Recent histories of the interwar period explore how the U.S. Navy digested the impact of World War I and prepared itself for World War II. However, most of these works overlook or dismiss the transformational quality of the War College war games and the central role they played in preparing the navy for war. To address that gap, Playing War details how the interwar navy projected itself into the future through simulated conflicts. Playing War recasts the reputation of the interwar War College as an agent of preparation and innovation and the war games as the instruments of that agency.
Recent histories of the interwar period explore how the U.S. Navy digested the impact of World War I and prepared itself for World War II. However, most of these works overlook or dismiss the transformational quality of the War College war games and the central role they played in preparing the navy for war. To address that gap, Playing War details how the interwar navy projected itself into the future through simulated conflicts. Playing War recasts the reputation of the interwar War College as an agent of preparation and innovation and the war games as the instruments of that agency.
Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II
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Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II
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Overview
Recent histories of the interwar period explore how the U.S. Navy digested the impact of World War I and prepared itself for World War II. However, most of these works overlook or dismiss the transformational quality of the War College war games and the central role they played in preparing the navy for war. To address that gap, Playing War details how the interwar navy projected itself into the future through simulated conflicts. Playing War recasts the reputation of the interwar War College as an agent of preparation and innovation and the war games as the instruments of that agency.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612348254 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
John M. Lillard is a manager at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia and an adjunct professor of history at Tidewater Community College. He served fifteen years as a naval officer, was previously an operations analyst who worked in support of numerous navy, marine corps, and air force acquisition programs, and has worked in the field of wargaming, modeling, and simulation since 1995. His work has appeared in the Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine and Rotor and Wing.
Read an Excerpt
Playing War
Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II
By John M. Lillard
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 the Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61234-825-4
CHAPTER 1
The Players
When Lieutenant Commander Chester Nimitz reported for duty at the War College in 1922, like all of his classmates he commenced what would be an atypical year in the career of a professional naval officer. Rather than leading subordinates in the performance of duties that he understood thoroughly, Nimitz would be cooperating with his peers to address problems and expand their knowledge in areas where they had little prior experience, using a method that most of them had never seen before for simulating naval combat. After graduation, they would leave the War College and return to familiar fleet or staff positions but with their personal and collective perspectives on strategy and tactics transformed to varying extents.
To better comprehend the transformative effect the wargames had on the navy, we need to understand the people who lived through that transformation. Accordingly, this study of wargaming in the interwar period begins with an examination of the players who participated in it — who they were, where they came from, how they came to be at the game, what their surroundings were like, and which preconceptions they brought to it. In this case, "players" refers to the staff who ran the War College, the faculty who orchestrated the games, and the students who acted out their assigned roles on the opposing sides. Previous historians like Spector have used vocabulary like "narrow, stereotyped, ritualized, and drained of relevance" to describe the interwar period wargames. If this were in fact the case, it would not be surprising to find primary source evidence to support such a claim. There was no one closer to the games than the staff, faculty, and students. If the interwar period wargames were irrelevant rituals, one would expect there to be some evidence among the postgame critiques and memoirs that reflected a War College environment that was not conducive to experimentation or learning. Such evidence might include rigid mission statements, outdated course material that did not incorporate new information, inadequate or ineffective staff, one-way communication between faculty and students, highly structured student routines, or student memoirs that imply that the wargaming experience was a waste of time or that the environment left little room for independent thought.
Because of their different roles and their longevity at the college, staff, faculty, and students had very different perspectives of the games, their purpose, their effectiveness, and their downstream effects on naval preparation for war. This chapter examines these different perspectives. The War College staff set the objectives and administered the curriculum for each group of students; accordingly, this chapter first examines the college's mission and vision, how the faculty went about accomplishing it, and what sort of environment they created while doing so. It then looks at the students: their backgrounds; how they came to the college; how they lived, worked, and learned within the War College environment; and how they perceived their experience both during their time as students and with the benefit of hindsight.
The interwar period at the Naval War College began with the return of Admiral William S. Sims to the position of school president in 1919. Sims had to cut short his first tour as president in 1917 when he was ordered to England, first as a senior naval observer, then as the commander in chief of all American naval forces in Europe, with the rank of vice admiral. Sims distinguished himself as a wartime leader, and the fact that he voluntarily accepted a reduction in rank to return to his peacetime assignment provided the college with a considerable amount of publicity and prestige. He became the highly recognizable face of the college for the first years of the interwar period.
Sims maintained a consistent vision of the War College as an institution that would carry on the school's original Mahanian objective, which Mahan himself spelled out at the opening of the War College's fourth session. Mahan declared the War College to be an institution that would "promote, not the creation of naval material, but the knowledge of how to use that material to the best advantage in the conduct of war." However, despite Mahan's imprimatur and Sims's formidable presence, the "greater" navy did not fully accept the War College as an essential part of a naval officer's career development in the beginning of the interwar period. In a holdover from the prewar era, senior naval leadership of the time valued the "practical man" more than the "theoretical" and believed that the place for a naval officer's formal education was aboard ships and not in the classroom. In the greater navy, this philosophy flowed down from senior leaders to junior officers. Accordingly, Sims's challenge was two-dimensional: to bolster the school's relevance in the eyes of the greater navy while at the same time establishing an environment inside the school where the proper combination of theoretical and practical learning could flourish. Sims's ability and authority was such that he was eventually able to realize his vision and have it maintained unchanged for twenty-two years.
