Connections North 2022: videos

The videos from the Connections North 2022 conference have been posted to Youtube.

One of them is me introducing a panel discussing “influence gaming”, with some remarks on two of my primitive efforts in that direction… Ukrainian Crisis and Kashmir Crisis.

REMARKS ON INFLUENCE GAMING 2022

Free game: Putin’s War

(No longer quite as illustrated.)

From two Italian game designers, Riccardo Affinati and Mauro Faina: Putin’s War, a free print-and-play mini-game on the current invasion. I haven’t tried it yet myself but it appears to be a simpler game focusing on the kinetic part of things; reactions by foreign countries and so forth are largely randomized through the unknown nature of the Ukrainian opposition that appears as the Russian units enter each new area. 

Notable in that it recycles the map and oblast victory point values from my 2014 game Ukrainian Crisis. I suppose that is about all of that game that is salvageable and useful for the 2022 situation. Still, I don’t mind. 

PUTIN’S WAR – ENGLISH RULES   PDF file complete, 4 MB.

Surprisingly candid designer’s notes – bravo!

DESIGNER’S NOTES: 

The game system of this solitaire boardgame derives in its planning from the game “AFGHANISTAN 1979-1989” by Mauro Faina published in the magazine “Guerre e Guerrieri” (April 2022), while for the map the game “Ukranian Crisis ”by Brian Train (2014) and the cover is the work of Marco Longobardo. English translation by Ty Bomba.

Being an introductory boardgame, we avoided adding additional complexities and a large number of pieces, tables or accessories. The boardgame is distributed for free and privately, not for profit, but to spread the passion for simulations and military history. Studying wars to never make them, this is our watchword, while our thanks go to all those who will help us “test” the boardgame and spread the idea that those who do not play will never know how to be a excellent human being.

Last warning, you will not find a simpler solitaire military simulation than this, if you have problems in interpreting the rules, then forget about the world of boardgames and do not ask me for clarification, while feel free to modify or confuse the rules written according to your own. tastes. 

Riccardo Affinati

Matrix games: Bandera II

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2022/05/09/bandera-ii-ukraine-matrix-game-update/

Signal boost, though I know many in the audience read Rex Brynen’s PaxSims blog already:

The elusive, profusive Tim Price has issued Bandera II, an updated version of his matrix game on the Ukrainian conflict to reflect current conditions. A 25-page free download, with some instructions on how to run a matrix game, map, and printable pages to make your own game tokens.

VDV Song, updated

Oh, this is just brilliant!

Logistical listicle @ RMN and ACD

Battle Lab ~ Defining “Logistics” for Wargames

At Armchair Dragoons today, Brant Guillory posts about logistics could be shown in wargames but aren’t (but don’t always have to be). I cannot improve on what he has to say here! Freebird!

https://rockymountainnavy.com/2022/03/09/wargame-wednesday-wheres-my-supply

And earlier, over at the Rocky Mountain Navy blog, a good piece on logistics treatment and examples of supply rules in modern-period wargames… the handwavy, the ambitious-but-fundamentally-spineless, and the just-don’t-go-there. Also, would the famous 40 km long traffic jam north of Kyiv happen in a civilian wargame? Answer: no it wouldn’t, because trucks are magic and unit commanders are smart and disciplined. Offhand, the only wargame I can recall that dealt seriously with the amount of road space a unit on the march took up was SPI’s East Front game Lost Battles, from 1971; also, some Bulge games have rules about traffic jams and occasionally someone insists you cannot just drive one division through another division.

Go and have a look at it, it also cites the logistical articles I had pointed out in previous posts that described the supply problems the Russians would run into if they invaded (however, I presented these as arguments against them doing an invasion, but that’s now moot).

But more to the point he illustrated the article with this map which is far more descriptive than the scary massive red and stripey zones and plunging arrows we see on TV and other media. It points out the nature of the mostly empty modern battlefield, the “line and dot” nature of an advance into enemy territory and an evocation of the long logistical tail the advance needs for its sustenance.

Actually, most military campaign maps from almost any period should be drawn like this; they should look like duelling plates of spaghetti.

How this ends

Mastering my perhaps wiser urge to shut up about recent developments lest I be singed again, I present this link:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/03/how-does-this-end-pub-86570

This rather agrees with my current thinking about how this war in Ukraine will stabilize (it will not exactly end).

At this day, at this hour, I think about at least two possibilities:

(1) Russia wins the conventional phase of the war and remains in occupation of the productive, more Russian part of Ukraine: Kyiv and everything east of the Dnipro, maybe more. There will be an extended insurgency that will see escalation on all points: weapons and perhaps advisors flowing in, conscripts flaking out, atrocities against civilians of all types by all agencies, and general misery and bloodshed and wasted efforts. The escalation will not likely reach any kind of decisive conclusion, at least in the short term and Ukraine, free and captive parts alike, remains a perpetual and depopulating economic basket case with no hope of improvement and a frozen conflict.

