Stardate 20020805.1219

(Captain's log): Cecil, a retired Marine officer, writes about my use of the technical term "defeat in detail":

It is refreshing to see someone still knows what the phrase means. You'd be astonished how few even among military professionals use it correctly. (And I'm disgusted to admit when most young officers say: "we're going to defeat him in detail," they actually mean "we're going to smash his combat force so completely even the pieces will be broken.")

I notice from your bio the avid wargaming, which helps explain the expertise. I always believed I learned more about tactics from Squad Leader than the Basic School; and more about operations and strategy from SSI than Command and Staff. There was an initiative to promote wargaming among officers, but it devolved into "staff rides" and analyses of famous battles instead of letting guys make some mistakes with counters, and has since been abandoned. A pity.

I would never hope to claim that my experience with wargaming actually qualified me to lead men into battle. I would never be so presumptuous. But I think it gives me a much better understanding of the real problem associated with military operations, and the real limits imposed by practical reality, and how to use those limits to win. You can do that because those limits also apply to your opponent; if you can capitalize on his limits, you can defeat him.

The influence of the hobby of wargaming has been pointed out before. Glenn Reynolds co-wrote an article about it which was published in NRO last year, and that inspired me to write about my own experience with it.

During the time that I was wargaming heavily (about fifteen years, starting in about 1978) I played many different kinds of games in many different formats, placed in many different eras, some historical and some synthetic, some highly abstract and some very realistic, some even set in the future. I was an avid computer wargamer for a long time.

When you play a single era intensively (like my experience with Napoleonics) you grow to learn the details of that era very well. But when you play a lot of different games, you begin to see certain underlying factors which apply everywhere, under all circumstances.

Logistics is everything. You can't fight with what you don't have, and you can't fight with what you do have if it's in the wrong place. Logistics is the foundation on which everything else is built; strategy and tactics can only work with what logistics has delivered. While I was never much of a fan of Command and Conquer, one thing about it I heartily endorse: its emphasis on production as the key to victory. C&C is about logistics, not about maneuver and tactics. You win by building factories, not by building tanks. You defeat your enemy by destroying his factories, not by destroying his field army. His field army is simply a barrier between you and his factories, your real target. And you can't do any of this without money.

Interdiction is the most important tactic in war. Using your military capability to interfere with your enemy's ability to produce or acquire war matériel, or to move it where he needs it to threaten you, is easier and more effective than defeating it once it reaches its destination. Many wars have been won through interdiction. It's generally accepted that this was a key element in the defeat of Japan in WWII, and Germany very nearly defeated the UK this way. (Twice! in two World Wars.) The most important battle of World War II was the Battle of the Atlantic.

The more you know, the better off you are. "Fog of war" is a very real problem, and it can be the difference between defeat and victory. Computer games in general are better than any other kind of wargaming at handling this, and you soon learn in computer wargames that you have to scout; you have to keep track of what your potential opponents are doing.

Traditional military forces invested vast amounts of money on troop formations which were often nearly useless on the battlefield. The most notable example of this is the Confederate cavalry in the American Civil War. The Union cavalry was useful on the battlefield because of their high-tech weapons, but the only advantage that the Confederate cavalry brought to a battlefield was the ability to move more rapidly than infantry, and since it wasn't able to fight alone that turned out to be pretty minimal. Nonetheless, the Confederate cavalry was immensely valuable, though not on the battlefield. Its job was strategic, not tactical; it was Lee's primary intelligence arm. Its job was to find out what the Union was doing, and to prevent the Union from finding out what Lee was doing. (These are respectively referred to as "scouting" and "screening".)

As you study the progress of war over the centuries, you find progressively larger and larger investments in intelligence gathering and analysis in the nations which won. The United States today spends more on intelligence gathering than most nations spend on their entire militaries; the ways it is collected are fantastically diverse and include satellites, radio interception, UAVs, and many, many other means most of which they'd rather we didn't know about.

There's a difference between capabilities and intentions, and you need to know them both. Capabilities are what your enemy has the ability to do. Intentions are what he wants to do. They may not coincide. He may be capable of something that he doesn't want to do, and he may want to do something but not have the ability. And, of course, he may have the ability to do something and also want to do it.

