Is China making the Kaiser's blunder?

Reading a  good book like Castles of Steel is a good way to get the intellectual juices flowing.

It's shallow reading of history to find "lessons" in it. Cases differ and fact sets are never precisely the same, so you can't simply transfer directly from one case to another. But experience is valuable, and it's certainly profit from the experience of others after making allowance for what is different and what is similar.

Former Varyag

There's certainly reason to think that Germany's naval expansion at the turn of the Twentieth Century played a role in bringing World War I and even led Germany;s defeat. Castles of Steel repeatedly points out that German naval officers were shocked that Britain joined the war. And it's clear that Britain's entry into the war was hardly a forgone conclusion. It broke with long-standing British practice of playing balance of power politics and avoiding the commitment of major land forces on the continent. It brought the British and French into an alliance -- pretty amazing considering those two nations had spent the bulk of the last five or six centuries as rivals.

Germany was -- and is -- the dominant nation in continental Europe. As a continental  power it necessarily had to give primacy of place to the army.  Resources are always finite and a navy could never get more than the leftovers after the army was taken care of.

Britain, of course, was a naval power. Its army would necessarily take second place in the defense of the island nation. Indeed, it's a truism that an island can only be defended off shore. There are very few cases of a successful island defense if an enemy manages to land on it.

So when the Germans started their naval buildup in the early 1900s it ended up being worse than a waste of resources. Not only did all the treasure sunk into the navy come at the expense of land forces, but it antagonized Britain and drove it into alliance against Germany.

Geography made any attempt at naval superiority for Germany impossible. Britain controlled access to the sea approaches of Germany. British national interests precluded allowing Germany to ever achieve parity in naval power.

If the Germans had restricted themselves to a naval force sufficient to guard their coasts against French and Russian naval forces there's every reason to think the British would have stayed out of the war. With no naval blockade or just the limited blockade the French could have mounted, the widespread suffering inflicted on the German economy. No British entry in the war means no BEF and probably victory for the Germans in 1914 or 1915 at the latest.. And, of course, with no unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain, there would have been no reason for an American entry into the war,.

It seems to me that China's situation a century later resembles Germany's in some ways. Its a rising economic power that is also tempted to expand its clout in international affairs and boost its military. Like Germany, however, China is a continental power with rival major powers that share borders with it. The army always will come first.

Like Germany, as well, the naval geography works against China. All the sea approaches to China are controlled by other countries -- who all have historical beefs with China. And like Germany, a hundred years ago, China's main rival is the world's biggest Navy. Except, of course, China's situation is even more dire. While the British were forced to be satisfied with a Navy as large as the next two combined, the U.S. Navy is nearly larger than all the other navies in the world, combined.

Germany, at least in theory, could over strain the British by building a large enough navy that some other navy would be able to take advantage and strike. The British negated this strategy through diplomacy. It made allies of the other significant navies, including  some it had fought against like France and the United States. By the time war came, the Germans stood almost alone at sea.

In China's case the ground is even harder to make up. The US Navy is far stronger than the Royal Navy ever was --and nearly every other significant navy in the world is already an ally. Among the few that are not formal allies, namely India and Russia, there's little reason to think they'd be inclined to side against the US on China's behalf and every reason to expect the opposite.

The bottom line is that any money spent on a blue-water navy is a complete waste as far as China is concerned. The geography, politics and military technology are hopelessly against them. They can't possibly spend enough money to make their naval forces militarily relevant -- but they can easily spend enough to annoy, alarm and drive into alliance their neighbors. There's been a lot of talk in the news lately about China's new aircraft carrier, submarine construction and other naval improvements. While obviously bearing watching, anything China does in this sphere seems like a trip down the road of folly.

Wargaming a US-China War

This post looks at the possibility, via Larry Bond on FaceBook.

From a wargamer's perspective, this sort of speculation has some interest, if only because China is about the only power that could, theoretically, be considered anything like a "peer competitor." That is, it's about the only potential foe that would pose any sort of challenge involving conventional warfare. A war with Iran, in contrast, while more likely, would mostly pose unconventional warfare challenges for the US, much less fertile ground for wargamers, especially those interested in naval affairs.

On the other hand, from a political standpoint a war between China and the United States seems highly unlikely, but also would probably be an unmitigated disaster should it occur.

