THE RULES OF THE GAME OF WAR

7. Some Under-Represented or Absent Factors

The reader's grasp of the full possibilities of this Kriegspiel may be enhanced by some mention of its chief limitations.

First of all, any attempt such as the present one to apply the general theory of war in abridged form must imply some voluntary historical limits. Thus we are not concerned here with war as waged in Antiquity, nor with feudal warfare, nor with modern war and the transformations it has undergone since the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of railways, machine-guns, tanks, motorisation, aviation, rockets and so forth.

Three basic and universal aspects of real warfare are absent or under-represented in the game: regrettably, it is hard to incorporate them into a confrontation that takes place on a flat chequered surface and permits of no intervention by external chance factors. These three considerations are, first, weather conditions and the alternation of night and day; secondly, the morale and degree of fatigue of troops; and, thirdly, uncertainty with regard to enemy positions and movements.

The Kriegspiel proceeds under temporal conditions that never vary: war pursued under a kind of solstice where climate never takes a hand and night never falls before hostilities are definitively concluded. This is the game's main shortcoming when it is compared with reality, but one that could not be mitigated without a loss of rigour in the schematic representation of the overall agonistic process.

Troop morale and fatigue are taken into account only marginally: they are reflected to a degree in the instant paralysis of fighting strength afflicting all units whose communications are cut (including units garrisoning forts, which here have no stopping power, and serve the purpose of tactical support alone). In this regard, an analogy might more readily be drawn with the armies of the Seven Years' War, so tightly dependent on magazines and convoys, than with those of the French Revolution. The quantitative constraints upon the forces available, their irreplaceability and hence their peculiar preciousness, are other features of this war game that are more akin to the military realities of the former period. Factors of morale are further reflected, perhaps, in the offensive strength embodied in the deep range of charging cavalry; as Ardant du Picq clearly demonstrated, the impact of such action in real combat could not be reckoned by simply multiplying mass by speed. As for the morale of generals, and the mental wear and tear affecting the leadership that has always counted for so much in war, it may be said, in contrast to the aforementioned factors, to be very much in evidence here, and liable considerably to affect play. One is often led to overestimate the consequences of movements initiated by one's adversary, even though they may be feints. There is simply no way of obtaining cast-iron certainty as to what should be done, and this holds true even after crushing numerical superiority has been achieved, for there are circumstances in which a seemingly defeated army may still launch decisive actions against its opponent's communications.

Lastly, it should be pointed out that this game falls far short of being a complete representation of real warfare in that it leaves no room for doubt about the enemy's positions and movements. An adversary's initial order of battle, admittedly, is unknown; but the opponent has a limited number of zones of concentration from which to make reasonable choices, and so it is prudent to follow suit. From the moment hostilities open, exact and certain knowledge of all enemy movements is vouchsafed instantly. To borrow the words of an old French proverb, L'ost sait ce que fait l'ost : each army knows what the other army is doing (the cavalry thus has no scouting function: its role is restricted to attack, pursuit and raiding).

With these reservations, we may say that this game accurately portrays all the factors at work in real war, and, more generally, the dialectics of all conflict.