Peter Perla's Art of Wargaming book, A guide for professionals and hobbyists
Sample Pages
Extract
2: Wargaming and the U.S. Naval War College
THE CREATION OF THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE
The latter quarter of the nineteenth century was a time of social and technological upheaval for the U.S. Navy. The sudden growth in the navy's size and fighting power occasioned by the War Between the States was followed by an equally precipitous decline after that war's end. At the same time, the technological revolutions in ship construction and weapons, which the war had helped accelerate, had left the navy's core of professional officers with deep-seated feelings of uncertainty about the future and the navy's place in it.1
There was a feeling abroad in the country and much of the world that economic progress and industrial efficiency would soon lead to the disappearance of war and so the need for armed forces of all types. For the United States especially, insulated from the great powers of Europe by the wide expanse of the Atlantic, military security seemed virtually assured by simple geography, and military forces seemed almost superfluous. Indeed, the secretary of war, Redfield Proctor, wrote in 1890 that the ‘military resources of the nation have been so recently demonstrated and its network of railroads is so adapted to a rapid concentration of troops on any threatened point, that no hostile force is likely to seek an encounter with us on our own soil. A small army sent upon our shores could not hope for success; it is not probable that any large one will run the risk."2
If civilians believed the military to be unimportant, naval officers felt themselves unappreciated. The ships, what remained of them, were old. The officer corps was plagued by the twin specters of a rigid system of seniority and an overabundance of seniors. It is little wonder that officers with ambition and imagination found the naval service less than satisfying. "Confronted with the combination of public indifference and professional stagnation, many officers became mere timeservers while others buried themselves with great thoroughness in some technical branch of their calling, ordnance or electricity, engineering, or international law."3
Determined to pull the navy from the pit of its despair, a small band of "reformers" took the initiative to turn the navy into a true profession. Led by Commodore Stephen B. Luce, the reformers sought no less than the complete transformation of the navy's officers, not into mere technicians, but into well-educated, well-rounded masters of the tools and techniques of a unique naval art. In addition, they sought to secure a place for these new naval professionals in the public's appreciation and understanding by demonstrating the importance of that profession for the general life and well-being of the nation and its people.
It was a tall order, but one Luce accepted as a challenge worth his commitment. In 1881 Luce was appointed commander of the newly formed Training Squadron in the Atlantic, with his flagship, the USS New Hampshire, anchored off Coasters Harbor Island only two miles north of the city of Newport, Rhode Island. The ship's executive officer was a young lieutenant named William McCarty Little, whom Luce had known as a student at the Naval Academy while Luce had been on the staff there. Operating from this base in Narragansett Bay, Luce embarked on a concerted campaign to establish a higher school for the professional education of naval officers.
In October 1884, after extensive efforts both within and outside the navy, Luce succeeded in getting the secretary of the navy, William Chandler, to sign General Order 325, formally establishing the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island. A year later the college became a reality, with Luce, detached from his command of the North Atlantic Squadron, as its first president. Among his staff were a Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the now retired Lieutenant William McCarty Little.4
McCARTY LITTLE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF NEWPORT WARGAMING
McCarty Little, as he was known to his friends, began his navy career in Newport in 1863, where he entered the Naval Academy during its brief hiatus there during the Civil War. (Annapolis was a bit too close to the front lines.) Graduating in 1866, McCarty Little served in various sea and shore assignments, many of which enabled him to maintain his association with the city he had grown to love. In 1876, however, he suffered an accident ashore, which cost him the sight of one of his eyes. He was able to return to active duty and served well for several more years until one of those unfortunate and inexplicable bureaucratic actions resulted in his discharge for medical reasons in 1884, after twenty years in the navy. Inevitably, he chose Newport as his new, and final, home port.
Just as inevitably, it seems, he became deeply involved with the activities of his old friend Luce. Although his role in the establishment and the organization of the Naval War College during its first year of existence is not fully recorded, "McCarty Little assisted in the preparation of teaching aids, established and maintained a library, and fulfilled administrative duties of a routine nature."5 His responsibilities expanded the following year.
