Winning a Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War by Norman Friedman & Naval History & Heritage Command

Author:Norman Friedman & Naval History & Heritage Command [Friedman, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2019-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

7. Conclusion: Games Versus Reality in the Pacific

G

aming had at least three possible functions. One was to explore possible wartime situations in ways full-scale exercises could not. Military judgment based on experience could often foresee outcomes, but not when entirely new technology was involved. This was the laboratory function performed by the Naval War College. The one entirely new technology of the inter-war period was naval aviation. Gaming provided the U.S. Navy with an invaluable sense of how that technology would affect war not only on the tactical, but also on the operational and strategic levels. For students at the college, the games offered a glimpse of what a future naval war would be like. No full-scale exercise could have done the same.

A second function was to teach students how to fight. The Naval War College emphasized its careful rational way of deciding what to do. Not long ago, the Naval War College placed Admiral Nimitz’s “Gray Book” (in effect, his command diary of the Pacific War) online. The “Gray Book” can be considered an extended exercise in the “Estimate of the Situation,” the decision-making basis that the college taught Admiral Nimitz when he was a student.

In January 1942, a British officer criticized American naval officers for tending to estimate the odds before making decisions.1 In effect, he was comparing what Newport taught with what his own Tactical School taught. The lesson the British derived from their World War I experience was that they should have shown far more aggressiveness and initiative. It can be argued that this was an illusory lesson; the massive World War I Grand Fleet was like an army, in which excessive initiative could have had devastating consequences. In any case, the Royal Navy’s tactical school awarded points for aggressiveness, even when the decisions taken proved unfortunate.2 In effect, that was a judgment on Britain’s enemies, that they could be bluffed because they were not nearly as professional as the Royal Navy. That judgment proved quite correct when the Royal Navy fought the Germans and the Italians. The U.S. Naval War College based its course on the idea that the enemy would be as professional as its own students. The students had to be taught to out-think a fully witting enemy. In comparing the U.S. and British approaches to gaming and to decision making, it would be interesting to ask whether the British approach would have been as successful against the Japanese.

Perhaps the greatest gap in Naval War College simulations of combat was the tempo of an actual battle. The complexity of the rules made it impossible for move to follow move fast enough to give students a sense of the confusion generated in an actual battle. There certainly was an attempt to simulate the “fog of war,” but instructors pointed out again and again that in games students had far more time to make decisions than they would have in reality. In theory, full-scale exercises would have filled some of this gap, but in reality they proved insufficient.

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