Military-Strategic Wargaming Before the First World War
Author: Dr James Halstead, PhD
Introduction
In December 2023, the Washington Post reported that after US officers ran ‘eight major tabletop war games’ to test plans for Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, Ukrainian officials concluded that these wargames had been unsuccessful because ‘it doesn’t work like that now’.[1] Wargaming, apparently, has failed to keep pace with ‘a war unlike anything NATO forces had experienced: a large conventional conflict, with World War I-style trenches overlaid by omnipresent drones and other futuristic tools’.[2] Critics of this interpretation in the wargaming community argued that it failed to consider the context of the wargames— especially that the Ukrainians ultimately did not adopt the plan developed by these wargames.[3] Understanding their context is a vital part of interpreting wargames. This article therefore uses the history of wargaming to explore how different institutional, strategic and planning contexts can all shape the conclusions and information which wargames provide to decision-makers.
These debates are relevant to the Australian Army and the Australian Defence Force (ADF), both of which belong to a long tradition of militaries using wargames to educate personnel and test plans. The Australian Army Battle Lab aids in tactical experimentation through products like the Australian Platoon Commander wargame.[4] At the operational and strategic levels, the ADF relies on the Joint Experimentation Directorate and the Defence Science and Technology Group’s Joint Experimentation and Wargaming Laboratory.[5]
While wargaming is frequently used to test and refine courses of action at the tactical level, this article examines the use of wargaming to explore, test and refine strategic options. It argues that wargaming does not automatically create good plans. Instead, it is a nuanced tool that fits into a broader planning process. Wargames serve multiple purposes, including both the communication and the generation of useful information. These are all influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by the varied contexts within which the wargames are played.
This article presents case studies of three land warfare games played by the German, British and Russian armies to test, refine and communicate plans for the first weeks of a European war. These wargames took place in very different contexts:
- The British wargame, organised by Major General James Grierson in 1905, was carried out before serious planning had started to explore the transport of a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to Belgium in case of a German invasion.
- German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen’s wargame was played in 1905 in the context of a potential single-front war with France.
- The Russian wargame, conducted in Kiev during April 1914, took place in the context of a fierce debate over military strategy for the early weeks of a war with Austria-Hungary and Germany.
These wargames were also played at different points in the planning process, for different reasons and with different outcomes. The British wargame helped to explore and shape planning assumptions before formal planning had begun. Schlieffen’s exercise validated a war plan designed for a highly specific strategic context which was later obscured by hindsight. The Russian wargame functioned primarily as a tool for internal strategic communication rather than for refining strategic plans.
This historical approach offers a novel way of understanding how wargames fit within the wider machinery of planning. In the past decade, wargaming scholarship has expanded and advanced. One line of enquiry has begun to examine more closely the different ways in which wargames can create knowledge, including by increasing experimentation.[6] David Banks, in making a case for consideration of the ‘methodological machinery of wargaming on its own terms’, has drawn attention to the need for histories of wargaming to inform current practices.[7] However, the historiography of wargaming remains underdeveloped for this kind of analysis. Where the history of wargaming contributes to these discussions, case studies are frequently illustrative, superficial and inaccurate, with particularly weak historical methods.[8] While many works on wargaming do study its history, this is frequently a framing device for discussion of theory.[9] This is unfortunate, as the study of historical wargaming can offer unique insights to modern wargamers, by demonstrating the intent of the wargame, what it concluded, how it was played, and the institutional and strategic context within which it was conducted.[10]
The historiography of wargames has therefore traditionally been poor, especially for the purposes of understanding the nuances of wargames. This article unites historical research with an understanding of wargames, so it is important to state the sources used. Both the German and Russian case studies utilise entirely secondary sources, while the case study of the British 1905 strategic wargame uses primary source focused research. All these examples, however, benefit from a strong secondary literature with minimal separation from the primary sources, which often directly cite (and, indeed, argue over) key archival sources. This article therefore generates its conclusions mainly from the consideration of existing secondary source evidence and the comparison of the three case studies with one another. Novelty comes from this comparison and from the unification of the previously siloed wargaming and historical literatures. It uses this to understand what knowledge these wargames produced, and the factors which shaped this knowledge.
It is therefore also important to understand the relationship of wargames to knowledge. This is a key facet of understanding where wargames offer value. Wargames are commonly divided into two broad categories: educational and analytical.[11] Analytical games ‘generate synthetic data that researchers can use to discover new knowledge’, while the purpose of educational games is ‘for players to internalise some core concept, gain information, or participate in a synthetic experience’.[12] This simple categorisation, however, belies a messier reality, and games are rarely exclusive to one of these two types.[13] This article therefore adopts Elg’s basic definition to define two categories used to understand the value of wargames to contemporary decision-makers: extraction (analytical) and communication (educational) of knowledge. Importantly, extraction and communication can happen simultaneously within the same game, even where the game is framed as being carried out for one purpose, such as analysis.
This article therefore uses strong historical primary and secondary sources to carry out three case studies of military-strategic wargames played before the First World War. It compares how institutional, planning and strategic contexts impacted the knowledge these games provided to strategic decision-makers. It also makes the case for stronger communication between the historical and wargaming literatures. The history of wargaming has, to date, not taken full advantage of historians’ deep acquaintance with the historical records or of their frequently superior understanding of the strategic contexts of wargames and decisions made because of these wargames. This can be seen most clearly in the debate on both sides surrounding Schlieffen’s wargaming of his eponymous war plan in 1905.
