Wargames Read online

  However, a game capable of simulating every aspect of war would become war. Generally the larger the scale on which warfare is waged, and the more important the role of political factors as opposed to military ones, the greater the difficulties of simulating it. Above all, unrestricted physical violence, the very factor that forms the essence of war and sets it apart, is hard to capture in a realistic way. Most people will probably refuse to play a game that claims too many casualties. Such a game is also very likely to be condemned and banned by the authorities, as many in fact were. Another possibility is that the game, by escalating out of hand, will develop into the real thing. That was just what happened in 1273 when an Anglo-French tournament turned into the so-called “Little Battle of Châlons” after King Edward I of England, who was among the participants, claimed that one of his opponents had committed a foul.7

  As a result, all wargames seek to limit violence in one way or another. The place where it takes place may be controlled very carefully so as to affect only the direct participants, thus making sure that escalation does not ensue; or it may be represented by purely symbolic means, as in chess and similar games; or it may be committed by, and on, figures that only exist in virtual reality, as in computer games; or the rules may ban the use of the most lethal weapons, as in some forms of tribal games and tournaments, as well as paintball, laser tag, and their like; or an element of pretense may be introduced, as in many kinds of sham fights and reenactments. Incidentally, the way various games manage violence and restrict it provides another excellent method for classifying them.

  Why study wargames?

  As I learnt at first hand when students at a seminar literally started jumping up and down on tables, wargames have always been enormously exciting. This fact, as well as the growing involvement on the part of government and big business, explains why the literature on them is vast. However, practically all modern workers in the field seem to have committed a fundamental error: their definition of wargames is both much too broad and much too narrow. It is too broad in that the term is applied to any kind of mock adversarial engagement without regard to whether what is simulated is war, or politics, or economics, or whatever. It is too narrow in that they focus on the kind of games played by opposing individuals or teams in some kind of room, with the aid of maps and/or boards or, beginning in the 1960s, either on the screens of computers or inside them.8

  Furthermore, the obligatory reference to chess and its alleged failure to present an adequate portrait of war apart, existing studies of wargames focus on the period since the elder Baron von Reisswitz invented modern wargaming exactly two centuries ago. That, of course, reflects on their understanding both of wargames and of war itself. Most leave out the games played by many tribal societies around the world, some of which are all but indistinguishable from “real” war; single combat and combats of champions from the Old Testament and the Iliad onwards; the Roman gladiatorial fights, which were probably the most popular, and certainly the most deadly, wargames of all time; as well as trials by combat, tournaments and duels, to mention but a few. Nor is it simply a question of leaving out most of history. Many modern wargames, be they of the kind “fought” by the American military at the National Training Center, or those that paintball and laser tag enthusiasts practice in their spare time, or those which reenact historical battles, are also given the cold shoulder. Even that, however, is but one side of the problem. Just as modern writers on wargames habitually ignore most of history, so anthropologists, ancient historians, and medievalists have stubbornly refused to look beyond their own specialties. As a result, their work has made little or no contribution to the field. Needless to say, truncating the subject in such a way imposes serious restrictions on what can be learnt from it.

  It is in order to avoid repeating this error that the present volume has taken the historical approach in an attempt to trace the games’ development from its origins to the present day. Here it may be worth mentioning that this approach is in many ways the exact opposite of the one that “game theorists” use. They have set themselves the task of reducing real events to games and games to a series of precise mathematical formulae; I, to the contrary, wanted to reintegrate wargames, a subject that is too often neglected or looked down upon, with human culture as a whole. Their objective was reductionist; mine, inclusivist. As we shall see, their method is in danger of producing results that are too abstract to be of use in the real world; mine, I hope, will prove fruitful and interesting to those who take the trouble to follow my work to the end.

  The outline of the volume is as follows. Chapter 1, “On animals and men,” opens with a brief look at hunting as well as the “wargames” animals play. Following a discussion of unarmed combat sports and contact sports, it proceeds through the various kinds of sham fights held by many tribal societies toward combats of champions and single combats. Chapter 2, “Games and gladiators,” is devoted to what were easily the most deadly wargames in the whole of history. Here the objective is to find the cultural factors that made them possible, what aspects of war they simulated, what aspects they did not simulate, why they were as popular as they were, and why they were finally brought to an end. Chapter 3, “Trials by combat, tournaments, and duels,” explores certain types of wargames which for centuries used to form an important part of Western culture but are now defunct. As was the case with Rome, not the least interesting question is why they are defunct, and what, if anything, has taken their place.

  Moving closer to the present, Chapter 4, “Battles, campaigns, wars, and politics,” focuses on various types of wargames that, resting on much older foundations, became very prominent in the nineteenth century when both amateurs and professional soldiers developed them and played them. Since the latter often used the games for training, simulation, and planning, this is also the place to take a look at their possibilities and limitations in these respects. Chapter 5, “From bloody games to bloodless wars,” deals with the kind of wargames that, instead of using floors, boards, or tables, are played by real people on real terrain. Chapter 6, “Enter the computer,” explains how those machines have transformed the field in which we are interested and how they are causing real reality and virtual reality to merge. Chapter 7, “The females of the species,” asks some questions about the way 50 percent of humanity relate, or do not relate, to wargames; here the goal is to use such games as a prism for examining what, to me, looks like some fundamental differences between the sexes. Finally, Chapter 8, “The mirrors and the mirrored,” represents our conclusions.