As Edward Carr noted here:

"The tripwire for outright conflict might be trivial: a scrap between China and one of its neighbours over some islands, or a miscalculation as American warships sail up to the 12-mile limit that defines Chinese territorial waters. But when the dominant male and the pretender square up, everything about them is at stake. Just as two conflagrations burnt the heart out of the 20th century, so a war between the leading powers of the 21st could set off an orgy of destruction.

The shadow of nuclear devastation is one reason to be fearful. But even if we avoided that last, hideous step, the cost would be immense. That is partly
because today’s conventional weapons are so potent, but also because China and America depend on each other in ways that Russia and America never did. The flow of goods to our shops would dry up, as globalisation failed. The financial system might collapse, because America could not borrow from China, and China would have nowhere to put its savings. Cyber-warriors might wreck communications and infrastructure. Collaboration on trade, science and action on climate change would be swept aside. Global economic depression would drag billions back into poverty."

Now, clearly the fact that a war would be a colossal bad idea is no guarantee that it won't happen after all. One only needs to remember the summer of 1914 to know that it can happen anyway.  But neither country seems very interested in stoking tensions at this point and I'd rate the chances as being rather low at this point. What the situation would look like in 20 years, or even 10 years, is hard to say. A lot can happen in that amount of time in politics. In 1923 Hitler was in jail for the Beer Hall Putsch, a decade later he was chancellor of Germany and a decade after that was embroiled in a global war. Clearly few prophets in 1923 would have foreseen 1943. So caution is warranted. Still, wars between global powers usually turn on identifiable clashes of interests and its hard to discern what those might be in the case of China and the US. Much of the great power rivalry of the 20th Century turned on ideology -- one sees no great ideological rivalry between the US and China. There are always possible geopolitical clashes of interest, as seen in the first half of the 20th Century, but it's hard to see much of that in the US-China relationship. China' disputes and concerns are very local. Even the Taiwan situation doesn't really represent a clash of interests, really. In large part it's a dispute left over from the Cold War. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan now would not have the same implications that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have had in 1980.

China-US trade war and its impact on gaming

Of course any China-U.S. trade war would have immense impacts outside the small world of gaming, but this is a gaming blog so that's our focus here.

Over at the Desert News Jeff Thredgold makes this point: "However, there is an important and positive by-product of that undervalued yuan. Goods produced in China are more affordable to Americans, whether shopping at Walmart or Target or Forever 21 or other retailers.
The Chinese currency manipulation allows greater U.S. household purchasing power for Chinese-made goods … good news for U.S. households that are already under tremendous pressure from a very damaging recession and a weak U.S. economic recovery."

Bloomberg News reports:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said China is headed for a “trade conflict” with the U.S. and other western countries as tensions rise about how to rebalance the global economy.

“What China is doing is functionally equivalent to having large export subsidies and large import tariffs,” Krugman, 57, said in a speech in the Free University in Berlin. “If it were doing that in the normal way, it would automatically be subject to large countervailing duties. And I think that’s going to happen at the rate we’re going.”


For quite some time I've thought that gamers were going to have to adjust their expectations on how much bling was in their games. The decade of the aughts brought us all sorts of terrific games packed to the gills with stuff such as Battlelore, War of the Ring, Tide of Iron and many more. It was also a decade that brought us highly detailed and already painted collectible miniatures in vast numbers used in everything from Dungeons & Dragons and Heroclix to Axis & Allies Miniatures and Heroscape.

As much as a 40% increase in the value of the Chinese currency to the US dollar might help the US in macro terms, let there be no mistaking its effect on game bits - there won't be many, any more. Indeed, some product line may simply become unaffordable to produce and others will ave to scale back considerably. I think collectible painted miniatures, in particular, may become obsolete.

We're already seeing some hints of the coming reality. Fantasy Flight Games is still struggling with finding a way to bring the Battlelore Core Set back to market at an economically doable price. It's latest stopgap is to "repurpose" excess inventory of French-language copies for the English-language market. A welcome development but obviously a stopgap.

We're also seeing plastic being replaced by cardboard in more games. In the latest versions of Axis & Allies, for example, the industrial sites and anti-aircraft guns have been changed to counters.