If he has intentions without capability, he may try to develop the capability. A good example of that is Iraq's programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. On the other hand, someone may develop a capability without the intention to use it. While the US had the ability to return the USSR to the stone age for decades during the Cold War, I don't think anyone ever believed that the US actually wanted to do so, and of course we never did. In that case, the capability was developed for deterrence and not to support active operations.

The clear difference here is demonstrated by nerve gas. The US has had substantial stocks of nerve gas since the 1950's, but has never used it in combat. Iraq developed nerve gas probably some time in the late 1970's, and used it in combat several times in the 1980's, both against Iran and against the Kurds. American nerve gas is much more sophisticated than Iraqi nerve gas, but it's evident that Iraqi nerve gas is more dangerous because Iraq has demonstrated the willingness to use it.

In the wake of recent postings by me advocating an attack against Iraq because of its programs to develop WMDs, several have written to me to say that if I believe that then I must also believe that we should attack China, so why haven't I said so? The implication is that my advocacy of an attack against Iraq is inconsistent.

Actually, it isn't. Setting aside other issues (such as the fact that I don't believe we have the ability to conquer China) the big difference is intentions. China has much greater capability with respect to WMDs, but has shown no comparable intentions to use them. That difference in intentions is critical.

Still, it's something you have to keep your eye on, because intentions can change a lot faster than capabilities. If an enemy develops (or tries to develop) a new capability, you need to know why, to analyze his intentions to figure out what he may decide to do with it, and to consider reasons why his intentions might change.

(This, by the way, is one of the reasons that so many other nations are so afraid of the US. We have immense capability, and every two years we undergo a peaceful political revolution which can completely change governmental policy. There are few nations whose intentions are more fluid and less easy to predict than the US. It's hardly a wonder we make them nervous.)

Initiative matters. Initiative is the opposite of reaction; it's the ability to make independent decisions about what you're going to do next instead of being forced into doing something because of activity by your opponent. I learned this lesson most clearly from the game of Go.

Go is one of the games where there is no random element and no hidden information. Like Chess, both players begin with forces which are exactly equal, and at any time both players have exactly the same information about the state of the game (i.e. the board position).

In Go there's a concept called sente (pronounced SEN-tay); it actually appears in all games to some extent but for instance in Chess it changes hands so fluidly that it's difficult to recognize. In some games it's actually formalized, such as having the lead in Bridge, which gives you the ability to choose what suit the next trick will be played in.

In Go it is clear and obvious when you know the game, though it has no direct equivalent to the lead in Bridge. What it permits you to do is to decide where on the board action will take place. While the players alternate making moves, one will clearly be controlling the flow of events and the other will be reacting to that. The one controlling the situation is said to have sente and it is a truism in the game of Go that if you have sente for the majority of the game then you will win. One level on which the game is fought is to see if, when you are on the defensive, you can figure out how to manipulate events so as to wrest sente from your opponent. One of the biggest differences between a good player and a less experienced one is the ability to maintain control of sente.

In military operations it's referred to as initiative. It refers to your ability to operate, at any level from the grand strategic down to the level of individual soldiers, without being forced into what you're doing by the actions of your opponent.

There's an example of that going on right now in the war we're fighting. Iraq and other Arab nations are surreptitiously supporting the Palestinian uprising against Israel. They are hoping to convince the US that we cannot attack Iraq until the situation in Israel is stabilized, and they're doing their best to make sure that isn't possible. King Abdullah of Jordan actually said in so many words a few days ago that the US shouldn't even consider any other actions in the Mid-East until after settling the Palestinian issue.

Most people don't recognize this for what it truly is: an attempt to steal initiative from the US. By trying to frame the strategic issues in this way, they hope to distract us and prevent us from using our initiative to attack Iraq. If they get us to accept that the Palestinian situation must be settled first, then as long as they can keep that stirred up, they can prevent us from doing anything else. In Go, a "loss of sente" move is one where your opponent ignores you and moves somewhere else. This move by the Arabs is also one, because Bush doesn't seem to be falling for it. The now-famous Bush speech about reform for the Palestinians amounted to a statement that he wasn't going to let the US be paralyzed by reacting to the situation there, among its other implications.