German Wargames, 1905
Wargamers have long idealised the use of wargaming by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the most famous of Germany’s prewar Chiefs of the General Staff. However, the historical legacy of these wargames is more complicated than they are currently given credit for.[14] This is because there is a severe disconnect between the historical scholarship and the wargaming scholarship. Especially pertinent is a lack of awareness among wargaming scholars of the (sometimes acrimonious) debate among historians between 1999 and 2020 about whether the Schlieffen Plan existed. In this debate, the type of wargaming carried out by the German General Staff is a key element in demonstrating the shaping of the German General Staff’s deployment plans for a future war.[15]
Wargaming scholars have adopted the traditional view of the Schlieffen Plan as a one-size-fits-all war plan in which Germany would defeat France with the famous right hook through Belgium before encircling Paris from the west. In the historical literature, there is a greater subtlety of understanding. Historical debate has centred around Schlieffen’s 1906 Denkschrift, which outlined the idea of—in a single-front war with France—a vast turning movement with the strong German right wing advancing through Belgium and Holland to circumvent the formidable Franco-German border fortresses. Since 1999 Zuber has contended that Schlieffen’s Denkschrift was not intended as a war plan; instead, Schlieffen’s plans were entirely defensive and centred around carrying out counterattacks against French and Russian invasions.[16] Rather than a war plan, it was an attempt by Schlieffen to make a political case for an expansion of the German Army. Where the debate has rested is that Schlieffen considered the classic plan of a long right hook through Belgium and Holland only in the case of a one-front war with France. Schlieffen’s doctrine for a two-front war was instead the successive counterattacks against French and Russian incursions that Zuber describes.[17]
A crucial part of Zuber’s evidence is the records of German General Staff wargames played from 1905 onwards. Zuber argues that these demonstrated that Schlieffen focused on counterattacks against expected French and Russian offensives into Germany rather than on the famous envelopment plan.[18] As this historical debate pertains to wargaming, there are two key aspects: argument around the function of wargames (whether they are intended principally to extract knowledge or to communicate knowledge) and what these wargames demonstrate about German war planning.
Unfortunately, both evolving interpretations of both the Schlieffen plan and the importance of wargaming to this debate have not yet been identified by wargaming scholars.[19] Instead, wargaming scholars have focused on a conclusion that German wargaming outcomes were too readily accepted, so long as they did not upset other officers, and that Germany declined to wargame the political and strategic repercussions of its war plans.
A key topic of debate among historians is how the German General Staff employed wargames. Zuber uses evidence of staff rides held in 1906 and 1908, which revolved around German counterattacks against French invasions, to argue that Schlieffen never planned for an outflanking movement into the depths of France.[20] In reply, Foley and Gross identify the use of such games as training tools rather than directly as war planning, with ‘no evidence to suggest that these rides were based on any real war plans or played a significant role in the formulation of war plans’.[21]
Although Zuber has continued to argue that these wargames were simultaneously used to test real war plans and to train officers, the available evidence does not support this interpretation. Staff ride scenarios were not reflected by contemporary deployment plans. In late 1905 a staff ride scenario concentrated seven-eighths of the German Army in the east against Russia, having assumed Dutch and Belgian support in the west. This was not reflected in the plans for a two-front war drafted later that year.[22] Also, the records of these wargames were available for use as a source only because they were both more widely distributed and given a lower security categorisation than real war plans would warrant.[23] This was not a negligible risk given the threat of espionage. Russian intelligence successfully obtained copies of German General Staff wargaming and mobilisation plans in 1911 or 1912.[24] German security classifications of deployment plans were so strict that most or all of the copies of these annual plans were burned once they were no longer current. Another factor was the risk of diplomatic embarrassment should a wargaming scenario for the invasion of another country be leaked. Both Britain and Russia were also unwilling to use scenarios in which they conducted an unprovoked invasion of another nation.. Given their lower security classification and their role as broader training exercises, it is understandable that wargames might cause anxieties about diplomatic damage being done. Given the divergence between staff ride scenarios and actual war plans, and the security concerns of the German General Staff, it is therefore likely these wargames were indeed intended to test training rather than plans.
A majority of German wargaming in the period therefore focused on generating knowledge by testing officers on a variety of different situations and circumstances, rather than rote rehearsal of real war plans. Pre-1914 German wargaming demonstrates the extent to which the knowledge produced by wargames depends on the context and, indeed, the doctrine being taught in the first place, given the result in 1914 of these German preparations and the fact that such unrestricted wargaming is not always a panacea.
Wargames which directly tested strategic plans were rarer, although not unheard of. In 1905 Schlieffen played through the basic idea of his Denkschrift against his best staff members multiple times.[25] In this scenario:
[Schlieffen] commanded the German troops which advanced in a sweeping wheel of the right wing through Belgium to the Lille-Mauberge line, circumventing Verdun in the north, and crossed the Seine west of Paris near Rouen.[26]
Following a first iteration, the senior quartermasters and heads of division of the general staff prepared four possible courses of action to counterattack with the French left wing.[27] After wargaming three of these options, an interim assessment was carried out, after which French plans were altered then tested in a third round of wargames. However, rather than being a broad and commonly applied method of wargaming across the army, this was a planning exercise restricted only to the most senior members of the General Staff. Unlike the annual exercises which tested officers, the sole purpose of this exercise was to test and refine Schlieffen’s plan for a single-front war with France.
