Unremarked anniversary

Even by me, but yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the end of ground operations during Desert Storm -- an anniversary little mentioned in the media. One suspects that the ongoing morass that ensued after we did go on to Baghdad has something to do with that.

That said, it is hard to imagine that 20 years have gone by. As it turned out, I missed Round 1 of the Iraq contests because my National Guard unit was not called up for duty -- there being plenty of regular troops available in that immediate post-Cold War world to easily handle the contingency. In contrast I ended up being called out tothe IRR to serve in Round 2 because the military was so short of field grade officers that someone like me was needed! What a difference a decade makes.

The First Iraq War was notable for the quick response of wargame companies to the unfolding situation. Strategy & Tactics rushed out Arabian Nightmare before the fighting even commenced, while even stodgy old Avalon Hill updated its Gulf Strike (under the Victory Games brand) with exampsions that covered the unfolding situation. I remember at the time testing out the situation using both games soliatire -- and each, while using very different systems, made it clear that the only question was WHEN, not IF, Iraq was going to be ejected from Kuwait. Other games, such as Omega Games Desert Victory, made it clear on the tactical level that the Iraqis were out of their depth. As it turned out, no game was able to capture the full extent of the impending Iraqi rout, largely because it was off the charts and anything that reflected the reality would have been deemed "unrealistic."

Even the post-war Desert Storm published in Command Magazine (cover above) had to have special "Historical" rules to reflect the actual event while presenting as a standard game a more credible Iraqi opponent. It didn't help. While a perfectly good wargame, Desert Storm wasn't too popular.

There were a few games published before Round Two as well, notably Back to Iraq (Thre editions in Command and S&T) and Millennium Wars: Iraq and at least one right after the fighting (Iraqi Freedom in Armchair General) but none of them dealt with anything past the intiial fighting. This, of course, turned out to be a major oversight because the period AFTER the conventional phase turned out to be the critical one. It's too bad that on one thought to ask those questions at the time because it might have provided a cautionary tale when it was really needed.

Current wars engender surprisingly little wargame attention

One of the surprising things to me about the current state of the wargame hobby is the lack of attention to current contingencies.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s during the peak of the wargame hobby back then there was no shortage of games that dealt with actual contemporary military actions or the recent past. One of the early S&T games was Grunt, which depicted Vietnam combat even as fighting was still going on. Year of the Rat came out just a few months after the 1972 campaign it depicts. At least one Arab-Israeli wargame had to be redesigned because the 1973 war broke out just before publication. Test of Arms was published while some of its campaigns were still in the news. And, of course, the whole NATO vs. Warsaw Pact was an unending source of games until 1990. Even the first Gulf War prompted a batch of real-time depiction and immediate post-war titles.

In contrast, despite the fact that we're currently fighting TWO wars, there's very little to show for it. The initial march on Baghdad phase generated a little bit of action, such as Back to Iraq, but almost nothing since. Likewise the Afghanistan fighting hasn't provoked much in the way of wargame design, not even at the skirmish or tactical level. Where's the Grunt! for 2009?