Last summer the Pentagon played the largest war game in history. Using 13,000 troops and a vast array of both real and virtual hardware, the blue forces -- the goodies -- took on the red, a rogue state in the Middle East. No one was in any doubt about Red's actual identity.
The three-week game, named Millennium Challenge, was always expected to end in a US victory and that's just the way things turned out -- but not without some hugely embarrassing cheating along the way. Millennium Challenge was billed as free play -- anything goes -- and the commander of the red forces, a retired Vietnam veteran, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, took the Pentagon at its word.
Within the first few days of the exercise, Van Riper, using surprise tactics involving coded messages broadcast from mosques during the call to prayer rather than radio transmissions, had sunk most of the US fleet in the Gulf, effectively ending the US campaign. Whereupon the Pentagon cried foul, claiming that the red team, or rather Iraq, wouldn't have acted like that and promptly refloated the fleet and brought its troops back to life.
That wasn't all. Van Riper was also ordered to look the other way while the US made amphibious landings, and long before the end of the war game he had ceased to issue any instructions to his troops on the grounds that it was pointless.
Far from being free play, the game was heavily scripted to give the Blues an easy victory -- to warm up the army, and, more importantly, the American public, for the conflict that everyone knew was coming.
So who was fooling whom? Van Riper was concerned that come the real event, US troops would be on the wrong end of unproven tactics and would rapidly come unstuck, while the Pentagon claimed that the whole point of Millennium Challenge was that it was a learning exercise.
"You kill me on the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing," said General Peter Pace, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, "or you put me back to life and you get 13 days' more experiment out of me. Which is better?"
Serious
Hindsight leaves the case unproven. The US did secure a relatively straightforward victory, but who knows what might have happened if Van Riper had been commanding the Iraqi forces? Furthermore, within the timescale of the campaign, there was a great deal that didn't go to plan.
So is this a failure of the war game, or merely an acceptance that such exercises are always an inexact science and that, no matter how many variables you factor in, there will always be something you haven't thought of to go wrong?
For most people -- students in particular -- war gaming is a bit of fun albeit very serious fun, as no one plays to lose, ranging from online shoot 'em ups to highly detailed, modelled reconstructions.
But war gaming is a serious academic discipline, not least at the military academies, where a great deal more than mere pride is at stake.
Britain's own run-up to what was to be the second Gulf war was far lower profile than the Americans', apart from the discovery, on exercises in Oman in 2001, that its tanks and various other items of equipment couldn't cope with the sand. But it is unlikely that any of its war games would have been so heavily scripted as Millennium Challenge.
"Training is not the same as mission rehearsal," says a military spokesman for the defense research agency, Qinetiq. "During training simulations you are trying to encourage soldiers to be flexible -- not to narrow down their options. Besides which, if you script a scenario too closely, you find that people get terribly upset and confused when the same things that happened in the training don't happen in real life."
War gaming was a great deal simpler during the cold war. For one thing you knew your enemy and the terrain over which you were likely to be fighting. Back in the 1970s at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, they often played out games based on the death of Tito and the subsequent power vacuum in Yugoslavia.
"This scenario was seen as one of the most likely flashpoints for a third world war," says Duncan Anderson, director of war studies at Sandhurst, "with Russia and NATO vying to take control."
These days, of course, you can't line up your imaginary forces on either side of the Rhine and count the hardware. Where once your enemies might have looked to attack your strengths, they now go for your weaknesses: moreover you don't even necessarily know who your enemies are.
As Air Marshal Brian Burridge, commander of the British forces in the Gulf, said recently: "In the Cold War, you knew who the enemy was; you knew his kit; you knew his doctrine; you knew his training.
"All you had to do was to play the music, set down in notation and conducted from the front. Now there's a constantly moving kaleidoscope, and you have to improvise. War used to be like symphony music -- now it's like jazz."
They don't play so many war games at Sandhurst any more, and that's something that Anderson rather regrets.
"Now that officer basic training is just one year rather than two, we don't have the time to run some of the games we used to," he says, "though we do still try to include as much as we can."
It's not until an officer goes on the captain-to-major military analysis promotion course that many soldiers will get a proper feel of the proper two-day war game. Soldiers are divided into syndicates, placed in different rooms, provided with computers, communications and virtual troops and told to get on with it.
"The scenarios look very different these days," Anderson continues, "as you have to factor in a lot of extra variables, such as civilians, humanitarian aid and politicians getting wobbly."
And then there's the press.
"A colleague of mine always rather enjoyed playing a Sun reporter; at key points in the exercise, when something had gone wrong, he would be extremely confrontational and start asking questions about the sexual misconduct of the troops," Anderson said.
Variables
"We also have to take account of luck -- though I can't remember ever factoring in any good luck. Usually we'll do something such as arranging for a direct hit on the power supply, so that all the computers and communications go down. More often than not, we aren't looking to create a scenario where there are winners and losers.
"Rather, we are trying to find out at what stage people become irrational and start making mistakes. When people feel under pressure, they feel they have fewer and fewer options: our aim is to broaden their focus," he said.
Unlike US war games, the Brits are happy to allow for unconventionality. Anderson remembers one game where the whole Iraqi air force was taken out by infecting their food supply with E. coli.
"They were grounded in the latrines," he laughs, before going on to make the more serious point. "You have to war game extreme scenarios. I'm sure the military will have run an exercise on a nuclear device going off in London; it would be irresponsible not to," he said.
Predictably, too, war games have become more realistic as computer simulations allow for more graphic representations. Qinetiq has already teamed up with Maverick, a games software developer, to produce Dive -- Dismounted Infantry Virtual Environment, an adapted model of the bestselling first-person shooter, Half Life -- where soldiers play different missions against each other online.
"The men tried harder to survive than they often do in training," says Major Bruce Pennell, of the Royal Logistics Corps. "When using lasers or virtual reality training, soldiers can become reckless. Here they took it as seriously as a live operation."
There is even evidence that suppressive fire -- rattling off a few rounds to keep the enemy guessing -- is more accurately replicated online than in exercises. The armed forces are still some way off adapting strategy and role-playing games, such as Command and Conquer, to simulate whole campaigns from the command and control perspective. But they are creeping in to war gaming for the officer class, and some see it as only a matter of time.
War gaming -- or kriegspiel -- began in earnest back in the middle of the 19th century with the Prussian general Moltke the Elder, who would endlessly rehearse scenarios on a large table using model soldiers. But if you're looking for people who are faithful to this original concept, you have to look outside the military. At one extreme you have the re-enacters, but you don't necessarily have to like dressing up to get involved.
Many universities are part of an active war gaming circuit -- the doyen and sometimes champion of which is Rob Jones, the computing officer at the school of education at the University of Leicester, central England. He started playing as a kid and has never stopped, though he has developed an aversion to computer war games.
"I spend all day working in front of a screen," he groans. "The last thing I want to do when I get home is switch on another computer."
Old battles
This form of war gaming is highly regularized and very competitive.
"People tend to specialize in certain areas, such as the Romans or the American Civil War," he says. "Sometimes they refight old battles, and sometimes they fight imaginary `what if' conflicts. There is a fixed system of scoring, though it can depend on the competition. You sometimes get more points if your troops are nicely painted," he said.
Jones's own speciality is World War II, and his knowledge of the troops and material is as encyclopedic as many generals'. But he fully admits that even the most skilled tactician can never have too much luck.
"In our games, a roll of the dice can determine whether a shell pierces the armor," he said.
So when he replays old battles, does the same side always win?
"Of course not," he replies, shocked at the suggestion.
Something worth bearing in mind the next time a politician tells you victory is assured.
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