This wargame was not without some criticism, and Gross argues that Schlieffen deliberately excluded the French response he considered most dangerous.[28] Other wargames may have been played, but it is difficult to prove just how commonly wargames were part of planning. Those records which Gross quotes on the game survived only by chance in the personal papers of participants. Records of other games might have been lost in Allied bombing during the Second World War or destroyed by the German General Staff at the time.
It is therefore difficult to link wargaming directly to the outcome of the Schlieffen Plan. Criticisms by wargaming scholars stem from an inadequate understanding of both the history and the context of German plans and wargaming.[29] They do not consider that Schlieffen never developed the Schlieffen Plan as a universal war plan. Instead, it was developed in 1905 for the case of a single-front war with France following the diminution of the Russian threat after the Russo-Japanese war.[30] This is an explicit aspect of the 1906 Denkschrift which described the plan and was a document which ‘incorporated a spectrum of scenarios’, not solely the single-minded right hook through Belgium.[31] The eventual employment of the right hook in a two-front war in 1914 instead reflected a significant rupture with Schlieffen’s strategic thinking by Moltke, his successor.[32]
Wargaming was heavily integrated into a much broader planning and training process. Schlieffen also used wargames to educate the General Staff on his ‘concepts and intentions’ and to ‘understand the situation of a large army and the tasks of an army corps operating in it’.[33] Attempts to study it should be carried out within this broader context, and those who make claims about wargaming as succeeding or failing to predict the success of German planning should consider more closely exactly what this evidence tells us about German wargaming.
British Strategic Wargame, 1905
By ‘startling coincidence’, in the same year in which Schlieffen wargamed his right hook through Belgium, a British wargame studied moving an expeditionary force to support Belgium against just such an invasion.[34] In 1905, the British Army was in the early phases of its post–South African War reforms and reorganisation. These reoriented the army towards a potential European commitment—causing a strategic debate that would rage most hotly between 1906 and 1910.[35] Concern about German ambitions, however, had begun to gestate several years earlier with Major General James Grierson’s appointment as Director of Military Operations in the then newly formed British General Staff.[36] Grierson had argued for a focus on Germany for several years prior to this. This position was bolstered by the addition of Colonel (future Field Marshal) William Robertson as his Director of Military Intelligence.[37] In January 1905, ‘influential representatives of the General Staff’ met at Camberley for a conference on imperial strategy. Grierson argued for the strengthening of the British Army, pointing out that the continuing Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) proved that even naval powers required land power to support naval operations. Validated by the discussions, Grierson left the conference with plans to prepare a wargame to explore the deployment of an expeditionary force to the European continent.[38]
Unlike the German wargame of 1905, which tested already established plans, this wargame was at the opposite end of the planning process and was intended to start ‘the process of replacing nebulous ideas with practicable military options’.[39] It was shaped by a list of assumptions about the strategic situation, communicated to participants in background briefings on the scenario.[40] In the game scenario, a German invasion of France had been stopped on the Franco-German frontier by a line of French fortresses between Sedan and Metz.[41] In order to break this deadlock, the Germans would attack France through Belgium with a small force of approximately seven corps several months into the war.[42] Another assumption of the game was that British troops would operate with their current equipment, organisation and training. Because of significant reorganisations in structure, doctrine and equipment, British troops were judged to be incapable of reaching Belgium in under three weeks.[43] Each game turn was carried out according to British wargame regulations, with an intelligence report briefing the results of the previous turn’s orders, the players issuing new orders in response to this developed situation, then umpires resolving these orders. Teams represented the British and Belgian armies, and the game lasted for nine turns.[44]
German troops concentrated south of the Meuse and pushed the smaller Belgian Army to the north as they advanced towards the French border. Liège was not directly attacked, apart from when a small German force carried out a diversion to the north. From 9 March, the Belgian team was converted to an Allied one as British forces began to arrive according to an embarkation program which was drawn up by the British players before the game.[45] By 12 March, German forces were ready to move across the French frontier; however, the Allies struck first and British and Belgian troops attacked the German right flank, capturing the town of Ciney. Although the game director concluded that the town could not have been held and that Allied retreat was inevitable, it was nonetheless determined that this constituted a very serious check which would have thrown already strained German logistics into chaos.[46]
Despite these dramatic results, it is difficult to draw a direct line from any element of the 1905 wargame to strategic decisions made. To Robertson, who commanded the German team, the game ‘went to show that there would be little chance of stopping the German turning movement unless the British forces arrived on the scene quickly and in considerable strength’.[47] Grierson’s report of the game was also circulated among senior figures. Sir John French, the BEF’s future Commander-in-Chief, informed Grierson that he had ‘nearly finished’ the account of the game ‘once and shall probably start it a second time before I go to bed tonight!’.[48] However, Robertson was vague as to who else actually saw these results, writing that ‘presumably these results were made known to the Government by the Chief of the General Staff, under whose instructions the war game took place’.[49] Given the lack of serious plans at the time, it is likely that the value of the wargame was mostly in the demonstration of the hazards and urgency of planning for any such continental commitment.
