Predictive Analysis and Some Wargaming History

Every now and then, StrategyPage still surprises. Ignore the anti-media screeds (SP has never understood how they work, they just want to vent) and get a kick out of the background stories behind wargaming and predictive analysis.

Predictive analysis, like OR in general, creates a framework that points you towards the right questions, and often provides the best answers as well. Like many OR problems, especially in the business world, the simulation framework is often quite rough. But in war, as in commerce, anything that will give you an edge can lead to success over your opponents. A predictive analysis is similar to what engineers call "a 60 percent solution" that can be calculated on the back of an envelope.

The one form of predictive analysis that the general public is aware of is wargames, and these have been increasingly useful in predicting the outbreak, and outcomes, of wars. There have even been commercial manual (like chess) wargames that have successfully applied predictive analysis. The commercial manual wargames produced some impressive results when it came to actual wars.

In late 1972 a game ("Year of the Rat") was published covering the recent (earlier in the year) North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. This game didn't predict the outcome of the war, but it got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames, for it was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, wargames did just that, accurately portraying the outcome of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The game ("Sinai") was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation had watched the game in development (he was a wargamer), and was assigned to camp out at the publisher's offices, while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting.

There weren't many wars to practice these predictive techniques on after that, until 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Months before the Coalition counterattacked, a game appeared ("Arabian Nightmare"), that predicted everything, including the low Coalition casualties. This time, the media got wind of it, and the game was featured on "Nightline" in October, 1990. This didn't cause much excitement with the general public, it was just some more weird stuff on the tube.

By: Brant