Andrew Wilson - The Bomb and the Computer: The History of Professional Wargaming 1780- 1968

Andrew Wilsons

T he Bomb and the Computer

The History of Professional Wargaming 1780- 1968

Edited by John Curry

This book was first published as The Bomb and the Computer in 1968 and then reprinted as War Gaming in 1970.

The r ights of John Curry and Andew Wilson to be identified as Authors of this Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of authors.

Books edited by John Curry as part of the History of Wargaming Project include:

Peter Perla's Art of Wargaming book, A guide for professionals and hobbyists

Thomas Allen's War Games professional wargaming 1945-1985

Innovations in Wargaming Vol 1, Developments in hobby and professional wargames

Army Wargames: Staff College Exercises 1870-1980.

Contact! The Restricted Canadian Army Tactical Wargame (1980)

Dunn Kempf: the Tactical Wargame of the American Army (1977-1997)

The British Army War Game (1956)

The British Army Desert War Game (1978) MOD Wargaming Rules

The Wargaming Pioneers Including Little Wars by H.G. Wells, The War Game for Boy Scouts and The War Game by Captain Sachs

1898-1940 Early Wargames Vol. 1

The British Kriegsspiel (1872) Including RUSI's Polemos (1888) Early Wargames Volume 2

More Wargaming Pioneers Ancient and World War II Battle and Skirmish Rules by Tony Bath, Lionel Tarr and Michael Korns Early Wargames Vol. 4

See The History of Wargaming Project at www.wargaming.co for other publications.

Cover photograph, by Tim Price, of the entrance corridor of a UK government bunker somewhere underground.

Table of Contents

Andrew Wilsons 1968 book was probably the first to bring together in a systematic way a comprehensible account of the strategic wargames that were played in the dark corridors of offices of the war planners around the world. In the days of the Cold War, the world was on the brink of World War III. Wargames were being played to refine warfighting plans, but also to help develop political strategies to avoid getting into an Armageddon-type confrontation. These strategists had written about their work, but usually in obscure journals in language only suitable for others of their craft to comprehend.

Wilsons book started with a description of the early kriegsspiel game played by the Germans as a tactical training tool. It then showed how wargames became broadly accepted as a military planning tool during the 19 th century. It should be remembered that, in 1968, Wilson was probably unaware of the wargaming movement that was being galvanised by the writing of Donald Featherstone and others. Wilson argued that wargames can be invaluable planning tools depending on the game mechanics and the nature of the assumptions made to produce the rules.

Wilson then moved onto how operations research influenced the senior commanders in World War II, paving the way for greater use of games in the new Cold War of the 1950s onwards. The book describes how the drive to mathematically-based games sometimes produced games that were less effective than believed. His account of the political military games, such as those by the RAND corporation, was particularly interesting. Few accounts of these games have made their way into the public domain in an understandable format. Thomas Allens book War Games (also published by the History of Wargaming Project) covers some of the same ground, but not in such a detailed and analytical fashion.

The book also discussed the growing role of the new computer technology in supporting and even replacing manual wargames. It is interesting to note that at the time of reprinting this book, there is a resurgence of manual wargames for training and analysis. Modern armed forces are starting to use a blended mix of technology and manual wargaming methods to fulfil operational analysis and training needs. The new generation of manual based wargames with their maps, counters and combat tables would be familiar to anyone who had played SPI or Avalon Hill wargames of the 1970s onwards.

The work concludes on a personal note, with Andrew Wilson observing how the wargames had produced successful strategies for American forces on the battlefields of Vietnam. However, he noted that these wargames did not take account of the toll of civilian casualties, the slow destruction of the agricultural base of the country and the demoralisation in the South Vietnam capital of Saigon. His worlds were prophetic : America won on the battlefield, but lost the war due to a failure of morale. It was only later developments in wargames in the 1980s and 1990s that started to take greater account of these human factors.

This work is a useful addition to the History of Wargaming Project and it is hoped the modern reader finds this early work about those strategic wargames that could have led to Armageddon of interest.

John Curry

Editor of the History of Wargaming Project

About six months after the Cuban missile crisis (1962), the London Times carried a story from Washington which read:

FIGHTING WORLD NUCLEAR WAR BY COMPUTER

The Defence Department has just completed a war game on computers, which, according to reports, confirms the belief that the United States would prevail in total nuclear war...

The war game, known as Simulation of Total Atomic Global Exchange (STAGE), is said to have taken nearly three years to prepare and five months to play. Electronic symbols representing missiles, bombers, decoys, interceptions and the like were recorded on magnetic tape, and the game was played by feeding punch cards with instructions into the machines.

Altogether 160,000 instructions were given and the computers determined which strikes were successful and what losses suffered. The specific results are still being tabulated and will remain secret.

STAGE, The Times pointed out, was the second electronic game of its kind to be played. The first, completed three years before, had presumably been fought on the intelligence calculation, subsequently proved incorrect, that the Soviet Union had a preponderance of missiles. This had led to a rapid increase in the defence budget.

Anybody reading this must immediately have been struck by a number of questions. For example, how can a machine take account of fear, despair and other human factors which must play a role in anything so cataclysmic as a nuclear war? Who designs and operates such machines? How much reliance is placed on them by governments? Are they used to predict the outcome of other events, such as wars to pacify South-East Asia?

Such questions are the starting-point of this book. But computer games are only one of the methods by which todays military planners seek answers to their often unanswerable questions. Their use can be explained only by reference to other methods such as Operations Analysis, Systems Analysis and Game -Theory, to which they are complementary. Moreover, the quest for certainty in military planning is not new. In the eighteenth century attempts were made to reduce the craft of war to a study of geometry, and in the early nineteenth to a question of railway timetables. To see modern war games in perspective it is necessary to observe earlier games, and the disasters to which they occasionally led. Again, one cannot describe the military use of war games without touching on the use of similar games for academic research in international relations and social science, as well as in business and for economic studies. Finally, computer games are used not merely to seek answers about todays and tomorrows weapons systems, but also to generate scenarios about the possible shape of the world in general in ten, fifteen and twenty years time.