From Tehran to Berlin
Thirty-four years ago this month, much like today, America and the world stands on a precipice of major change. Times are uncertain, though for many there is ample reason to hope. Though the situation can be quite different at each historical turning point, looking to history can provide a guiding light not only regarding mistakes to avoid (still highly important) but also what the better times were like and why.
Many recently have drawn parallels to the Biden and Carter administrations, both single terms ending in darkness (and both involving Americans being held hostage in the Middle East). The American political system was not designed to enable her President alone to take things so far down or bring back up, but the 20th century became chock full of examples of exactly that happening. At the risk of passing some premature judgment, world patterns surrounding the administration that went out four years ago and is now coming back in are consistent with historical trends of the world becoming inherently more stable if a strong POTUS is in office.
Not only were the hostages in Iran freed before Ronald Reagan took his oath of office, but that was just a sample of what was to come as the world entered its final phase of a struggle between nuclear-armed former allies to write [and/or rewrite] global history. The weapons of mass destruction aspect meant the Cold War held a specter unlike any of the previous conflicts between great world empires before. Open warfare occurred in places but it was neither full-scale nor direct because everyone knew what escalation to such a level could mean.
That began to change in the 1980s with the general deployment of 4th generation warplanes equipped with "smart" weapons. On the global strategic aspect, concurrently there was enough advancement in defense against ballistic missiles, the Soviet Union's primary means for delivering its nuclear weapons to targets, for the Reagan administration to strongarm Russia into an arms race their economy could never sustain. The regional strategic aspect saw implementation of AirLand Battle, the first fully-workable plan for NATO to use the superior quality of its new combined arms technology to be able to defend against a full-scale Warsaw Pact invasion without having to resort to risking unthinkable escalation via the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Military strength, as a rule, should always be ready for use (not merely a bluff), yet it has often served a more significant aspect: projecting strength can prevent war altogether by convincing opposition that an engagement of arms would be too costly for their own goals. In the ages of imperialism, from antiquity to classical post-Reformation Western Civilization, this often failed because alliances made with the idea of maintaining balance of power would instead increase the scale by dragging allies into fights begun by a single aggressive, ambitious, or merely angry emperor. All this political gamesmanship culminated in World War I, which proved so devastating it revolutionized most of the world by persuading populations that it may no longer be worth throwing away their lives in obeisance to royal whims.
Were it not for the scale once again brought about by alliance obligations...history correctly notes Adolf Hitler signed his death warrant declaring war on the United States, neither support of Imperial Japan nor enabling the subsequent rise of the Soviet Union being worthwhile costs...World War II could have just been the last of these European imperial wars. Past colonial empires, like the British, arguably qualify as historical superpowers for their time, but the term earned a practical redefinition with the Cold War as there was never before a time in history a mere two great nations could exert so much swift and heavy influence on the rest of the globe. The United States of America, not a typical empire but a nation built around a set of ideals rather than any ethnic identity, now had a foil to those free republican ideals in the form of the socialist Soviets who were at least as determined to reshape the world in their image.
Officially the US was never at war with the USSR...in fact they were still technically allies, sharing seats at the top of the peace-enforcing United Nations Security Council. The Cold War involved naked ambition of irreconcilable ideologies which socialism definitely lost (despite the assertions from China and other potential belligerents attempting to pick up the banner dropped by the fall of the Soviet Union). For a while the globe enjoyed Pax Americana as the world's sole remaining superpower proved a benevolent force for peace and prosperity, NATO now standing as one of several US-led alliances for the purpose of checking the ambitions of petty aggressors.
AirLand Battle Portrayed
The Cold War reached this final crucial phase at the same time computing technology was entering the home en masse, and early developers jumped on the possibilities that would enable the common man to test some of the theories being evaluated by their countries' flag officers. There was no shortage of arcade-type games portraying the new cool tanks and jets, but it was the traditional wargames (a perfect fit for computers which could handle setup, rule enforcement and result calculations faster than people) that gave strategic theoreticians, professional and amateur alike, opportunity to engage in consideration which, in some cases, proved so close to the mark it would raise brows among the officials on the inside who had access to the real classified information. With enough good information publicly available for anyone who did their homework to form such viable theories, imaginations ran wild in other mediums.
