Real Clear Defense:
Wayne P. Hughes Jr.
Peacetime military planning is governed by analogy. The essence of readiness is combat training, which in peacetime is a sterile imitation of wartime experience. Strategy and tactics derive so much from extrapolations from the past that it is a popular half-truth that military men prepare for the last war. Weapons are designed in the mythological paper world of systems analysis and are tested in the tepid environment of safety-first.
In this peacetime world of pseudo-realism, fleet exercises and war games are the best simulations we have of the wartime world of blood, sweat, and courage. Yet fleet exercises are infrequent and expensive and have their own constraints: “Orange” commanders, for instance, will think like Americans, in spite of their best efforts to “think Red.” War games are even greater abstractions, of which the most realistic and time-consuming will leave plenty of doubt over the influence of the “random number generator” and other artificialities.
Still, there are clues. After nearly all these exercises and games, the exercise reports say, in effect, “Missile magazine capacity might have been a problem.” It is a vast understatement. The Israeli-Egyptian naval war of 1973 was characterized by deception, countermeasures, and tactics in which success or failure hinged on who had the last weapons remaining. The aircraft carrier has long been the backbone of U.S. Navy tactics for two reasons: aircraft radius of action and the capacity for sustained combat. An attack aircraft may rearm; a missile is on a one-way trip. To highlight their formidability, missiles have been likened to pilotless kamikazes. But the comparison also highlights their weakness: a missile can be used only once.
Let us imagine a test of the role that missile capacity will play in naval combat. We will keep the test absurdly simple and the analogy so remote that there can be no danger of inferring unwarranted conclusions. Let us devise a war game that is simple, replicative, and with characteristics that are generally understood by most military men.
Let us play chess.
We will make one change. We will give each piece two “shots.” Each pawn and piece will have two chips, and when it takes another piece it spends one chip. After it has captured twice, it is out of weapons and becomes a passive participant–useful, you will learn when you play, to block and interpose but without the power to destroy. All the other rules of chess hold: castling, capturing en passant, checking and mating. A pawn reaching the eighth row is promoted and rearmed with two weapons.
Missile chess is different from regular chess. Just as the warrior who adapts to new weapons defeats the warrior who will not learn, so the missile chess player who understands the consequences of his new constraint will defeat the expert at classical chess. Pawns, armed like queens and rooks, become 8 feet tall, like a man on the frontier with a Colt .45. A knight, bishop, or any other piece may capture his way into a mating move and be powerless to execute the coup de grace. End games hinge on who has armed pawns and pieces remaining on the board…
