Strategic war game of 190510/31/2022
In the post war period, officers would game out huge engagements using miniature fleets on the floor of a facility at the college known as Pringle Hall. In the 1880s, the American Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island began using tabletop miniatures to game out historic and hypothetical sea battles in classrooms. It wasn’t just 19 th century armies that were experimenting with war games. In fact, many would credit the fascination with Kriegsspiel among Prussian officers as a contributing factor to that country’s stunning and lighting-fast victory over France the 1870 war. “This is training for war!” Soon, the up-and-coming generation of officers throughout the Prussian army were playing Kriegsspiel in both lecture halls and mess halls and an as a result, continually honing their battle-winning skills. “This is not a game,” declared an enthusiastic chief of staff. He was so excited by it he had the designer demonstrate Kriegsspiel for the Prussian military leadership. Reisswitz showed the game to the Prussian prince Wilhelm (the future German Kaiser). The game could even be modified to recreate historic battles offering players a much more vivid understanding of tactics than those who simply studied maps and written accounts. Other variants of Kriegsspiel could be played on a paper map. These tiles could be re-arranged by players at the start of a game to simulate different landscapes. The board itself included terrain features like forests, rivers and mountains that were painted on large square wooden tiles. Players would move and fight using a turn-based system – each turn represented two minutes of time. Combat was resolved using dice, which coupled with each unit’s respective combat strength, would insert a random element of chance into the simulation. These counters were printed with unit designations and information denoting combat strength and mobility. Units and regiments, which were represented by long, thin wooden or metal blocks, were coloured red for one side and blue for the other. The revised game, which was named Kriegsspiel (or War Game, in English) added more layers of complexity to the game, the rules of which would be familiar to anyone who has ever played a tabletop war game. The original allowed players to battle each other on a tabletop board that depicted a natural landscape using infantry, cavalry and artillery. Then in 1824, a young Prussian artillery officer by the name of Georg von Reisswitz upgraded a war game designed by his father in the 1780s to entertain the Duke of Brunswick. When chess was introduced to Europe in the 16 th and 17 th Centuries, the game took the public by storm. įor centuries, these games, which saw players do battle with armies of ornate carved polished miniatures, were played by the privileged largely for amusement. Some of the earliest war games were the original Indian version of chess, known as Chaturanga as well as the ancient Chinese strategy game Go. #STRATEGIC WAR GAME OF 1905 PROFESSIONAL#While planning out one of the largest military operations in a generation using a tabletop board game conjures up all sorts of unlikely images of generals rolling dice and marching toy soldiers around a map, professional strategists have been doing just that very thing for nearly 200 years. And by day’s end, Herman and a group of senior officers had already successfully played out a shorthand version of what in five months would go down in history as Operation Desert Storm. By mid afternoon, he was on the military’s payroll. According to a 1994 Military History article on war games by Peter Perla, before lunch on the day of the invasion, the Pentagon had the game’s designer, Mark Herman, on the phone. #STRATEGIC WAR GAME OF 1905 SERIES#Designed in the late 1980s by a subsidiary of the commercial war game company Avalon Hill, Gulf Strike allowed civilian hobbyists to battle through a series of hypothetical wars involving the U.S., Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran on a hexagonal-grid map of the Gulf region. Out of desperation, someone in the American military nerve-centre reached for a copy of a hobby store military board game entitled Gulf Strike. But on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks surprised the world and rolled into the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, decision makers in the Pentagon had virtually no plans on the shelf for the defeating the world’s fourth largest army. #STRATEGIC WAR GAME OF 1905 FULL#The Pentagon actually used an earlier edition of this same civilian game to plan Desert Storm.īY THE END of the Cold War, American military planners had contingencies and plans for just about every conceivable crisis – Latin American counterinsurgencies, confrontations on the Korean Peninsula, a full out Warsaw Pact onslaught against NATO. A post-Gulf War copy of the game Gulf Strike.
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