Among the early results was a short-lived series by Australian computer wargame pioneer Roger Keating, his career covering the core portfolio of probably that country's most famous computer wargame developer, Strategic Studies Group Pty Ltd. (shortened to SSG, not to be confused with US publisher SSI who, making things trickier, was SSG's US distributor). These four titles published from 1982 to 1985 (the year of their setting it just so happens) presented an unprecedented scale when combined since each took place in one of the potential flare-up spots: while the other three were set in Europe, RDF is notable for being set in the Middle East...not the only instance of non-military sources from this era managing to hit on a little accurate prophecy. When Superpowers Collide, while an excellent early example for their scope of scenarios, but are limited in aspect due to conditions for victory being strictly a matter of territorial control.
Screenshot is courtesy of The Wargaming Scribe, among the few to conduct a full playthrough and post findings online; craters show where tactical nuclear strikes have occurred. Another pioneer was young programming genius Sid Meier, who in 1983 wrote for his company MicroProse its first (of many) strategy game: NATO Commander. All of Meier's efforts have been strong though some like HellCat Ace and Covert Action he considers less fondly in hindsight, and NATO Commander is another such example because of how rough he soon thought it relative to successors. He has a point, but there is more to it.
NATO Commander was the first implementation of Meier's hex-based wargaming engine that would be refined for a trilogy in which he partnered with historian and wargame designer Dr. Ed Bever for what is designated collectively as the MicroProse Command Series (Crusade in Europe, Decision in the Desert, Conflict in Vietnam), after which Meier retired from the wargaming genre. While its implementation has bugs (see what happens after the 31st day) its scope is amazing for the time: not only is there war over territory, but victory is also weighed militarily upon relative military losses and politically if fighting were escalated to WMD use. I recall reading it made its way somewhere into actual US military academic use, but I cannot locate the source for that.
Around the same time one of Sid Meier's future collaborating partners was busy with his own work on a different medium. Aspiring author Tom Clancy was using figures from wargame designer Larry Bond's Harpoon as aids in covering the technical aspects in The Hunt for Red October, which would lead to the two men working together directly for Clancy's second novel portraying a 1980s-era WWIII: Red Storm Rising. It was not be the only thriller portraying a non-nuclear WWIII in Europe, but it became the most famous and influential which further propelled Clancy to the top of a literary genre he helped develop.
Meier and Clancy came together for the computer adaptation of Red Storm Rising, which merely used the WWIII setting in the Atlantic as backdrop for a modern warfare counterpart to Sid's WWII submarine simulation hit Silent Service. Yet when it released in 1988, the gaming market was already being assailed by many vehicle simulators (including MicroProse's own) which found a Red Storm Rising sort of scenario ideal for computer pilots and soldiers to fight in due to the lack of any real-life war that was really testing the newer technologies and tactics involved. Especially as more capable 16-bit systems like the Amiga and IBM PC compatibles sporting faster processors with advanced video and sound hardware came into common use, more accurate portrayals were possible bringing theory closer to reality.
The Conflict That Really Was
Alas, the Cold War [officially] ended without a shot fired; it appeared AirLand Battle would never get the trial by fire proving its validity. In 1990, after collapse of the Warsaw Pact but before the final end of the Soviet Union, the fascist dictatorship of Iraq forcefully conquered its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait, prompting a US-led international response to preempt further aggression against regional allies Saudi Arabia and Israel. The transition to Pax Americana still in process, this deployment and readiness of forces followed the existing Cold War NATO playbook.
This proved unfortunate for the ambitions of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who commanded one of the largest military forces in the world...modeled after Soviet doctrine while using the very Soviet equipment NATO planners had prepared for years to face in Europe. The higher-tier Iraqi Republican Guard troops (like Nazi SS units, they were better-equipped and more fanatical than run-of-the-mill conscripts making up the core of the army) were a threat not to be underestimated, and the sheer force of Iraqi numbers meant a full-scale invasion of Saudi Arabia would be difficult to counter. Yet history knows how it turned out in the end: a single cross-border incursion was quickly routed, NATO's qualitative advantage proved overwhelming even to the Republican Guard, and within a week Iraq was now the nation at the mercy of being conquered outright if only the US opted to (it would take an additional dozen years to implement that option, but that is another story).
New Portrayals
"We were just as happy to have these conflicts remain hypothetical, but when the United States entered a real shooting war, involving weapons and situations we had speculated about for so long, we could not ignore it." -Excerpt from the introduction for F-15 Strike Eagle II: Operation Desert Storm Scenario Disk
While the applicability of how AirLand Battle was implemented in the First Gulf War is a debate for the academics, it had much greater effect than the hindsight implications of how things may have turned out had the Cold War ever gone hot. Now, finally, there was a real war that put these weapons and tactics to the test; there need not be only theoretical scenarios for modern warfare simulations any longer. The world changes that came with Pax Americana and the Global War on Terror made imaginations run even more wild, but the trend continues for potential conflict settings to be those viable in the present state of politics across the globe with popular scenarios from this era including renewed fighting against Iraq (came true!), escalation against a resurgent Russia (could still possibly become true), with the conducting of operations against top enemies Iran and North Korea remaining relevant even after all these decades.
