Wartime Thanksgivings

While we enjoy Thanksgiving at home with friends and family it's appropriate to remember our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and others serving overseas and dining on MREs or less at cold outposts in Afghan mountains, at sea or inside missile silos and all the other places where duty requires.

THANKSGIVING DAY 1863
By the President of the United States : a Proclamation

...In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union...

...I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

SOURCE: Pilgrim Hall Museum website, which lists a sample of wartime proclamations from 1898, 1917, 1943, 1953, 1967 and 1991.

Plausible war? Red Dragon Rising

Speculative wargames have been a staple since SPI published Red Star/White Star, and in particular speculation about how a possible confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact as so fertile a topic for wargame designers that games on that topic were virtually a hobby within the hobby and contemporary combat generally ranked among the top two or three most popular wargame topics in SPI polls for years.

Of course that confrontation never came to be and the bottom sort of dropped out of the genre after the Fall of Communism in 1989. Oh sure, there's still an occasional game published on the topic, but it's dropped down somewhere between the Spanish-American War and the War of Austrian Succession in wargamer interest.

Even during the heyday of NATO-Warsaw Pact interest there were a few other stabs at treating other prospective wars -- and some of those even happened. The SPI game Sinai was famously redesigned in 1973 just before publication to account for the actual October War.

Still, I think it's fair to say that most of the major conflicts of the Cold War era that actually broke out were unanticipated by wargame designers. And who could blame them? There's a considerable amount of implausibility of Britain and Argentina coming to blows, Iraq invading Iran or even the Soviets invading Afghanistan. Implicit in making the case for a plausible future-history wargame is making a case that one side or the other has something to gain. The unpleasant outcome for the aggressor in those three wars suggest it really wasn't a good idea. (Yes, I am aware that Iraq supposedly "won" it's war with Iran, but I don't think there's any doubt it was a very hollow victory).

The post-Berlin Wall world has seen a steadily decreasing number of international state-on-state conflicts of the sort wargames handle best and wargamers find interesting. Most conflicts these days are low-level guerilla wars, insurgencies and terror campaigns.

Advances in printing technology have made it possible to rush into print with a wargame if there's sufficient lead-time in the crisis. Both the first Gulf War and the more recent Iraq War saw pre-conflict wargames hit the market, but they were hardly great examples of prognostication. The very title of Back to Iraq (which appeared in various editions in Command and then Strategy & Tactics magazine suggests how predictable the occurrence of that war would be. But even the Iraq War games that did appear missed the real nature of the war that would be fought -- stopping after a month or so of fighting in the belief that the issue would be decided. We now know that the "Mission Accomplished" moment was really just the beginning of the story. And I don't think anybody designed a wargame involving an American intervention in Afghanistan beforehand.

So how many plausible situations exist for a major state-to-state war in the current international climate? In the post-Cold War world there were brief fads of looking at potential wars between the United States and Japan, some kind of resurrected Russian state or even the "World" banding together to take down the remaining superpower USA. All of these had more of the aura of some kind of "Sci Fi" treatment than an examination of a real possibility.

There seem to be five possible international flash points that could boil over into some sort of major state-on-state war. Some of these have had wargames designed about them, a few have not.

1. Korea -- For more than 50 years the threat of war has hung over the Korean peninsula, but despite the weird reclusive nature of the North Korean regime, the chances of war breaking out there seem to recede each year. The fact is that any chance the North Koreas had of overrunning the South dissipated years ago -- a fact that even a madman can see. There have been a few of wargames looking at this, including some in detail -- but the last one was almost a decade ago.

2. Israel -- Another area that has seen more than a half-century of conflict and will undoubtedly see more, but not state-on-state. There gulf in military might between the Palestinians and the Israelis resembles late Nineteenth Century colonial warfare. No one has bothered to design a game on this topic.

3. Iran -- Possibly the single most likely war -- with both Israel and the United States has plausible foes to Iran, and yet no one has tried to design a wargame on how this could play out. Is it too politically fraught, hard to research or what?