  Going beyond the obvious questions – why wargames are/were held and how, how they relate/d to war, and how useful they are/were in helping train for it, simulate it, and prepare for it – what can a study of wargames teach us? To answer, consider an old story by Ephraim Kishon (1924–2005), a Hungarian-born Israeli humorist whose books, translated into German and other languages, sold in the tens of millions. A man is sitting on a park bench. After a while he is joined by an older man who takes out a photograph of a child and shows it to his companion. “My grandson,” he says. Once the stranger has expressed his admiration, the grandfather calls one of the children playing on the grass and presents him. “Why did you not call your grandson in the first place?” the younger man asks. “Because,” the proud grandfather answers, “recently the child has not been eating very well. The picture looks more like him than he does!”

  Though the story is deliberately silly, the point the grandfather is trying to make is anything but. “Reality,” after all, is an elusive, ever-shifting, thing. It exists, if at all, only for a moment, and that moment itself may very well be entirely untypical. That is why some representations of it can capture its essence better than reality itself can. Studied both as they were held at certain times and places and across time, wargames provide a singularly useful tool for understanding the nature of war and the way various societies related to it. Like Kishon’s photograph, they can present us with war in its purest form, so to speak. A
t the same time, the way people related to them can tell us something both about changing social attitudes and about human nature in general.

  War, to quote one modern scholar summing up what many have said before him, “offers the individual an escape from debilitating tedium and existential boredom, a glorious alternative to the banality of everyday life and work. It appeals to his need for excitement, adventure, stimulation, sensation, spectacle, and his craving for power, grandeur and self esteem.”9 Whether that applies to real-life war may be, and often has been, disputed. But when it comes to wargames there can be no doubt concerning its truth. After all, one of their main functions is precisely to provide the thrill at little or no cost to participants, spectators, or both; their very existence proves how successful they are in doing just that. If only for this reason, it is important that they be studied and understood.

  1 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1950 [1938].

  2 J. M. Roberts et al., “Games in Culture,” American Anthropologist, 61, 4, August 1959, pp. 597–605.

  3 C. von Clausewitz, On War, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 127.

  4 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Fairfield, IA: World Library, 2006 ; T. Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966 ; E. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987.

  5 Quoted in Clausewitz, On War, p. 112.

  6 Quoted in W. Hardcastle Brown, Odd Derivations of Words, Phrases, Slang, Synonyms, General Books, 2010, p. 312.

  7 See M. Keene, Chivalry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 87.

  8 Just a few of the more important works that have taken this approach include: T. B. Allen, War Games, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987 ; J. F. Dunnigan, Wargames Handbook, 3rd edn, iUniverse, 2000 ; P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990 ; T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960 ; M. Shubik, Games for Society, Business, and War, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975 ; and A. Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, London: Crescent, 1968 . To my knowledge, the only volume that attempts to cover earlier periods as well is T. J. Cornell and T. B. Allen, eds., War and Games, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002.

  9 J. M. G. van der Dennen, The Origin of War, PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Groningen, 2000, vol. I, 245.

  1 On animals and men

  Hunting, combat sports, and contact sports

  To begin at the beginning, both humans and many species of animals hunt. In so far as hunting is a question of using violence to catch, overcome, and kill a living creature, unquestionably it has certain things in common with warfare. Unless the animals are driven to be killed, physical effort and/or skill play an important role. So does chance in the form of a sudden gust of wind that may carry the hunter’s scent, or, in the days of edged weapons, deflect his arrow from its intended target. Hunting also involves strategy, although it differs from the kind commonly used in war. Not many animals will stand and fight the hunter just as he fights them, and almost none will do so unless it is cornered first. Even if it is, normally precautions are taken to ensure that the killing is one-sided. That is why, in English, hunting is also known as the “chase,” from the French chasse, “pursuit.” Semantically it is closely associated with its opposite, to flee; the same is true of its German and Dutch equivalents, Jagd and jacht.

