Using Tactical Decision Exercises to Study Tactics
2002; The MIT Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-4148
Autores Tópico(s)Military History and Strategy
ResumoWhat is necessary to be performed in the heat of action should constantly be practiced in the leisure of peace. - Vegetius1 USING GAMES to train leaders is neither new nor revolutionary. Such methods date back to Sun Tzu.2 Although initially played principally for amusement, such exercises were soon found to be worthwhile for training and educating students for their respective professions. Today, many organizations use similar practices to develop leaders and prepare them for decisionmaking under actual conditions. Notables include the U.S. Armed Services and some law-enforcement and fire-prevention services. The variation of such games found effective for training subordinates in decisionmaking skills is the tactical decision exercise (TDE). The TDE provides an effective mechanism for developing individual ability to make decisions under physical and mental stress. While TDEs are not the perfect substitute for actual training and experience, they do serve to sharpen individual intuitive decisionmaking ability. In today's military, constrained as it is by shrinking budgets, personnel shortages, and numerous missions, TDEs provide leaders at all levels an opportunity to hone decisionmaking skills during scenarios that place the student-leader in stressful situations. Recently, there has been a resurgence of the TDE variety of war games. Experiences in peace operations have rekindled interest in the merits of using these role-playing scenarios to develop decisionmaking skills. History of Wargaming Who actually invented the first war game is unknown, but historians generally credit Prussian Baron von Reisswitz for being the first to move war games out of the entertainment realm and into the military. He designed the 1811 version of the game using scaled pieces to represent units. He later moved the game to a sand table containing features corresponding to actual terrain. Tthe pieces were no longer restricted to moving within the confines of the squares of a chessboard. Players could move the pieces freely within the capabilities of the respective units. The accompanying rules were also noteworthy because their foundation in military experiences of the day (Napoleonic Wars) added realism. Reisswitz's game became extremely popular in courts and higher echelons of society, yet never really took root within professional military circles.3 Many in the military were skeptical of the game's merits. In 1824, Reisswitz's son George, a lieutenant in the Prussian Guard Artillery, developed a more refined version of the game that included a number of improvements. He titled his version of the game Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a War Game.4 The refined game included set-piece rules and incorporated actual topographical maps to represent the battlefield. The game gained widespread attention and eventually became a staple within the regiments. The game's intrinsic worth so impressed Lieutenant Helmuth von Moltke that in 1828 he founded a war-game club called the Kriegspieler herein. In 1857, as the chief of staff in the Prussian Army, Moltke pushed the use of wargaming throughout the army. During the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, the heavily reserve- and militia-based Prussian Army soundly defeated the highly regarded French Army in a mere 5 months. The reversal of the balance of power in Europe was so rapid and unexpected that it shocked the world. Noted military historian Michael Howard writes that the nature of the Prussians' overwhelming victory was largely attributed to superior organization and education.6 Their remarkable military successes prompted many other countries to analyze and incorporate some of the Prussian reforms into their own military establishments, one of which was officer education through war games and staff rides. The United States also took note. In 1882, Major William R. Livermore devised the U. …
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