A lot of people are trying to take our initiative away from us, and some of them are allies. Strident calls from Europe for "multilateralism" and "allied action" and "consultation" and "UN approval" amount to hoping that the US will accept a European (or world) veto over American initiative, so that we won't do anything unless they give us permission (which, presumably, they usually would not). Bush isn't falling for that, either.

Initiative can be abused, of course. The fact that you have it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily use it wisely. But all other things being equal, you'd like to keep as much initiative as you can.

There's never enough time or resources to do everything. You must always prioritize, and if you get this wrong, you'll lose. Fight the important fights first, leave those which can wait for later.

Though two players in Go have equal forces and equal information, they may be radically different in capability and the critical difference in their skill is the ability to evaluate and prioritize their moves. This can't be emphasized enough.

This is where your initiative either gets used or abused. If you prioritize badly, you waste your initiative.

No game teaches this lesson better than the computer version of BloodBowl, because in that game your turn ends when you issue an order to a man and he fails to carry it out. You learn very rapidly to order the most important moves first.

Wars are fought by men, not by weapons. Weapons are important, but the men who use them are more important, and their actual performance is never certain. Training and morale are the greatest asset of a modern military force.

Certainly it's true that a platoon from some half-assed modern country like Romania, armed with modern infantry weapons, could defeat a Roman Legion, but when the weaponry on the two sides is not totally imbalanced, the difference is the men.

Too many people think that in a real battle you can move units around on a map, and that they'll go where you say and do what you tell them and that victory or defeat is a matter of comparing statistics, or of maneuver like a chess game. Some war games can give that impression, but the better ones will include increasingly elaborate simulations of the effects of morale on the troops. In Napoleonics, individual units can rout away from combat, and you may or may not have the ability to rally them. When that happens, it can shake other units nearby and they may also rout. One time I had half my army of Prussians, one entire wing of the battle, collapse and rout in a single turn. (One problem with the Prussians was that their morale was a bit fragile; when it was good, they fought well, but when it was bad things got sticky really fast.)

I don't think any game simulates the effects of morale on a battlefield better than the Close Combat series of computer games, which actually model morale at the level of individual soldiers. When you give orders, a given soldier may obey the order correctly, obey it incorrectly, ignore it and be aggressive, or ignore it and flee. How you manage the battle and whether you can win it depends enormously on whether you can maintain your troops in good order.

War uses things up. When men are killed, they're gone forever. When a unit is destroyed, it doesn't come back the next day. A bullet fired can't be fired again. What you use up now, you won't get back, but if you don't take advantage of it you may as well not have it. You have to accept that it is impossible to fight without taking losses. You better be willing to do so, or you shouldn't be there. It's important to minimize losses, but winning is even more important and you can't win without losing some of your own.

If you don't delegate, you'll lose. You can't micromanage. Officers who try to do it all will overwhelm themselves. If you have good men, you can give them large assignments and rely on them to carry them out. Since there isn't enough of you to do everything, you've got to let someone else do some of it. And you've got to sleep sometime. (Which is part of why you have to have good men.)

The mark of a superb officer is when he doesn't issue any orders because he knows that doing so will harm more than help. Eisenhower didn't issue any orders at all on D-Day; he'd delegated everything, and the last order he gave, the day before, was to begin the attack.

All battle is chaos. Attempting to command in battle means trying to maintain order in that chaos, but you have to accept that you won't completely succeed. Not all orders will be carried out. Some will not be carried out the way you think. Things will go faster or slower than you think. Some of what you think you know about the situation will be wrong. Your enemy will always surprise you. Your scouts will report things which are not there, and miss things which are. Nothing is certain, everything is hazy. Nothing ever goes the way you expect, unless you are unreasonably lucky. When you go into an attack, or a battle, or a war you can never be certain what the result will be.

