military exercise
Herbstmanöver in southern
Germany, autumn 1909 (
Emperor Wilhelm II second on the left) The use of military exercises and war games can be found to date back to as early as the early 19th century, wherein it was the officers of the
Prussian Army who created the contemporary, tactical form of wargames that have since been more widely used and developed by other military conglomerations throughout the world. Non-tactical forms of wargames have existed for much longer, however, in the forms of tabletop games such as
chess and
Go. The modern use of military exercises grew out of the military need to study warfare and to
reenact old battles for learning purposes. During the age of
Kabinettskriege (Cabinet wars),
Frederick the Great,
King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, "put together his armies as a well-oiled clockwork mechanism whose components were
robot-like warriors. No individual initiative was allowed to Frederick's soldiers; their only role was to cooperate in the creation of walls of projectiles through synchronized firepower." This was in the pursuit of a more effective army, and such practices made it easier to look at war from a top-down perspective. Disciplined troops should respond predictably, allowing study to be confined to maneuvers and
command.
Prussia's victory over the
Second French Empire in the
Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) is sometimes partly credited to the training of Prussian officers with the
wargame Kriegsspiel, which was invented around 1811 and gained popularity with many officers in the Prussian army. These first wargames were played with
dice which represented "friction", or the intrusion of less than ideal circumstances during a real war (including
morale,
meteorology, the
fog of war, etc.)., 2019 military exercise training information reel. 21st century militaries still use wargames to simulate future wars and
model their reaction. According to
Manuel de Landa, after
World War II the
Command, Control and Communications (C3) was transferred from the military staff to the
RAND Corporation, the first
think tank. Around the mid to late 20th century, computer simulated war games were created to replace traditional war gaming methods with the goal of optimizing and speeding up the process and making it possible to analyze more complex scenarios with greater ease. In 1958, the Naval War college installed a computer war game system where their traditional war gaming activities were held. The system was called the Navy Electronic Warfare System, and cost over $10 million to install. The change from traditional war gaming methods to electronic computer simulated ones meant that the value and accuracy of a war game simulation was less dependent on skill and individual experiences, and more dependent on quantitative data and complicated analysis methods. passing civilian traffic in
Herbstein,
West Germany during
Exercise Reforger 83|alt=
Von Neumann was employed by the RAND Corporation, and his
game theory was used in wargames to model
nuclear dissuasion during the
Cold War. Thus, the U.S.
nuclear strategy was defined using wargames, "
SAM" representing the U.S. and "
IVAN" representing the Soviet Union. Early game theory included only
zero-sum games, which means that when one player won, the other automatically lost. The
prisoner's dilemma, which models the situation of two prisoners in which each one is given the choice to betray or not the other, gave three alternatives to the game: • Neither prisoners betrays the other, and both are given short-term sentences • One prisoner betrays the other, and is freed, while the other gets a long sentence • Both prisoners betray each other, and both are given mid-sized sentences This model gave the basis for the
massive retaliation nuclear doctrine. The
zero-sum fallacy and
cooperative games would be theorized only later, while the evolution of
nuclear technology and
missiles made the massive retaliation nuclear strategy obsolete. ==List of military exercises==