The bottom line is that players who like a box chock full of plastic are going to find the future very disappointing as China "rebalances" the value of its currency with the rest of the world.

Army Without Hope? The KMT in A&A Miniatures

For a nation that managed to hold out virtually alone for years against Japan, China never has gotten much respect in any Axis & Allies game, whether it's a Larry Harris design or A&A miniatures.

A few months back I proposed a "100-point" standard game order of battle that I thought might be competitive against the 1939 Japanese. Constructed under the latest rules, using formations and fortification limits, single-army bonus and 1939 year restrictions, it looked like this: One KMT infantry company (1 KMT officer, 10 KMT riflemen, 1 KMT MG team) eight more KMT MG teams, 1 more officer and 1 more rifleman, 1 T-26 tank, a headquarters, a pill box, six barbed wire and four minefields for a total of 110 points. (In historical terms this is an infantry company, a machine gun company and a few supports)

It took a long time to get this to the table, but I finally got a chance to play it. I constructed the following Japanese force, which was not very exotic at all: Two Japanese infantry platoons (1 imperial sergeant, 5 Arisaka rifles, 1 knee mortar) two Type 89 Chi-Ro "medium" tanks, one imperial sniper, one MG team, 1 70mm gun, 1 SNLF Fanatic and a Zero for 110 points. The Japanese player was a total A&A newbie, although an experienced gamer.

We battled over Map No. 1 of the 3-inch hexes (village), with the Japanese starting on the more open side, while the Chinese had a bit more woods cover. The mines and wire were set up to force the Japanese into a narrow approach to the objective. Not that it made much difference.

The Japanese player made a straightforward, competent frontal assault with the sergeants and riflemen, accompanied by the tanks, while the mortars, machine gun, sniper and infantry gun provided covering fire. The Zero took pot shots at long range until the end game when most of the KMT machine guns were gone. KMT fire was reasonably effective and, if anything, the KMT made more than its share of cover rolls. The Japanese lost both tanks, the infantry gun and about 5 riflemen. The Chinese were wiped out to a man in five turns.

While I might try to tinker around the edges with this OB, perhaps subbing more pillboxes for the barbed wire and/ or mines, the Chinese have too limited a selection of units to be competitive right now. Unfortunately there's little historical basis for giving them much more. A cannon would be nice, and maybe some better quality infantry would help, but the main things that made China such a hard nut for Japan to crack are really outside the scope of a tactical wargame.

Axis & Allies Miniatures -- Making do with what you got, the KMT

One of the irritating things about most published strategy advice and army/warband/deck builds in collectible games is that they assume the players have access to the full line of available figures/cards. I suppose there may be a few players with unlimited budgets and time out there, but most of us have to play with what we got -- either putting up with the luck of the draw from randomized boosters or making a few strategic purchases of singles.

Most articles also seem to assume a minimum of external constraints so the army creator has the most flexibility to make use of clever combos. This may be OK with fantasy game, but I think the history-based AAM game loses a bit when you let it drift into fantastic anything-goes army builds that mix Germans and Japanese or 1940 French with 1945 Soviets.

So here's an exploration of an army build that shows more than a passing nod to history and tries to make the most out of what one player has in the box while obeying the standard army construction rules from the Expanded Rules.

The basic parameters in force will be for a 100-point army using historical army limits and year restrictions. The 100-point army is being picked because I intend to field a KMT Nationalist Chinese army and I am certain I can't field a larger force. I will only use models I own, with no proxies. The army will be tried out later against a contemporary Japanese build.

The Historical Army limit in this case is that the Nationalist Chinese can't be in an army with any other nationality. This is a pretty strict condition, in that the Chinese don't have many units to choose from. Some "historical" builds get around this by giving the Chinese access to some weapons they did actually field such a P-40 fighters and Sherman tanks, but going by the rule book these aren't available yet. (I'd like to see the Chinese eventually get a little help here. A Flying Tiger reprint of the P-40 would be good and giving the Chinese a few support weapons would be appropriate -- maybe some captured Japanese mortars and anti-tank guns).

On the other hand, being a pure Chinese army gives them more points to use -- their "100-
point" army will actually have 110 points to spend. Their biggest challenge will be spending that many points while remaining within the 15-piece army maximum size rule.

