Why War Games Do Not Work

0:00Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'd like to start by apologising for being late. Actually, the whole way from Atlanta to Auburn, I was trying to think of some kind of joke I could tell about this. I couldn't think of one. So, I apologise again. The flight was okay. It was just the van that did not show up. My subject for today is supposed to be why war games don't work. Well, I have a surprise for you. They do. They do work.

0:49War games do work. The question is not why don't war games work. The question is, why didn't those that the Pentagon played in preparation of the great and mighty war against Iraq work? And those are two completely different questions. Now, I don't have to tell you that any attempt to forecast the future is very, very problematic and very difficult.

1:34We really don't have a good way to handle the future. Suppose we do want to know what happens to the stock market tomorrow. Suppose we want to know where our country is going tomorrow. What possibilities do we have for looking into the future? Yes, we can use historical analogies. We can look back and say, in Roman times the situation was such-and-such, and therefore taking all kinds of things into account, then tomorrow things are going to work out in such-and-such a way again.

2:28Or we can use trends. We can say, a year ago, or two years ago, or ten years ago, or fifty years ago, we were at points such and such. And since then, things have been moving in such and such a direction. and therefore assuming that the trend persists, after tomorrow we can expect to be at such and such a point. Or we can use the so-called Delphi method, which in essence means that we are going to Ask various experts, sir, madame, can you please tell us what is going to happen tomorrow?

3:23I don't have to tell you that none of these methods is very reliable. Analogies are always problematic because circumstances are never the same. Trends have an unfortunate habit of coming to an end just when you need them most. And there's even a little limerick about that. A trend is a trend is a trend. The question is, will it bend or be pushed off course by an unforeseen force and come to a premature end?

4:10And finally, Delphi, you know, Delphi sounds good but is really very problematic because out of 50 experts, maybe one is going to get it right and you never know which one. That reminds me of a former minister of finance that we used to have in Israel and about him it used to be said that he was normal twice a week but you never knew, two days a week but you never knew which days. Ladies and gentlemen, forecasting the future is always very, very problematic and we all know that.

5:02And if we only found a reliable way to do that, all of us here would presumably be millionaires long ago. War games are one method of doing this, or of trying to do this, and a method which has its advantages. In fact, war games have one advantage that no other method has. They allow you to do something no other means does. They allow you to play both sides of an issue.

5:56War, ladies and gentlemen, by definition, is a two-sided activity. Any war has two sides, two parties that interact with each other, that try to achieve their goes well at the same time preventing the other side from achieving his goals. Where you only have one side, you do not have war. You may have a massacre but you do not have war.

6:41War, by definition, involves two sides. And here already you can see why war is so much like a game. Because most games also have two sides. From that point of view, it does not really matter which kind of game you are talking about. Whether it is football, or basketball, or chess, or many other kinds of board games, By definition, they must have at least two sides, and usually most games, as we all know, do have two sides.

7:44So, from this point of view, there is a strong affinity between war and games. I could even argue that war is simply a game in which anything is permitted. And if you look back at the etymology of the word itself, war and the way it is called in various languages, including my own. I'm Dutch originally. The Dutch way for a word, sorry, for a word is oorlog, which means the original game, or the great game. The great game, as some of you may know, was also the name that the British in India a hundred or War has this in common with games that it has two sides.

9:04Force, war and games involve strategy, which means that you are playing or fighting against an opponent who, like yourself, is to a large extent free to do or not to do what he wants in his attempt to achieve his goals and prevent you from achieving yours. So, both wars and games involve studying the opponent in order to understand his mind.

9:52Both wars and games involve studying his capability to see not only what he wants to do, but what he can do. Both wars and games will involve such things as planning how to use your own strengths and exploit the other guy's weakness, and so on and so on and so on. I could go on and explain the affinities between war and games, and the beautiful thing about it is, again, that in many ways it does not really matter which kind of games we are talking about.