(2) Russia wins the conventional phase of the war and forces a capitulation from whoever succeeds Zelensky (a brave man but he will always have a price on his head). Ukraine is at least partly occupied or dismembered (Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea but really those parts left Ukraine 7 years ago) and is forced into neutrality but there is little appetite to invade or conquer the country again – “Finlandization”, a word I learned in Poli Sci courses at university but we don’t use that word much anymore for some reason. There is a chance for Ukraine to stabilize and develop, though its politics will always be under intense scrutiny and meddling… just like 2013-14 but with different oligarchs. The gas flows. Some wallets are stuffed. Though the United States looks bad for not holding the moral high ground, we are not talking about nuclear exchanges now.

How likely is the second path? Diplomacy in the US is in a bad way, and has been for at least a generation, maybe two. Even when its talent and experience weren’t being actively gutted it was not doing its job. I doubt it will ever be rebuilt to anything that works, and this is a terrible time to have effectively no options that don’t look or act like spiked clubs.

I still don’t know, and it has only been a week; Poland took six weeks in 1939.

But in all likely cases, the future of the conflict is ugly, prolonged, miserable and not what anyone particularly wanted.

I’d love to be proven wrong on any of that.

Podcast: Armchair Dragoons

https://www.armchairdragoons.com/podcast/mentioned-in-dispatches-season-8-ep-6-looking-back-at-wargames-on-ukraine

Brant Guillory invited me on his regular podcast Mentioned in Dispatches recently.

Together with his regular partner in broadcasting Mike, we talk about games postulating war in Ukraine and how they seem to be largely inapplicable, or got it wrong.

I did Ukrainian Crisis in 2014 of course; and Brant designed Orange Crush, an operational level kinetic combat game about action around Lviv, in 2007.

But we talk about other things too….

Today’s factoid

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky voiced Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian language dub of Paddington and Paddington 2.

Now:

(sorry, don’t know ultimate source of this graphic)

Meanwhile, the best digest of Ukraine war news and analysis I’ve seen so far is the daily campaign assessments put out by the Institute for the Study of War:

https://understandingwar.org/

Beats hours of futile doomscrolling and semi-conscious journalism.

Ukrainian Crisis: tableflip

Why I am not writing a 2022 scenario for Ukrainian Crisis

Well, I admit I was wrong.
After all, I’m not a freakin’ wizard.

I maintain though, that a 2022 scenario for this game would have been out of place anyway, for an overt invasion of Ukraine on this scale and extent is an admission that the other two sub-games have been lost, and in this case perhaps not even seriously played.

In that sense it’s a tableflip, and I still don’t see a point in constructing a scenario for that; find a different game.

And as I have said in the previous post, if somebody wants a war, they will get it… and now there is one, and it will be a disaster for all concerned.

There were many ways to accomplish Russian objectives; this is a poor one, possibly the worst course they could try.

And now that the table has been flipped and the pieces are headed for the floor, at this point I would not even try to guess the ultimate outcome.

One Facebook group I read is “Radio War Nerd”, a follow-on from the very entertaining and insightful War Nerd columns written over the years by “Gary Brecher”. One of the administrators is Mark Ames, who has posted the following today: 

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

 

I was wrong about Putin’s strategic intentions, wrong with a good crowd that’s been very useful to me over many years, and continue to be — people like exiled dissident journalists Leonid Bershidsky and Leonid Ragozin, along with a lot of other Russians and gone-native Russia-watchers who got this wrong. We — I — held to assumptions based on watching, reporting, researching, living in & thinking about Russia over the past few decades. (I should say that we all disagree on a lot of stuff, the Leonids for example are far more viscerally anti-Kremlin than I, and more sympathetic to the Maidan revolution, but none of us believed this is the sort of thing that fits Putin’s profile). Anyway, those assumptions no longer work, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve already got it figured out which assumptions will work from here on out.

 

 

This time it’s the very worst ghouls who got it right for once in their sleazy careers, after getting everything wrong without fail since the start of the century. There’s Robert Kagan, Vicky Nuland’s husband, who just published a big piece a couple of days ago in the WaPo about the impending mass invasion. Normally I’d take that as the final proof that Putin was about to do the very opposite of what Kagan predicted—if Kagan predicts invasion, experience says it really means Putin is about to quit the Kremlin to join Code Pink. The Kagan Clan and the Atlantic Council get paid for being wrong, but I suspect they’ll get extra bonuses from their sponsors for getting something right for once (and for helping catalyze the current shitshow by designing Biden’s hawkish Ukraine policy a year ago, which we’ve gone over).

