English: A volcano called Syria (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The situation in Syria has caught public attention because of the alleged use of chemical weapons (most likely Sarin) by someone.
I don’t usually stray into current affairs quite so much as this, these sort of situations are too raw to even think about designing games about them. However the press coverage seems to be quite off base to me, seeing this as a repeat of Iraq/Afghanistan where it appears to me to be closer to the break up of Yugoslavia, or perhaps the Rwanda genocide. Also much of my experience in trying to understand conflict can be brought to bear on this situation.
This post is prompted by an excellent post by the guys at On Violence. You should read Capturing Australia! COIN is Boring Pt.3Â to which this was my belated comment.
McCormick model of insurgency (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My apologies for coming late to this one, I’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks now and being spending time with the family.
I’ve been interested in designing a counter insurgency game since the mid 1990s. The original trigger for my interest were the decolonisation conflicts of the British Empire. This wasn’t a board game, nor a computer game. The group I belong to designs face to face games for multiple participants, a bit like the sort of command post exercises those of us who’ve done some military or civil contingencies time would recognise.
I never ran the decolonisation game that prompted this, it needed 20 players, which was too many for the free venues and too few to make it economic in the hired halls. However there were a number of spin-off games, including a look at the Palestine/Israel insurgency in 1945-48; Malaya in the 1950s and Aden in the early 60s.
By the time I’d looked at those traditional insurgencies we got into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. My most recent attempt, which sort of almost counts as a board game (it has a map, which is really only for flavour) looked at the experience from the point of view of the Afghan farmers, and the drivers that took them to insurgency (or not as the case happens). I ran it twice, both times with someone who served in Afghanistan as one of the players.
I come at all this as a hobbyist. I make the games I’d like to play but cannot find commercially. The same is true of the people that I play with, we form a community of game design activists. (Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group, mainly in the UK). Over the years I’ve played games as both an insurgent and a counter-insurgent. They hold a lot of game play and interest. However a lot of it defies easy mechanisms that you can write down on a few pages than just about anyone can understand.
Part of this is that insurgencies aren’t all the same. What works in dealing with one group might only make things work with another. You need to get inside the culture and methods of the insurgents to defeat them. Or at least that is how I read it. Sometimes it will be unpalatable for modern players to play those games, either because of a close connection with someone hurt by the insurgency, or because current moral standards differ from those of the period or culture concerned.
That said, I think it is possible to write good games about insurgency. They just need to be specifically tailored to the insurgency in question and the players appropriately briefed in advance. You also need players that will roleplay it a little rather than just play to mechanisms.
I’ve been looking through some of my early writing on my computer, most of which was written for publication in Chestnut Lodge‘s club magazine, known affectionately as MilMud (a contraction of Military Muddling). I found several articles from the mid 90s which I have cut and pasted into the blog with dates when they were originally written or the file modified date if that isn’t clear. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Libre Office can open WordPerfect 5.1 files with no problems.
Design Session for ‘Lion Comes Home‘ onside report. This was the start of my fascination with counter insurgency, back in 1995. I wanted to do a game about the post-war decolonisation, and I did lots of work on it and ran many test versions of parts of it. However the whole game never appeared because it was too big for a club game and I didn’t want to commit to running a megagame.
Onside Report on C3I. This marks another of my obsessions, in trying to accurately model morale of people in combat. Almost everything I read (and a few recent conversations with veterans) suggest that most people in combat aren’t remotely effective, and even those that are aren’t as good as they would be in training. Despite the tone of the article I never further developed or used C3I because it was too fiddly for a good game.
Milmud article on Revolutionary Warfare. An article I wrote for the CLWG club magazine on one of the spin off games from my idea for Lion Comes Home. This was in January 2003.
There are still more articles in my archives that I intend to add to my blog, so that this becomes a better record of the development of various ideas. Unless I write fresh material as a result, I’m always going to slot them in to where they would have appeared had I had a blog at the time.
I picked this up for a pound in a charity shop in Caterham. I was surprised to find that it stood up well to the passing of time. It was written towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, during which it is set, and first published in 1939.
It still reads as a good story. A bit boys own in places, but it is Biggles and that’s exactly what Biggles stories are supposed to be. There is a good feel for the history, which is partly through being practically contemporaneous with the events it described. Well worth reading.
I borrowed this from the library and liked it so much that I bought my own copy. I found it very interesting because it is unusual for an other rank to write a memoir. Especially one where the author was a battery sergeant major who also had access to the battery clerk’s notes. So, much of the 1944-45 campaign is very well documented with grid references for gun positions, ammo expenditure and times of moves. It is a fantastic reference book for WW2 operations of a Royal Horse Artillery battery in self propelled guns.
There is also some of the human element to it as well. I was especially moved by the mystery of Gunner E T Jones who disappeared in the middle of a battle between the authors casualty evacuation runs. Gunner Jones was never found and is commemorated on the memorial for the missing at Bayeux.
It has a Fab Concept. However it doesn’t quite work. Some of it is too heavy handed and not well enough researched to be credible.