10:43You can certainly talk about the strategy of, let us say, a basketball game or a football game. And you can equally well talk about strategy in a war. And in both cases it will be very much a question of trying to understand the other side, advantages and disadvantages, strong points and weak points, combine them with their own and lock them together in such a way as to make the outcome work in your favor. So to return to my original point, I am not saying that war games are perfect, I am saying that in some ways war games are the best way we have as humans to study that great unknown which is called the future, and that this is particularly true in the case of war, precisely only because of the affinity between war and games, and that affinity consists essentially of the fact that both wars and war and games are two-sided activities.

12:25And so, if you look back into history, you will find that war games have always been used for planning, modeling, training, forecasting war. But indeed, in many ways, they have been the most used method for doing all this. Beginning, ladies and gentlemen, at least as early as the 10th century BC, when, I'm sure Let the boys stand up and play in front of us.

13:31The play involving twelve of the servants of King David and twelve of the servants of The House of Saul who fought each other to the death until they were all killed. So using games to model war, using games to understand war, using games in order to substitute for war in this case, goes back a very, very long time indeed. And one might even argue, perhaps because we don't know, that the origins of war and games is exactly the same.

14:22I could give you any number of cases in which war games did succeed, probably the best known are the hundreds and maybe thousands of war games that were played by the U.S. Navy at the Naval War College between 1920 and 1941 in preparation for what was known at that time Plan Orange, A Possible War Against Japan Some of you may even have seen pictures of how it was done.

15:13They had this huge hall and in the hall it was surrounded by galleries, so senior officers could look on. The whole had a checkered floor and on the checkered floor there were little models of ships and for two decades a whole generation of naval officers, some of whom were this time to rise to very senior rank indeed, played and replayed and replayed and replayed every Every single possibility that might one day arise in the war in the Pacific.

16:00And when the war finally came, there had been nothing that had not been replayed by somebody at some time during the preceding twenty years. You might say, nobody really forstalled Pearl Harbor, that is true. But everybody had fought, quote-unquote, the Japanese countless times, and considered, which is what people should do in war games. Suppose the Japs do this, what do I do then? Suppose they do that, what do I do then? All of this with the help of little ship models that were pushed over the checkered floor with, as I say, galleries all around the hall so that senior officers would stand there and look on what was going on.

17:04I'd like to say something about the various kinds of work. So maybe you gain a little bit of a better understanding of what this is all about. I just explained how the Navy used to do it, the US Navy. And many of you to this day, I'm sure, are aware of a whole class, a whole range of war are games that are commercially sold and which operate exactly on this principle.

17:50They come in cardboard boxes. They are made by companies such as Avalon. They contain a map which is divided not into squares but into hexes. They have all kinds of counters that will represent ships or aircraft or tanks or units, and those can be moved according to very complicated rules to the right and to the left at such and such a pace in the presence of such and such enemy units which will do to them such and such as they come close or as they don't come close and so on and so on and so on. These games are enormously complicated to play. They can take weeks, even months, until you finally finish with them.

18:42You have them at every level, from a model of the whole of World War II to the individual battle, and there are quite a number of people who play them. But this is only one of a great many types. Some of the earliest war games known were played by a Greek soldier and statesman called Philopoeman in the 3rd century BC. And if you read your Polybius, you'll find that Philopoeman used to go riding with his staff, and then he would ask them,

19:55Almost the only kind of training for an activity so full of surprises as war always is. As all of you know, the Middle Ages had their tournaments. What were tournaments if not war games? if not attempts to recreate war on a specified field at a specified time at a specified place. And originally they were extremely dangerous. Worst known tournaments started around 1800 and they got so dangerous that it became necessary to really create some rules so that not too many people would be killed.

20:55So they decided that they would only be played with blunt weapons and they decided later on that there would be a partition, all of you must have seen this in the movies, separating the two opponents, so that each one was moving, riding his horse on a separate side of the partition. But even so, accidents continued to happen. And in 1561, a king of France, Henry II, was killed in a tournament. And of course, later, the poor guy who did it was executed.

21:40You can't kill a king even accidentally and expect to live. There is chess. Many of you, I'm sure, know how to play chess. Chess originated in India in the 6th century AD. I won't go into all the details, but all of us understand that it is an attempt to model war. It is an attempt to model war which leaves out many things.