In fact, the wargame’s preliminary nature may have had a negative impact. Gooch writes that it ‘resulted in a belief that Britain would have both time and space at her disposal’ and an assumption that:
such a violation would not take place until a war between Germany and France had gone on for some months and that when it did, the German move would be predominantly south of the Meuse.[50]
None of these conclusions had been generated from gameplay. The assumption that Germany would only invade Belgium several months into a continental war, and with only seven corps (limiting them thus to an advance south of the Meuse) was generated by the scenario and therefore could also have been part of a wider set of assumptions within the army at the time. This preliminary exercise resulted in fundamental assumptions in British strategy which would ‘take some years to eradicate’.[51] This demonstrates one of the hidden risks of wargaming: that even though bound and understood by participants in a certain context, wargames can look and feel both so compelling and so immersive that decision-makers can take their conclusions as reaching further than intended.
Wargame scholars have struggled to define the contributions of wargames and in doing so have dramatically overstated them in several different ways.[52] Andrew Wilson argues that the 1905 wargame demonstrated the extreme length of time it would take to deploy the BEF to Belgium and that ‘France could not be expected to resist an attack on her own’. Wilson notes that this conclusion resulted in subsequent staff talks with the French Army.[53] This is overstating the evidence, however. This pivot only occurred at the end of 1906 when a number of other considerations—the poor state of the Belgian Army, the efficiency of the French Army, and concerns about the violation of the neutrality of the Low Countries—prompted renewed reliance on the French General Staff.[54] Elsewhere, Matt Caffrey concludes that ‘the Germans would destroy the French Army before the BEF could intervene in strength’.[55] In fact the 1905 game concluded with the French and British armies (who were only just beginning to arrive in Belgium) intact and, indeed, having just severely disrupted the German advance with their flank attack.[56] More sensationally, the UK Ministry of Defence’s Wargaming Handbook states that the 1905 strategic wargame allowed Britain ‘to presciently anticipate the Schlieffen plan’.[57] This, however, was simply a condition of the scenario, and the scenario was substantially different from the situation the Allies would face in 1914. The most persistent claim is that the game showed the requirement to revise British mobilisation and deployment planning.[58] However, there is no direct causal link between the results of this wargame and the eventual revision of mobilisation plans in 1910, some five years later.[59]
A common theme of the wargaming scholarship, therefore, is a misunderstanding of the nature of the 1905 wargame. This was not a wargame designed—or, indeed, intended—to produce decisive decisions or to produce important data or information. It was the beginning of a process of assessing Britain’s ability to deploy an expeditionary force to the European continent in time to influence operations.[60] It was a preliminary exercise intended to introduce the problem and to study the rough parameters. Attempts to link the conclusions of the wargame directly to strategic decision-making are therefore misguided. This is not to say that the wargame was not valuable; it began the process of presenting Britain’s strategic problems in a practical perspective. This kickstarted a process in which serious planning was invested into a continental commitment and demonstrated many of the basic risks that needed to be understood and mitigated. Such misunderstandings have been common, and similarly misunderstood is the wargaming carried out by the Russian Army before 1914.
Russian Strategic Wargame, 1914
Existing analysis of pre–First World War Russian wargames by wargaming scholars is lacking, despite a good range of sources. Mason writes:
The Russian Army was enormous. Their wargames indicated resources were insufficient to equip and supply the entire army. It was better to fully support two field armies than mobilization of the entire army. The second issue involved how to invade East Prussia. The Masurian Lakes was a barrier that forced the Russians to divide their forces. One army would sweep north while a second army swung around the southern tip of the lakes. The wargame indicated the geography could prevent the armies from supporting each other. It also revealed the Germans could use this barrier to defeat each army in turn.[61]
This has set the tone for how wargaming scholars have viewed the interactions between prewar Russian wargames and the early battles of the First World War: that the Russians invading East Prussia ‘found themselves’ divided by the lakes and subsequently were defeated in detail by the German Army.[62] To wargaming scholars, Russian wargames acted as unwelcome prophets, rejected by a blinkered or overconfident Russian Army establishment.
In fact, the April 1914 Kiev wargame that Mason references did not simulate a Russian invasion of East Prussia. Instead it simulated an initial German offensive against the Russian First and Second Armies, as part of a much larger wargame which studied not the threat of Germany but how ‘the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Army’ could be achieved.[63] New sources and interpretations, made available in the last decade, make possible a broader analysis of the nature and outcomes of these Russian wargames.[64]
Hitherto emphasis has been on the lessons which senior Russian leaders learned from the wargame. Through this lens, there has been ample criticism of Russian leadership by historians. A ‘common thread’ of lessons by historians emphasises that the wargame primarily indicated lessons on logistics, which were ignored.[65] This focus on analytical lessons that could be learned from the game is misleading. More detailed examination of this wargame demonstrates a very different picture of what the game was intended for and what its intended outputs were.
