Most games seem to simply give the less centralized, more initiative oriented forces better combat ratings or training levels. However, I think this oversimplifies, since it is perfectly possibly to have a military force that is technically well-trained, but in a bad doctrine, as the Prussian of 1806 showed.

In particular, I am giving thought to a stategy game where the players represent multiple generations of heads of state, controlling nation-states over long periods, with the ability to exercise some degree of control on the level of training their military has, through allocating research and funding. Few players would voluntarilty choose an option that made their forces less efficient. But few militaries today or in the past have followed the Auftragstaktik approach, and many have gone to the other extreme that the Soviets tried. Most militaries seem to fall somewhere between.

I am looking for ideas on how I can model these doctrinal differences outside of blanket "troop quality" bonuses, and in such a way that players will be most likely to choose the same doctrines that militaries historically have. (That is, there should exist some kind of seeming incentives for a player to want to have a "Centralized" or "Balanced" military doctrine, such that only a few players would be likely to choose an Auftragstaktik approach.)

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Originally posted by LWD:
There is an interesting section on doctrine in [u]Shattered Sword[/u] as well as a fair number of referances to how it impacted the battle of Midway throughout the book. There is also a email group hosted by Dunnigan for profesionals in the field of modeling, simulations, and games might be worth asking there. here's a referance that might help locate it:
milgames@yahoogroups.com

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Originally posted by LWD:
I've recieved mail from the list withing the last week or so. Here is a link to the groups web page:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/milgames/
and this is the subscription address:
milgames-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Hope that helps.

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Yes it does.

I searched Yahoo, and the web in general with Google, with no luck, but your link worked.

Any armed force would by and large tend to reflect, for good and bad, the general characteristics of the society it is part of, which would seem like the logical starting point. Then, the relative importance of the armed forces impact on that: In societies where the armed forces have a very low status, they may not be able to reproduce all the virtues of their society. The US during the interwar years would be a case in point. In societies where they have a very high status or priority, they may be able to exceed those virtues, overcome some of the basic shortcomings of their socities and develop some qualitative traits that are not mirrored in society at large. The USSR and Israel come to mind here. In gaming terms, this could mean that as long as normal proportions of national resources aredevted to the military, the general characteristics of society will also largely determine viable options of military development. In cases of low funding, not all the options those characteristics provide would be available. In cases of very large funding, more options hould be open than societal characteristics normally provides.

Then it would be an issue of linking military development options to certain specific societal characteristics. The chief ones that come to mind are educational level, technological level, political system, militarisation and cultural level.

Generally, anything that requires complex organisations, a high level of individual initiative and advanced operating methods presupposes a high educational level. Advanced weaponry and equipment requires a high technological level, and again impacts on available options for operational methods, doctrine etc. The political system, broadly understood, impacts on the military system. It is, for example, much of the reason why the Prussians were out of date in 1806, despite high technical and educational standards. The general autocratic nature of russian and soviet society have an obvious linkage to the Red Army command style. Militarisation can I guess be defined as the cultural result of military spending, and would alsways move towards the current level of spending, on the assumption that the role of themilitary in a society is analogous to the proportion of its resources that society spends on it. In other words - if you increase military spending and keep it up for a time, militarisation increases over time. Conversely if you reduce it. Political system could be a general modifier on what level of militarisation results from a given level of military spending. The reason why it could be meaningful to use militarisation as a separate entity in addition to military spending is that it impacts in different ways. The higher the standing of the armed forces, the more diverse and gifted people they attract, and the more the rest of society gears its efforts towards military needs. This again impacts on the thing which should perhaps be separately modelled rather than a mechanistic result of general characteristics, namely innovation.

If you look, f.e., at the Prussian army in 1806 and the same army in 1813, they arose from almost entirely similar general societal characteristics, but were very different forces. What separated them were essentially innovation sparked by externally imposed events. Events forced them to do something, and they made specific choices which in many ways set Germany on the path it followed until 1945. General socio-economic characteristics still limit the options in such situations, but it could be argued that "culture" could be a good term to represent the things that make a country choose a certain set of solutions rather than others when they are put in such circumstances. Clausewitz knew his Kant and Hegel, and were influenced by their thinking. As German writers and philophers concerned themselves with their fields of study in the explicit belief that these did not need to concern themselves with wider political issues, German soldiers tended to concern themselves with the conduct of war in a narrow sense without dealing much with wider issues national mobilisation or foreign poltics. The French doctrine of "cran" evidently owed not a little to Bergsonian vitalism, and that of Jomini to the spirit of French positivism. The building up of the US armed forces after Pearl Harbor arguably resonated with the general chracteristics of American mentality and culture, as much as with the technical and socio-economic characteristics of US society. And so on. All of this is tolerably vague, but I guess can be summed up by saying that there were issues of mentality which made it likely that a German of a certain generation would view some issues differently from a Briton of the same generation. Perhaps one could model a certain number of different culture types, which would then impact on the range of military options.

