Читать книгу Simulation and Wargaming - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Before the rise of the computer, the primary form of combat simulation was wargaming. Wargaming has a rich history and has been used by many cultures and in many different forms. The ancient games of chess and Go are but a few of the games that were believed to have usefulness in training and testing military commanders’ decision‐making capabilities, and this belief led to the designing of games focused on modeling combat for the development of military leaders. In the nineteenth century, the Prussians developed Free and Rigid Kriegspiel as methods to educate their officers. Rigid Kriegspiel focused on the calculations of combat, with the hypothesis that good combat leaders had to be able to employ a type of “combat calculus” to mathematically understand what decisions should be made on the battlefield.⁵ Free Kriegspiel used battle‐tested Prussian officers to assess junior officers’ responses as they were presented with possible combat situations to which they had to react.⁶

In the early part of the twentieth century, F.W. Lanchester proposed two sets of differential equations that could be used to simulate combat, referred to as Lanchester’s linear and square laws. Although he proposed these laws to simulate aerial combat, they gained traction for use in modeling ground combat. The square law rewards a combatant’s ability to concentrate forces and was seen as relevant to modern warfare, and the linear law has been accepted as a model of ancient warfare where combatants were unable to mass fires.⁷ Lanchester came to realize, through studying the Battle of Trafalgar, that if a battle can be decomposed into a series of concurrent and consecutive sub‐battles, separated by space and time, then it is more appropriate to apply the square law to each sub‐battle, and sum all sub‐battle losses to gain a more accurate accounting of the entire battle than it is to apply the square law a single time to the entire battle.⁸ As computer‐based combat simulations were developed in the latter half of the century, many ground aggregate simulations used some adaptation of Lanchester’s laws to model attrition.⁹

In the first half of the twentieth century, the US Navy made great use of wargaming to examine a potential war with Japan, beginning over two decades of focused wargaming in 1919 at the US Naval War College.¹⁰ This detailed examination of war in the Pacific proved to be so successful that, after the conclusion of World War II, Admiral Chester Nimitz said “…nothing that happened during the war was a surprise – absolutely nothing except the Kamikaze…”¹¹