The year restriction will be 1939. This actually helps the Chinese, because they have no post-1939 units yet, but it limits the Japanese considerably.

The process of building our KMT force starts with taking advantage of the Formation Rules to field the Chinese Infantry Company for 26 points. While somewhat cheaper in build points as a formation than its components would cost individually (26 instead of 31) the biggest advantage of the formation is that it gives the Chinese 12 pieces while only counting as 5 against the army maximum size. I'd have considered fielding TWO of these units, but I don't have enough KMT Riflemen to form a second company.

In any case this gives us the following units to start with



1 KMT Officer (Key Special Ability is +1 initiative)

10 KMT Riflemen (Special Ability is actually a big disability, disruptions kill the unit)

1 KMT Machine-gun team (Double-shot SA, but subject to "Overheat")


I have just one T-26, so we'll toss that in for the limited antitank ability it brings. It costs 11 points, so the total build is now 37 and six units.

I happened to draw a lot of machine-gun teams out of my boosters, so I can add seven more of these units to the order of battle for 42 points. They will obviously form the real core of my force.

The build is now 79 points and 13 units. I'll toss in one more KMT officer to add a little redundancy in that department, which brings the force up to 14 units and 84 points.

I still have 26 build points left but one more slots for units, so the balance will have to be spent on support units and obstacles.

There's little point in buying a fuel dump for one tank and I have no confidence in the Chinese being able to protect an ammo dump, but a Headquarters seems like a useful support, giving the Chinese a second bite at the initiative apple each turn. Adding one of these costs 7 points, bringing the total to 91.





I'll add a couple of pillboxes for four points, bringing the total to 95. One pillbox will probably hold the HQ, hopefully protecting it from a marauding Zero and the other one will likely hold an MG team.


I think minefields are likely to be useful, so I'll add in all five of those I own for 10 points, bringing the force total to 105 points.





I'll spend three points to buy six barbed wire, which may be helpful if the Japanese field a lot of infantry. I'd buy more, but I don't have any. This brings the total to 108, so I finish off the buy with two tank obstacles. The Japanese will probably field some tanks and this may help keep them out of a key hex or two. I debated whether another pillbox might not be a better purchase, but the pillbox benefit isn't very strong, and I'd rather have the variety of options having another type of piece may provide. This brings the total to 110 points.

This Chinese army has some obvious deficiencies, but most of them can't be helped. First off, it doesn't have any dedicated AA guns, for the good reason the Chinese have none. There are lot of machine guns, though, so any Zero that shows up will have to be wary. More seriously the Chinese force has minimal anti-tank ability. There's only one proper AT gun, on the T-26, and the Chinese infantry and officers have no Close Assault ability.

Mitigating this, however, is the fact that none of the available 1939 Japanese armor (Type 89A Chi-Ro, Type 87 armored car, Type 95 Ha-Go or Type 97 Te-Ke) has any armor greater than 2, so even the Chinese machine-gun teams have a 25% chance of disrupting them out to 8 hexes away! Add in the double-shot SA and there's about a 6% chance of a single MG team damaging any Japanese armored vehicle. With a total of 9 MG teams in the Chinese force the cumulative chances are not negligible.

In the future I'll post a session report on how this force fares in combat, but comments are welcome.

EDIT: A ForuMini commenter pointed out that the rules were modified on Nov. 12 and the 15-unit army maximum has been dropped, but a new restriction has been placed on obstacles -- only 10% of an army's maximum allowable cost can be spent on Obstacles, so my proposed build runs afoul of that limit. So we will eliminate one pillbox, the two tank obstacles and two of the minefields to bring the Obstacle total back within limits and add in one more machine gun team and two more riflemen to replace them. This gives the Chinese a little more offensive ability.

I expect that my plan will be to use the massed machine guns to lay down a base of fire and then rush the objective with my mass of riflemen on the theory that "they can't kill us all."

Interesting link on game knock-offs

This blogger reports on a trip in China that brought him to a warehouse full of high-quality copies of "German" games, which is interesting in light of the whole Games Workshop intellectual property brouhaha we saw on Boardgame Geek last week.

The blogger wonders if the move to save a buck by sending production to China didn't have the unintended consequence of making it easier for the counterfeiters to do the deed by providing expertise.