Russian Army wargaming had a difficult legacy in 1914. Minister of War Vladimir Sukhomlinov had tried several times to organise large-scale wargames.[66] An attempt was first made in 1911 to organise a large game in Saint Petersburg which would use a whole wing of the Tsar’s winter palace as a venue. This aimed both to test the then-developing Russian war plan and to judge the performance of senior officers.[67] It was intended to contribute to the debate about the radical overhaul of Russia’s 1912 Mobilisation Schedule.[68] This game, however, was cancelled when the Tsar’s first cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, commander of the St Petersburg military district, asked the Tsar to cancel it because he did not want general officers to be subjected to ‘examinations’.[69]
In the interim, debate continued over the 1912 Mobilisation Schedule. This war plan reoriented Russian strategic focus away from the Germans in East Prussia and towards the Austro-Hungarian Army in Galicia.[70] There was significant debate over this plan among the heads of military districts, and in February 1912 the concession was made of developing two war plans: A and G.[71] Plan A focused on Austria but also included an invasion of East Prussia. G focused on Germany alone. Military district commanders, especially General Nikolai Kliuev, Chief of Staff of the Warsaw Military District, were convinced that the plan did not allocate enough troops against Austria-Hungary and sought to alter the plan away from any offensives into East Prussia.[72] Kliuev was consequently removed from command of the Warsaw military district and transferred to a corps command in the Caucasus by the GUGSh (the Russian General Staff).[73] The GUGSh wielded a considerable stick in its ability to remove dissenters, yet dissent was too widespread to transfer everyone. In April 1914 the GUGSh therefore deployed the carrot: a wargame that aimed to communicate to senior officers in the military districts the ‘success of strategic planning’.[74]
This wargame aimed to demonstrate the ‘correctness of the general considerations for the deployment of our armies in a war with the powers of the Triple Alliance’. It also held a subordinate training purpose of providing ‘practice in making decisions and giving orders to persons designated for higher positions in the event of complications on the Western borders’.[75]
The political setting for the game was that Russia and France were at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Romania remained neutral, while Great Britain signalled that it was ready to support France with an expeditionary force.[76] Germany focused on the west, deploying only five corps in East Prussia. Austria-Hungary, meanwhile, deployed its forces in Galicia in line with the Austro-Hungarian mobilisation plan, which had recently been obtained by Russian intelligence.[77] Russian deployments were made in line with the 1912 Mobilisation Schedule, with action in the game starting on the 10th day after mobilisation, allowing for the armies to be mobilised and ready to make strategic decisions. The Russian plan was to wait for, and counterattack against, a German offensive on the Middle Neman, while in Galicia (modern-day western Ukraine and southern Poland), the Third and Eighth Armies were to attack the flank of the expected Austrian drive north into Poland against the Fourth and Fifth Armies.[78]
In the game, the Russians suffered an early crisis: the German offensive on the Neman against the First Army, with the Second Army too far away to offer any support. The First Army’s counteroffensive against the Germans was pushed ‘to the brink of defeat’, having not had time to fully mobilise its reserve divisions.[79] Although General Zhilinsky, commanding the North-Western Front, countered with an immediate invasion of East Prussia, the German offensive was only repelled after the BEF’s arrival in France forced the removal of three German corps from East Prussia.[80] As the game ended, the First and Second Armies began operations to invade East Prussia.[81]
Meanwhile, in Galicia the Russian envelopment of the Austro-Hungarians proceeded to plan. By the second turn, the Third and Eighth Armies were enveloping Lemberg (now Lviv). A massive Austrian counteroffensive failed to stop them after a transfer of Russian reserves restored momentum. By the end of the game, the promised envelopment of the Austrians around Lemberg was unfolding as planned. This was accompanied by a simultaneous success on the Austrian left flank in modern-day southern Poland as the Austrian drive northwards into was defeated and driven back.[82]
In the immediate aftermath, few wider lessons were drawn from the game by its directors. Its principal purpose, after all, had been to demonstrate the superiority of the GUGSh’s deployment plan.[83] Victory by the Russian team in the game more than validated this concept in the eyes of the game directors. However, this success also concealed several deficits: the invasion of East Prussia was only achieved after the transfer of three German corps away from East Prussia and an initial period of defensive fighting for the two Russian armies there (which even then almost ended badly for the First Army). An extremely heavy thumb, therefore, was placed on the scale to allow for the success of the wargame.
What is equally clear even from a compressed summary of the game is the poor analysis to date by wargaming scholars. It is a grotesque stretching of the evidence to argue that the Russians wargamed the same invasion of East Prussia which they attempted in 1914. Wargaming scholars have similarly ignored the four Russian armies fighting in Galicia at the same time. This is especially egregious as it was a key part of the strategic question around resource allocation between the South-Western and North-Western Fronts. Nor did the wargame demonstrate the potential dangers of the isolation of each of the two armies invading East Prussia (which were obvious to anyone who could read a map, and indeed were noted). Instead, the wargame saw a successful invasion of East Prussia after the narrow defeat of an initial German offensive, aided by the transfer of reserves to counter the arrival of the BEF in France.
Understanding the conclusions created by this game is a task far beyond simple prediction and much more about the purpose, design and intent of wargame exercises. This was certainly not a wargame intended to predict how the early weeks of a war with the central powers would happen. Nor was it a wargame carried out to test and analyse plans. At its base it was carried out to validate Russian plans, but most of all it was a piece of internal messaging intended to present and then validate the GUGSh’s war plans, which were = heavily opposed across much of the Russian Army at the time.
