Category Archives: Wargames

Computational Military Reasoning (Tactical Artificial Intelligence) Part 2

In my last blog post I described how the TIGER / MATE programs classified battles (in computer science terms ‘objects’) based on attributes and that anchored or unanchored flanks was one such attribute. After demonstrating the algorithm for calculating the presence or absence of anchored flanks we saw how the envelopment and turning tactical maneuvers were implemented. In this blog post we will look at another attribute: restricted avenues of attack and restricted avenues of retreat.

The only avenue of retreat from the Battle of First Bull Run back to Washington was over a narrow Stone Bridge. When a wagon overturned panic ensued. Library of Congress.

One classic example of a restricted avenue of retreat was the narrow stone bridge crossing Cub Run Creek which was the only eastern exit from the First Bull Run battlefield. The entire Union army would have to pass over this bridge as it fell back on Washington, D.C. When artillery fire caused a wagon to overturn and block the bridge, panic ensued.

At the battle of Antietam Burnside tried to force his entire corps over a narrow bridge to attack a Confederate position on the hill directly above. The bridge was famously carried by the 51st New York Infantry and 51st Pennsylvania Infantry who demanded restoration of their whiskey rations in return for this daring charge. From the original Edwin Forbes drawing. Click to enlarge.

Burnside’s Bridge at the battle of Antietam is a famous example of a restricted avenue of attack. Burnside was unaware that Snavely Ford was only 1.4 miles south of the stone bridge and allowed a back door into the Confederate position. Consequently, he continued to throw his corps across the bridge with disastrous results.

How to determine if there is a restricted line of attack or a restricted line of retreat on a battlefield

From the perspective of computer science restricted avenues of retreat and restricted avenues of attack are basically the same problem and can be solved with a similar algorithm.

As before we must first establish that there is agreement among Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of the existence of – and the ability to quantify – the attributes of ‘Avenue of Attack’, ‘Avenue of Retreat’ and ‘Choke Point’.

The following slides are from an unclassified briefing that I gave to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) on my MATE program (funded by DARPA research grant W911NF-11-200024):

All slides can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Now that we have determined if there is a restricted avenue of attack the next blog post will discuss what to do with this information; specifically the implementation of the infiltration and penetration offensive maneuvers.

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to email me.

References:

TIGER: An Unsupervised Machine Learning Tactical Inference Generator, Sidran, D. E. Download here.

Free Scenarios Twenty-One Through Twenty-Five

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We asked you for your Top 30 battles that you would like to see included free with General Staff for supporters of our Kickstarter campaign. We have previously announced the first twenty vote-getters. Today we are announcing the next five. One of the interesting features of General Staff is the ability to combine any two armies with a map to create a scenario. We use this feature for two day battles (such as Wagram and 2nd Bull Run) effectively creating two completely different battles (with two different armies) but using the same battlefield map.

This map of the battle of Alma was created only two years after the battle. Click to enlarge.

The battle of Alma is our first foray into the Crimean War. The Russians, though outnumbered, have the heights with their guns entrenched in heavy fortifications. The British and the French suffer numerous communication breakdowns. The battle seesawed back and forth until a final assault by the Highland Brigade carried the day and the Russians broke and fled from the battlefield. Playing the Allies will test your ability to coordinate attacks via messengers. Playing the Russians will require skillful coordination of counterattacks.

Wagram was a two day battle with the first day involving crossing the Danube. Click to enlarge.

On May 21st and 22nd Napoleon had attempted to cross the Danube at Lobau Island only to be turned back by Archduke Charles. Now, after over a month of preparations and reinforcements, Napoleon was ready to try again.

We present two distinct scenarios for the battle of Wagram: the first representing the situation on July 5th and Napoleon’s second attempt at crossing the Danube and establishing a beachhead and the second the battle of July 6th in which Archduke Charles attempted a double envelopment of Napoleon’s army. Only Napoleon’s hastily created ‘grand battery’ of artillery, a desperate cavalry charge and a counterattack by MacDonald’s corps saved the day. The Austrians eventually broke and fled the battlefield and sued for an armistice which ended the 1809 war.

Plan of the second Battle of Bull Run Va. Showing position of both armies at 7 p.m. 30th Aug. 1862. From the Library of Congress. Click to Enlarge

After General George McClellan’s disastrous Peninsula campaign, President Lincoln appointed Major General John Pope to lead the newly formed Army of Virginia and was tasked with the missions of protecting Washington D.C. and clearing the Shenandoah Valley of Confederates. McClellan, who never responded promptly to orders even in the best of circumstances, simply ignored commands to begin transferring his army from the peninsula southeast of Richmond up to Pope in front of Washington. Lee, knowing that McClellan had a bad case of the ‘slows’ took advantage of his interior lines to rapidly move his forces north to destroy Pope before McClellan’s troops could reinforce him.

The battle on the old Mananas battlefield began on August 28, 1862 with Jackson (commanding the left wing) shelling the passing Union column of King’s division (which included the soon to be famous Iron Brigade). The Iron Brigade, though outnumbered, attacked and fought Jackson’s famous division to a standstill. However, Jackson’s attack was primarily a feint employed as a ‘fixing force’ for an envelopment maneuver; Longstreet’s corps was expected to appear on the Union’s unprotected left flank.