MicroProse, who had been spearheading speculative simulations since NATO Commander, was so quick to grant Gulf War scenarios to its customer base that it outran the momentum of part of its product line. Another was Dynamix who updated their 1989 simulator A-10 Tank Killer with a Desert Storm mission set (but at least took the opportunity to add quality-of-life improvements to their game engine). Numerous other developers took their time which generally resulted in better-tuned products, but the approach by MicroProse for 1991 is an interesting case study in how to keep the old as new.
Gunship, five years old at that point, is the most extreme example. The release of sequel Gunship 2000, which would come stock with Iraq as one of its mission regions, was not due until later in the year. Since the original still ranked among the company's greatest hits, its IBM PC version was repackaged in a big box (all prior releases were in the smaller size boxes common to 8-bit releases) with the additional of a white sticker on the front headlined "Understanding Desert Storm" with a couple bullet points noting how the AH-64 Apache contributed to the Gulf War effort that it may be [imaginatively] experienced in the simulation. Due to the nature of its boot disk build no substantive changes could be made to the program itself, though in this form players could at least be certain they were getting the most refined .05 version.
A less extreme, but the least precise, re-release with the "Understanding Desert Storm" sticker was F-19 Stealth Fighter. F-19 remained popular (its sequel F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 was nearing release and would come stock with a Desert Storm mission set) despite it long being no longer secret that the plane itself did not exist as the US military succeeded in fooling the public (including Tom Clancy himself) from learning about the stealth fighter that was actually the F-117 Nighthawk. F-19s relation to the Gulf War was indicated as offering a Persian Gulf setting, but those mission were flown against Iran with Iraq only a potentially annoying neutral belligerent. Suspension of disbelief already perhaps made this forgivable but those who also owned F-15 Strike Eagle II could at least transfer the scenarios from that game, one of which included targets in northwestern Iraq.
M1 Tank Platoon had no sequel or expansion in development (nor would it get one until 1998), so it got something special for its "Understanding Desert Storm" treatment. Freely downloadable or orderable was a patch that switched the original green European terrain palette to a desert one suitable for a Gulf scenario. Some imagination was still required since this only changed the colors and not any notations, but due to Iraq using mostly Soviet equipment it was actually not that much of a stretch.
F-15 Strike Eagle II originally shipped, like its prequel, with mission sets against Libya, Iran, Vietnam, and several potential Arab aggressors in the Middle East (including Iraq); owners of F-19 Stealth Fighter were able to import its two distinct scenarios against the Soviet Union in the Arctic Ocean and Warsaw Pact in Europe (ports of F-15 II for Atari ST, Amiga, and Sega Genesis came with all 6). Following the Gulf War, F-15 II got the royal treatment exclusively for its PC pathfinder with the Operation Desert Storm Scenario Disk (while add-on disks were fairly common in computer games, this was a first for MicroProse). Since it was designed to import the scenarios from F-19 and early plans existed for others game expansion was a cinch, but it did not stop there: a "campaign" (actually a sequential series of narrowly defined missions with unique weapon payloads) was included based on the actual Desert Storm air campaign. As a nice bonus it seamlessly integrated the formerly F-19-exclusive North Cape and Central Europe sets but with a twist: their scenario descriptors in the technical supplement are not set in the past and taken verbatim from the F-19 manual, but "updated" to reflect the end of the Warsaw Pact with the still-looming threat of the Soviet Union (in 1991 Gorbachev was in trouble and no one could predict what might happen).
Afterword
The Gulf War was a boon to computer war simulations with over 30 known titles set in it, competitive with the Cold War as a whole (hundreds of games are set in the Cold War but a small fraction actually cover military conflict). Both settings carried on out of sheer momentum for a time; since then they have joined WWII & Vietnam as legacy military history, still portrayed (well in some cases) but with a weaker attachment to the younger generations playing them now. Nevertheless a remnant of that legacy keeps renewing, a trend that appears set to continue...at least until the next war comes along showing to game developers how well a new generation of First World technology and tactics work in a real 21st century battlefield.
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