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During the interwar period, war gaming was the principal means of education at the Naval War College. Each year’s games ended with a month-long “Big Game” which usually simulated all or part of the plan for the possible war against Japan (Orange). For example, in 1927, introducing the students to that year’s Big Game, the president of the war college told them that what they enacted would shape the rest of their careers.
Gaming had two distinct functions. One was educational, teaching students who had specialized in one or another element of the fleet how the fleet as a whole fit together to fight as a unified entity. Game scenarios were suffused with aircraft on both sides. As a consequence, officers who were not aviators became familiar with what aircraft could do. The most famous example is Raymond Spruance, who specialized in cruiser operations. William F. Halsey, who entered the College as a destroyer specialist, left it seeking aviation training to become an effective carrier force commander.
The other role was as a laboratory for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, for example, the War College advised on the overall characteristics of U.S. carriers and cruisers. Most spectacularly, its evaluator’s comments on the outcome of the 1933 Big Game caused the Chief of Naval Operations to revise the plan for a Pacific war, to the one the navy very successfully executed in 1943–45. Oddly, following this success the War College was downgraded from being part of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations to being part of the naval educational system, its views no longer sought on questions such as the character of new warships. However, only graduates of the gaming process were accepted into the War Plans Division, and the Division received reports of the games. In this sense the laboratory function survived.
The current situation is rather different. The War College is much closer to a conventional academic institution, with departments and professors. In the interwar period, the instructors were generally recent graduates temporarily attached to the College. Because they and the students were all active naval officers, and because the instructors did not generally far outrank the older students, the usual academic distinctions probably mattered very little. That is certainly not the case now. Students now often carry out realistic exercises, such as planning and budgeting, but the days of the Big Game are gone.
Gaming is certainly alive, and the College gaming facility is used as a laboratory. But it is a laboratory for high-level research, never (it seems) a means of familiarizing students with the facts of future naval warfare. That makes sense. For decades, graduates of the War College have had to deal with a wide range of issues, many of them diplomatic or administrative.
What would be needed to turn the College back into what it was in the 1930s, an institution designed to prepare the officers of the fleet for a looming war? What new technology would suffuse war games as aviation did in the 1930s? The obvious answers would be space systems, command and control, unmanned vehicles, and cyber weapons. The details of the weapons, particularly cyber weapons, are justifiably very secret; cyber verges on black subjects such as decryption of enemy messages. But unless officers not directly involved in such black arts can get a feel for them, they may well be unable to wield or beat off attacks employing the new weapons. The penalties for ignorance can be very serious.
History provides some evidence. The contemporary Royal Naval College of the 1930s was a more conventional academic institution whose students heard lectures and wrote papers. They received a single lecture on the Fleet Air Arm. Their sole game, which came at the end of the course, was a simulation of part of the British war plan for the Far East.
The Royal Navy did conduct some effective carrier operations, but its naval air record was not generally outstanding.
We don’t want our own record in a future war suffused with unmanned vehicles and cyber-attacks to be similarly undistinguished. Having brilliant cyber-commanders is not enough. Fleet commanders have to know what those cyber-experts can do so that they can effectively wield all of their weapons.
It may well be that the officers in question are already receiving the necessary schooling, but not at the Naval War College. The U.S. Navy currently has a much more extensive school system than it had in the 1930s. The function of the Naval War College may be quite different than in the past. In that case the hope must be that the war-fighting school is providing the instruction associated with the War College of the 1930s.
Dr. Norman Friedman is a strategist known for his ability to meld historical, technical, and strategic factors in analyses of current problems. He spent over a decade at a prominent think tank, then a decade as a personal consultant to the Secretary of the Navy in the Office of Program Appraisal. Dr. Friedman served on a U.S. Navy study of future surface combatant characteristics and later on a panel reviewing U.S. Navy R&D on ship hull and machinery topics. He wrote under government contract a history of wargaming during the interwar period at the Naval War College. Dr. Friedman has published over forty books, including The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War, Seapower as Strategy, and Fighting the Great War at Sea. His most recent book is Cold War Anti-Submarine Warfare. In 2022, the Naval Historical Foundation awarded Dr. Friedman its Commodore Dudley W. Knox medal to recognize his contributions to naval history. He also received the Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Nautical Research. Dr. Friedman received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University.
