New book: Understanding Urban Warfare (Spencer/ Collins)

Okay, I usually don’t shill things, even my own work (much) but this is an item worth looking into if you are interested in the topic as I am.

On sale as of today, a new book on directions in urban operations that hits all the high spots – complexity of the urban battlefield, the extreme strains on logistical and C3I systems, high rates of casualties, concerns for the civilian population and protection of infrastructure, etc. and illustrates it with recent examples of extended urban battles, from Mogadishu 1993 to Shusha 2020 (Second Nagorno-Karabakh War).

John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, co-director of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He is also the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum and a Colonel in the California State Guard with assignment to the 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard as the Director of Urban Warfare Training.

War Plan Crimson: A Novel of Alternate History

How on earth did I miss this?

Michael Cnudde, an author who describes himself as “the fevered mind behind Somerset House Press…. who lives in Toronto, Ontario where he plots global domination in his spare time” wrote a novel about War Plan Crimson (and Sutherland-Brown’s Defence Scheme No. 1) in 2011! The jacket copy reads:

We were lucky.

In our history, Franklin Roosevelt quietly and easily suppressed the 1933 Business Plot, a little-known attempt by a group of Wall Street barons and power brokers to overthrow and replace him with a homeland fascist government.

What if we weren’t lucky?

What it the coup plotters had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and placed a homegrown Hitler in the White House? By using hitherto top military secret documents and historical research, author Michael Cnudde tells the story of The War That Almost Was.

 

You can sample the book for free online, and/or buy it for $2.99 at this link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/68354

I haven’t had a look at it yet… meanwhile, the entries for 2011 on his website have images of several pages of comment on Defence Scheme No. 1. He also regularly writes reviews of other alternate history books and TV shows.

http://www.somersethousepress.com/2011/

Perhaps he is not a gamer… for he seems as oblivious of my work as I have been of his!

Eurowargames anthology

One project I undertook during the winter was to prepare a piece for an upcoming anthology on Eurowargames – basically an expansion on my “games as citizen journalism” wheeze. This project is edited by Riccardo Masini, Fred Serval and Jan Heinemann, three very good names; they put out a call for articles last fall.

https://eurowargames.wordpress.com/

The original focus has somewhat widened, and the range of submissions will reflect that I think. Latest is that the anthology will be published in fall or winter of 2021, after getting sufficient funding through Kickstarter.

They did ask me my opinion about crowdfunding this, and I had no objection to using it as a pre-order system, but please, NO STRETCH GOALS!

Just get the book funded, and only the book. No tooled leather slipcases, commemorative tea cosies, or sets of commissioned miniatures of the authors (that last one is tempting though. I wonder what I would look like as a small action figure).

Anyway, the above interview (made before the final deadline for article submissions, so they did not yet know for certain what-all they had) gives more details.

Article on professional wargaming from VICE France

Polish, not French officers and NCOs.

Seen today: an article that originally appeared in VICE France that includes an interview with Antoine Bourguilleau, historian and researcher at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Bourgilleau talks about the use of wargames to train professional soldiers.

Games cited or illustrated (other than the obligatory introductory reference to Risk, of course) include:

• Kriegsspiel
• the 1930s US Naval War College games
• the WATU anti-submarine games
• the Fletcher Pratt naval wargame
• Phantom Fury by Laurent Closier
• FITNA by Pierre Razoux
• Matrix games get a brief description too.

Have a look!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gpwb/how

https://passes-composes.com/book/264

Bourgilleau has written a book on the subject, difficult to tell whether it is more than the usual historical survey of the subject.

Playing Oppression

The MIT GameLab is a combined game design program, research centre and development tank for games that explore the use of play in human development, education and communication.

One topic of current research, which has attracted a bit of popular press and comment recently as well, is the structure and functions of games with respect to colonialism. Research on the topic is being done by the Mary Flanagan (author of the brilliant Critical Play: Radical Game Design and of the final chapter in the Zones of Control anthology) and Mikael Jakobsson.

The product will be a book called Playing Oppression. The authors say:

The title for this project comes from an idea that euro games offer some of the excitement of the periods they depict (sails, discovery, heroism, fame, and fortune) but not too much through their gameplay and physical pieces, by hiding the bloody end of the sword and only engaging with foreign cultures as passive representations that can be neatly sorted into a box between plays.

http://gamelab.mit.edu/research/games-and-colonialism/

Forthcoming from MIT Press!

And bound to be interesting.

 

New book: Successful Professional Wargames by Graham Longley-Brown

Graham Longley-Brown served in the British Army as a Regular officer from 1986 to 2003, and finished off his career as the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College Directing Staff Subject Matter Expert for wargaming from 2000-2002. Since his retirement from the Regular Army, Graham has worked as a self-employed consultant (www.lbsconsultancy.co.uk) running wargames for national militaries and their research centres across the world. Graham also developed the Rapid Campaign Analysis Toolset in use by the British military, helped to write the UK MOD Wargaming Handbook, and co-founded and organizes the Connections-UK conference on professional wargaming. (www.professionalwargaming.co.uk)

I’ve known Graham since I first became involved with Connections-UK, at the first conference in 2013. Now he has written a book, Successful Professional Wargames: A Practitioner’s Handbook wherein he promises to reveal all his secrets.