4. Pakistan -- This resembles a NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation in miniature -- two large, conventional armies with nuclear weapons facing off along a long border in a shallow theater. There were a couple of wargames on the topic around the beginning of the decade but nothing recently. The chances of this one happening seem to have receded for the moment, but it wouldn't take a lot for it to come to a boil again.

5. China -- This one has caught the fancy of recent designers for some reason. Red Dragon Rising was a big hit in S&T magazine and even had some expansion counters in a recent issue. The last issue of Command Magazine featured a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And Taiwan remains a potential flash point, but like many of the other long-simmering conflicts around the world, the passage of time seems to be lessening the chances of war. The potential costs are high and the stakes seem relatively low, especially because everyone concerned seems to have an interest in kicking the ball down the field.

Most of the anticipated conflicts seem unlikely to erupt into anything wargame-worthy. Are there any out-of-left field Falklands War situations out there?

There don't seem to be many candidates. Neither North America nor Western Europe seem to have any. The EU integration of economies and distaste for military spending make a state-on-state war unthinkable in Western Europe (which is an astounding break with the past, BTW).

Hardly any African states have the wherewithal to consider meaningful state-on-state fighting. South America has some countries with the potential for military power, but a lack of state-vs.-state disputes that anybody would want to fight over, the antics of Venezuela notwithstanding.

That leaves Asia and the Middle East where most of the potential wars have already been discussed. Could Thailand and Burma battle? What about Russian and the Ukraine? Australia and New Zealand? Well, I guess the last one would be quite a stretch. The Russia-Ukraine possibility was been touched on in one game, but that's it.

Of course, the lack of suitable topics for plausible future wars is not a bad thing. And our forbears have provided us with no shortage of historical wars to refight, so this is no crisis.

TCS: Semper Fi! review

Semper Fi! comprehensive review

Tactical Combat Series No. 10

Published: 1997

Designer: Lee Forester

TCS Overview

Repeated from earlier reviews. If already familiar with TCS skip this part.

Now published by Multi-Man Publishing, the TCS is one of The Gamers founding lines of series wargames that use a common set of standard rules to allow players to explore many different battles without having to learn a new set of rules every time.

In TCS the ground scale is 125 meters per hex, time is 20 minutes per daylight turn and units are platoons of troops, weapons sections and individual vehicles, so it’s about halfway between the ASL/Squad Leader squad-based systems and the traditional PanzerBlitz/First Battle platoon-oriented systems typically seen in tactical 20th Century wargames. Unlike most of its peers, TCS games always depict specific historical incidents on the actual terrain. There are no “geomorphic” representative maps or generic counters.Distinctively, the TCS system is much less concerned with the characteristics of the hardware used than the typical tactical wargame. Offensively, units either fire area-effect weapons such as small arms and high explosives or with weapons with a point effect such as anti-tank guns. Similarly, they are either area targets such as soldiers or point targets such as a vehicle, or occasionally both. If armed, the unit has a range and if made up of troops a morale rating. If it’s a vehicle or gun it has a defense rating based on its armor.

Platoons have five “steps” while weapons units have one or two. Vehicles represent individual machines and are either hit (mission kill) or not.

As one would expect there are rules covering special conditions, tactics and needs such as smoke, fortifications and various terrain effects, but the basic structure is very straightforward and, compared to other tactical wargames, uncomplicated. This aspect of the game is deliberately kept simple.

The real heart of the game system is the command control rules, which mimics the kind of staff planning that goes into conducting actual military operations at this scale. Players actually draw up their battle plans in schematic form on “op sheets” specifying exactly how they plan to conduct their attack or defense using specific units in specific ways. Once the plan is drawn up it waits while sufficient “weighted turns” accumulate in order to put it into effect. How much time passes will depend on factors such the complexity of the plan, how many different units are involved, the nature of the mission and the overall quality of the unit’s staff work and a die roll. A simple movement plan involving no contact with the enemy by a single company under a highly trained staff might take just a turn or two before coming into effect. On the other hand, a complex, multi-battalion deliberate assault by a poorly-staffed army like the Soviets may never actually happen.