 

God knows I don’t want to absolve Putin in any way here. It’s true that the US and NATO are big partners in this nightmare; they’ve done all they could to provoke a crisis assuming they could slowly creep and bleed it out, and when the Kremlin gave extra- serious signals last year that something big would happen, Biden responded with the same feckless diplomacy and distracted attention that’s characterized his Admin’s zombified domestic political program, whatever’s left of it anyway. I think Putin, who has clearly built up a volcano’s worth of grievances, understood Biden’s feckless inertia as an active fuck you, and Putin was clearly waiting for just that. He wants to bomb big, and Ukraine is the live demonstration board. Putin has all the “agency” imaginable here. He could have chosen a whole range of responses, none of them pretty, but none of them anywhere near as violent and dangerous and widespread as this one. This is what he wants; the US provoked, but it’s Putin, and very much not-metonymy Putin but Putin with his supporters, who is bombing the shit out of Ukraine. My family has good friends in Kiev; one of my wife’s best friends is huddling with her 3 children in their apartment as I’m writing this, too afraid to go out to the nearest bomb shelter, and her ex-husband is too afraid to come help with the children, he’s huddling in his apartment building. Most of my wife’s close friends from Moscow came from Ukraine, so it’s just hard to fathom. Полный пиздец.

The world is going to be a much much worse place for everyone. No lessons will be learned. Or rather, only the worst lessons will be learned, by and for the worst people. US intelligence credibility restored; neocon credibility restored; progressive agendas, such as they were still possible, gone; the GOP is going to pillory Biden and the Dems as weak, as taken advantage of by Putin, turning Russiagate on its ugly head. NATO’s gonna get very extra NATO. Ukraine is fucked. The worse, the worse-er, all around.

 

 

This invasion didn’t come from nothing, but I thought there would be more of something else before this. Mea culpa.

Why I am not writing a 2022 scenario for Ukrainian Crisis

[Edited 24 February 2022 –

Obviously, I was wrong.

See: Ukrainian Crisis: tableflip]

For the last few weeks if not months there has been a steadily frantic series of articles and other pieces in the Western media about an imminent and huge invasion of Ukraine by Russia, by a massing of up to 175,000 troops on the border (cf. New York Times). The above cartoonish map from the German magazine BILD shows you how it would all roll out.

I have read only a few half-intelligent or at least measured pieces on the subject so far; here are two that I would bother to bring to anyone’s attention.

The first is

https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics

The first is from War on the Rocks, and while it does not dismiss the chance of an overt Russian invasion outright it does take a semi-realistic look at the ability of the Russian forces to launch and sustain such an operation (also, vs. Poland or the Baltics). Short answer is, yes if they wanted, but not far and not for long.

(The piece also invokes that Baltic war game that RAND ran five years ago that had Russia seizing all three Baltic states within three days. I’m very reticent about generalizing the findings of that RAND wargame, even if it did have a hex map and counters. Some of its questionable assumptions and omissions are summarized here):  http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX?233@@.1ddb6d55/161!enclosure=.1ddbe25c

The second is

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/war-between-russia-and-ukraine-a-basic-scenario

The Valdai Discussion Club is, as fairly as one can put it, a Russian think tank that sometimes stands in for an endorsement or occasionally testing out of Russian government thinking and policy on foreign affairs and world events. It’s easy to dismiss its outputs as Putin propaganda or even sinister maskirovka but the linked article lists some pretty basic and logical points and consequences for why Russia would not and should not invade Ukraine.

That War on the Rocks article is the only Western media thing I’ve seen that actually stopped to crunch the numbers. All the rest of this is drum-beating, ritual dances for whatever tribe of analysts/ journalists the writer belongs to, and stupid little arrows on a cartoon map. At this point it seems to serve both sides much better to put on the best show they can in the event that something might happen, than it is for anything to actually happen.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I do not intend to write any kind of update or scenario for 2022 for Ukrainian Crisis. The game was best fitted to cover the first six months of the 2014 crisis until the First Minsk Agreement. And while its mechanisms are quite flexible and adaptable to other conflicts, it’s not worth the effort to try and update so many of its component parts for this go-round… and anyway, as the game not so quietly points out, a large overt military invasion is a signal that you have already lost the sub-games in its other two dimensions (even more so if the invasion is launched in response to a large-scale deliberate Ukrainian offensive on the LPR and DPR).

Perhaps I am wrong about this. If some nation genuinely wants a border war, it can at least start one but I doubt it will prove much more than most other border wars ever have. In the meantime, you can go back to 2014 and see what you could have done back then: Free Games!

[ETA: Another article along the same lines – not enough trucks – by David Axe (War is Boring) appeared in Forbes magazine: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/01/13/the-russian-army-doesnt-have-enough-trucks-to-defeat-ukraine-fast ]