22:30First of all, it completely leaves out the little question of supply. So in that sense, it is a purely tactical game. It includes only the fight itself, and of course, even the fight is only included in a highly simplified way, and it ignores everything that happens until the forces clash on the It ignores secrecy. One of the great differences between chess and real war is that in real war very often you don't know what the enemy is doing.

23:22In chess you do, experts call this a game of perfect information. This particular point of view chess is very different from war. Both sides are instantly and fully appraised of everything that the opponent does or does Chess, like most games, although not all, also leaves out friction, meaning that if I, as a chess player, want my queen, or my castle, or my whatever, to advance from A to B, then this castle will in fact get the order to move from A to B, and it will get her.

24:18It will not be held up by rain, it will not be held up by, let us say, mud. The van will be there on time, right, to use my own example from today. All the little things, right, that, to use a somewhat crude term, all the screw-ups that are present in war, are not present in chess. It is a game without friction. You can introduce friction into war games, but it is not easy to do. Usually they do it by rolling a dice, okay?

25:05You decide to do something, and then you roll a dice. and let us say it is in order with six surfaces, so you say that or the rules say that in four out of six stages the thing that you have decided to do is going to happen, but in one it is not going to happen and in one something completely different is going to happen. So this actually is a good way to introduce friction into war, but as you can imagine It makes playing the game very complicated, which is why that takes so long, and which is why, personally, I must admit, I find them extremely boring.

25:52The attempt to incorporate all these factors into games will make them enormously complex. Some of those rule books will consist of dozens and dozens of pages with hundreds and hundreds of rules, and I personally must say I've never really understood how the patience to go through them all and never really understood how other people have the patience to go through them This is where computers come in.

26:52Computers have the advantage that you can feed any number of rules into it. And once you fed the rule into the computer program, it stays there and the computer will will not forget the rule, and it will not get the rule wrong, at least supposedly wrong, and it will do what it is told, and it will do what it is told very fast, so playing the game will not take weeks or months, plus, it will do that time after time after time So, you can change the variables.

27:41You can feed in one kind of unit, another kind of unit. You can try this, you can try that. You can change the rules. You can do all that and play the game fast, time after time after time after time, and Then see what works and what does not work. Ladies and gentlemen, I was supposed to tell you why war games don't work and I have spent the last 20 minutes or so explaining to you why they do work.

28:26I don't want to take this too far. I don't want to argue that war games are perfect. No human attempt to look into the future is or can be. We are just little blind creatures with a very very limited ability to look into the future, but as the tools, and God knows that they're not very good, but as the tools for looking into the future, for trying to so to speak, to rehearse the future, for trying to explore if not what the future will be to bring what it may bring, and do so in a way that is not one-sided, but two-sided, I would argue, in spite of my thoughts, that there simply is no substitute for war games.

29:43War Games are the two, maybe, certainly the best two, maybe even almost the only two for doing all of this. So the real question, ladies and gentlemen, is not why war games don't work. The real question is, why those that were used in order to prepare for Iraq did not work? Those are very different questions. The first and by far the most important reason is because apparently there was no thought at all what would happen once Iraq had been occupied and Saddam Hussein toppled.

30:52You see, ladies and gentlemen, modeling Iraq was not so, or the Iraqi war was really not so very difficult. You had to have a map fed into the computer. You had to have the various forces fed into the computer. You had to have the capabilities, the things that I could do, the things that I could not do, fed into computers. All of this involves lots and lots of foldable work, but it still can be done. We know more or less what such and such a weapon is capable of. We know more or less what such a unit and such a unit needs per day. We know more or less so many things that go into their moves and their fights and their shooting at each other.

31:46And you can feed these things into a computer and then time after time you come out with the result, which actually happened, that this war would be won and easily won too. So if it had all been about the first three weeks of the war, then you could have argued The war games worked, and they worked very well indeed.

32:24The problem, of course, was that contrary to President Bush announcing on board of the Lincoln and in the midst of that little party that he arranged for himself, Major combat operations were over. Well, this was where he got it wrong. And this is where Ramsfeld got it wrong. And this is where Wolfovich got it wrong. And I read, like most of you did today, I suppose, that Wolfovich is now going to the World Bank. Do you know who went to the World Bank before him?

