Computer wargames wonks fight Mideast battles
AS ONE OF THE FIRST U.S. officers to enter Kuwait City after the Iraqis were routed in February 1991, army Lt. Col. M. Evan Brooks had the task of helping Kuwait's Red Crescent regain its footing.
It was an unlikely mission for reservist Brooks - a Jew whose civilian job was as a lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C . But Brooks got on famously with his Kuwaiti hosts, who in the end wanted to kn ow how many wars he'd fought in. "Counting this one," Brooks replied, "one."
What he didn't tell them was that he had developed his logistical acumen playing wargames. "These games," says Brooks, "taught me that you have to organize. They give you a good idea of what you have to do to get from here to there. This helped me tremendously when I had to start organizing for real."
For most people, mention of "wargames" conjures up images of computer addicts frantically manipulating joysticks to send electronically generated armi es out to dominate the world. And indeed computer-based wargames - along with their paper or board manual counterparts - are hugely popular among armchair g enerals; they now account for one in 10 computer games sold.
But as Brooks would testify, the games are far from being mere afternoon entertainment. They are being used more and more by real generals in the Pentagon and elsewhere - to develop strategies, analyze tactical options in a range of scenarios, even keep track as battles unfold.
Not surprisingly, given the region's history of conflict, the Middle East figures prominently in the scenarios dreamed up by the designers of computer wargames. The Pentagon used two store-bought products - "Gulf Strike" and "Arabian Nightmare: The Kuwaiti War" - to help plan and conduct Operation Desert Storm. According to James Dunnigan, author of "The Complete Wargames Handbook" (William Morrow & Co., 1992) and the designer of both "Arabian Nightmare" and "Sinai" (a wargame set on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts in the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars), Desert Storm commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf relied extensively on a team of wargamers he sequestered in an air-conditioned bunker in Saudi Arabia.
Surprisingly, claims Dunnigan, the commercially available wargames outperformed their more expensive inhouse military counterparts, particularly in their accurate estimates of casualty rates.
One of the games revolving around Middle Eastern war is "Harpoon" (used, incidentally, by novelist Tom Clancy to plot his submarine thriller "The Hunt for Red October"), which pits Israel against any number of opponents. In one scenario, the "Koranic Compact" - an alliance of Syria, Iraq and Iran - launches a conventional assault on the Golan that could involve a tactical nuclear weapon. In another, "Sail from Sidra," NATO forces must contend with an attack by a Zhirinovsky-led CIS on Italy following the destruction of Israel.
Israeli military experts have been at the forefront of those developing and using wargames for their own purposes. In 1988, responding to the army's poor showing in Lebanon, the IDF's Planning Department designed its own manual wargame, "Mahshavat Krav" (Combat Thinking), to help senior IDF officers more efficiently deploy and manage an army that had been reorganize d after the Lebanon War to foster better use of combined arms forces.
By 1990, manual wargames had become a training staple for IDF officers, who had long relied on sandbox simulations and battlefield mock-ups. At officer training school, cadets now begin training with extensive game experience culled from Nintendo and Sega units, home computers and video arcades.
Wargaming has also gained adherents at command and headquarters levels, as well as at staff college. "Our job," former Military Intelligence commander Uri Saguy declared in 1988, "is to exercise and train the army's senior command to think (creatively) and take the initiative exactly as we do with our junior officers. That's what's novel about these games."
With the outbreak of Desert Storm, the IDF began integrating computer games. Their advantage is that they automatically perform the intensive number-crunching required of players of manual games, saving time and brain-sweat. According to the army magazine Bamahaneh, the IDF's Training Branch is now designing new, post-"Harpoon" computer games to serve its next-century needs - but little is yet known about what these games will look like, or how effective they will prove.
Brooks is the first to acknowledge that on the tactical level, no wargames can ever substitute for actual field maneuvers. But, in a cost-conscious military like Israel's, computer games allow military strategists to examine options and predict how scenarios might unfold without always having to expend gas, ammunition and manpower on real training exercises. Even more importantly for Israel, that can help reduce the risk of training accidents in the field. The great thing about wargames, says Brooks, is that "people playing them don't get killed."