• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

4. Wargaming the Middle East: The Evolution of Simulated Battlefields from Chequerboards to Virtual Worlds and Instrumented Artificial Cities Janina Schupp Abstract Shortly after the end of a tank combat during the Gulf War, a team of US Army historians, scientists, and engineers flew to Iraq to gather detailed data of the battle. The collected information was used to create an exact virtual simulation of the combat for training. The mapping capability – offered by the resulting simulation game 73 Easting – to visualize the battlefield from any position and point in time revolutionized military exercises. With ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, these digital training cartographies are now linked to real bodies and vehicles through digital and mobile technologies during live training in artificially constructed villages. This chapter analyses this evolution and critically investigates the growing ‘gamification’ ensuing in these representations of Middle Eastern battlefields. Keywords: Wargames, Middle East, interactive battlespace, live simulations In war the experienced soldier reacts in the same way as the human eye does in the dark: the pupil expands to admit what little light there is, discerning objects by degrees, and finally seeing them indistinctly. By contrast, the novice is plunged into the deepest night. […] It is immensely important that no soldier, whatever his rank, should wait for war to expose him to those aspects of active service that amaze and confuse him when he first comes across them. (Clausewitz 1989, p. 122) Strohmaier, A. and A. Krewani (eds.), Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa: Producing Space. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462989092_ch04 96 JANINA SCHUPP The act of playing at war is deeply engrained in human history and has per- sisted to the present day in both professional and hobby culture. Wargaming allows the participant to become an active part of a warfare situation and thus ‘provides a unique learning experience that leads to a deeper and more personal understanding and appreciation of warfare than can be attained by any other method short of actual participation on the field of battle’ (Perla 2011, p. 19). Wargaming is a unique tool for grasping the complexity of war, understanding the effects of modern weapons and strategies, and preparing soldiers for deployment on the battlefield. Thus, war games improve logical thinking under intense circumstances and enhance personal comprehension of combat. The war game, however, provides this new knowledge and skills at the price of compressing the complexity of reality: The war game gives us a chance to play at one of the most terrible creations of the hand of man, a creation capable of destroying all we have ever built and, at the last, the very world on which we live. It also gives us a chance to reduce the terrifying dimensions of this monster of our own making to a more human scale. […] Its weaknesses lie in its inability to re-create the actual physical conditions under which such decisions must be made or the actual consequences, of those decisions. Then again, perhaps those too are strengths. (Perla 2011, p. 277) Environments and humans have to be reduced and compressed to their most crucial features to be accommodated as components of a game or model of reality. These compressions widen the gap between the experience of a real, original space and the perceptions generated by its artificial doppelgänger. What is left out and what is considered relevant enough to be included in the artificial reproduction are both equally important factors to consider and have an impact on the distortion of reality. As Roger Dean Smith describes, real systems are extremely complex and a determination must be made about the details that will be captured in the model. Some details must be omitted and their effects lost or aggregated into other variables that are included in the model. In both cases, an inaccuracy has been introduced. (Smith 2009, p. 11) Violence, pain, death, and guilt are the most evident realities of conflict that fall victim to this process of simulation, as their reproduction is often hindered by technological limitations or judged less relevant for the train- ing of strategy and tactics. In addition, the association between war and WaGM R A ING THE MIDDLE EAST: THE EVOLUTION OF SIMULATED BaTTLEFIELDS 97 game also reveals a fundamental enjoyment in the competition of such a compressed and so-called sanitized war – a feeling that has been purposely reinforced by militaries up to the present day. As H. G. Wells’s miniature wargaming manual Little Wars expresses: Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster – and […] no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embit- terment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence. (Wells 1913, p. 97) However, war games reduce not only the destruction and emotional extent of real war but also the representation of actual urban spaces and populations that will be encountered in future conflicts. The artificial constructs devel- oped for training purposes are based on – and in turn produce – imaginary cartographies, which are often several degrees removed from their real geographical counterparts. Preconceived notions that Western militaries have about the terrain and population of the Middle East can influence the artificial training cartographies produced to grasp foreign countries. According to Edward W. Said, such an imagined or ‘imaginative geography’ legitimates a vocabulary, a universe of representative discourse peculiar to the discussion and understanding of Islam and of the Orient. […] We need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do […] is at one and the same time to characterise the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are [the Western world]. (Said 1978, p. 71) The application of such an imagined Middle Eastern geography and Oriental- ist language in military simulations thus functions as ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness’ (Said 1978, p. 6). The resulting military simulations in turn transfer these imaginative con- structs of the Middle East to the soldiers during training. The cartographies encountered by soldiers during the training hence shape their expectation and imagination of these foreign countries even before deployment. 98 JANINA SCHUPP Throughout history, technological progress has determined the ways in which these imagined geographies of enemy territories were produced by Western militaries. This chapter will trace the technologies used for spatial simulation throughout history in order to reveal the evolution of these artificial and imagined cartographies built by Western militaries and their effect on the perception of the Middle East. A Historical Introduction: Early Terrain Representation from Abstraction to Map Use Tracing back the origins of mapping geographical spaces and humans in wargaming is an almost impossible task, as warfare has influenced games – and vice versa – long before this phenomenon was documented (Allen 1987; Perla 2011; Lewin 2012; Creveld 2013). The first known ancestor of today’s wargaming practices is the game Wei Hai, c. 500 B.C.,1 frequently credited to the Chinese general Sun Tzu (Perla 2011, p. 29), which later developed into the Japanese game Go. While Wei Hai relied on coloured stones to represent armies, a more elaborate four-sided board game with miniature soldiers, elephants, and cavalry appeared in India around the sixth century under the name Chaturanga. Chaturanga is often claimed to be the ancestor of modern chess, which in turn marked the beginning of Western military wargaming. Chess represented its contemporary state of warfare, with kings, towers, and knights mirroring the components of conflicts at the time. Chess and its wargaming ancestors and descendants have thus always reflected contemporary warfare practices, and war games have increasingly aimed for accuracy in relation to real warfare and geography. However, the terrain of the battlefield was still visually reduced to a grid of squares with colour coding, and no spatial or geographical features were attributed to the simulated combat space. The main difficulty of early wargaming was thus the accurate mapping of terrain specificities and of the spatial positions of military elements, such as soldiers, machinery, and provisions. Only important military figures were personified, while the general population was not captured by the simulation. These strong reductions, resulting from the finite technological means available, communicated a limited impression of foreign lives and environments. 1 Wei Hai is variously dated in publications as originating in 3000 B.C., 1000 B.C., and 500 B.C. Since Sun Tzu lived around 500 B.C., this approximate date is used here. WaGM R A ING THE MIDDLE EAST: THE EVOLUTION OF SIMULATED BaTTLEFIELDS 99 In the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, wargaming was primarily expanded in Germany. Early progress in terrain representation was made by Johann C.L. Hellwig in 1780, followed by Georg Venturini in 1797, who both extended the board (to 1666 and then 3600 squares, respectively), introduced different colours to differentiate terrain condi- tions, and included pieces to represent bridges, wagons, or fortifications, amongst other features. In Prussia in 1812 the most prominent early war game, the Kriegsspiel, was invented by civilian war counsellor Baron George Leopold von Reiswitz. The Kriegsspiel exchanged the rigid chessboard for an open table with several topographical terrain pieces that could be rearranged at will to create different landscapes.

Load more

  22

Copy Link