Conclusion
This article has studied three military-strategic wargames played in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War by the German, British, and Russian armies. By studying the knowledge both created and communicated by these games and how this was influenced by the different institutional, strategic, and planning contexts, this article provides three case studies of both the varied roles and the hidden dangers of the use of wargaming within planning processes. These case studies also offer several corrections to existing literature while using the history of wargames to create a more nuanced understanding of the knowledge that wargames have historically produced for decision-makers.
Britain’s 1905 wargame was played as a very early preliminary exercise, designed to shape planning assumptions for a British intervention in Belgium. It was intended to explore the strategic problem and to shape the constraints on and potential requirements for future planning. However, this game has been incorrectly represented in scholarship as far more important than it was in shaping British predictions about German strategy. Although it was an impactful wargame and appears to have remained in key decision-makers’ minds years later, its legacy is marred by the series of assumptions baked into British strategy by politicians following the game. These were insights gained not from gameplay itself but instead by the scenario and assumptions. While this wargame extracted knowledge about the required planning assumptions for a future expeditionary force, it also ultimately communicated the wrong kind of knowledge to decision-makers: assumptions and scenarios for the game rather than the results of play.
Schlieffen’s wargame of the same year, on the other hand, was intended to rigorously test and validate a military plan which had been developed in depth over the preceding years. All three games discussed in this article produced knowledge useful to their respective institution’s planning but each had significant risks and drawbacks. Schlieffen’s 1905 wargame demonstrated the success of his Denkschrift in militarily defeating France with a right hook through Belgium. But this should be qualified by the specific context of 1905 in which Schlieffen foresaw a single-front war while Russia recovered from the Russo-Japanese War. Schlieffen’s other plans, in fact, focused on more limited wars of counterattack. When war came, Moltke adopted Schlieffen’s right-hook plan, ignorant of the condition that it was intended for a single-front war against France. Hindsight has tended to obscure this specific context in which Schlieffen was wargaming. Until now, this context of both the broader planning and the game itself has been obscured by a longstanding disconnect between historical and wargaming literature on Schlieffen’s wargames.
The Russian Kiev wargame was carried out after planning had finished and was—more overtly than Schlieffen’s wargames—an attempt to disseminate the plan and settle debates among the senior leadership of the Russian Army about the plan’s suitability. This is a key aspect of the wargame, which focused more on communicating than on extracting knowledge, but it has—like the Schlieffen wargames—been misunderstood. To date, most wargaming scholars covering this game have instead concentrated on the game’s findings both for Russian plans for an invasion of East Prussia and for the game’s discounting of the logistical implications. The game, in fact, was much wider and the main emphasis was on demonstrating the lack of risk being taken in East Prussia to defeat the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia.
The wargames compared in this article were conducted in entirely different contexts, at different stages in the planning process and with very different objectives, while their institutional and strategic contexts naturally varied dramatically too. The British wargame was employed as a preliminary exploration ahead of serious planning. Schlieffen’s 1905 wargame was played to test and validate a finished plan. The Russian wargame was conducted when planning had finished, and it was intended to communicate the intent and validity of the plan to senior Russian commanders.
Strategic, planning, and institutional contexts all dramatically alter both the knowledge produced by the game and how it can be used. To get the most out of wargames therefore requires rigorous and careful bounding within the right contexts, and extreme care in communicating the results and their contexts. Wargaming’s value lies as much in how it is conducted as in how the outcome is understood, contextualised and developed. Wargames are not magic bullets but sensitive media that are innately attuned to their contexts, capable of both creating and communicating poor-quality information with unfortunate implications if not managed correctly. Wargaming is an inherently introspective technique, and any utilisation of the knowledge must carefully contextualise and present any conclusions. This article is by no means the final word; both a greater quantity and better quality of historical wargame case studies will assist scholars in understanding the contribution that wargames can provide to decision-making, creating a more rigorous and thorough grounding for the technique.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Miscalculations, Divisions Marked Offensive Planning by U.S., Ukraine’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2023, at: www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-counteroffensive-us-planning-russia-war.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rex Brynen, ‘Wargaming Doesn’t Work’, PAXsims, 17 December 2023, at: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2023/12/17/wargaming-doesnt-work.
[4] Andrew Somerville, ‘Wargaming—Australian Combined Arms’, The Cove, 6 February 2026, at: https://cove.army.gov.au/article/wargaming-australian-combined-arms.
[5] Department of Defence, ‘Joint Experimentation and Wargaming Laboratory’, Defence Science and Technology Group (website), at: www.dst.defence.gov.au/research-facility/joint-experimentation-and-wargaming-laboratory; Australian Defence Force, ‘Background for the Basic and Advanced Analytic Wargaming Courses from the Naval Postgraduate School in Canberra, 17 February to 6 March 2020’, OpAnalytics, 2020, at: https://opanalytics.ca/aus/jed.html.