33:10McNamara, that kid. So I was wondering whether the same story is repeating itself. Let me tell you a little story about Wolfovich. I met Wolfovich some years ago at the World Economic Forum, and this was not long after The Russians had tried to occupy Chechnya and had failed miserably back, I think, in 1996. And so, Volfovich and I were on the same panel and talking about why they had failed. And Volfovich, in all seriousness, was trying to explain that it was because the Russians had not used the best weapons at their disposal.

34:03The implication of course being that if they had been Americans, and if they had used every one of those marvelous weapons that America has, and which it models in war games, then of course they would have won easily. Well, they did win easily, but that was not the end of the story. That was only the beginning. And as we now know, over 90% of all the Americans killed in Iraq were killed after the end of major combat operations, and this still goes on.

34:59They were killed in a period and in a kind of operation, in a kind of war, that was never modelled at all. So whatever else, you can't really blame war games, can you? You can't blame war games because this kind of thing was never modelled at all. It was simply ignored. There was no thought devoted to the question what shall we do after we win, quote-unquote, this war. And indeed, about a year ago, I think, I met a former head of Philips, the Netherlands, who told me he was retired, and he told me, well, you know, not long after major war combat operations came to an end, suddenly I get a call from Wolfrich, and Wolfrich is saying, oh, God, you know, we haven't made so much thought about all of this, we don't know what to do, can you please help us to set up a proper Arabic speaking television station, Because we don't know what to do. Of course they didn't know what to do. They never gave it. It was never considered a problem.

36:21Why didn't they gave it? They didn't gave it because A, as I just said, because it was not considered a problem. But be it because it would have been extra ordinarily complicated and difficult to do. You see, forming a model of a war with all the thousands upon thousands of factors that go into it is difficult enough, so difficult that in those haxes, games are based on haxes, the rules are almost impossible to play, and so difficult that the computerized war gaming center at Rhode Island, the Naval War College, last time I asked about it, it cost a quarter But far more difficult is factoring in a whole country, because now that the Iraqi army no longer exists, the United States is at war with a whole country, including not just military Union that have so and so many tanks and each tank can fire so and so many times a minute

38:03to such and such a range and have such and such a high probability and it can move to such and such a distance over such and such terrain and it needs such and such so and so much supplies to do so and so on and so on and so on. All of this is difficult to model, but you can still do it. But now you are talking about completely different things. You are talking about political relationships. You are talking about cultural relationships. You are talking about social relationships. You are talking about people's beliefs, people's thoughts.

38:48How do you factor those into a machine that basically only knows how to say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, so fast, no, that not a million mathematicians cannot even come opposite? How do you feed beliefs, attitudes, thoughts into a machine? And the answer is you don't. And since you don't, you only play those parts of the world where hardware and its performance And so, not only was the war that came after the end of major combat operations never gained.

39:53The reason why it was not gained, or maybe the reason why it couldn't be gained, was Because there is no way to factor these other questions into a workbook. Maybe I should tell you another little story about this. The other day I got a new book to review. It was written to somebody who teaches at one of your work colleges, but I won't name the guy. And he tried, as so many others have done before him, to construct a model of past wars to see whether it would work in the future.

40:43And it was a very nice model, except that it had absolutely nothing to say about morale. Except that it had absolutely nothing to say about the will to fight. Just that it had nothing to say in this case about logistic, nothing to say about cultural attitudes and so on and so on. In fact, it had nothing to say about anything important. And unfortunately, I had to say so in my review. In the case of Iraq II, war games were applied.

41:31Some could say they were applied very successfully, but to the wrong war. They were only applied to the first stage, which was supposed to end, and which did end, with the complete defeat of Saddam Hussein's forces. So that, as the Russians say, yokh, nothing, a black hole, most because they did not really expect any hard problems at this stage, and because the factors that go into fighting a war of this kind would have been probably impossible to model and therefore feed into And so, instead of playing what would happen, they played what they could model.

