- Military
- History
- Security & Defense
- Determining America's Role in the World
Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet during World War II, decades later would stand in front of a cohort of Navy student officers in Newport and tell them that, “the War with Japan had been reenacted in the game rooms there so many—by so many people, and in so many different ways, that nothing that happened during the War was a surprise.”[1] This quote, a part of a lecture given by Nimitz at the Naval War College in 1960, is now part and parcel of the myth of the wargames run at the Naval War College between World War I and World War II: a myth that an institution—simply by doing its job well—carved out victory for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific.
However, it would be too simplistic, a post-hoc historical rendering, to paint a picture of these wargames as an accident, a happenstance, a lucky turn of events for a faculty and students who were minding their own business on the island of Newport. Instead, the story of the Naval War College’s wargames between World War I and World War II is a story of intentionality. It is a story of a group of stubborn, egotistical, idiosyncratic faculty confident they knew better than the stodgy Navy leaders sitting in Washington. It is not a linear progression of influence, but instead a bureaucratic game of maneuver in which its true influence was not necessarily in the ability to infiltrate the staff of the Navy leadership, but instead to build a generation of naval officers that would build the campaigns and arsenals of World War II.
This story of influence and games really begins before World War I, a decade after the birth of the Naval War College. The college was struggling to find its footing in an intensely traditional U.S. Navy. The fledgling institution was far afield from the Navy’s nucleus in Washington D.C. and many in the Navy were wary of professional military education outside of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Officer learning after leaving the Naval Academy was to occur at sea, a product of trial and error aboard a U.S. naval vessel—not a series of seminars delivered from the playground of America’s gilded elite. Meanwhile, Congress was ambivalent about the upstart college and, lacking a civilian advocate, the Naval War College’s budget began to winnow, hidden in the lines of the nearby torpedo outpost, seemingly destined to decline into obsolescence.
Wargames were an opportunity for the Naval War College to distinguish itself from the Naval Academy and draw some much-needed attention to the new school. Then President Henry Taylor publicized the events, publishing them in navy circulars and discussing them with journalists, sending reports back to the Navy, and inviting the Secretary of the Navy, Hilary Herbert, to watch the games. The combination of Newport in the summer, the theater of the wargames, and the romantic renderings of map board surrounded by uniformed mustachioed officers in the pages of Harper’s Weekly helped Taylor garner influence in the most important offices in Washington, D.C. Secretary of the Navy Herbert reported back from his summer visit in 1895 that he was “well pleased by what he saw,”[2] and Theodore Roosevelt (in his position as assistant secretary of the Navy) wrote that “I look back with greatest pleasure on my altogether too short visit to the War College, and when I come on again I want to time my visit so as to see one of your big strategic war games.”[3] Harper’s Weekly waxed quixotically about “all these things considered, it would seem as though nothing in the wide circle of national work is more deserving of public sympathy and hearty support than the Naval War College at Newport.”[4]
The wargames served a secondary purpose of evangelizing a new Prussian system of campaign design that Naval War College faculty like William McCarty Little believed the amorphous American Navy desperately needed. As early as 1886, Little began to incorporate wargaming into his lectures within the summer course and leaned heavily on the German staff model and the “science of war” that wargames like Kriegsspiel promised to bring to emerging naval warfare.[5] Harper’s Weekly wrote of the advances, chronicling to its readers, “Here the War College has then a new and successful departure, and the year’s work just closed has been peculiarly practical and progressive. It consisted, first and foremost, in working out a problem in strategy—an application to American naval tactics of the Kriegsspiel to which the German Army, and particularly the officers of the General Staff, owe their high efficiency in mobilization and strategic movement.”[6]
What began as seminars and tactical problems—chart maneuvers—evolved after World War I into a curriculum explicitly built on games that progressed from tactical maneuvers to operational and strategic problems. Whereas games early after World War I focused on replaying historical battles or competing with the pacing British Navy, later games were explicitly connected with the Navy’s War Plan Orange to defeat Japan in the Pacific. These games were used to teach students about mission command, intelligence assessments, and operational maneuvers, but they also integrated new technologies, like aircraft, and experimented with the integration of these technologies in campaigns and tactics. The maneuver rules used to play the games represented the most up to date assessments of U.S. and adversary capabilities and provided the scientific foundation for modeling naval campaigns. The games, played by students, but facilitated by faculty, questioned traditional Navy assumptions about a Pacific campaign and pushed the Navy to invest in a new arsenal that included aircraft carriers and amphibious assault capabilities.
But despite their ostensible success preparing the Navy for World War II or Nimitz’s comments decades later, the historical record tells a far more complex story about how these games built influence. The Naval War College’s relationship with the Navy staff was not always smooth sailing. Despite having a member of the Naval War College on the staff that organized campaign planning, Naval War College wargames were often overlooked and dismissed by the traditional Navy. The first President of the Naval War College after World War I, William Sims, testified against the Secretary of Navy in Congress,[7] setting up an adversarial relationship from the onset of his tenure.
The Naval War College games are, therefore, an example of games that built influence not necessarily because they were tasked to answer a specific question or because they directly changed Navy decisions in one particular moment. Instead, their role as teaching games made them extremely influential to a generation of naval officers. Students were given great autonomy in their play and encouraged to question assumptions and rules. These officers were inspired by the games they played, but, perhaps most importantly—they were receptive to the games themselves. They harkened back to the Naval War College, often cycling in and out for assignments. They remained close with the faculty and the leadership, as well as their cohort of students. For many, the games were their first time thinking about the impact of new technologies like airplanes or submarines.
We often look back at these interwar games as a model to replicate today. What was it that made them so special? And can we recreate that magic to build a Navy for the future of America’s next war? The answer probably goes back to Nimitz, but this time it’s December 2, 1941—5 days before the date that would live in infamy. Nimitz, an alumnus of the Naval War College and current head of the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation, is giving a lecture in Newport. There, he tells the students, “time was when the War College needed strong support to protect it from the scoffers who believed that the place to learn about war was in a ship, and who looked askance at War College students…those times are past…its graduates are indispensable to the National Defense…no matter how badly officers are needed afloat…our schools and educational institutions must be expanded, rather than curtailed.”[8]
And that is the magic—an institution, not beholden to the traditional navy, staffed by a faculty of experts and critical thinkers, and populated by the best and the brightest future officers—using wargames not to predict the future, but to build the future.
[1] https://www.usnwcarchives.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/297.
[2] Little to Luce, 9 August 1895, Luce Papers, Library of Congress.
[3] Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Caspar F. Goodrich. [June 16, 1897]. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o159025. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University.
[4] “The Naval War College and its Work,” Harper’s Weekly 1895-02-16: Volume 39, Issue 1991, pp. 149–150.
[5] Captain Forde Todd, U.S. Navy, “Demonstrative Problem I. Remarks Made on the Estimate of the Situation,” 22 July 1931, Department of Operations, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.
[6] The Naval War College and its Work,” Harper's Weekly 1895-02-16: Volume 39, Issue 1991, pp. 149–150.
[7] Tracy Barrett Kittredge, “Naval Lessons of the Great War: A Review of the Senate Naval Investigation of the Criticisms by Admiral Sims of the Policies and Methods of Josephus Daniels.” (1921).
[8] https://www.usnwcarchives.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/364.