Sims expanded on Mahan's interpretation of the War College mission in a speech to the officers of the U.S. Naval Academy on 11 November 1912. He stated, "The primary objective of the Naval War College is to study the principles of warfare ... to develop the practical application of these principles to war on the sea under modern conditions, and then to train our minds to the highest degree of precision and rapidity in the correct application of these principles." Later in the speech, Sims elaborated on what he called "wholly essential" qualities necessary for a naval leader to apply these principles properly. He said, "These qualities ... comprise the ability to recognize ... promptly, the military significance of each strategical and tactical situation; the ability to withstand surprise without impairment or suspension of judgment; rapidity of decision and promptness of action; and inflexible determination in carrying out the plan of operations." The recognition that Sims emphasized he repeatedly referred to in his speech as the "estimate of the situation." This phrase refers to the act of processing available information and determining a course of action. In other words, Sims called the mission of the War College to teach officers how to think, not what to think. The estimate of the situation became the foundation of a deductive system of studying and solving war problems, and that system became the focus of the War College curriculum. The college formally documented guidelines for developing estimates in a pamphlet in 1910, and later expanded the pamphlet into the official War College publication The Estimate of the Situation: Plans and Orders (later revised into Sound Military Decision). The Estimate evolved into a guidebook by which U.S. naval officers learned to dissect and diagnose naval problems. The War College staff never intended The Estimate to be a rulebook or set of procedures, however, and the official college philosophy toward such an interpretation was explicit. As was stated in the booklet The Mission and Organization of the Naval War College, 1936–1937, "Human action cannot be governed, nor can war successfully be waged, solely by precedent or by adherence to rule. The College offers no rules for the application of fundamentals and sedulously advises avoidance of such rules. Development of sound professional judgment, through unremitting individual study and observation, is the only path to the successful application of fundamentals. Assistance to the individual in this development is the offering of the College." This philosophy of "assistance but not rules" is crucial to understanding the War College course of study construct and how the wargames fit into it as laboratories for practice and experimentation. While the curriculum matured and instructors came and went, the Estimate of the Situation — both the publication and the action — remained foundational. Naval War College students went to classes to learn about it, attended lectures to put it in the proper context, and practiced it repeatedly during the wargames that formed the major part of their curriculum.
Sims viewed the games from the perspective of a practical man. To him, they were simply a form of practice for developing estimates, in the same way that warship commanders of the time used "dotter" and subcaliber exercises to train their gun crews. Sims understood that opportunities to conduct full-scale fleet maneuvers would be few and far between but that repeatable wargames could provide inexpensive and accessible opportunities for student-officers to learn through trial and error that which they could not hope to experience at sea. Nevertheless, while Sims stressed this practical aspect of wargaming, he also could see that the games could "serve to develop new applications of the principles of warfare as applied to modern naval conditions." His qualification left the door open for the War College to move beyond simple training and into the realm of strategy, tactics, and technology development.
Learning how to properly assess situations, develop orders, and experiment with new applications was central, but Sims was adamant that the War College not have any direct role in the development of official war plans. In a letter to the secretary of the navy, he stated, "It should be well understood by the service that the college is in no sense a planmaking body, nor has it any administrative or executive functions." This policy, codified in the Mission and Organization of the Naval War College pamphlet, echoed Sims's vision of the War College as an institution that provided "an uninterrupted opportunity, free from administrative demands, for concentration [on study of the exercise of command]." This was one guiding principle that the college maintained (with one exception during the presidency of William Pratt) throughout the interwar period. The last president during peacetime, Edward Kalbfus, confirmed the durability of this philosophy in a statement that Sims would have endorsed, describing the college as "existing for the mental advancement of the individual student officer, not as a reference point for profound opinions, nor as a test plant for war plans, nor as a proving ground for suggested new types." This position relative to the activities of the "greater Navy" led to something of a dichotomy. While there was no direct connection between the college and OP-12 (the War Plans Division of the Chief of Naval Operations' staff), there was an indirect connection through a sort of cyclic osmosis. Students arrived at the War College from the operational navy having made deployments overseas and having participated in the annual fleet problems, which were field tests for the various war plans. These students rotated back to the fleet, carrying their War College experiences with them. Some students became instructors who wrote the wargame scenarios set in real-world geographic areas and could not help but be influenced by their own experiences in the fleet and by current thought among members of the navy staff. In fact, attendance at the War College was a prerequisite for assignment to OP-12.