To return to innovation, this is especially important here. Normally, any bureaucratic system - military or civilian - simply tends to continue doing things as they have always done them, unless something forces them to change. They don't keep ut with the spirit of the age automatically, and people within the systems who do keep up with that spirit are rarely heard. However, when they are forced to innovate, they will tend to turn to people who are capable of innovation, and such people generally do keep in touch with the spirit of the time, so to speak. Hence, when you reach these "decision points", as the Prussians did after Jena, the men formulating the solutions will tend to be men who have been significantly shaped by external contemporary culture. The general culture of the day is the capital which is drawn on to generate neccessary fundamental change.

Oh well, just some loose observations really, from someone who has never designed a game. But if there were one or two useful notions there, it's worth the time.

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Originally posted by Joseph Scott:
I am looking for anyone's ideas on how to model the level of Centralization of military systems in wargames and nation-state/empire leadership strategy games.

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My interest is not so much at the nation/empire level as the tactical level, but in general it seems to me that there are three payoff balances that need to be modelled to show the relative benefits of Auftragstaktik vs. dirigiste approaches to command.

First, there is the obvious balance between speed of reaction and centralism of decision-making.

If the player opts for a centralised command doctrine, he gets to make all the decisions himself, but suffers the delays of having the situation reported to him and his orders distributed. If he delegates the decisions to his subordinates, the decisions are made quicker, but he has to (say) roll on the subordinate initiative table to see what his underlings actually do, which might not be what he expects and might not be sensible (e.g. following the classic subaltern line of reasoning "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do it"). In general one would expect quick, variable-quality decisions to work better than slow, high-quality decsions if there is some means of recognising and correcting poor decisions before they have gone too far (Col. Jim Storr has some interesting things to say about this in the "British Army Review" a while back).

What balance is the right one will be influenced by the comms means available to the commander. If the comms are rubbish, then he is obliged to leave the decisions to the local commander simply because no other course is possible. An historical example is the world-wide deployments of the Royal Navy in the age of sail, where, even if the Admiralty had wished to exert micro-mangerial control of individual ships, it had no way of communicating with them that didn't take months. On the other hand, a modern digitized force may have reliable, high-capacity, low-latency electronic comms to all parts of the battlespace (yeah, right) to an extent that positively invites the Generals to get out their long-handled screwdrivers and start acting as section commanders (there was an excellent piece on this phenomenon in Viet Name by John Kramer in Strategy & Tactics no. 29, ISTR). In most cases the comms will be soemwhere in between, and the commander will have to "read the battle" so as to be able to place himself at the decisive point and exert personal control on the main effort. The comms layout may also require him to answer the puzzle "At the front always, sometimes, never?" put by John Keegan in "The Mask of Command"; he needs to go forward for hat-waving command, but stay back with his signals staff to get the best comms.

I don't think I have ever seen a wargame make even a half-decent attempt at protraying this question of decision speed and "getting inside the OODA loop". In particuar, it is hard to do with fixed-length turns, because the normal rule for most games is that you get to move all your pieces every turn, and they do (or at least try to do) exactly what you want them to, as if by telepathy.

The second balance is one of the subordinate commanders' level of training and the amount of central planning. If he has very expert subordinates, the commander will evidently be much happier to leave local decisions to them than if they have just finished the short course and never commanded troops before in their life. In effect, this will indicate how likely the subordinates are to roll some sensible and useful course of action on the subordinate initiative table. This is another general rule of life; one of the "One-Minute Manager" books ISTR discusses the differences in management style needed when managing people who are new to the business and people with bags of experience.

An historical example here would be the Soviet forces in WW2. They did in fact manage to generate high tempo very well, and got inside the German OODA loop on many occasions, but this was achieved by meticulous planning and preparation (with plenty of optional courses planned out), fierce central control, and extensive rehearsals, so that everyone knew what they were doing before crossing the start line. The alternative, of trusting the local commander Auftragstaktik-style, was simply not possible in the time available because of the level of training achievable.