  Other similarities between hunting and war, specifically including the willingness to shed blood and the outdoor life that both require, do not have to be explained in any great detail. Plato at one point claimed that war was simply a different form of hunting,1 which was not meant exactly as a compliment to soldiers. Xenophon and Machiavelli, both of whom had commanded men in war, saw things in a different light. To them it was a useful form of military training.2 Pigsticking and other forms of big-game hunting continued to be advertised as such down to the last years of the nineteenth century.3 Warriors of all periods have often hunted during their leisure hours. For example, the Roman Emperor Hadrian is said to have incurred a scar when hunting, causing him to grow a beard and ending a centuries-old tradition when Romans had shaved. During the Middle Ages, and indeed for centuries after they had ended, hunting was the warrior’s sport par excellence; before he was killed at the ripe old age of twenty-six, World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen spent his leave hunting.4 One anthropologist, investigating the Avatip of New Guinea, has suggested that they see warfare as a superior form of hunting in which the prey is human beings.5

  Certainly among humans, and probably among some animal species such as chimpanzees, hunting is often practiced not simply for nutrition but for fun as well. Cats will even try to catch images floating on a screen; at least one dog I knew used to chase spots of light thrown on the floor by a flashlight. Whether these and other animals behave as they do because of some “hunting instinct,” or because the activity generates a thrill, it is, of course, impossible to say. Possibly both motives are involved, and possibly motives differ not only from one animal to another but also from one moment to another; after all, human behavior in these matters is not always consistent either.

  Some evolutionary biologists believe that hunting, passed to us by our primate-like ancestors, is the oldest sport of all.6 In this context it is worth pointing out that, several centuries before the word “sport” came to acquire its present meaning of serious physical exercise, it was used in the sense of “joke,” “amusement,” or “game.” Be that as it may, hunting, whether carried out by animals or by humans, differs from war in that it is an interspecies activity and not an intraspecies one. One sometimes comes across “manhunts,” as well as attempts to institute games in which some people are tasked with running away and others with tracking them and hunting them down. However, the former are not games, whereas most of the latter seem to fizzle out almost as soon as they are started. Both involve a chase, not strategy. Hence hunting, though useful for purposes of comparison, will not be further considered in these pages.

  As is the case with human games, those played by animals may be divided into different kinds. In many of them there is no sentient opponent capable of putting up resistance, and therefore no strategy as defined in the introduction to the present volume. For example, ravens and otters sometimes engage in sliding games. Squirrels seem to like to manipulate pine cones, dogs to chase objects, shake them, and tug at them. My late poodle, Poonch, even developed a whole series of signals to show me, whenever we arrived at a certain spot during a walk, that he wanted me to throw objects so he could retrieve them. First he would start breathing hard. If that did not work, he would rub my leg; if I still did not get the idea he would emit a special high-pitched bark he used exclusively for that purpose. Monkeys and apes regularly seize branches and swing on them even when there is no obvious need for doing so. In these and a great many other activities the objective seems to be not “usefulness” but plain fun. Some of the games in question are extremely demanding in terms of the skills they require. Still they cannot be classified as wargames and will not be considered here.

  Many kinds of animals also engage in fighting between individuals. To repeat, what distinguishes serious fighting from play, or games, is the presence in the latter of certain restrictions that may take the form either of pretense or of rules. To start with the former, distinguishing between the “real” thing and make-believe demands a considerable amount of intelligence. Before play can get under way, one of the parties must send out some kind of signal, such as a bow (dogs) or jerky head and body movements accompanied by a raised tail (cattle).7 The other must understand what it is all about, and of course signal its consent by using similar means. To bring the game to an end it is necessary to send out another signal; some psychologists speak of different “degrees of intentionality.”8 Hence it comes as no surprise that all observable animal “wargames” seem to occur among vertebrates, and specifically mammals. When Darwin accepted the claim of another biologist that he had seen ants clashing and pret
ending to bite each other “like so many puppies,” he was almost certainly wrong.9

  In particular, such games are something practically all carnivores and primates engage in as a matter of routine, especially but by no means exclusively when they are young. Generally the longer the period of youth, i.e. the larger the percentage of their entire life that members of a given species have to go through before reaching sexual maturity, the more they engage in play, agonistic play included: an hour a day spent in this way is by no means unusual.10 One must, however, keep in mind that deliberately formulating a set of rules that will govern some future activity, let alone maneuvering among the rules so as to use them in one’s favor while putting one’s opponent at a disadvantage, is even more intellectually demanding than putting on an act. This explains why, even among our nearest relatives the primates, there seems to be no question of formal rules similar to those that govern the higher forms of human play.

  Depending on the species, the “fighting” may take many forms. Normally the first stage consists of maneuvering for position, which can easily be observed in dogs and some species of monkeys, and assuming offensive or defensive postures. This is followed by various kinds of wrestling. Some animals also push and butt and ram and horn one another. Other species engage in scratching and biting which, if done in earnest, can result in very serious injuries indeed. In the animal world as a whole, biting is by far the most common form of inflicting injury. When done in play rather than in earnest, it is replaced by mouthing which either causes no wounds or very minor ones. Close observation shows that two mechanisms are at work. First, the biting animal, when closing its jaws on the opponent, will not apply the full force of which it is capable. Second, the bite, while applied with full force, may be directed against body parts that are relatively invulnerable. The first pattern is common among dogs and bears, the second in jackals. The latter seem to obey the maxim, “thou shalt not bite thy playmate’s ear.”11 Incidentally, dogs that play with humans soon learn which parts of the body are protected by clothing and can therefore be bitten with greater force.