Knowledge is a funny thing. In one sense it's priceless but time-consuming and hard to get. so countries and communities can make quite a success of themselves by exploiting an edge in knowledge. Think of Swiss watches and Silicon Valley, for example, which are based on a concentration of knowledge. But on the other hand knowledge, unlike other resources, is not fixed in space or time and it's possible to spread it. During the Industrial Revolution the British tried very hard to prevent the spread of their techniques, but factory workers and managers with British experience still managed to make their way to America and elsewhere and bring their knowledge with them.

Chinese products today have many quality control issues, which is to be expected given the societal limitations of China -- right now. But I'm old enough to remember when Made in Japan once signaled that aproduct was cheap and ill-made. Now Made in Japan means Lexus. Long after the contract for making the high-quality product has ended the knowledge of how to meet those standards wil remain and sooner or later entrepreneurs will act. China, unlike Japan, but like the United States, is big enough all-by-itself to form a complete market for any good or service. I would imagine that the numbers of players of Settlers of Catan in China is extremely tiny as a percentage of the population -- but with a billion potential customers you don't need much of a percentage to have a worthwhile market for a product.

Red Dragon Rising musings

This game seems to have legs, especially for a magazine game. There will be a major 70+ counter variant in S&T 258, reportedly.

It's also seeming quite topical these days. Note this recent article: http://uk.reuters.com/article/usPoliticsNews/idUKTRE54363X20090504?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

It's no surprise that China would gear their naval buildup towards countering our Navy. And Adm. Mullen seems to be doing his best to tamp down the hype in the article.

If Japan and Taiwan were not strong US allies then China might be expected to gear its (deliciously named) People's Liberation Army Navy to dealing with those two local and regional powers. But it's hard to imagine any scenario involving conflict with either that would not instantly involve the USN, so the PLAN is obligated to deal with the threat as matter of basic military prudence.

That said, I don't think a conflict is inevitable. In the short and medium term the main cause for concern would be some sudden flareup over Taiwan. This is always a possibility because of the political and emotional stakes involved, which can be volatile. On the other hand, time may very well solve this problem.

There is, however, a long-term threat caused by grand strategic factors. Simply stated, the USA is the Top Dog in the world power structure. China is a former Top Dog that believes it is long overdue to return to Top Dog stature and it has the booming economy to support that. It's busy building up some military capability to back that up, but military hardware is just a small part of China's ambitions as it improves domestic infrastructure, reforms domestic affairs and invests in science and technology. This is a multi-generational affair that will play out over the rest of the 21st Century. It may result in some major war or wars just as the rivalry between the British Empire and Germany did in the first half of the 2oth Century. Or it may be resolved relatively peacefully like the Cold War. Can't say yet.

There may be "interesting times"" ahead.

*Interesting in the sense implied by the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."

This is an interesting development

It would be interesting to account for this capability in Red Dragon Rising.

https://www.usni.org/forthemedia/ChineseKillWeapon.asp

When Dragons Fight -- a review

When Dragons Fight has the sad distinction of being the issue game in the final issue of Command Magazine, No. 54, dated November 2000.

Command Magazine had a very good run, more than half a hundred issues over more than 10 years, which made it by far the longest-lived and most successful wargame-in-a-magazine project outside of Strategy & Tactics, which originated to concept.

Command was born out of a failed attempt by former S&T editor Ty Bomba and his associates to buy S&T. Having lined up financial backing but failed to secure the deal, Bomba went ahead anyway with his own vision of what an S&T-like magazine ought to look like. Bomba is a strong personality and such people often provoke strong reactions and Bomba and his feisty magazine were always a bit controversial.

Still, having some serious competition was good for both magazines and, ironically, Bomba is back at S&T these days. Command's demise came as somewhat of a surprise, not least, apparently to Bomba. That last issue contains, for example, the first part of a planned two-part article about Custer's Last Stand.

It wasn't a complete surprise, however, because the magazine had been limping along like a badly holed and listing battleship for the better part of three years. Cash flow problems, the bane of all small businesses, crippled operations around Issue No. 49. In addition, that issue was a disaster as the planned historical wargame wasn't ready and a chess variant presented instead. Subscriber reaction was very negative, and the problem was compounded by the ensuing erratice schedule which never really allowed a recovery.