Which is why no plan for a battle survives first contact with the enemy. A battle plan is what you hope will happen, not what actually will happen. You must be flexible, and react to circumstances as they arise. That's the mark of a good officer corps, and good non-coms, and even good soldiers. The Normandy attack was a success because the American army was good at this. At Utah Beach, ocean currents caused the landing to take place at the wrong part of the beach, and all the planning which had taken place became obsolete. The ranking officer on the ground, Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, decided to chuck the plan and fight the war from where he was. (The alternative, which was seriously considered, was to reembark on the landing craft and move to the correct location.) The entire rest of the battle was ad-libbed.

At Omaha beach, the battle was chaos. There were far more and far better defenders than were expected. The pre-attack bombing and shelling had been completely useless, and the defenses were much stronger than expected. The plan completely broke down; the time table was shredded. Officers all over the beach were killed; the command structure broke down. But the attack succeeded anyway, and the biggest reason it did is because small groups of men began to self-organize and to judge the situation as they saw it, and deal with it. Leaders spontaneously appeared, something which happens in good armies. Privates said "Follow me!" and others, whose nominal ranks might have been higher, did. Individual attacks eventually opened up exits, and eventually the German resistance was silenced, albeit at a horrifyingly high price.

One of the reasons why truly realistic military exercises are so valuable (such as at the American National Training Center at Fort Irwin) is that the first contact troops and officers have with the true chaos of war is a major shock. Part of the process of becoming what is usually referred to as "seasoned troops" has to do with becoming used to this (as much as anyone can). The NTC helps to give troops this understanding of the chaos of war.

And so do a lot of wargames. This is another place where Command and Conquer excels, for instance, but to some extent any real-time wargame will simulate this.

This isn't just a local phenomenon of individual battles. Improvisation plays a key part in wars. During the Afghan operation last year, after Mazar-e Sharif fell and the Taliban pulled back to Kabul, it had originally been expected that the offensive would end there and that the war would go static for a few months with the offensive beginning again after winter was over.

But the men on the ground reported that they thought that the situation was fluid, and that if we and the Northern alliance kept pushing that the Taliban might well collapse completely. A decision was made on the spot to try it, and as we all know the result was a spectacular success. Much credit goes to General Franks and his staff for their willingness to improvise and take advantage of the situation.

One of the interesting things about a lot of these principles is that when they happen some people not truly versed in the art of war will assume that they indicate failure. When a plan breaks down and the officers start to improvise, when things don't go the way they are expected to, when someone cannot say ahead of a battle exactly how it will come out, then they portray this as a failure of the command structure, and perhaps as an argument against fighting the war at all. For instance, one argument voiced by many about the prospect of our attacking Iraq is that by so doing we may throw the whole region into chaos.

Well, yes. We might. But while that's a factor to be taken into account, it isn't necessarily a fatal objection. When I'm playing Go against a player who is substantially inferior to me, who plays with a handicap, sometimes when I see a situation I don't like what I'll do is to make a series of moves which make the situation fantastically complicated even if I can't see where it will end up. What I'm relying on is the fact that as it develops I'll be able to use my superior understanding of the game and ability to analyze it to see my way through the situation before my less experienced opponent, and will have the situation in hand before he even realizes what I'm doing.

To some extent this happens in every war. No-one can ever predict at the beginning of the war the timetable for victory, or even where all the battles will take place. The Allies didn't decide on an attack on Sicily (nor where on Sicily) in WWII until after the combat in North Africa was largely finished. It wasn't the only possible choice, by any means. For instance, an attack on Sardinia might have provided well-placed airfields for heavy bombers which would have given them the ability to reach all of Italy and France and even southern Germany.

War is inherently chaotic, but you can use that against your enemy if you're better at it than he is.

Returning to my letter from Cecil, I think there's grounds for hope. While formal use of wargames as a training aid in the military may not have succeeded, I'm willing to bet that those kinds of computer games are immensely popular among the young men who make up our armed forces at all levels. How many of the midshipmen at the Naval Academy do you think have played at least one computer wargame? I bet it approaches 90%.

Which means that they may have absorbed a lot of these concepts from that experience without even realizing it. While they may not, for instance, use the term "defeat in detail" correctly, I'm willing to bet that most of them know the true concept without even realizing it, because you can't win a lot of those games without defeating your enemies in detail.

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