The U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) recently announced it was dropping much of its military history courses and replacing them with more wargaming. Many graduates of the CGSC object to the changes because there are few places you can get college level instruction on military history and the degree of ignorance about military history has become epic among college graduates. It’s not just military history but history in general. For military leaders knowledge of military history is important, something often appreciated only in hindsight. For the army this is a major issue at the two primary schools for officers seen as promising and likely to be more effective as they get promoted. The first of these is the CGSC, whose students are mid-level officers (captains and majors). Each year about a thousand of these officers take the basic ten month course. Five or ten years later about a third of those CGSC grads can get into the Army War College (AWC), a two-year course that is more of a graduate school in format and graduates tend to end up as senior commanders in the army. Drastic changes in the curriculum are rare and the de-emphasis of military history at CGSC to make more time for wargames is not as drastic as it sounds as it is part of a movement that began in the 1970s as the army went through a metamorphosis in terms of using military history and several recent (World War II) developments (Operations Research and its use in the form of wargames) that had an impact on the understanding of history.
If wargaming is used to teach the history, that will work. Lord knows the linkage is obvious.
I'm big on both military history and wargaming. My shelf space makes that clear. I only had one military history class in grad school, but that is what I emphasized in all my classes where I could.
I have jokes that in high school before my World War II class (I was lucky to be in my high school early enough to have "history" classes before generic "social studies" classes--blech--replaced them) I played a game of Third Reich (an old Avalon Hill board game) instead of studying course material.
And in the spirit of the Strategypage article, before the Iraq War I made a quick and dirty game skeleton--basically just map and units--to estimate a rapid and low-cost invasion all the way to Baghdad (looking on my shelf now, I realize I must have finally thrown it out in a periodic house cleaning to clear out old unused things on scarce shelf space).
Sadly my board wargaming is low these days despite my proliferating titles on my shelves. My gaming group is not into the wargaming side. I suspect that when my children are out of the nest and I don't need to save my dining table for eating that I will resume such gaming again--ah, there were many holiday dinners as a child when my mom was urging me to clear a wargame off the dining room table before guests arrived!
So while the loss of classes bothers me a bit--you need a structure of understanding history to exploit wargames--a simple tilt away from history to wargaming doesn't seem like a problem. After all, we are training military officers who need to win our wars and not military historians who need to explain wars.
