Wargames by Martin van Creveld

Author:Martin van Creveld [Creveld, Martin van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781107684423
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-04-03T22:00:00+00:00

The hilt of the knife

In all pre-1914 wargames, only military factors were simulated. This was as true of tribal mock warfare and of tournaments as of the most sophisticated games conducted by early twentieth-century general staffs. In some of the latter, the forces being simulated numbered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men. True, the underlying assumption was that a large part of the male population had been mobilized and was wearing uniform. All the more remarkable was the fact that those forces seemed to glide along like magic, so to speak. Obeying their masters, who drew up the schedules and issued the orders, they made their way on foot, by road, and by railroad. Taking geographical and topographical conditions into account they advanced, retreated, clashed, penetrated, outflanked and encircled one another, and “fired” at one another with such and such results. Naval wargames were similarly organized. To the extent that the underlying economic realities were ignored, once again we see the principle of Kishon’s grandson at work: the games gave a better impression of the way commanders thought about war than war itself did. At best, what they simulated were campaigns – without exception, brief ones lasting no more than a few weeks – rather than wars.

The experience of 1914–18 changed all that. The idea that economics mattered was hardly new – those in charge of royal and national treasuries had always known it, and it had been raised to the level of theory by Frederick Engels in 1878.101 Now the rise of “total war” compelled even the most conservative commanders, such as the Frenchman Ferdinand Foch and the German Erich Ludendorff, to admit that military operations were merely the knife that economics, forming the hilt, empowered.102 Not accidentally, the interwar period saw the opening in several countries of colleges and research institutes specifically charged with investigating and teaching the links between war and the economic infrastructure on which it rests, the best known of which was the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces. World War II, which in terms of the resources mobilized to wage it probably dwarfed all previous ones combined, provided an even stronger push in the same direction. If the war showed anything, it was that even the best army (the Wehrmacht) with the most brilliant operational commanders could not prevail against a crushing material superiority combined with the kind of political leadership needed to form and maintain a global coalition.103 Nor did the end of that conflict in August 1945 lead to a change of heart. By the late 1940s the idea that any future wars would be “total” had hardened into dogma − wrongly, as it turned out, for this was just the time when spreading nuclear weapons were making such conflicts between powerful states impossible.104

Helwig, Venturini, the two Reisswitzes, and many of their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century successors had all based their work on the belief that the conduct of war is rooted, at least in large part, in the laws of mathematics and physics.

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