This past week or so, I’ve brushed up against a number of different articles about professional wargaming. The latest encounter was through yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
Often attributed to Winston Churchill, it is said that “Generals are always prepared to fight the last war.” Going back several generations, America’s armed forces deployed a military optimized for the North German Plain against insurgencies, often with disappointing results. For the first part of the Cold War, it sometimes seemed that we were preparing to refight World War II, just with more modern weaponry.
Our actual military experiences in that time demonstrated a flaw in this thinking. In recent decades, the U.S. has adopted and perfected a suite of counter-insurgency strategies and tactics (albeit still, sometimes, with disappointing results) and has reorganized and reprioritized accordingly. In the meantime, our adversaries, especially China, have worked to create their own force-projection abilities on par, technologically, with America’s.
Are we at a point where “the last war” is Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan while the next war is again the “great power” conflict of the previous century? Are we focusing our efforts on the suppression of irregular militia forces while China is prepping for War in the Pacific, Part II?
The front page (just below the fold) of The Journal suggests just that with their article The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict (presumably paywalled). It explains how an Air Force Lt. General was assigned to a “classified Pentagon wargame” simulating “a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea.” In that game “China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.” The remainder of the article analyzes the ways in which America’s defensive structure falls short of its charge.
The article is billed as part 1 of a series. Reading through its roughly one-and-a-half pages, I get some details about the changes being proposed to align the nation’s wartime capabilities to its mostly likely challenges for the future – particularly focusing on China and Taiwan. Such an article fits into a larger effort by The Journal to advocate for the increasing of defense spending in the current budget cycle. Some of the details are interesting; fewer tanks/more ships, longer range standoff weaponry, and a renewed emphasis on electronic warfare, to name a few.
For myself, I’d be more interested in reading about the wargaming exercise. Unfortunately, I have neither the requisite security clearance nor a need to know so as to be privy to the details. I’m left to speculate on the nature of the session and how it might have achieved its results.
The “surprise result” was how advanced the Chinese offensive capabilities were and what quick work they made of U.S. preparations. Yet, it was our own military who provided that information about the opposition forces and it was we who calculated their effectiveness within the context of the wargaming parameters. I am going to guess this session was an exercise designed to pass on to the right people a determination about force readiness that someone had a priori figured out. It may be less of a “simulation” exercise than a “reveal” of the latest intel on what China has in store for us.
To say any more about this wargaming exercise would be to greatly overstep the limits of my knowledge and understanding. Instead, I’ll just leave this one as a link and, perhaps, come back to this topic later.
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