by Dave Pascoe

The Changing Face of War

The face of warfare has been changing rapidly ever since the American colonists decided to hide behind trees and shoot down the British rank and file like so many ducks in a row. We look at that example and wonder how the British could be so stupid as to conveniently line themselves up to be shot.

But where retrospective vision is always 20-20, it's a lot more difficult to accept the truth that we, today, are just as bound in our traditionalist thinking as the British were over two hundred years ago. This is the history of warfarel the side that innovates usually wins.

It is said that most commanders are still fighting the last war. It is not easy to break out of conventional thinking. All you have to do is to look at the commanders of the Vietnam war to see how easy it is to fall victim to conventional thinking.

Traditional thinking eventually made utter fools out of some highly decorated men, some of the very same men who won WWII. The few that break out of conventional thinking are called geniuses, when all they really did was to see beyond the range of common ideas, beyond the doctrine taught in war colleges.

The innovative military minds who left behind traditional ways were not more intelligent, better, more educated or smarter men. In fact, the most innovative thinkers are often those without formal education. Odd, isn't it.

Yet it's understandable, because they were not trained by some school as to how and what they should think. Instead, they were forced to think on the fly, they were forced to take the time and effort to find alternative means to an end. Observe the performance of the likes of Mao, Patton, Giap, Halsey, Rommel, Napoleon, Sherman, Grant, etcetera. These men were mostly educated, but not in schools that slaved them to standard doctrine.

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The Lesson for Us

In this is a good lesson for all war strategy gamers, including Falcon 4 campaigners. This campaign presents us with a reasonable representation of what a conventional war with North Korea might be like.

Bearing in mind that we did not win the 1950 war with them (despite the fact that many people believe that we did), there is no reason not to believe that the outcome of future war would be any different if we fight it the same way. That is particularly true considering the political constraints present today that were not present then. (The use of the A-bomb was so seriously considered that it had actually been prepared for use. McAruther and Curtis LeMay almost got their wish to "bomb them back to the stone age.")

For those who may be interested, the History Channel runs a new series, "Korea, the Forgotten War," beginning September 20th.

The Falcon 4 Challenge

The challenge presented us in the Falcon 4 campaign is how to defeat a numerically superior enemy on his home turf, and to do it with the tools given us. It is not an easy challenge, nor should it be. It is a strategic as well as a tactical challenge for war gamers to break out of modes of conventional thinking in order to win. We should take our cue from Vietnam where, to fall victim to conventional thinking, and to play by self-imposed "rules", is to lose.

Falcon 4 is not just an air combat simulation. It merges war gaming with air combat, and to win you have to think as much like a battlefield commander as a fighter pilot. The name of the game here is not numbers (the Vietnam doctrine of attrition), but strategy. That's why Microprose starts you out at a disadvantage in the first place. The theater is teeming with SAMs, and you may have noticed that the enemy has four times as many air defenses as our side does (at default settings that can be changed).

No matter how bad the odds, there is always a way to win. Our job as campaign strategists is to find it.

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