Plenty of good reading for wargame practitioners in the past few weeks.
Guardian News and Media. (2023a, September 30). What would happen if Russia invaded Finland? I went to a giant war game in London to find out. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/30/what-would-happen-if-russia-invaded-finland-i-went-to-a-giant-war-game-in-london-to-find-out
“War-gaming is about preparing for the future,” Catherine says. “How do you make the best of a bad set of options? How do you navigate a space that isn’t black and white, where the view of the decision-maker is blurred?” Catherine has worked in fields related to war-gaming for some time and, along with Banks, she helped me understand some of its history.
As much as I want to enjoy this article, the comments of Wizard of Armageddon brings me back to reality:
Wargaming Waterloo by Charles J. Esdaile, PhD, DOI: 10.56686/9798986259444
Wargaming—the simulation of complex war situations—is becoming increasingly more relevant to political and military discourse as U.S. armed forces lean more heavily on it as a training tool to hone warfighters’ decision-making skills and to shape defense plans and policies. And while wargaming can be useful for informing predictions of future military conflicts, it is also an excellent tool for understanding past conflicts.
Wargaming Waterloo explores three key aspects of wargaming as a practice by focusing on the iconic battle that led to Napoléon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815. A longtime subject of both fascination and controversy, the Battle of Waterloo presents particular problems as a board, map, or tabletop wargame and also poses a serious research question: just how good a chance did Napoléon have at victory when he confronted the duke of Wellington at Mont Saint-Jean and how would the strategic situation have to be different to enable Napoléon to prevail?
Wargaming Waterloo
We all talk about how the public perceives wargames, but this passage is by far the best I have seen in a long time:
Despite applying long in advance, the Guinness World Records organization would not consider the forthcoming game for the title of largest historical tabletop wargame ever played. The category did not exist, so there were no previous records to break, but it seemed clear to us that this was establishing a new record. Even after an appeal, the decision was still no, as it was for a second submission for the largest-ever printed battle map. It was disappointing that the Guinness Book of World Records was happy to recognize the most baked beans eaten in five minutes with a cocktail stick but not willing to accommodate the concept of a huge wargame, played for charity no less. Whether this says something about public perceptions of wargaming is uncertain, but it would have been nice to be recognized.
Wargaming Waterloo, p. xvi
Kirschenbaum, M. (2023). Granular worlds: Situating the sand table in media history. Critical Inquiry, 50(1), 137–163. https://doi.org/10.1086/726299 (via PAXSIMS)
A sand table is an intentional structure that is an early, indeed ancient, interactive platform for visualization and simulation. An intellectual furnishing that is also a tangible instance of speculative infrastructure, the sand table offers a tactile space for the rehearsal of tactics, staccato words whose roots lie in haptics and arrangement. While common in military settings, sand tables have also been used to teach the blind, train wilderness firefighters, conduct therapy for trauma victims, illustrate stories to children, and play imaginative games. Today there is a direct line from this seemingly modest technology—an implementation of what has been called elemental media—to augmented reality and other tangible interfaces. Part media history, part media archaeology, this article argues that sand tables belong to the lineage of platforms for speculative thinking and world-building that culminated in the rise of the digital computer amid a Cold War complex of scenario-driven futurology (whose centerpiece was the so-called situation room). It also suggests that sand, in its literal granularity—the physical affordances of the minute particulars of its particulate matter—offers an alternative to the binary regimen of ones and zeros that is the extractive product of the refined silica out of which semiconductors are still made.
At the risk of spoiling the whole article for you (a very interesting read) I want to quote at length the last few paragraphs which shows the power of a sand table:
But the Cold War was never just a bipolar drama of nuclear annihilation. It was a war fought by proxy: espionage and economics but also asymmetrical military actions variously called small wars, brushfire wars, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and perhaps most aptly, dirty wars. Put another way, in the real world (as opposed to the simulations in WarGames) vectors and binary strings inevitably gave way to the grain of the local, to tribological stresses and fractures that were beyond the capacity of computers to model. (From a modeling and simulation standpoint, the physics of sand remained largely uncomputable until well into the 1980s—just as asymmetrical warfare had long been regarded as “ungameable” by the military establishment, owing to its myriad human factors.) Here then is an alternate scene that could have and maybe should have come out of Kittler’s media history but didn’t: Lyndon Johnson in the White House situation room in early 1968, presiding over an episode from just such a proxy war.
He is studying a sand table model depicting—in something very close to real time—the state of operations at Khe Sanh, where an outpost of marines has been surrounded by some forty thousand North Vietnamese regulars (fig. 8). Johnson was obsessed with Khe Sanh, fearing the potential for a repeat of the defeat at Dien Bien Phu a decade and a half earlier that had ended France’s colonial occupation. As the battle—really more of a siege—unfolded over a critical two-and-a-half-month period, an Army historian was tasked with keeping Johnson and his staff up to date. The White House sand table— a mirror image of an even larger one said to be on the ground in Saigon— was the centerpiece of these briefings, used to plot moves and countermoves. “I projected their timetable and predicted their attack to the day—a week or ten days before it happened,” military-affairs journalist Thomas B. Allen claims the Army historian subsequently told him.
The outpost at Khe Sanh held (albeit with heavy casualties on both sides) and was successfully evacuated later in the year. A second Dien Bien Phu was forestalled. But in the official White House photograph of the briefings, one can view the material presence of the sand table in the situation room as a kind of index of the extremity of Johnson’s fixation, even as it captures the simultaneous power and impotence of the American position in Vietnam—this exacting reconstruction of a remote countryside erected in the halls of power, enclosed in a box, overlain with a grid, the president and his men towering and glowering above.
The obvious correlate is to the famous Pete Souza photograph of Barack Obama and his advisors watching the Osama Bin Laden raid from a small room in the White House basement. With the exception of the military commander overseeing the mission (who remains focused on his laptop) the attention of the dozen or so figures in the photograph is singularly directed at what is clearly a large screen just out of the shot. The principals are all seated as opposed to standing, arms and hands in passive positions crossed or folded in front of them (all save Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose hand covers her mouth). Note, by contrast, the upright bodies in the Johnson photograph: one in the group (it looks like National Security Advisor Walt Rostow) with his finger outstretched, almost but not quite to touch, like a god; another resting his fingertips on the very edge of the table; and Johnson himself, leaning in, hands braced, gaze almost straight down. He seems to be scrying. Surely there is an angle here, a posture. Surely the situation can be determined.
Granular Worlds, 162-163
Feature image courtesy tabletopgaming.co.uk
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