USING BOARD WAR GAMES FOR TRAINING: This Popular Mechanics article focuses on a CIA analyst who uses games to train. Glad he’s doing it.

Training for any job, let alone one involved in security, is crucial. The prospect of having to go through it, though, is enough to make your eyes glaze over. Which is why the CIA brought a new element to their internal training exercises: board games.

The article is good –except using games for this purpose is not new. Board games have been used like this for decades. It may not have been official policy, but I know U.S. intelligence community analysts used board games for this purpose in the 1970s and 1980s. The military used them. Firefight is an example. The game was published in 1976. StrategyPage editor Jim Dunnigan designed it for the U.S. Army. In 2001 a lieutenant-colonel in CENTCOM’s J-5 told me his section was using my Arabian Nightmare: Kuwait War game for training purposes. He said that game’s “Political” module was particularly valuable for generating challenging scenarios. (The commentary at the link refers to the “Political rules.” The Political Game could radically re-shape the military campaign. In fact, Saddam could win the Political Game.)

UPDATE: Of course war games are not new. Soldiers have run map exercises since the invention of maps. In the mid-1980s an archivist at the old U.S. Army historical center at Carlisle Barracks, PA, showed me a “war gaming kit” put together by a U.S. Army officer in the 1850s. If I recall correctly, the wooden box had a compass, a protractor, a ruler and some small pieces of colored wood to indicate units. The archivist said the officer’s notes showed he experimented with “what if” scenarios. The center had part of a map the man had used. (I didn’t see the map or the notes.) The kit and documents were kept in a store room and someone “would get to it eventually.”