[6] Andrew W Reddie and Ruby E Booth, ‘Wargame Design: Addressing the Trilemma’, MORS Journal of Wargaming 1, no. 1 (2024): 5–20; Andrew W Reddie and Bethany L Goldblum, ‘Evidence of the Unthinkable: Experimental Wargaming at the Nuclear Threshold’, Journal of Peace Research 60, no. 5 (2023): 760–776; Joshua Letchford et al., ‘Experimental Wargaming with SIGNAL’, Military Operations Research 27, no. 2 (2022): 59082; Nick Bosio, ‘Moulding War’s Thinking: Using Wargaming to Broaden Military Minds’, Australian Army Journal XVI, no. 2 (2020): 24–48, pp. 37–38; Nick Bosio, ‘Gaming to Win: Enhancing Military Decision-Making’, Australian Army Journal XVIII, no. 1 (2022): 37–68; David Banks, ‘The Methodological Machinery of Wargaming: A Path Towards Discovering Wargaming’s Epistemological Foundations’, International Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2024): viae002.
[7] David Banks, ‘Admitting What We Know & Knowing What That Means: Explaining the Types of Knowledge That Wargames (Might) Produce’, paper presented at Connections UK, Uxbridge, 9 September 2025; Banks, ‘Methodological Machinery of Wargaming’.
[8] Ministry of Defence (MoD), Wargaming Handbook (Shrivenham, 2017), at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82e90d40f0b6230269d575/doctrine_uk_wargaming_handbook.pdf; Bundeswehr, Wargaming Handbook (Bundeswehr Doctrine Centre, 2025); Vincent Breton, Wargaming Handbook: Conduct a Wargaming Project (Service of the Military Commissioner of the Armed Forces, Joint-Army Centre for Multiservice Support, 2024); Roger Mason, ‘Wargaming: Its History and Future’, The International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (2018): 77–101; Andrew Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer (Barrie and Rockliff, 1968).
[9] Peter Perla, Peter Perla’s The Art of Wargaming, ed. John Curry (The History of Wargaming Project, 2011).
[10] See Paul Edward Strong, ‘Wargaming the Atlantic War: Captain Gilbert Rogers and the Wrens of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit’, paper presented at MORS Wargaming Special Meeting, October 2017, at: https://professionalwargaming.co.uk/171210WATU-MORS.pdf; Milan Vego, ‘German War Gaming’, Naval War College Review 65, no. 4 (2012).
[11] Banks, ‘Methodological Machinery of Wargaming’, p. 4; Johan Elg, ‘Analysis vs Educational Wargames: A Dichotomy’, MORS Journal of Wargaming 2, no. 1 (2025): 31–40.
[12] Banks, ‘Methodological Machinery of Wargaming’, p. 6.
[13] Terence Zuber, ‘There Never Was a “Schlieffen Plan”: A Reply to Gerhard Gross’, War in History 17, no. 2 (2010): 231–249; Gerhard P Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan: New Sources on the History of German Military Planning’, War in History 15, no. 4 (2008): 389–431; Robert T Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’, War in History 13, no. 1 (2006): 91–115.
[14] This article has neither the space nor the intellectual emphasis to focus on the wider debate; it therefore touches on and describes only those elements relevant to wargaming’s role. For the points most pertinent to the debate consult Terence Zuber, The Real German War Plan, 1904–1914 (The History Press, 2011); Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’; Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’; Terence M Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources: An Attempt to Resolve the Schlieffen Plan Controversy’, War in History 28, no. 3 (2020): 525–543.
[15] For a list of the main publications in this debate see Zuber’s website with the addition of Holmes’s article, published since this list was published: Terence Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan Debate 1999–2014’, Terence Zuber, Military Historian, at: https://terencezuber.com/schlieffendebate.php (accessed 18 February 2026); Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources’.
[16] Terence Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered’, War in History 6 (no. 3) (1999): 262–305. Much of this debate around the details of German war planning misses the main point of Zuber’s contention, which was that Germany never planned a war of aggression. This contention was opposed in Hans Ehlert et al. (eds), The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I, trans. David T Zabecki (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).
[17] Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources’.
[18] Zuber, The Real German War Plan, p. 9.
[19] Mason, ‘Wargaming’, p. 83; Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, p. 39.
[20] Zuber, The Real German War Plan, p. 87.
[21] Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’, p. 98 (quoted); Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’.
[22] Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources’, pp. 538–539.
[23] Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’, pp. 96–97.
[24] Nikolai N Golovin, The Russian Campaign of 1914: The Beginning of the War and Operations in East Prussia (The Command and General Staff School Press, 1933), pp. 181, 201; Robert A Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations In The Great War (The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 12–13.
[25] Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’, pp. 96–97; Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’, p. 411.
[26] Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’, p. 410.
[27] Ibid., p. 410.
[28] Ibid., p. 411.
[29] Matthew B Caffrey, On Wargaming: How Wargames Have Shaped History and How They May Shape the Future, Newport Papers 43 (Naval War College, 2019) p. 39; Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, pp. 20–21.
[30] Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’, pp. 99–100; Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources’, p. 533.
[31] Dennis Showalter, Instrument of War: The German Army, 1914–1918 (Osprey Publishing, 2016), p. 31.
[32] Holmes, ‘Back to the Sources’, p. 533.
[33] Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’, p. 409.
[34] George Ashton, ‘The Entente Cordiale and the “Military Conversations”’, The Quarterly Review 258, no. 512 (1932): 363–83, 369.
[35] Hew Strachan, ‘The British Army, Its General Staff and the Continental Commitment, 1904–1914’, in David French and Brian Holden-Reid (eds), The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, 1890–1939 (Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 76–77.
