So we’re on Day Four of the First Snowpocalypse of 2024, and anticipating Icepocalypse: The Sequel later today.
The wild card is power, tho. There are still a crap-ton of outages from the first round of weather, and ice has a nasty way of bringing powerlines down around here. So hoping for luck with that.
Meanwhile I'm working to stay busy. The weather has badly disrupted my kendo practice - the ceiling here is too low for a correct men-uchi, so I'm reduced to trying all sorts of gimmicks to workaround. Plus the little gym we belong to is down a steep hill from St. Johns and, while I'll bet we could zip down it'd be reeeeeal iffy trying to get back up so, no.
I'm writing a lot about Portland soccer - our women's professional team 1) just got sold to a California real estate developer and 2) just made it's 2024 college draft picks, so there's a lot to talk about.
And I'm reading a lot; first Wayne Lee's splendid The Cutting-off Way, a modern analysis of native warfare in Northeastern North America between first European contact and the emergence of the early United States.
Second, several sources for my planned Frontiers 1914 post later in the month (or February), beginning with Showalter, Robinson, and Robinson (2019) The German Failure In Belgium. I've also got Terence Zuber's 2007 The Battle of the Frontiers on order. The more I look into this whole "Frontiers" business the more I want to focus on the issue of reconnaissance and, particularly, cavalry, since it was the horse soldiers that the commanding officers of 1914 presumed would get them the intelligence they needed to carry out their operational planning.
(Yes, the fliers were busy, as well, but I don't get the sense that the maneuver commanders had enough familiarity with how the aircraft worked and how to use the information they could produce to really incorporate that into their planning...)
Anyway, that should keep me busy for a bit.
In a shocking upset, Tubby swept the board. Yeah, I know. Pinch me.
There's no kidding ourselves; the Right is gonna return this fucker to us in November. If they can foist him back into power it's gonna suck for everyone not them, and, frankly, that's so obvious that if you're not them and you're not fulminating at the moment you get to vote against them, fight them, and destroy them, you're nuts.
We the People are going to get a very simple choice this year; choose the promise of the better angels of the American Experiment, or choose the original sins of the Founders, the long legacy of slavery and oligarchy.
I know where I stand. Where the rest of my nation will go? I can only remind them that...
Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.
4 comments:
Looking forward to your frontiers piece.
As a wargame designer (and occasional player) I am always interested in reconnaissance, intelligence and deception.
I've started in on too many 1914 games where, for the sake of closing quickly and rolling dice, both sides had satellite/GPS levels of knowledge about where the enemy was.
Basic flaw in the practice, but players have no patience with recce or logistics or morale... all of the things that really decide the battle and campaign.
To simulate real-time C3I you almost have to have umpires and two separate game tables not visible to the other side.
IOW Side A has a map table showing their units and the most recent intel and recon reports of enemy positions and movement. Side B has the same, and the umpires have the master map with both sides' dispositions.
Only as the opponents' recon elements make contact do the umpires place the enemy forces revealed on the opponent maps.
That's 1) time consuming, 2) logistically complicated, and 3) expensive, so as you say, most wargames just assume god-like powers of knowledge.
I'm just really getting dug into the events of August 1914, but what jumps out at me is how all the major combatants suffered because of what they thought they knew that was untrue, and what they didn't know they didn't know.
In particular, all the elements that came together by 1939 were there; they had the ground recon, they had the air recon, they had the commo (primitive in the case of radio, but it was there...).
What they DIDN'T have was a systematic appreciation for how all that had to be integrated.
So in large part the failures of the recon battle weren't particularly on any physical or tactical piece. It was on the mindset, the understanding of the synergy needed to put all those guys and horses and aircraft and commo and most importantly analysis together.
It's amazing to see how players change their style when they do sit down and play an umpired game like this.
This is also frequently the method for games played by the professional military, who have limited time and resources but appreciate the importance of these things.
I have tinkered in my designs (in particular, one on the 1939 Poland Campaign) with players not being 100% sure of what they are facing, and how well what they have is going to work.
IIRC all Tier 1 services - that is, legit modern-warfare-capable organizations such as the US, Britain, Japan, etc. - do their wargaming this way, all the way from "tabletop" exercises to the close-to-LFX maneuver exercises at places like the NTC at Ft. Irwin.
You can't simulate the "fog" of actual war without it.
Mind you, it's not foolproof. Recall the pre-"Desert Saber" game in which the Red Team officer playing Saddam pulled off all sorts of clever low-tech tricks that caught the US/UK players out. He was reeled in and the "game" reset...fortunately the actual Iraqi leadership wasn't as clever.
In their study of the Japanese Navy at Midway ("Shattered Sword") Parshall and Tully recount the pre-Midway wargame where the supposed-US playing officer did something similar and inflicted serious damage on the Kido Butai - not, IIRC, as heavy as at Midway - and the Gunreibu, the Naval Staff, did the same thing - reset the game and told the "US" player to act like they thought he would.
So...better than the God's Eye view of most two-player games, but can still be gimmicked!
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