By Tyler McBrien

In his much discussed new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Yale legal historian Samuel Moyn traces how efforts to make war more ethical have only perpetuated the entire grisly enterprise. Technological and legal innovations intended to dull war’s sharpest edges only served to keep the whole weapon intact. “We fight war crimes but have forgotten the crime of war,” writes Moyn.[1]

Though Moyn mainly focuses on legal mechanisms—treaties, conventions, and laws—the history of wargames, or games that realistically simulate warfare, would have also fit cleanly into his narrative. English novelist and pacifist H.G. Wells, a bit character in Humane, similarly attempted to end war or make it less lethal through the introduction of his own wargame in his 1913 book Little Wars. But like Moyn’s other well-intentioned characters, his invention only handed the generals more tools for battle.

Wells did not invent the wargame. As he writes in the introduction of Little Wars, “[i]n all ages a certain barbaric warfare has been waged with soldiers of tin and lead and wood, with the weapons of the wild.”[3] Historians speculate that abstract games like chess were developed to represent troop movements in battle, and military commanders like Napoleon would routinely manipulate colored pins over topographic maps to simulate counterfactual campaigns. 

In the modern era, many historians credit the nineteenth century Prussian army as the first military to adopt wargaming in an official capacity. The fact that Prussia was the first to develop such an innovative use of games for war was fitting for a country which had achieved significant integration of the military and the state. As one Prussian minister famously said, “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.”[4]

The Prussian Kriegspiel, which translates literally to “wargame” in German, marked a departure from earlier iterations designed purely for educational purposes in military schools. Kriegspiel sets, complete with Zinnfiguren, or “tin figures,” found their way to every regiment in the Prussian army, and the Kaiser himself would attend Kriegspiel tournaments in full military regalia. 

 Make no mistake: the aim of Kriegspiel was not fun, but victory. As the chief of the German general staff said in 1824, “It is not a game at all! It’s training for war!”[5] Prussia’s tabletop fantasies translated to real-world gains, and the world took notice. When word spread that Prussia’s Kriegspiel sessions led to a decisive victory against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, the wargame reached near mythic status among great powers of the day. In adapting a version of Kriegspiel for the British army, Captain Baring of the Royal Artillery wrote in 1872, “The increased importance which is now attached to the game may be, in some measure, due to the feeling that the great tactical skill displayed by Prussian officers in the late war had been, at least partially, acquired by means of the instruction which the game affords.”[6] Japan credited its surprise victory against Russia in 1905 in part to the stratagems played out in Kriegspiel. Even the United States, then a minor power, began to develop an “American Kriegspiel” in 1872, after Kriegspiel-aided victories “opened the eyes of all Europe to its importance.”[7]

 A notorious pacifist at the time of writing Little Wars, Wells sought to reclaim the Kriegspiel for the side of peace and wrest the Zinnfiguren from the warlord’s grasp. After laying out the genesis of his creation, its rules, and an exemplary game, Wells finally tells the reader what he’s really up to. “How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!”[8] Wells exclaims in the book’s conclusion. 

Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.[9]

His was not a training game; he sought to replace war entirely. 

The prospect of war was no idle threat; dark clouds were already gathering above Europe. “Great War is…a game out of all proportion,” Wells ended his book, presciently. “Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”[10] Wells hoped that after three or four times playing his Kriegspiel, even the most belligerent general would realize “just what a blundering thing Great War must be.”

Wells likely knew that wargames enabled war, or at least a more humane strain of it. Indeed, the militaries of his day used wargames to perfect their wartime strategies. But Wells saw an alternative. By simulating the costs of war without actually realizing those losses, Wells hoped wargames could replace war instead of intensifying it. 

Unfortunately this utopian vision did not come to pass. In an appendix to first edition of Little Wars, which was initially published in a magazine before appearing in full book form, Wells discusses the warm reception his wargame found among members of the British Army, “in spite of the pacific outbreak in its concluding section.”[11] Wells struck up a correspondence with one colonel in particular who pointed out “the possibility of developing Little Wars into a vivid and inspiring Kriegspiel.”[12] Abandoning his earlier motives, Wells obliged the colonel in the appendix by elaborating on how Little Wars might be adapted for military training. Wells’ justification would be right at home in Moyn’s book. “If Great War is to be played at all,” he wrote, “the better it is played the more humanely it will be done. I see no inconsistency in deploring the practice while perfecting the method.”[13]

In the end, the playful seduction of wargames seemed too great even for Wells. In the conclusion of Little Wars, his “pacific outbreak” begins, “I could go on now and tell of battles, copiously. In the memory of the one skirmish I have given I do but taste blood. I would like to go on, to a large, thick book. It would be an agreeable task.”[14] Even the great pacifist got a thrill from war’s simulacrum.

Perhaps Wells’ original project was doomed from the start, because nothing can capture the visceral horror of war, short of the real thing. A story from Henry Nash, an analyst with the Department of Defense during the Cold War, illustrates this paradox. During a NATO wargame, Nash remembered the nasty shock one Air Force colonel expressed when he learned about the number of casualties that resulted from his decision to strike an enemy urban center with a nuclear weapon. “It took the simulated reality of a war game to bring home the human dimensions of this act,” wrote Nash. “The colonel quickly regained his composure, reassuring himself that this was, after all, only a game.”[15] Although a game had helped him appreciate the scale of destruction, he was able to move on because it was a game. 

Wars have continued, of course, and so have wargames. Last year, the Pentagon announced it “failed miserably” against China in a simulated battle for Taiwan.[16] In response, the military began to overhaul its Joint Warfighting Concept, which has guided forces for decades. Although wargames never came to replace war, they might still dictate its future. Like the many laws and weapons in Humane, wargames, initially meant to reduce war, have been co-opted by the military establishment as another tool to wage it endlessly.

About the Author

Tyler McBrien is an M.A. student in international relations at the University of Chicago. You can find more of his writing on Twitter (@TylerMcBrien). 

Endnotes

1. Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 10. 

2. Bani Abidi, “Then It Was Moulded Anew,” Experimenter, November 2012, https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.002/id01319/press_release.pdf. 

3. H.G. Wells, Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books (London: Frank Palmer, 1913), 9.

4. Dennis E. Showalter, “The Prussian Military State,” in Early Modern Military History, 1840–1815, ed. G. Mortimer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 118–134.

5. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Penguin Random House, 1992), 37.

6. W.R. Livermore, The American Kriegsspiel: A Game for Practicing the Art of War Upon a Topographical Map (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), 2. 

7. Livermore, The American Kriegsspiel, 2.

8. Wells, Little Wars, 97.

9. Wells, Little Wars, 97.

10. Wells, Little Wars, 100.

11. Wells, Little Wars, 101. 

12. Wells, Little Wars, 101.

13. Wells, Little Wars, 101. 

14. Wells, Little Wars, 96. 

15. Henry T. Nash, “The Bureaucratization of Homicide,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (1980): 24.

16. Tara Kopp, “‘It Failed Miserably’: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How the US Military Will Fight,” Defense One, July 26, 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/.