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"As military science develops, innovation tends to be more difficult than
less . . . . In these circumstances, when everybody starts wrong, the advantage goes to the side which can most quickly
adjust itself to the new and unfamiliar environment and learn from its mistakes." -- Sir Michael Howard, RUSI, 1974
For the third time in this century, the United States is attempting
to develop a coherent vision of future armed conflict during an "interwar" period... The key to success in this process, as
Sir Michael Howard noted a quarter century ago, is a willingness to experiment and to learn from one's mistakes...
Traditional military missions, once separated in time, distance, platform,
and function, are now being fused. This integration of surveillance, information, battle management, and precision strike
has become known over the last few years as a "system of systems." Its future shape, sketched by open architectures and subject
to serendipity, is far from clear. To develop the necessary coherence in an unsure environment with unclear concepts is truly
a daunting task, but one that cannot be deferred.
One of the more useful methods of peering into an uncertain future,
history has suggested, is the use of wargaming...
A great deal of analytical thinking about military matters conducted during
the 1920s and 1930s was aided and facilitated by conflict simulations... the term "wargame" should not be interpreted
to connote a less than serious approach. The archives at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, document
more than 300 wargames played during the interwar period, many of which stressed the strategic environment of war in the Pacific
and the operational concepts for employing aircraft carriers in such a conflict...
Norman Friedman has pointed out that the benefits of gaming
accrue when the assumptions on which they are based stay stable for a long period of time. [N. Friedman, "The Maritime
Strategy and the Design of the U.S. Fleet," Comparative Strategy, 6 (1987), 416.] In the 1920s
and 1930s the wargamers at Newport were able to anticipate almost every move their potential adversary might make
(except kamikazes, as Nimitz noted in a postwar letter to the Naval War College), by rehearsing the naval war in the
Pacific time and time again...
Future wargaming always must be designed to accommodate actions taken by the
adversary...
Sir Michael Howard concluded his advice a quarter century
ago with the observation,
[This is an aspect of military
science which needs to be studied above all others in the Armed Forces: the capacity to adapt oneself to the utterly unpredictable,
the entirely unknown.] I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever doctrine the Armed
Forces are working on now, that they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that
they have got it wrong. What matters is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives. [
Michael Howard, "Military Science in the Age of Peace," RUSI Journal, 119 (March 1974), 7.] JLJ - I have included the previous
sentence from Howard's article in the above quote.
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