[36] The establishment of a General Staff was a key outcome of the post–South African War reforms for the British Army. See John Gooch, ‘The Creation of the British General Staff, 1904–1914’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 116 (1971): 50–54.
[37] Strachan, ‘The British Army, Its General Staff and the Continental Commitment’.
[38] Ashton, ‘Entente Cordiale and the “Military Conversations”’, p. 367; Christopher Yi-Han Choy, ‘British War-Gaming, 1870-1914’ (Masters Thesis, King’s College, 2013), p. 26. Previous assessments have argued that the game was much larger, taking place between January and May 1905. Ashton notes only that the game was ‘worked out by Grierson in April and March’, which implies a much shorter time scale that included planning.
[39] William Philpott, ‘The General Staff and the Paradoxes of Continental War’, in David French and Brian Holden-Reid (eds), The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, 1890–1939 (Frank Cass, 2002), p. 96; Ashton, ‘Entente Cordiale and the “Military Conversations”’, p. 368.
[40] Ashton, ‘Entente Cordiale and the “Military Conversations”’, p. 369; TNA, WO 33/364: Records of a Strategic War Game.
[41] TNA, WO 33/364: Records of a Strategic War Game, p. 16.
[42] Ibid., p. 16.
[43] Ibid., p. 81.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid., p. 16.
[46] Ibid., p. 136, 156.
[47] William Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914–1918, Volume 1 (Cassell and Company, 1926), pp. 24–25.
[48] DS MacDiarmid, The Life of Lieutenant-General Sir James Moncrieff Grierson (Constable & Company Ltd, 1923), p. 212.
[49] Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen, p. 25.
[50] John Gooch, The Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy c. 1900–1916 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 280.
[51] Ibid., p. 280.
[52] TNA, WO 33/364: Records of a Strategic War Game; Strachan, ‘The British Army, Its General Staff and the Continental Commitment’, pp. 77, 80, 82; Philpott, ‘General Staff and the Paradoxes of Continental War’, p. 96; Gooch, Plans of War, p. 280; Perla, The Art of Wargaming, p. 62.
[53] Perla, The Art of Wargaming, p. 63; Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer.
[54] Gooch, pp. 282, 283.
[55] Caffrey, On Wargaming, p. 38.
[56] TNA, WO 33/364: Records of a Strategic War Game, pp. 155–156.
[57] MoD, Wargaming Handbook, p. 2.
[58] Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, p. 25; MoD, Wargaming Handbook, p. 2.
[59] Christopher Phillips, Civilian Specialists at War: Britain’s Transport Experts and the First World War (University of London Press, 2020), p. 66.
[60] Philpott, ‘General Staff and the Paradoxes of Continental War’, p. 96; Gooch, Plans of War, p. 96; Strachan, ‘The British Army, Its General Staff and the Continental Commitment’, p. 80.
[61] Mason, ‘Wargaming’, p. 83.
[62] Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer, p. 27. Wilson entirely used Golovin’s account of the Russian Army in the First World War for his sources. Golovin, The Russian Campaign of 1914, pp. 35–38; Caffrey, On Wargaming, p. 29; Mason, ‘Wargaming’, p. 83.
[63] Bruce Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 252.
[64] Most existing interpretations of these games are based on Suvorov’s article, produced shortly after the war in 1919. Alpeev recently produced an article reinterpreting these wargames, using a greater range of sources than Suvorov. AA Suvorov, ‘Voennaia Igra Starshikh Voiskovykh Nachal’nikov v Aprele 1914 Goda’, Voenno-Istoricheskii Sbornik 1 (1919): 9–29; Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, pp. 250–254; Golovin, The Russian Campaign of 1914; Oleg Alpeev, ‘Стратегическая Военная Игра Старших Войсковых Начальников в Киеве 20–24 Апреля 1914 Года [The Strategic Wargame by Senior Army Leaders in Kiev on 20–24 April 1914]’, Военно-Исторический Журнал] [Military History Journal] 2019, no. 10: 14–23.
[65] Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, p. 253; Golovin, The Russian Campaign of 1914, pp. 37–39.
[66] For Russian naval wargaming see Toby Ewin, ‘Naval Wargaming up to WW1’, paper presented at Connections UK, Insights from Historical Wargaming, 10 September 2025, https://professionalwargaming.co.uk/25UKTobyEwin.mp3; https://professionalwargaming.co.uk/CUK25-Ewin-ConnectionsSlides-NavyWargamesUpToWW1.pdf..
[67] Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, p. 251.
[68] Alpeev, ‘Strategic Wargame’, p. 15.
[69] Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, p. 251.
[70] Alpeev, ‘Strategic Wargame’, p. 16.
[71] Ibid., p. 16.
[72] Ibid., pp. 16–17.
[73] Ibid., p. 18.
[74] Ibid., p. 18.
[75] Ibid., p. 15.
[76] Ibid., p. 19.
[77] Ibid., p. 19.
[78] Ibid., p. 20.
[79] Ibid., pp. 20–21.
[80] Note the pretext created for such an invasion of East Prussia created by a German offensive into Russia.
[81] Alpeev, ‘Strategic Wargame’, p. 21.
[82] Ibid., p. 22.
[83] Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, p. 253.