He’s obviously doing something right!

Published by John Curry’s History of Wargaming project, you can buy your copy here: http://www.wargaming.co/professional/details/professionalhandbook.htm

 

Phil’s Phlush With Greatness

On tonight’s broadcast of Jeopardy!, Philip Sabin’s book shows up as a clue.

After a considerable pause, the contestant guessed, “….the Battle of Troy”.

Podcast: on Armchair Dragoons’ “Mentioned in Dispatches”, vol 2 ep 9

Recently I sat down with James Sterrett for an episode of Brant Guillory’s podcast “Mentioned in Dispatches.”

The occasion was the recent release of Matt Caffrey’s new book On Wargaming

On Wargaming by Matt Caffrey, out at last!

and we thought we would discuss, for well over an hour in our meandering ways, this book and other books we’ve found useful for thinking about games and game design.

James has a more practical take on this of course, as he teaches game design to his students at the US Army Command and General Staff College.

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/teaching-wargame-design-at-cgsc/

Anyway, here is the link, go and have a listen!

https://www.armchairdragoons.com/podcast/mentioned-in-dispatches-season-2-episode-9-the-essential-wargaming-library/

In other news, this weekend is the inaugural Victoriaconn, a mini-convention put on here in town by local gamer Geoff Conns. I’ll be there Friday and Saturday (have to work Sunday), showing the playtest version of China’s War and the near-production copy of the Brief Border Wars quad. Maybe someone will notice….

http://www.victoriaconn.ca/

Remembering to Forget

photo: bbc.com

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/03/us-army-trying-bury-lessons-iraq-war/155403

As has been explained to me by senior officers who are still on active duty, the conventional wisdom today is that our military has moved on — and in an odd redux, they note that we have returned to the philosophy of 1973. Similar to how the Pentagon abandoned its doctrine of fighting counterinsurgencies and irregular conflicts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, today’s military has shifted away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of preparing to fight insurgents and guerrillas, our security establishment has refocused almost exclusively on the realm of great power conflict — in their parlance, peer or near-peer competitors such as Russia or China.

Distressing, but hardly surprising… the same thing happened after Vietnam, though the external circumstances were quite different. The US Army may be a “learning organization” but it keeps forgetting that it needs to retain some of that learning.

As the world continues to migrate to cities and pressures from failed or failing states push populations toward armed insurrection, it is quite possible that our next conflict could be another irregular war fought against guerrillas and insurgents. Even if we do end up facing a peer or near-peer competitor as the defense establishment is predicting, many of the lessons of the Iraq War still ring true. If we find ourselves facing such a foe, it would be highly likely that our opponents would fight us with a blend of conventional warfare—using ships, tanks, and warplanes—as well as with irregular tactics such as we faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blending both types of warfare, which has been called “hybrid warfare” or “conflict in the grey zone” enables our enemies to counter some of our conventional advantages asymmetrically, and challenge us symmetrically with forces that are on par with our capabilities. The use of paramilitaries or militias rather than uniformed soldiers, ambushing logistics convoys with improvised explosive devices, and hiding soldiers and resources amongst the civilian population- all staples of the Iraq conflict- are tactics that have also been used by Russia and other states because they make attribution and retaliation more difficult. It would be a dangerous proposition to hope that nation-state competitors we face in the future have not studied the war in Iraq and adapted their tactics. 

The two volumes of the Iraq War Study, completed in 2016 but not released until the very end of 2018, may be found here. Download them if you’re interested, just so you can have them for later….

Volume One (2003-2006): https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/publication-detail.cfm?publicationID=3667

Volume Two (2007-2011): https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/publication-detail.cfm?publicationID=3668

 

New on the bookshelf

I’ve recently acquired a book or two on urban conflict:

image: amazon.com

Blood and Concrete: 21st Century Conflict in Urban Centers and Megacities

A 768 page brick of a book, consisting mostly of articles on the subject previously published in Small Wars Journal. I’ve read a few of them but there is plenty more to chew on. Some new material, including a preface by David Kilcullen.

Surprise content: a reprint of the review of Operation Whirlwind Michael Peck wrote for SWJ! link to original is here: Review of Operation Whirlwind in Small Wars Journal

Published January 2019, Amazon.com link

image: amazon.com

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

Another interesting title, but I haven’t been able to get into it yet – it has been a busy couple of weeks. Where the above title goes into mainly the kinetic considerations of urban battles that largely haven’t been fought yet, this one stops to consider the extensive and increasing militarization of the largely non-kinetic life we lead in the West, via surveillance, security bureaucracy/ theatre and the manipulation of fear and language.

Published 2011, Amazon.com link

Both of these make good additions to the library I have been building on the subject, which includes:

• Out of the Mountains: the Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen
• Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq by Louis diMarco
• Planet of Slums by Mike Davis