I have seen few efforts at modelling this in any wargame, but Frank Chadwick's "Ambush" series made something of a stab at it with its system of command points, which could be accumulated to reflect planning. I don't think I've seen rehearsals appear in any wargame apart from Omega Games' "Ranger", which is highly unusual in that it actually involves planning (and is IMHO a thumping good game).

The third balance is one of trust and fear, and how far people tell the boss the truth. If a commander has the habit of "shooting the messenger" whenever he hears bad news or somebody makes a bone-headed suggestion, he is pretty soon not going to hear anything his subordinates think he won't like. Before long, he simply will not be given the true picture because his subordinates cannot trust him to deal fairly with them, and fear him.

This works the other way round, as well; one of the reasons for not permitting junior commanders to devise their own plans might be the suspicion that they are plotting against you. Saddam's Iraqi Army probably provides an example of this, but I suspect it is the case in very many armies of tin-pot dictatorships. Where officers are selected for political reliability rather than professional competence, one can reasonably expect to have an army that is good enough for carrying out the brutal repression of dissent, but falls to pieces quickly when faced with a real army.

I've never seen a wargame try to deal with the trust vs fear aspect, although I did read a report in "The Nugget" of a game called something like "In the Court of the Mighty King", where players tried to suck up to a demented potentate who was fond of ordering "off with his head!" on the merest whim. Not too different from some commanding officers, I am led to believe.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. Do let me know if you ever find or create a game that covers these aspects of command. I don't think they would necessarily be difficult to show in a game, it's just that we have to throw away about half a century of accumulated wargamerly conventions.

All the best,

John.

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I am looking for anyone's ideas on how to model the level of Centralization of military systems in wargames and nation-state/empire leadership strategy games.

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I have a semi-small war game collection of about 200 wargames and in all of them I believe I only have 2 games that deals with this rather abstractly.

The following war game (model) is a Army/Corps level game based on the Eastern Front during WW2.

In this game there are the following factors:

Effectiveness Rating
LSP (Leg Strength Points)
MSP (Mobile Strength Points)
HQ (Army Level/Front Level)
Corps / Armies (the actual maneuver units)
Activation Costs
Initiative
Operation Costs

Instead of an IGUGO system it is based on who has the initiative. Basically during each phase the player with the initiative decides who will take a phase. The phasing player selects one HQ to Active for Operations this phase. This HQ Activates Corps within his Command Range and based on the overall Command Points Available. The Soviets in this game have some special HQ that are identified with a * and when the Soviet player has a phase he may decided instead of activating one HQ he may decide to Activate 2 such * HQ that would in turn activate all the Corps / Armies (in the case of the Soviets) within either HQ ranges.

I having been playing military war games for over 25 years and this is the only system that I am aware of that has any type of Centralization. Most hobby war gamers do not like the system I just mentioned due to its complexities and record tracking. However there are a few of us who do enjoy that board game. I believe for the general public if this game was computerized with the complexities hidden away more would enjoy it.

With that being said you may have noticed I said 2 war game models. The other war game model is even more abstract. It has leaders and HQ's and Army level units. Essentially you active HQ under and Offensive or Attrition or Pass type offensive on the map. This game is really abstract and does not model what you are referring to very well.

The East Front game I attempted to describe above does go into more detail for such things as posture (the Germans may conduct a Blitzkrieg type of attack, the Soviets a Echelon type of attack, all sides (Finland, Rumania, Hungary, Italy, Russia and Germany may also conduct Assault, Limited Assault and a few other postures), there is also various weather and terrain variables and what I most like about this military war game that most East Front games do not simulate is attrition. In most popular war games you may have a full strength German Panzer division with a attack and defense strength of say 10, if the unit suffers any combat loss it flips to say a 4 factor unit in a weekly or bi-weekly game this is rather a sharp drop and if in the next week/bi-weekly turn the unit is reinforced it is again back up to full strength of 10. This is unrealistic in my view, in this model I was trying to describe; there are LSP and MSP that are assigned to units (the Corps/Armies). A German Panzer Corps theoretically could have strength of say 9 (plus one for the unit itself) but with the Fog of War (FOW) a player can not inspect his opponents units. So you are not quite sure as the Soviets (or as the Axis) if that Panzer Corps sitting over there is a 9-4-20 or a 2-4-20. I like this model and it makes it more realistic and fun for me.

Anyway hope I did shed some war game light on the topic even though I did not shed any good philosophic or model's methods ideas.