The historiography of the War College tended to emphasize the role and influence of War College presidents. While the president was the most visible face associated with the college, wargame records reflect that the rear admirals who occupied the president's position actually had much less to do with the wargames than did the captains who chaired the Operations, Strategy, and Tactics Departments. This latter group of officers directed the execution of the curriculum, designed the wargame scenarios, approved the class assignments, officiated at the wargames, and led the postgame critiques. Accordingly, it was they, and not the War College presidents, who were most responsible for the degree to which wargaming impacted preparation for real war.
Admiral Sims's status, reputation, and the loyalty he inspired in officers who had served with him previously attracted high-quality instructors to the school. Staff rosters from the first years of the interwar period include officers like Joseph Taussig and Reginald Belknap, who had distinguished themselves in the U.S. Navy's limited combat operations during the late war. Sims was also able to persuade notable figures from government, business, and academic circles such as James Quayle Dealey, chair of the political science department at Brown University, to contribute regularly as guest lecturers. As the interwar period progressed and Sims's handpicked staff rotated back to fleet assignments, new staff instructors were drawn from the best and brightest of War College graduates. At the end of their term, former students such as Harris Laning '22, Carl Moore '35, and Bernhard Bieri '36 simply changed sides of the classroom to become instructors. Some like Thomas Withers '24 and Raymond Spruance '27 came back for multiple tours. These instructors would have major influence on how the wargames evolved over the interwar period.
While the drawing of instructors from a small pool of distinguished graduates might seem like a closed-loop system that would stifle original thinking, a number of interwar instructors were notable for how they modernized the curriculum and updated the maneuvers. One of the best examples of this was Harris Laning, who served two tours on the staff, first as head of the Tactics Department from 1923 to 1924 and next as president from 1931 to 1934. Today Laning is an obscure figure in naval history, as he was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation during World War I and was too senior to participate actively in World War II, but his position is much more prominent in the more esoteric histories of naval wargaming. Both John Hattendorf and Albert Nofi give him a large share of the credit for injecting discipline, rigor, and relevance to wargames of the interwar period. Laning's flag lieutenant, James Holloway, recalled him as an innovator who advocated for new ship formations, building air-capable ships, and placing the fleet commander out of the battle line, either on board a specially equipped flagship or ashore. One of Laning's first significant contributions to War College wargaming was his senior thesis, "The Naval Battle," which became a textbook for subsequent classes. He also exhibited more flexibility than the stereotypical interwar naval professional might be given credit for. After the class of 1923 (Laning's first class as an instructor) finished two rough performances in their major tactical maneuvers, his students requested an outline that might provide more specific guidance than The Estimate of the Situation. Laning responded with a fifteen-page how-to document titled "Hints on the Solution of Tactical Problems." The procedures he outlined in this paper found their way into the subsequent update of The Estimate of the Situation.
Two of Laning's students from the class of 1924 gained reputations as advocates for the navy's nascent aviation and submarine forces. Captain Joseph Reeves served on the college staff as head of the Tactics Department in 1925 before becoming one of the first senior naval officers to be designated as an aviator. Reeves's biographer, Thomas Wildenberg, credits him with developing the carrier task force concept and putting it into practice during fleet problems. Reeves's classmate Captain Thomas Withers was an early advocate for technology advances in submarine habitability and endurance, and promoted the long-range interdiction tactics that the submarine force would eventually employ with such success during World War II in the Pacific theater. Withers served on the tactics and operations staffs from 1924 to 1926 and later returned in 1928 to manage the junior course.
William Veazie Pratt was not a War College graduate, but he did serve a tour as an instructor before his appointment as president in 1925. Pratt was both an intellectual and something of an anomaly among his fellow flag officers because of his views in favor of disarmament and his work in support of the Washington and later London Naval Conferences. While he was not completely convinced of the practicality of submarines in a naval campaign, Pratt was very clear-eyed regarding the possibilities of naval aviation, and his statements on the subject are a solid counter to the popular vision of interwar leaders of the navy as hidebound traditionalists. When he arrived at Newport, he immediately emphasized the neglected field of logistics at the college and aligned his instructor staff to mirror the organization of a fleet staff. He also attempted to restore the college to its original role in the war planning process, but by the midtwenties, the separation between the college and OP-12 was too deeply institutionalized. Both Ronald Spector and Michael Vlahos emphasized Pratt's highly visible and ultimately short-lived attempts to realign and reinvent the War College as examples of interwar navy resistance to change, but these perspectives overlook a steadier and long-term evolution reflected in wargame records. Logistics planning remained in the curriculum after the functions of the Logistics Department were absorbed into those of the Operations Department, and the flow of War College graduates to OP-12 continued.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Playing War by John M. Lillard. Copyright © 2016 the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,List of Tables,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. The Players,
2. The Game Process,
3. The Early Phase, 1919–27,
4. The Middle Phase, 1928–34,
5. The Late Phase, 1935–41,
Conclusion,
Appendix A. Naval War College Class Demographics,
Appendix B. Naval War College Wargames,
Appendix C. The World Naval Balance, 1919–41,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,