Kriegsspiel in the news -- 6 July 1878

[henridecat]

Discussion copied from Yahoo group
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The quick version is... follow this link:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9905E4DE143EE63BBC4E53DFB1668383669FDE

The long version is....

I get an RSS feed from Play This Thing!, which notes some
unusual/offbeat game every day, and, once a week, pays attention to
boardgames. On Tuesday, the game of interest was H. G. Wells' Little
Wars (http://playthisthing.com/little-wars). So I posted back to the
author about the impending release of Kriegsspiel
(http://playthisthing.com/von-reisswitz-kriegsspiel) -- and a person
signed in as "Shade_Jon" posted the link to the article above,
titled....

"The German Game of War: Maps and Military Movements. The War Game of
"Kriegspiel" -- How foreign military students are instructed in
offensive and defensive tactics"

You may need a free registration to view it. A piece of infowar from
my father: use "maryleeds" for both fields of the login.


James Sterrett
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Thanks for the links James.

I was interested in the author's description of Kriegsspiel and the European autumn manoeuvres, where numbers are assumed to prevail. Is this a reference to the move away from the earlier use of dice to 'free kriegsspiel', where the expert umpire decided the outcomes of individual combats?

He certainly makes a good point about the exclusion of morale & discipline from the game (which you could argue that use of dice somehow represents). Maybe these factors appeared more important to an American with recent experience of the raw ACW armies, than to European military minds with large military establishments and long-standing training programs?

Martin James
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> I was interested in the author's description of Kriegsspiel and the European
autumn manoeuvres, where numbers are assumed to prevail. Is this a reference to
the move away from the earlier use of dice to 'free kriegsspiel', where the
expert umpire decided the outcomes of individual combats?

I saw it as being part of the same system that uses dice, but I agree
it isn't clear.

> He certainly makes a good point about the exclusion of morale & discipline
from the game (which you could argue that use of dice somehow represents).
Maybe these factors appeared more important to an American with recent
experience of the raw ACW armies, than to European military minds with large
military establishments and long-standing training programs?

Heck, these things are *still* generally excluded from most military
simulations.

Soft factors are generally declared impossible to model. We all know
that isn't really true -- but you rapidly get into incredible slugouts
when you're required to model soft factors and prove the model is
Correct.

We use Decisive Action (Decisive Point/HPS Sims) for the division
exercises at CGSC, and about once a year, the *unthinkable* happens...
a US battalion surrenders! (Which, we are sometimes assured, *never*
happens in real life.) When we look at the situation in the exercise,
we inevitably find that this battalion has been fighting unsupported
against insane odds - and usually cut off - for a lengthy period of
time. But asking why a unit in that position *wouldn't* disintegrate
doesn't always get very far.

--
James Sterrett
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James -
The US Navy has a similar problem at the Naval War College with aircraft carriers. When I attended the Command and General Staff College course we participated in several war games using their computer supported gaming system. It was amazing to learn that the Soviet Carrier "Leonid Brezhnev" could take hits from more than 15 cruise missiles and still conduct normal flight operations. Then we remembered who ran the computers.

Robert A. Mosher
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