Wargames and predictive analysis put things in perspective. They force you to face reality. As a result, this kind of tool is not popular with politicians (who have a different kind of reality) and journalists (who want headlines, not reality.) But people in the military still use these tools to quickly get a grasp of fast moving situations. General Barry McCaffrey, CINC of SOUTHCOM, for example, was faced with a war between Peru and Ecuador in 1995. The Pentagon and the White House were looking to him for a quick analysis of the situation. Fortunately for him, the guy who designed Arabian Nightmare (Austin Bay, a reserve officer mobilized to debrief former Cuban soldiers among the Cuban refugees being moved through Panama, was in the area). LTC Bay came to the attention of a colonel on the CENTCOM staff, who remembered seeing some of Bays wargaming work at the Army War College, and asked LTC Bay if he could whip up a Peru-Ecuador wargame overnight, so they could put together an analysis for GEN McCaffrey. It was done, and, when McCaffrey briefed the Joint Chiefs, he used LTC Bay's game, and its analysis. It was noted that McCaffrey's tools were better than anything that Leavenworth or DC area analysts were able to come up with. McCaffrey gave Bay a commendation medal.
I did this, in an amateur way, before the invasion of Iraq, and concluded that it would be a relatively easy victory--even if Iraq used chemical weapons. I used a hex sheet to draw a map of Iraq and the likely invasion corridors, made unit counters with combat and movement factors that I estimated, and then set up Iraqi defenses and then ran the invasion. It was pure back-of-the-envelope stuff but I was confident it was reasonably accurate. See here, here, and here, for those initial assessments based on the quick and dirty simulations I did.
And as the counter-insurgency raged, I did similar analysis using troop numbers in different regions of Iraq. I wasn't about to panic based on headlines and analysis by reporters who simply didn't know what they were talking about. The numbers I ran indicated to me that we would eventually be able to win.
War isn't a game, by any stretch of the imagination--but it can be simulated with games.
UPDATE: I should point out that while I could game the invasion and run the numbers based on geography and population for the insurgency/terror campaign to make an educated guess on the outcome, I couldn't do that for the actual start of the insurgency. That I did not predict. I had no way of gaming that. Some opponents of the invasion insisted Saddam was so weak that we could overthrow the regime. If so, that meant a pro-Baathist insurgency by the minority Sunni Arabs was not likely. I held my judgment on the question of an insurgency before the war, but felt that the 80% of the population represented by Kurds and Shias backed by us could beat any insurgency mounted by the 20% Sunni Arab population.
When the Special Republican Guards failed to fight when it came to the Battle for Baghdad when out troops first entered the capital, I discounted the ability of the Sunni Arabs to mount an insurgency. I thought they were just too tired after decades of war and sanctions. So it made sense to me to accept the view from the Pentagon that the summer low level violence was composed of dead enders.
What I didn't count on was the vast amount of money the Sunni Arabs had from the UN Oil for Food scam. Nor did I count on the vast amounts of ammunition available for making IEDs that Saddam had stashed around the country. Both allowed the minority to fight out of proportion to their numbers. Further, although this didn't make itself evident until spring 2004, I didn't think that Syria and Iran would dare to support jihadis and Sadrists to fight us. I couldn't imagine we'd let them get away with that. But they did. And we did.
Still, despite the ability and will of the Baathists to resist, by the end of 2003, we were grinding down their resistance, having captured Saddam himself even. The al Qaeda invasion of Iraq and the Sadrist uprising in spring 2004 created a whole new chapter in the war. A chapter I did not game to predict.
Still, as I wrote above, it was still possible to run the numbers and avoid panic over even an unexpected development. Others may have predicted those insurgency events, but I did not--even with a gamer's and history major's perspective.
