200 years of Kriegsspiel history - lessons to be learned?

by Jorit Wintjes

Introduction - 200 years of Kriegsspiel history

As the year 2024, the 200th anniversary of the official introduction of wargaming into professional military education, draws to a close, it might be time to dwell briefly on what, if anything, can be learned from the history of wargaming as it unfolded in the decades before the First World War. That history shows three distinct phases: the initial overcoming of opposition, a rapid expansion fuelled by the enthusiasm of mostly younger officers, and a broadening of purpose and scope once it was widely disseminated.

Thus, the Prussian Kriegsspiel initially had to overcome opposition claiming it was detrimental to discipline, it was then championed by several younger officers who rose to prominence as important theoreticians, successful unit commanders or even chief of staff of the army, before after around 50 years branching out into different subjects from tactical training to railway logistics and casualty management, and covering different levels of warfare from small-scale tactical wargames to large campaign wargames.

When 52 years after its introduction in the Prussian army the newly-founded German navy adopted the Kriegsspiel in 1876 as well, the development was similar: initially, it faced a lot of criticism as it was seen as a “paper exercise” not conducive to promoting the most important quality in navy personnel, seamanship; then, its success was as much due to younger officers taking a keen interest as it was to navy high command pushing it as part of a campaign of “land militarization”, as Alfred von Tirpitz would later call it. And eventually, it was used for a variety of different purposes ranging from logistical exercises to tactical training.

Looking at the history of the Kriegsspiel and how it fared in the Prussian army between 1824 and 1870, around the world from 1872 onwards, and in navies from 1876 onwards, a few general points about the use of wargames in professional military education emerge which, even after 150 years or more, haven’t lost their relevance:

1. If you want to think wargames, think purpose.

By far the single most important question in employing wargames as educational instruments, and the one question from which success or failure of a wargame depend is “what is it that participants should take away from it?”. The clearer the definition of the educational objective, the greater the chance for educational success. In educational contexts, the character of any wargame will always be directly related to its educational objective, and usually those wargames are most suitable for a specific educational purpose which are specifically designed for it. This does not mean that commercially available wargames are unsuitable for educational purposes, but that purpose must be clearly defined before employing them.

2. Wargames are precision tools, not blunt objects.

Wargames are always models with a high degree of abstraction. Any sequence of decisions or events depicted by a wargame will always be influenced by a multitude of factors that are impossible to cover in a single wargame. Successful wargames will therefore invariably focus on a narrow set of factors, and it is about these and these only that participants can learn something. This is at the same time a great advantage and a great limitation of wargames, and it is important to explain the limitations of any wargame to the participants.

3. Questions of definition actually do matter.

The term “wargame” nowadays covers a wide range of activities, just as the term “Kriegsspiel” did in the early 20th century, ranging from tactical exercises and actual manoeuvres to staff courses and written examinations. Thinking about what “wargame” actually means is not merely an academic exercise. Although every practitioner will have a pretty good idea about the meaning of the term - even if putting it into one succinct sentence may be difficult -, there are by far more non-practitioners than practitioners out there; trying to promote wargaming as an activity in professional military education means being able to explain clearly what wargaming in the relevant context is, what it is capable of and what its limitations are.

4. Accessibility is key.

In any normal wargame, participants have to interact with the wargame’s rules. A complex set of rules will not only require a significant amount of preparation prior to the actual running of the wargame, it can even be off-putting for participants; keeping a wargame highly accessible means keeping the rules as simple as possible. Much the same is true for facilitator-driven wargames; if facilitating requires specific training, then this again poses an obstacle to easy access. While complexity is sometimes unavoidable, and while there is a place for large and complex wargames in professional military education, there should always also be simple and highly accessible wargames, particularly for first exposure to wargaming.

5. Expectation management is important.

Wargames are essentially abstract models of reality, and, as the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful. The degree of abstraction is usually obvious to the participants, particularly if they come with real-life experiences of some of the aspects depicted by the wargame. In that case there is the real danger that participants measure the value of the wargame not by the success its educational objectives but by how “realistic” the depiction of the technological, operational or doctrinal elements is, with which the participants are familiar. Expectation management is the best way to avoid this, and a common instrument for doing so - and therefore a crucial part of every educational wargame - is the inclusion of design notes in a wargame.

6. It’s not just the playing that is important.

One of the ground rules of educational wargaming is that there can be no educational success without active participation. However, while active participation is necessary for the success of any wargame, on its own it is not sufficient, not even when participants are enthusiastic about what they do. This is most obvious when in a wargame in-game success is not equivalent to educational success, for example when the winning side has “played the mechanism” by exploiting loopholes in the rules, or when in-game success was mainly the result of a disparity in familiarity with the rules. In such cases facilitators or umpires have to focus on the educational objectives in their post-mortem analysis, a task that, as experience has shown, can be quite daunting - it is far too tempting for the winning side to swat criticism away by claiming “but we won”!

7. There will always be opposition to overcome.

For the past two centuries the history of wargaming is one of increasing and receding interest into using it for educational purposes; right now, as the first quarter of the 21st century is almost over, wargaming has become more popular than it was at the turn of the century. Yet even in times of great interest wargaming will always compete with other elements of professional military education, and as a result there will always be opposition to overcome when it comes to gaining access to the most valuable resource of all, time. Wargames practitioners will therefore have to make the case for using wargames time and again by being open and clear about the educational capabilities as well as the limitations of wargaming (see points 1., 2., 3. and 5. above).

8. Facilitators or umpires are important.

Kriegsspiel-type wargames require facilitators, the majority of wargames don’t. Even in the latter case, however, it is important to have someone acting as umpire; it is crucial for any wargame’s success as an educational exercise to have the educational objectives clearly pointed out beforehand, and to turn back to them during the post-mortem analysis (see points 5. and 6. above).

A final word.

Wargaming is a military capability, and just like other capabilities it is easy to lose and hard and time-consuming to regain. Integrating wargaming into professional military education and preserving it as a capability requires institutional support of some sort that provides both the “nuts and bolt”, so to speak, of educational wargaming (ie the wargames themselves), and the theoretical backing required for producing wargames suitable for educational purposes. Institutional support will also, in times when wargaming might not be as fashionable as it is now (and looking at the past two centuries of its history suggest that history to be a sequence of phases where wargaming is popular and fashionable followed by phases where it is not) offer a chance of this capability to survive, at least in some form.