42:41And having played what they could model, they then decided that what they could model was the important thing, and that everything else did not require any particular thought. We all know the result. We all know the result. I myself would argue, and like most of you, I've noticed American casualties have been going down over the last few weeks, and of This is not because things are going well in Iraq, this is because things are going so badly in Iraq that what the US forces do or don't do, whether they are there or not, has become almost irrelevant.

43:44Apparently, there was an argument between Bin Laden, somewhere in his cave in Pakistan, and Zarqawi, moving from one place to another in Iraq, and always somehow eluding his would-be chapter, as to the best strategy to use. Bin Laden, being an ideologue, said, well, you have to go after those wicked Americans. After all, the goal, the purpose of the whole exercise is, as I wrote, I, Bin Laden, wrote ten years ago to get rid of the infidels who are contaminating sacred Muslim land.

44:38Shade Zarqawi, who is less of an ideologue and more of a pragmatist and who is also the man on the spot and therefore the man who holds the cards. Sorry Mr. Bin Laden, Osama, my dear, you know, I don't agree with that strategy at all. Without the Iraqi forces, the American forces in Iraq are deaf and blind. They, to use an impolite expression, don't know the face of the S. And how can they, given that the number of Arabic speakers, people who are familiar with The culture, its tradition, its language, its habit, is so very slow, and where any translator is automatically a suspect, either because he wants to betray them or because he has pressure being put on him and he has no choice.

45:52And in a situation where American troops only stay in the country for a year, and so by the time they are really going to learn something, they are already on their way out. I say, thank heaven, I don't have to serve in that place again. So in a way, American troops are simply irrelevant, and since they are irrelevant, they are, there's no point in going after them, no more so, because after all, they have the heavy weapons and they present more difficult targets. What we have to do is to go after the Iraqi, after the new Iraqi army.

46:43Indeed, since sooner or later the Americans are going to leave, in a sense the war has already been won and what we are doing now is not so much fight the Americans as prepare for the day after. And as I said, since it is Zalkawi and not Bin Laden, who is the man on the spot, Bin Laden did not have much choice but to listen to him. Modelling all this would probably have been impossible.

47:29There is no game in the world that can factor in such questions. But, and here I've come to the end of our presentation, don't let that mislead you, as may be the people who formulated the questions for me to answer to some extent did. War games are one very powerful tool for looking into the future, in some ways the best tool we have, and particularly for looking into the future of war.

48:15Because, as I tried to explain, no other human activity provides this substitute for the one-on-one, two-sided interaction between two belligerents, each of which is trying to achieve his aims while preventing the other from doing the same, Each of which is strategizing, each of which is trying to mislead the other, to outwit the other. There just is no substitute. The question is, how do we use these tools effectively?

49:04And what are the limits beyond which those tools cannot grow? And I'm very much afraid that it is in getting the answers to those questions wrong that Mr. Rothbard and Mr. Wolfovich screwed up. Thank you for your attention.

49:34It's a funny feeling, you know, coming all the way from Israel just for 40 minutes of talk, so please, I'll do my best to answer any questions. What's your opinion about the letters of Mark as an effective means of finding Ben Laos if there's nothing else that needs to work? I've seen letters of Mark as opposed to...

50:24about being dead or alive, you know, will be given 25 million dollars. So it does not seem to work very well either, does it? When I was going out to private people going out and doing it. No, I would not be surprised if people, private people are doing it already. Because 25 million is a lot of dollars, is a lot of money. Okay? Question here? In the context of your country, how effective have war games been for Israelis? We have suffered from exactly the same problems as you do. We are probably today the second most sophisticated military on earth in some ways.

51:11We too use war games. We too have the Weizmann Institute. We too have computers. You can model, let us say, the effectiveness or, in my view, ineffectiveness of anti-balistic missiles. You cannot model the factors such as the Palestinian willingness to commit suicide. How do you model that? And as a result, unfortunately, we have lost our struggle against the Second Intifada, and we are even now preparing to go out of the disaster.

51:58So I would argue we are suffering from exactly the same problems that you do, for exactly the same reasons. We are using the same tools to a large extent, and the results are also the same.