Games of War and Peace V: Space Invaders
By Charles Cameron
It has been a while since I posted an entry in my “Games of War and Peace” series, but I just came across a quote in Stephen Ulph’s Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology that brought back memories…
The epigraph to Ulph’s Introduction quotes from Rosie Cowan and Richard Norton-Taylor’s piece, Britain now No 1 al-Qaida target – anti-terror chiefs from the (UK) Guardian of 19 October 2006, and I’ve added a couple of earlier paragraphs for context:
Even though the police and M15 have disrupted terror plots and groups influenced by al-Qaida, they describe the networks as very resilient.They say there is a frightening number of young men willing to step up and replace those who have been arrested or gone to ground.
“It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,” said one senior counter-terrorism source. “When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.”
I don’t think there’s a deep strategic insight there, the way there may be with Mao and the game of Go, although the question of what drives the continuing recruitment of those young men is an important one.
But I’d like to ask — what other game-related insights do you find of value in understanding contemporary jihadism?
November 19th, 2010 at 3:17 am
Zen, IMHO, it is search for purpose. The jihadi bubbas aren’t unlike the commie agitators of century ago; find folks who are on the losing end and make friends—all the better when there is a religion involved–and particularly when the "god" is unseen along with the "reward." This is one reason America’s prisons are ripe for jihadi training—a captive (no pun intended) audience, and time to convince/recruit. This will be long war, my friend—for the West persists in PC, when these bubbas are playing for keeps—so this "ain’t no game" (as my ancestors would say), these boys are playing for keeps.
November 19th, 2010 at 3:49 am
Hi Scott,
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Sorry, this was from Charles. He is still trying to get the hang of co-blogging without my editing – I will go in and add his name and the tags for the post.
November 19th, 2010 at 4:49 am
Yup, one of mine. Hi Scott! — and as always, thanks, Zen…
November 19th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
In the Civilization series, a military unit as garrison converts one unhappy citizen to a neutral citizen. Lessons:
– Garrisons NEVER create happy citizens. Ever.
– Any unit has the same garrison effect. It is a prohibitively expensive waste to assign a combat unit to garrison duty. Cheap infantry / police units are the way to go. Smart players will field a combat stack/army and a garrison stack/army to follow it, and never allow the two to become confused. If you can’t afford this, you can’t afford to start a war.
More general strategy lessons from Civ:
– Happy (loyal) citizens counter the effects of unhappy (disloyal) ones. Raising a conquered area’s standard of living (by supplying medicine, luxuries, entertainment, and specialist middle class jobs) and providing for the rule of law (functioning courthouses etc.) are far more effective and cost effective than maintaining control via garrison. In this respect there is no difference between home and conquered territory.
– Long term, there is no way to control an area’s resources other than conquest and assimilation of the residents into your culture. EVERY other method attempted will breed resentment and eventually permanent war. Period. Full stop. If you want something someone else controls (cough oil cough), you can either trade for it fair and square with something tangible they desire for as long as they are willing to trade, or you conquer, kill, subjugate, and brainwash them and everyone related to them, everywhere on earth, until their culture ceases to exist. There is no middle way.
– One sided treaties where you demand a resource but offer nothing in return may be accepted for a time if the military balance is overwhelmingly in your favor, but the populace on the short end will resent it and that resentment will fester over time until war is inevitable regardless of the power imbalance.
November 19th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Thanks, Pode.
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Your comment raises a very important set of questions for me:
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To what extent, when we learn from war games, are we simply learning things the game designers have themselves learned (or believe they have learned) by observing war, and then built into their games as rule-sets?
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If a game is realistic in the sense that it accurately represents its designer’s learnings in this way, how will we ever learn "past" the limitations of the designer’s vision?
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And are games that have rulesets that are clearly not "accurate to the realities of war" — such as chess, where I don’t think that anyone would argue that bishops in time of war can really "take" castles by moving at them diagonally — in some ways therefore better platforms for strategic thinking?