Downes-Martin, Stephen

van Creveld, Martin

English

U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons

Naval War College ReviewVolume 67Number 4 Autumn Article 112014Wargames: From Gladiators to GigabytesStephen Downes-MartinMartin van CreveldFollow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-reviewThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in Naval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contactrepository.inquiries@usnwc.edu.Recommended CitationDownes-Martin, Stephen and van Creveld, Martin (2014) "Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes," Naval War College Review: Vol.67 : No. 4 , Article 11.Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol67/iss4/11 1 5 2  NAVA L  WA R  C O L L E G E  R E V I E Wdiplomacy, expeditionary operations, and maritime security. In a penultimate chapter he takes the example of the issues currently surrounding the South China Sea as a case that simultaneously combines all five of his strategic view-points and requires an integrated and coordinated approach to its solution. In conclusion, he emphasizes that naval strategists will find no easy answers—competitive and collaborative trends are important but will be impossible to predict as the importance of navies con-tinues to rise in the twenty-first century. There are shifting attitudes to the global commons, while the range and diver-sity of naval tasks are both increasing.JOHN B. HATTENDORFNaval War Collegevan Creveld, Martin. Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. 341pp. $27.99 This work attempts, in the author’s own words, “to reintegrate wargames . . . with human culture as a whole.” It succeeds admirably, providing a valu-able addition to the knowledge base of the serious national-security war gamer, whose objective is to under-stand modern and future war as well as possible to plan and train for it and to educate national-security professionals.Drawing on his established strengths as an expert in military history and strategy, the author traces the his-tory and development of war games from earliest hunters up to modern times, setting war gaming within the context of the general topic of games. He addresses the narrow questions of how war games are influenced by the experience of war and what they tell us about the conduct of war. More broadly, van Creveld examines the general topic of gaming, why we game, the types of game in which we engage, what these types of game tell us about our culture, and how our culture influences who games and which games are chosen.In his sequential survey of the his-tory and development of gaming and war games within gaming, the author establishes four basic human needs that gaming satisfies: religious (ap-pease the gods or ascertain their wishes by combat), decision making without engaging the whole of society (duels, trial by combat), preparation for war (explore possible futures; plan, train, and educate), and entertainment. He also examines interactions and how they evolved. Over time games and war games have become bloodless, as weapons have become more lethal and reliable (modern weapons make a medieval tourney simply impractical as a method of training for war), and the first two needs have withered, leaving us with bloodless war games and entertainment. Van Creveld makes the interesting point that the differences between real war and gaming about war are themselves of value and not simply artifacts to be removed. This is a critical point, given the lukewarm response to war gam-ing by some leaders. In the same way a single war game represents a single possible trajectory through a large space of possible sequences of decisions and outcomes, so does a historical event represent a single collection of decisions drawn from all those that could have been made—the reality of that mo-ment could be “entirely atypical.” The 1Downes-Martin and van Creveld: Wargames: From Gladiators to GigabytesPublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2014 B O O K  R E V I E WS  1 5 3differences between reality and gaming provide a means of capturing what the culture sees as important in the real-ity of war. Culture and the structure and execution of games by that culture should provide insights into the dif-ferences and similarities between that culture and ours when thinking about war. Of special interest is the author’s examination of the effect a culture has on how and why it games, thus provid-ing insight into how to integrate gaming with other techniques drawn from the culture to improve performance in war.STEPHEN DOWNES-MARTINNaval War CollegeWheeler, Michael. The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 304pp. $26In his latest book Michael Wheeler incorporates his years of experience as a professor at Harvard Business School, his membership in the Program on Negotiation (a cross-disciplinary consortium of negotiation experts from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University), and the research of the latter of over ten years in a project led by James Sebenius to take the study and prac-tice of negotiation to a new level. The members of this project analyzed such diplomats as George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke, investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, United Na-tions special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and sports agent/marketer Donald Dell, to learn what these individu-als believed to be the most important factors in successful negotiation. Wheeler credits his colleagues who published before him: Roger Fisher, Bill Ury, and Bruce Patton, whose ground-breaking text published thirty years ago, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, significantly contrib-uted to the development of negotiation. Readers are reminded that relation-ships are important and that though aggressive, value-claiming tactics may work once, people rarely come back for another drubbing. Wheeler also agrees that a careful consideration of your own interests, as well as those of the other party, is important before beginning negotiations. He recognizes the necessity of establishing your own best alterna-tive to a negotiated agreement—or, as he calls it, your “baseline”—as the mini-mum agreement you must achieve to get as much value as you are giving. He maintains, however, that although these things are important, it is often impossi-ble to identify your baseline, never mind those of others, until you actually begin negotiations. Wheeler seeks to recom-mend ways to deal with that situation, arguing that successful negotiators are those who are able to see new possibili-ties for agreement by improvising, in a process he likens to what jazz musi-cians do. The greatest value of this work is that the author takes this difficult concept of how to improvise success-fully during negotiations and offers great examples of how to accomplish it. This is a great book for anyone in-volved in negotiations, whether it be diplomacy, national policy, or purchasing. It takes the study and practice of negotiation to a level that had not previously been reached. ROGER H. DUCEYNaval War College2Naval War College Review, Vol. 67 [2014], No. 4, Art. 11https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol67/iss4/11

Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

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Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

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