Luce had been detached to resume command of the North Atlantic Squadron, and Mahan had assumed the role of War College president. Plagued by bureaucratic and political problems, Mahan leaned heavily on McCarty Little for both moral and practical support. For McCarty Little, an unofficial member of the staff, that support included the preparation of maps and charts for Mahan's lectures on strategy and tactics, and also the preparation and delivery of a lecture of his own. The latter, simply titled "Colomb's War Game," was the first on the subject to be given at the college. It was not the last.
Little's budding interest in wargaming was almost certainly stimulated by his association with army Major W. R. Livermore, author of The American Kriegsspiel, who was stationed across the harbor from the Naval War College in Fort Adams. The two men worked together on a unique project conceived by Rear Admiral Luce, who had left the college in body to take command of the North Atlantic Squadron, but had not strayed far in spirit.
During the summer and fall of 1887, Luce brought the ships of his North Atlantic Squadron into Narragansett Bay for an extended period of time. He took advantage of his position to place them at the disposal of the college, in keeping with his notion that the education of naval officers required both theoretical and practical instruction. The end result was a joint army-navy maneuver, which Livermore helped the War College plan.
Two maneuvers were held in the bay during October and November. The first simulated a night torpedo attack on the ships of the North Atlantic Squadron. The second was an elaborate attack on the city of Newport itself. For the latter, the squadron ran through a minefield, past Fort Adams at the entrance of the bay, and suffered a torpedo attack as it passed the Navy Torpedo Station on Goat Island. It then carried out an amphibious landing at Coddington Point to the north of the War College’s home on Coasters Harbor Island. Livermore served as the umpire for the maneuver, with McCarty Little acting as his assistant. At the conclusion of the exercise, a critique was prepared and discussed at the college.6
Unfortunately, the new secretary of the navy, William C. Whitney, was not enamored of Luce, his maneuvers, or the Naval War College. The experiment would not be repeated until after the turn of the century. In the midst of a raging bureaucratic war over the future of the college, McCarty Little's suggestion to use steam launches in place of actual warships for the colleges "school of application" ran into difficulties over acquiring even these poor substitutes. As a result, the college came to rely more and more on wargaming as a supplement to its curriculum of readings and lectures.
McCarty Little, now an official member of the War Colleges staff, expanded his single lecture of the previous year into a series of six presentations for 1887 and conducted his first actual wargame at the College.7 Little continued his lectures in 1888 and 1889, and he also continued refining and developing his own ideas. Livermore had become even more closely associated with the college during this period, and in 1889 he lectured there on military strategy and tactics. But the political travails of the college continued.
From 1891 to 1892 courses were suspended during construction of a new War College building on Coasters Harbor Island, but McCarty Little did not suspend his work on wargaming. While continuing to refine his own techniques, he also embarked on a course of translating important foreign works dealing with naval strategy and tactics. Not surprisingly, his first translation was one dealing with wargaming, the Italian rules published in 1891 by Lieutenant A. Colombo of the Italian Navy.8
McCarty Little followed a two-year absence from the college (to serve as the United States's special commissioner to Spain for the 1892 Colombian Exposition) with a rapid reentry into the swing of things at Newport. In addition to the incessant political battles waged against opponents of the college, Little returned to his work on wargaming. A single game had been conducted during 1892 while he was away, but it was not completed. During the following year, classes were not held at the college, but the staff continued to work on refining gaming techniques. In 1894, under newly appointed President Captain Henry Taylor, gaming became an integral and permanent part of the course of study for all students.
Taylor, possibly with the encouragement and certainly the assistance of McCarty Little, integrated wargaming with that part of the students' course in which the class was assigned a problem. Typically in those early years the student problems focused on coastal defense, and each student was required to develop a complete solution to the problem. These solutions were then examined, tested, and critiqued in a wargame.