Global War Game: Second Series, 1984-1988

by Robert H. Gile

This report deals with practical issues and major themes identified during the second Global War Game (GWG) Series. Its focus is on various general topics, specific force employment issues, and discrete game events. Because of the interplay of themes and issues among several theaters, some repetition is necessary to provide a more complete discussion. The Global War Game was conceived in 1978 to build a structure to explore warfighting issues in a larger perspective than the tactical view prevalent in the Navy at that time. These games constitute a research project that ranges from policy through strategy to operations (campaigns). It was and is an opportunity to investigate ideas and concepts that may vary from current policy or strategic “wisdom.” With the understanding that game simulations were but an approximation of the behavior of governments in global war, the scenarios should be considered as a context for issues to be explored. The first game (1979) had a distinctly naval focus, but the series quickly evolved, by obvious necessity, into a much broader military and political forum. Throughout the first series, GWG was utilized as a test bed or crucible for an emerging maritime strategy. A brief summary of these initial games and an overview of some of the major issues examined in them is included in this volume for those who do not have access to Global War The First Five Years (Newport Paper Number 4.) While the first series involved several different geographical areas to confront current, real-world events or to test a specific concept, the second series picked up where the first terminated, with a major war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact (WP). It was a natural extension of the first series, designed for the purpose of exploring issues that would arise in waging protracted warfare in the decade of the 1990s. Effort has been made throughout this paper to preserve the terminology that was in use when the games were conducted and to relate faithfully actual strategies pursued and campaigns implemented as well as the rationale behind them. Thus, while some of the terminology may seem archaic and some of the operations ill-advised, it is necessary to look at these efforts as learning experience that reflects how our thinking about global war, our concepts, and our practices matured during the series.

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2006

Reviews

[youzicha]

This is basically Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, but instead of getting together 12 of Clancy's friends to putter around for two afternoons, the Navy gathered 600 military officers, diplomats, nuclear scientists, intelligence officers, etc, and put them all up in a conference building for three weeks at a time each year from 1979 to 1988.

The book summaries the 1979-83 games, and then describes the next two games in detail. One can quibble a little with the emphasis—the games were organized by the Navy, and it just so happens that naval forces determine all the key points in the war, while the ground forces and the air force play supporting roles—but in any case it is the most detailed late-80s World War 3 scenario I have seen, and there are lots of interesting details. For example, from the first day of hostilities, the U.S. Navy planned to make it a top priority to sink as many Soviet SSBNs as possible, which surely must have implications for crisis stability...

The organizers were particularly interested in whether a global war could be kept from going nuclear, and the results were kind of mixed. In the longest game, they played the scenario for 65 simulated days, and neither side found that the advantages of tactical nuclear weapons outweighed the escalation risk; so far so good. The game then moved into a final phase where they considered peace negotiations, which is where trouble showed up. The negotiators were presented with three different scenarios for how the war in Europe might have developed by day 75, ranging from U.S. advantage to a draw to Soviet advantage, but in fact every scenario gave the same result: the minimum negotiation aims of the two sides were incompatible, and they decided to continue the war to improve their position. In this situation they planned for either a multi-year war of attrition (even though the weapons stockpiles were already severely depleted), or started to consider going nuclear to gain a breakthrough quicker.

Of course, one worries that the results may be biased because all three sides—the U.S., the Soviet Union, and third-party countries—were played by Reagan-era Americans. Amusingly, the book explains that in the first few games in 1979-80 the role of the Politburo was played by military officers, and the scenarios they came up with were things like "with no warning, the Soviets launch an all-out assault on Western Europe as a prelude to invading the Middle East and taking their oil fields". Eventually the game organizers brought in diplomats and intelligence officers, who scaled down the Soviet aims to trying to avoid losing control over Eastern Europe. But even so, the premise for the largest game (which ran for a total of 12 weeks in 1985-88) was that there are pro-democracy demonstrations in East Germany, and the Soviet Union concludes that their only option is to invade West Germany and the rest of NATO, thus triggering an global war. The book authors comment that "events of the late 1980s and early 1990s would appear to show that the Global 'Red Team' seriously overestimated the capabilities of the Warsaw Pact", but given how devastating their simulated war was, maybe they mostly underestimated Mikhail Gorbachev.