There's also a very real question whether the wargame hobby can really support two S&T-style magazines, but Command did last long enough to suggest that it could -- at least the 1990s hobby could.

When Dragons Fight was an appropriate game to end the run with. Like the very first issue's game -- Blitzkrieg '41 -- WDF is a Bomba design. As such it features "brutal, manly combat" in high hex-and-counter wargame style. Units are rated for combat strength in attack and defense, have movement allowances and a basic IGO-HUGO turn sequence. Bomba disliked the complications of zones of control rules and they rarely appear in his designs, so WDF has none.

The situation is an interesting one, proposing to see what might happen if the People's Republic of China were to try to seize Taiwan by invasion. Most analysts foresee a more naval-air campaign instead, but if the Chinese decided on a direct approach it might look like this.

The Chinese, in the Command traditional white-on-red color scheme, are a fairly conventional-appearing force based around infantry divisions that have four steps of strength and tank divisions with six steps. The main limitation for the Chinese is that their limited transportation means can only bring in one division per turn (day) except for the initial invasion lift of two.

They do have a full supporting cast of special forces type troops, including two naval infantry brigades, two airborne brigades, eight airmobile regiments and one artillery division. If they can seize an airport they can also quickly bring in five two-step light infantry divisions.

Bomba has a weakness for weapon weirdness, here indulged with a counter representing fire support from a battery of "Super guns" of the type designed by the late Gerad Bull.

The white-on-dark blue Taiwan forces are very different. They have seven weak reserve infantry divisions and two somewhat stronger Marine divisions that are only leg-mobile and therefore nearly static. Their main hope rests with 28 two-step Combined Arms Brigades supported by three airmobile brigades. All these units are speedy, but the Taiwanese generally are weak in staying power.

Finally both sides have access to air support, which varies from 1-3 units per turn, but both sides never have air support on the same turn. This is, perhaps, the single biggest wild card in the game and a run of bad or good fortune with the air support can be critical. The Chinese are guaranteed the full 3-units of air power on the invasion turn and if they manage to capture the fortified Taiwanese air base Chien An No. 3 they get a permanent award of three while the Taiwanese air force is gone for good.

Like most invasion games, the outcome of the initial invasion is critical. With air support, the super gun and use of human waves the Chinese can almost guarantee a landing. If they fail they lose and you simple start over. Keeping the beachhead safe is the first order of business, so it's probably not wise to land in the thickest part of the Taiwanese defenses. Losing the beachhead means defeat. The difficulty for the Taiwanese is that the island is too big for the army to cover every possible landing zone in strength. In addition, the game opens with a Chinese cruise missile barrage that as a 33% chance of inflicting a step loss on each Taiwan unit. This barrage comes after the Chinese setup, so it can't be counted on to clear the way for a landing, but it does mean that about a third of the potential Taiwanese strength is negated.

By the way, this provides a handy balancing mechanic for the game between players of different experience. Adjusting the damage +1 or -1 depending on the relative experience of the Taiwanese will make the game more or less challenging without changing its nature. Considering the actual effectiveness of such a cruise missile strike is unknowable, there's ample justification for making the change as it suits the players anyway.

The overall course of the game will be familiar to anyone who has played Bomba designs, with a step-loss result odds-based CRT, optional move/fight or fight/move sequencing for either player turn (except the first one) and minimal supply rules.

The game can last up to 14 turns as the Chinese seek to capture 16 victory points worth of cities and "large towns." City hexes are worth three VPs each, while towns are worth one. The distribution of settlements around Taiwan mean that the capture of any substantial portion of the island will be enough for Chinese victory.

Play goes fast enough that players should be able to play a match, switching sides, in a long evening. There shouldn't be much time wasted with looking up rules or computing combat results as everything is familiar wargame standard stuff. Units will be heading to the dead pile in satisfying numbers.

How realistic the game might be is hard to gauge, of course. As a hypothetical war too much is unknown and unknowable to get too dogmatic about things and the game does assume two big, but debatable things. First, that the Chinese will try to take the island by brute force. Second, that the U.S. Navy will not intervene for those critical 14 days.

The new S&T game Red Dragon Rising may be have a better take on the likely course of a China war, but it's mostly a naval-air game. For a look at the ground fighting WDF seems like it's at least plausible.