I bought this book because I liked the premise, a change in the nature of warfare brought about by better information available to the whole army through a wiki style network. It has promise for some very interesting stories, but the author instead wrote a political polemic based on very old fashioned stereotypes and without bothering to do his research.
Accepting that our narrator is probably unreliable, given he is definitely going insane, and the twist that happens at the end (no spoilers) it is clear that we cannot rely on him. However there are bits of his prior experience with the British Army that just don’t work for me (having been in the TA from 1989-1992 and knowing a fair number of current and recently ex-service personnel).
The primary character is supposed to have served in the British Army for a few months before deserting because he didn’t like the extreme discipline. This itself is fair enough, a few months would see a soldier through basic training and into the specialist training for their arm of service. This is the period when the most discipline is imposed. All through the book the success of the new model armies is based on the rigid inflexibility of traditional forces that cannot think for themselves. This is the bit I find most difficult to swallow, even back in the 1980s soldiers were being taught to solve problems and work through gaps in information and orders, especially regulars that were deployed to Northern Ireland. By the current period, with the huge increase in peacekeeping operations and the small insurgencies thinking is a core skill for all ranks, not just senior officers. The stereotype might have been true for the 1950s conscripts, but even then I doubt it.
This is not my only problem with the book though. While it is clear that the author can write decent prose, there is still not a whole lot of thinking going on about the consequences of how the technology changes things. There is some in there, but not enough. For example why didn’t the British Army just turn on massive jammers of the wifi signal when they came up against the NMAs? Also why are the NMA better on a man for man basis when they are largely untrained volunteers up against properly trained soldiers in a veteran army? I can get local superiority allowing them to win battles, but in an exchange of fire I don’t see how wiki info turns people into better shots.
Anyway, the book is riddled with holes and could have been edited into a crisper better book. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
This was the first time I have read a prisoner of war story involving Germans as the POWs, apart from having read the official history of British Intelligence in WW2 (which only dealt with the captured German spies). I have, however read lots about the prisoners of the Germans.
It was interesting that security in British camps seems to have been quite lax. Despite many apparently successful German breakouts there is only one well known instance of a German POW making a home run. This book comes across as having been well researched where it comes to its primary subject matter, although there is quite a lot of preamble with a summary of how WW2 went which is not as well researched as the main subject. This lets it down for those well versed in WW2 history.
Once the preamble is done there is a specific history of the camp in Devizes that is obviously the author’s initial exposure to the story that he decided to write about. There is a lot of original research included where the author has spoken to locals about the camp before researching it in the national archives. The story follows the efforts of the British authorities to keep control in the last year of the war when prisoner numbers increased dramatically.
The German POWs were graded according to their sympathies to the Nazis, the believers being black, the anti-Nazis being white and the majority Grey. The camps were initially mixed, and the Nazis outnumbered the anti-nazis. This meant that the camps were run by the Nazis and had a hostile tone for those Germans that had worked out how the war was going to end.
After a riot in Devizes a number of the POWs were transferred to a camp in Scotland. When they got there some of the hardliners decided that some of their fellow POWs weren’t ardent enough Nazis. This came to a head with the lynching of a German prisoner who was accused of collaboration with the British.
This is an excellent history of a small unit action set in the wider context of the war, and well explained for those not steeped in military history or the second world war.
The author starts with setting the background, explaining the grand sweep of the war and the events that lead to the formation of the commandos in mid-1940 and then a high-level overview of the commando training and the early operations so that you understand what commandos are all about, and the strategic context that lead to the assault on Dieppe in late summer 1942.
The build up to the attack is well covered, based heavily on the account by the embedded journalist that accompanied 4 Commando. After that the assault narrative splits into two, one for each of the groups that landed, and based on a mixture of accounts and interviews with various survivors of the operation.
This is more than just an infantry officer’s memoir. Denis Forman was closely involved in the Battle School movement that transformed the British Army’s infantry training during the second world war. He then went on to serve alongside Lionel Wigram (the primary proponent and intellectual leader of the Battle School movement) in Italy. The story is as much about Lionel Wigram as it is about Denis Forman himself.
However one of the stand out pieces for me is the honest treatment of how men deal with battle. The psychological impact and how unreliable things become is often not mentioned in most memoirs, there is an unspoken need not to embarrass anyone, or bring up things better left to lie. This book manages to discuss it without shaming anyone.
Also, the appendices have copies of the reports into the lessons from the Sicily campaign drawn by Lionel Wigram. Not published at the time because they were too controversial they tell an interesting story of how the theory met reality.
Just before the war started Denis Forman graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1939. He was certain that there was going to be a war but didn’t want to commit himself to the Army until it started, so he took a short-term post with a shipping agency to avoid being sent to the Far East to make his fortune (which is where he was being directed by his elders). When war broke out he was in the Netherlands, and he returned to join the Argylls where he was promptly sent off to be an officer cadet.
His description of joining an infantry battalion and his efforts as a subaltern within it are priceless. He honestly shows how desperate the British Army was in the Summer of 1940 and how it was manning (and ‘leading’) its infantry battalions. More than enough to make you wonder about what would have happened if the Germans had invaded (although I like to believe that they probably had some very similar issues).
