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Stardate
20020824.1452 (Captain's log): Louis writes:
Months ago, you were writing about wargaming and mentioned that the Japanese put sunken ships back into play, and ignored the results of a wargame in which Japanese Nationals, who had been living in America (in diplomatic posts, as I recall) were playing a wargame as the US side, and played aggressively, sweeping across the Pacific.
Well, I just heard that the US Navy has allegedly done something similar.
According to a senior officer of the OpFor in an exercise, a large wargame was manipulated, potentially to justify a new method of war that it was meant to test.
I'm not really too worried about this report. Most of this is based on disgruntled comments from the commander of the Red force, but the analogy to the Japanese situation is not really valid because I think the goals of these exercises was entirely different.
There were two cases where the Japanese fudged their wargames. One was as part of the planning process for the battle of Midway, where in the early stages of the battle the "Americans" sank two Japanese carriers and the referee (Admiral Ugaki, it turns out) put them back into play for the second phase of the simulation. But that was a small high-level wargame only involving the top officers, extending over a couple of days, and in fact the goal of those kinds of wargames wasn't quite what many people think. It was one of those strangely-Japanese things where everyone gets together to bless a consensus decision, rather than a true attempt to determine if it sucked. The goal wasn't to see what would happen, it was for the Japanese to win the wargame as an affirmation of the wisdom of everyone involved agreeing to the plan.
So the Japanese did win the wargame, as they were supposed to, but they didn't win the battle.
The other case was after repatriation of stranded diplomatic personnel on both sides. Japanese military attaches from Japan's Washington embassy came back home and had a lot of knowledge of the US (in part, because they'd had full access to American newspapers while being confined to a resort in West Virginia) but little direct knowledge of the state of the war. They were formed into an "American" team for a longer term simulation of grand strategy to try to plot the course of the war, and even though the rules were set to unrealistically favor Japan (with decreased American production, for instance) the "Americans" managed to turn the war around and begin the process of rolling up all the Japanese acquisitions. About the time that the "Americans" invaded the Philippines, the entire thing was terminated. In this case they truly were attempting to use the process as a way of predicting the course of the war, and they probably blew it when they ignored the result.
But I don't think that the point of the wargame that the US military just held (it wasn't just the Navy) was actually to discover anything about strategy and tactics. This was, rather, a training exercise for our command structure.
The Red Force commander's complaints that some of his brilliant moves were disallowed by the judges may have actually been based on a decision by the judges that such actions were not really possible for our enemies. (It's easy to move counters around on a table; moving actual ships and troops is harder.) But even if the judges actually did override legitimate military brilliance on his part, it probably doesn't matter.
I think the purpose of this exercise was to give our officers some experience working under pressure, since the commands in question tried to treat the process of playing in the wargame as if it were a real war. And whether the scenario was realistic or not, I'm sure it accomplished that.
Given that the "Red Force" was a mythical nation anyway, it doesn't really seem as if the purpose was to try to learn anything realistic. It's true that the mythical nation bore a suspiciously strong resemblance to Iraq, but that's completely reasonable under the circumstances.
The exercise did let everyone practice the skills they'd need to control a real war when it comes. I think that's really all it was intended to do, and I think that was valuable. It isn't actually possible to predict the course of this or any other war, this way or any other way. There are just too many variables.
But it was valuable to let the "Blue Team" practice some of the kinds of operations that they might be called on to command in reality, which is why letting our fleet be sunk in the Gulf was not useful. (It's also, despite his bitching, highly unlikely in reality) They needed practice in commanding an amphibious landing, so such an event was included as part of the scenario. It's probably true that to some extent the overall course of the simulation was prescripted, and if you look at it as a training exercise instead of a means of analysis, that makes a lot of sense.
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