On the second day, August 29th, Pope attempted to initiate a double envelopment against Jackson. However, Longstreet had now appeared on the battlefield at exactly the wrong place for Pope’s envelopment maneuver. The day was marked with incredibly poor communications between Pope and his subordinates and ended mostly as it began with neither side gaining or losing much ground.

The third day, August 30th, began with Longstreet’s counterattack on the Union’s exposed left flank. Again, incredibly poor communications between Pope and his subordinates turned a bad situation into a disaster. Unlike the first battle of Bull Run, the Union army fell back on Washington in an orderly column through an extremely limited avenue of retreat over Bull Run.

The Wargame in the Viking Grave

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The recent article, “A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics,” which appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology has started a firestorm of controversy in both academia and the international press. The New York Times wrote, “…the controversy has reignited a longstanding debate about the role of women among the Vikings, Norse seafarers whose exploits, from the 8th to the 11th centuries, are central to Scandinavian identity.” Some argue that the DNA testing, itself, was in error or that the bones of the Viking warrior were mixed up with bones from another grave since the original discovery of grave Bj 581 from the Birka settlement on the island of Bjorko by Hjalmar Stolpe and first reported in 1889. Nonetheless, what caught my eye – and probably yours as well – were these words from the original article:

“The grave goods include a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy (van Hamel, 1934; Whittaker, 2006), stressing the buried individual’s role as a high-ranking officer.” – A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics, American Journal of Physical Anthropolgy, Hendenstierna-Jonson, et. al.

I had to find out: what was the Viking wargame buried in grave Bj 581?

Illustration by Evald Hansen based on the original plan of grave Bj 581 by excavator Hjalmar Stolpe; published in 1889 (Stolpe, 1889). The red circle highlights the gaming pieces. Click to enlarge.

Reconstruction of grave Bj 581 drawn by one of the authors, Neil Price. Click to enlarge.

First, I contacted Dr. Rosemary Moore who teaches Roman Military History and Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean (as well as Classics) at the University of Iowa. I studied under Dr. Moore in graduate school and she was also on my Doctoral Defense Committee. Dr. Moore is also a former Marine officer and enjoys World of Warcraft and wargames. She did some preliminary research and forwarded Game-Boards and Gaming-Pieces in the Northern European Iron Age by Helène Whittaker to me. In describing a female burial in the same Viking cemetery (Bj 523) Whittaker writes, “Grave 523 was an exceptionally rich burial which contained gaming-pieces of glass…” And, “The female burial in Grave 523 at Birka shows that gaming equipment could at times also be associated with high status female burials. It can accordingly be suggested that the occurrence of gaming pieces and game-boards in funerary contexts could refer specifically to male prestige and the values associated with military prowess and leadership, but at times could also express social status in general, both male and female.”

While unable to find an actual photograph of the game pieces from Bj 581, I did discover a reference to 27 antler game pieces from that grave located at the Statens Historiska Museum in Sweden. A bit more digging found this photograph of 27 bone / antler game pieces from the same museum and tagged as having been found at Bjorko.

Twenty-seven bone/antler game pieces found in grave 624 at Björkö, Uppland Sweden Adelsö parish. From the Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm. Click to enlarge.

While the above game pieces came from a different grave in the same cemetery, they are of the right number and material. Consequently, the game pieces in Bj 581 must have been very similar.

What did the board look like? This photograph of a game board from a 7th century Viking boat burial in Valsgärde, Sweden had similar pieces:

Game board discovered in a 7th century Viking boat burial in Valsgärde, Sweden. Click to enlarge.

So, now it looks like we’ve found the pieces and the game board. All that’s left is to identify the game, itself. The best guess is that this is the game Hnefatafl. There are a number of modern versions of the game (some using different pieces) though the original rules were never recorded.

The name of the game comes from the Old Icelandic words hnef (fist) and tafl (table). Fist-table sounds like a proper Viking game for warriors.

Creating Victory Conditions in General Staff

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The General Staff Wargaming System provides users with the tools to create scenarios of their own design. These scenarios can be historical battles or they can be ‘what if’ scenarios (e.g. what if Custer had brought Gatling guns to the Little Big Horn or what if Robert E. Lee fought Wellington). To determine the victor of these scenarios or battles we need to have a predetermined set of Victory Conditions. Below is a screen shot of the Edit Scenario Victory Conditions screen:

The Victory Point editing screen in the General Staff Scenario Editor. Click to enlarge.

And below is a screen shot of the self-checking error function for setting Victory Points:

General Staff automatically checks for impossible victory conditions. Click to enlarge.

The General Staff Wargaming System is designed to give maximum flexibility to the scenario designer. It fully supports creating scenarios from 18th and 19th century armies and any map.

How to Edit Unit Speeds in General Staff

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We recently had a series of very spirited discussions about the speed of units in various formations and across different terrain types during the Napoleonic Era in the Facebook Wargaming groups. A number of people were very kind to forward documents, tables and charts that had estimates of unit speeds. But, one thing that quickly became apparent was there was quite a bit of disagreement about, “how fast could a unit march,” in the 19th century.

Furthermore, we hadn’t even begun to talk about battles that took place in bad weather (the battles of Stone’s River and Fort Donnelson during the American Civil War come to mind).

The solution, obviously, was to allow the user (the scenario designer) to have complete control over these values. Consequently, we’ve added a very easy to use utility to facilitate editing and displaying unit speeds in various formations across different terrains.

Below is a video we created that demonstrates these utilities: