is a group property surround an entire event-space. this means that in order to get a better handle on the "nature" of an event-space interaction, you need to look at the structural factors that limit and condition that event-space.

Certainly there will be differences, and a lot of those differences are "caused" (don't get me started on why that is in quotes ) by changes in the socio-cultural technology available and in use.

I apologize for rambling. Again, I respect 99% of what Mr. Owen says. However, I did feel the need to voice a different opinion on this one post. Thank you for listening.

No need to apologize !

There are a couple of rather neat cultural memes that operates here: "attack the message, not the messenger" and "agree to disagree". This can definitely lead to "lively" discussions!

Cheers,

Marc

ps. apologies for the tight focus on changing technology; I'm in the process of prepping a course on the interaction of technology and warfare, so my brain is more than a little focused that way at the moment.