Simulating the Unthinkable

Abstract

In the 1950s, US civilian defense analysts forcibly challenged the institutional dominance of senior military officers with the argument that, since seasoned experience of waging conventional war was irrelevant to future war planning, the traditionalists no longer enjoyed a defensible basis for their authority, for it was neither scientific nor rational. Yet if we look closely at the publications of the civilian analysts, and their debates at professional symposia and conferences, rather than the rhetoric of scientific authority with which they assailed the old regime, the terms in which they described their techniques of gaming and simulation were a modernist irrationalism that stressed the primacy of intuition, insight, discretion and artistry. These analysts freely employed irrationalist terms similar to, but not identical with, that of traditional military wisdom. Moreover, they did not minimize or conceal the irrationalism of their simulations, but frequently addressed the problem. In internal discussions of simulation and game design, play and assessment, they expressed anxiety about the validity of the correspondence between their model of future war and its unobtainable referent. While they sharply criticized the shortcomings in modelling the historically unique event of nuclear combat, they nevertheless justified simulation as the best technique available.