Ever since the first warrior picked up a wooden stick in imitation of a sword, the line between war and entertainment has been decidedly blurry. Military training in ancient Greece and chivalric Europe gave rise to the Olympics and medieval jousting tournaments; paintball guns and video games have become tools for honing the skills of today's soldiers. The realm of strategy, however, is where games have exerted the most remarkable impact on the conduct of war, serving as a tool for, as one U.S. Army general put it, "writing history in advance."
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5th century B.C.
The ancient
Greeks begin playing petteia, among the first board games modeled on war.
6th century A.D.
Chess is invented in Northern India,
spreads to Persia and then Europe, and by the late 15th century evolves into
its modern form. Its original name in Sanskrit, chaturanga, means "four parts,"
referring to divisions of the military of the Gupta Empire.
15th century
Firearms, invented centuries earlier
in China, spread to armies throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The
new weapons mean battles can no longer be accurately simulated without killing
people, forcing strategists to look to more abstract means of preparing for
war.
1650
Chess enthusiasts in what's now
modern-day Germany begin developing increasingly elaborate battlefield strategy
games based on the original. By the late 18th century, military leaders take
notice.
1811
Prussian army advisor Leopold von
Reisswitz and his son Georg, an army lieutenant, publish an elaborate manual,
Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a
Wargame. Thirteen years later, Georg presents King Friedrich Wilhelm III with a
refined version of their game, in which two teams face off across a scale map using
dice to simulate the vagaries of war. The king is enthralled, and kriegsspiel,
the grandfather of all modern military war games, is born.
1870
Prussia's decisive victories in the
Franco-Prussian War bring international renown to the king's army and its
training techniques, including the now widely imitated kriegsspiel. Militaries
begin using war games to predict how future conflicts might unfold.
1887
The first American war games, modeled
on kriegsspiel, are held at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Theodore
Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the Navy, later becomes an avid spectator.
1918-1941
Governmental interest in war games
peaks, notably in Germany (where actual military exercises are restricted by
the Treaty of Versailles), the United States (whose Navy conducts several
hundred games, most of them focused on the Pacific, between the wars), and
Japan.
1927
Fourteen years before Japanese planes descend upon
the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, officers in the Imperial Navy
under the leadership of Lt. Comm. Sokichi Takagi play out the scenario in a
war game -- and find it ending badly, with the base barely damaged and U.S.
forces quickly retaliating against Tokyo. Officers redo the exercise
repeatedly until they arrive at the battle plan used in 1941.
1940
Three
months after the invasion of Poland, Hitler's Chief of Army General Staff Franz
Halder oversees four months of war games to plan Nazi Germany's May 1940
conquest of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The game
correctly anticipates the Allies' first response: pre-emptively invading
Belgium.
1950s
American strategic intellectuals like
Herbert Goldhamer, Andrew Marshall, and Herman Kahn explore the implications of
a nuclear apocalypse in elaborate games simulating not just military conflict
but the geopolitics of the Cold War.
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