This is a fascinating and unique system that creates a very different pacing from what’s usually seen. Long stretches of time tend to pass with relatively little going on interspersed with periods of intense action. It much more closely resembles the pacing of actual military operations than most tactical wargames.

On the other hand, this is also the system’s biggest weakness. It is wholly unsuited for competitive playing styles. It relies absolutely on the players making good faith effort to act within the spirit of the rules. It relies on them faithfully executing plans that no longer make tactical sense because ground facts have changed since the plan was drawn up. It requires players who will not attempt to wring every possible “legal” advantage the rules might allow but instead try act as the real-life commanders would have. It’s pointless for players whose first consideration is winning to play this. This is a game system for people interested in the journey, NOT the destination.

It can be played solitaire fairly easily by drawing up alternative plans for both sides and then dicing among those for the actual plans being used.

Series designer Dean Essig firmly insisted that no game in the series would be made obsolete by any rules changes. All updates to the system are required to be backwards compatible and therefore every game (Except the modern Force Eagle's war) can (and should) be played with the latest edition of the rules, currently 3.1.


Semper Fi! specifics:

Tactical Combat Series Rules version 3.1

17th-18th Aug., 1950; 18th-20th Nov., 1950; 28th Nov.- 1st Dec. 1950 Korea
Four small maps
Unit symbols: AFV, weapons and troops are all are full color icons.

Opposing Sides:United States: Elements of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade and elements of the 1st Marine Division
Communist: Elements of the 4th and 6th Divisions, North Korean People's Army and elements of the 58th, 59th and 80th Divisions of the Chinese Volunteer Army.
Total number of battalion equivalents (the usual op sheet size) in play: From less than 1 to up to about 15 or so.
Playing time: From one hour for the smallest to about 20 hours.

In the earliest TCS games there were usually a half-dozen "training" scenarios that depicted small company/battalion-sized firefights that allowed the players to learn aspects of the game system before they tackled the full-blown regular scenarios, but that handy tool was abandoned as the series went on. Most of the games did make sure to include one or two smaller scenarios among their number, but for the most part the trend was towards larger and more involved battles.

Semper Fi! was apparently conceived as a way to introduce new players to the TCS system by concentrating on smaller fights. In some cases one or both sides have just a company or battalion's worth of troops and even the largest scenario would be no more than medium sized in the typical system game.

Unlike other games in the series, Semper Fi! does not depict one continuous action, but instead a series of separate battles, so there's no overall campaign game. Some of the battles were, however, linked and there is a chance for a mini-campaign game linking some scenarios.

Semper Fi! is the only TCS game to date (aside from Force Eagles War, which is considered part of a separate series) to take place outside World War II and related conflicts, but tactically the Korean War was very much a World War II-era conflict. Nearly all the weapons and tactics were the same as World War II and nearly every leader above the company level in both armies would have had extensive World War II experience.

Despite this, Semper Fi! does include more than the usual number of special rules.

The game continues listing the Infantry guns and ATGs as "Special B" targets that are usually area targets for most fire. Weapons units use the integral "nominal" trucks that have become the defacto system standard. On-Map artillery is modified somewhat and a new streamlined "assault combat routine is introduced.

There are special rules to take account of Korea-specific conditions such as Heat Exhaustion in one battle, the dedicated Marine air support in a couple of battles and the special morale characteristics of U.S. Marines in all the battles.

A number of smaller, specialized infantry units such as bazooka teams and headquarters squads appear.

The Communists, in contrast, have few special rules. Both North Korean and Chinese units have a morale benefit for night combat and a disadvantage in anti-tank combat. Communist mortars are off map and restricted in the amount of fire support they can provide due to ammo shortages and counter battery fire.
Chinese units "benefit" from political officers who can cancel a suppressed result at the cost of a step.

