Hi historians of Reddit, My question has to do with how war-gamers envisioned a european wide conflict in the early 20th century would have gone before WW1 started.
I know that there have been dedicated communities of war-gamers in the echelons of European military society playing games like Kriegsspiel since at least after the Napoleonic wars. My question is how did these war-gamers envision pitched battle between modern, early-20th century armies would go based off their most recently updated editions with the most modern technology incorporated?
Were they accurate? If not, what were they missing? How did war-gaming change, if at all, after WW1?
Short answer:
No, the wargames that were undertaken didn't look for the impacts of changing military technology and recent military experience was ignored or misunderstood; at the time military leaders believed that technology had not fundamentally changed the balance of warfare and that offensive action would dominate.
Discussion:
Prewar Wargames and the Cult of the Offensive
Pre- WW1 wargames were more about operational and logistical issues than simulating the impact of new technology on the battlefield. European military leaders generally believed they were in a military technology regime little changed from 1870, or indeed not much changed from 1815; they saw the modern war as "Napoleon with a railroad and telegraph", meaning armies could move faster with more supplies and headquarters would command far more effectively and quickly. The few that looked at recent military experience and saw that it promised a tougher time for the attack thought of that as an obstacle, but not something so dramatic as to require rethinking war plans.
That is, they all imagined that manoeuvre, mobility and initiative had the advantage leading to an estimation that the offensive would dominate defenses. The "cult of the offensive" was a fixed, unexamined understanding of "how warfare works"; indeed, its that understanding of the advantage that they believe the aggressor had that created the instability that lead to the outbreak of war. Precisely because all parties believed that "defense is hard, offense will dominate", armies had plans to mobilize quickly-- and viewed the mobilization of adversaries as threatening.
These views were held by both military leaders like Schlieffen and Moltke, and political leaders like Bethman-Hollweg. Similar views were particularly strong in France, notably with Joffre. Particularly disastrously, all were convinced that even when on the defensive strategically, a defender should try to go on the offensive. The Allies could have hunkered down in their trenches, but instead thought that warfare required attack or counterattack- resulting in catastrophes like Verdun and the Somme.
If the nations had properly understood the _true_ state military technology as it affected the balance between offense and defense, they'd have been on much less of a hair trigger. The exercises that they conducted, wargames and staff studies, never looked qt the issue in a way that would have revealed the impact massive firepower against unprotected men in the field, and how that changed strategy.
The most significant impact of a prewar wargame on planning was likely the five month 1905 British exercise which looked at a war against Germany in Europe. Anticipating the Schlieffen Plan, the game suggested that the British could not convoy troops to the continent quickly enough to prevent the occupation of Belgium. As a consequence, British military planning called for a stepped up deployment in the event of war, but note that this "learning" tended to reinforce the mistaken impression that the offensive will dominate and that it is hard to defend.
Ignored Lessons of Recent Military Conflicts
In the event, they didn't need to conduct a wargame to see what war was likely to be like: they had recent experience which should have guided them: most recently the Boer War and especially the Russo-Japanese War. Port Arthur was bloody in precisely the same way that Verdun was bloody, men charging into heavily defended positions, resulting in slaughter. Observers chalked it up to the perceived deficiencies of the Russians and Japanese -- and of course, noted that the Japanese did prevail in the end.
Military publications of the day, like the journal of the Royal United Services Institution were filled with articles from observers of these wars-- Port Arthur was a very heavily observed conflict. They noted all kinds of things about changing technology-- the improvisation of grenades by both sides, and their widespread use for the first time in more than a century was noted, for example.
But they didn't carry through these observations about tactics and technology to how it might impact strategy. The British experience in the Boer War _had_ given them some idea that the defense was gaining an upper hand; they were better informed than were the French-- but they took that only as "a problem to be solved" for an attacking general, rather than new information that ought inform a new strategy. Very much like the battleship admirals could look at aircraft carriers and still not understand that naval combat had changed, so too with generals and their staffs didn't "get" that firepower now dominated mobility.
Wargames after WWI -- and the institutional limits of Wargaming lessons
Wargaming after WW I continued as it had been before- much more an attempt to work out operational problems than to unearth genuine surises. So, for example, Marshal Foch and the Staff conduct a wargame in 1921 to examine military responses to a hypothetical German remilitarization of the Rhineland; this was all about logistics -- eg "how many men and vehicles can get over the bridges" not about "how do new tactics and equipment change warfare"
American war plans for the Pacific, "War Plan Orange" failed to foresee the value of aircraft carriers, but did get some of the geography right-- the importance of Midway, "island hopping". Black shoe admirals were not about to volunteer -- "Oh, I guess our battleships are obsolete, and I should have learned to fly a plane". Billy Mitchell's dramatic demonstrations did lead to adding more anti-aircraft guns to battleships; that kind of incremental response is the most you get out of a very conservative military establishment, to get real change requires that a lot of blood be spilled first. The German and Allied offensives of 1917-18 look very different from earlier in the war (tanks, "stosstruppen" tactics), but that's not the result of a wargame, that's the result of a million men dead on the Somme.
In general, its too much to ask of a wargame, study or simulation to expect that it will reveal something that will move a deeply entrenched and politically vested military bureaucracy; flag officers and their favorite programs are a Maginot line of bureaucratic immobility.
Very recently we've had much more detailed games where genuinely dramatic outcomes should have reshaped thinking, but these simulations are vastly more involved than any early 20th century kriegspiel. And even in the case of Van Riper and the celebrated Millenium Challenge 2002 (a $250 million exercise entirely different in scope and granularity from any kriegspiel circa 1900), the brass fought back against results they didn't expect or like with the bureaucratic tools at their disposal, far from saying "that's something new, we need to adapt", the response was "we don't want to hear about it, bury it".
Sources
The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War
The Making of the Military Entente, 1904–14: France, the British Army, and the Prospect of War
Technology, Tactics, and Morale: Jean de Bloch, the Boer War, and British Military Theory, 1900-1914
The Lesson -- Rudyard Kipling's poetic learnings from the Boer War, a novel, perhaps unique format for modern military science. His recipe for the failings of the British Army? More horses!
The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914
The Russo-Japanese War, Lessons Not Learned
UN PLAN OUBLIÉ DU MARÉCHAL FOCH
MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE: THE REAL STORY OF A CORRUPTED MILITARY EXERCISE AND ITS LEGACY
The War Game and How It is Played [1914] - what Kriegspiel looked like at the outbreak of WW I; note the tremendous umpire-dependence, what you really get out of such an exercise is "how to best manage your forces, in the context of current military doctrine and understanding". It was not an exercise that could deliver news of mistaken appreciations of military technology.