The Communists do benefit from a rule providing a special status of "hidden" available to units at set up that do not move. Distinct from the usual spotting rules, "hidden" units cannot be attacked until they get revealed by firing, moving or being adjacent to U.S. units. This rule is critical to the Communists to allow them to survive the U.S. firepower advantage. It prevents the Marines from simply sitting back and picking off Communist units with Corsairs or artillery barrages at leisure.

All the scenarios are short enough that players will probably only have a chance to execute their initial op sheet, although there's some chance the Marines might have a chance to draw up and implement a new op sheet occasionally.

Two scenarios take place on the Changallon Valley Map, a 20 by 27-hex battlefield of steep hills overlooking a very soggy rice-paddy filled valley. In the first scenario, which doesn't use the command rules, a few platoons of North Korean infantry ambush a Marine column with two infantry companies, battalion headquarters troops, a recon section in jeeps and a platoon of tanks with artillery and air support. In the second scenario one of the Marine companies fends off a night attack by a company of North Koreans. This scenario does use op sheets, but there will be just one per side and with just five turns no opportunity for a change.

Three scenarios take place on the 16 by 18-hex No-Name Ridge map, with features a rice-paddy encircled ridge with a few nearby hills. The first scenario covers a morning attack on the ridge, held by a reinforced battalion of North Korean infantry, by an understrength battalion of Marines. The second scenario continues the action with an afternoon attack by a second battalion of Marines while the third scenario covers the whole day's fighting. This third scenario provides the only opportunity for any tank-on-tank action in Semper Fi!, with a platoon of M-26 Pershing tanks possibly engaging some T-34/85s and/or Su-76s.

Three more scenarios cover the saga of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines as it defends "Fox Hill" on the 16 by 18-hex Fox Hill map. The first scenario depicts the first night's fighting, as Fox Company faced a two-company attack by Chicoms. Variants add more Chinese, change the weather or add artillery support. This is my favorite scenario in the game system for teaching because there are many tools available for adjusting the play balance. For example, the game can be played with up to two whole battalions of Chinese attacking during a snow storm to provide a real challenge for an experienced U.S. player against a novice. On the other hand, the veteran Chinese player can try to take the hill with just the original two companies of infantry while giving the novice U.S. a battery of 105 mm howitzers in support. The second scenario depicts the second night's attack on the weakened Fox Company, which does, however, have artillery support. Like the first night's attack the Chinese historically didn't come in full strength, with just two companies. A variant adds the balance of that battalion for a greater challenge. The third scenario links both night's attacks, while adding the possibility of a third night. This makes a nice little campaign game, playable in an evening.

The Hagaru map is the setting for the final five scenarios. At 30 by 35 hexes, this is the largest battlefield and the OB is also, by far, the most extensive. The scenarios cover several nights of fighting around the airfield at Hagaru. The terrain is mostly flat, snow-covered open ground, except for a steep hill overlooking the airfield and the flattened town of Hagaru. Each historical night's fighting is covered, as well as one hypothetical. The U.S. forces are an eclectic mix of Marine combat and support troops, Army units and even some British commandos. Although not depicted explicitly, many of the "American" units include large numbers of Korean draftees as well. In contrast to the hodge-podge of U.N. troops, the Chinese forces are numerous and homogeneous. Depending on the scenario, the Chinese attack with one to three regiments of infantry, each having 30 platoons of infantry, nine "weapons" (light mortar) sections and nine machine guns sections. The only support they have are some off-board mortar fire and, occasionally, a few infantry guns.

The scenarios on the Hagaru map are fairly big, but each covers just a single night's worth of fighting. As night turns are an hour each, instead of the usual 20 minutes and winter nights are long, they end up being no more than 11 turns long, so even these scenarios are relatively small by TCS standards and can probably be played to completion in an evening.

Compared to most games in the series, Semper Fi! had an unusual amount of errata, some of which definitely affects play and players should be sure to download it.

Semper Fi! is one of my favorites in the system. Getting together for one of the larger games can be difficult and usually they require multiple sitting to complete so someone needs to have the space to leave the game set up. Semper Fi1 scenarios, on the other hand, can always be played in a single evening, especially if players take the time to draw up their op sheets before hand.