War Games: A History of War on Paper

3. The State of the War Game

3 The State of the War Game The War Game In light of the devastating consequences of the Thirty Years’ War, Christoph Weickmann—with his King’s Game for the determination of “distinguished officials’ temperaments”—evidently pursued the goal of recommending to the potentates of his time the consolidation of a professional class as much as a means to their rise. Had his work had a broader reception than was actually the case, he would most likely have himself become—not completely un-self-servingly—the prototype of the very official advisor and administrator in military affairs to whom he assigned a decisive role in his game. In actuality, however, another half-century would elapse before the “soldier king” Friedrich Wilhelm I, in 1713, after the War of the Spanish Succession, came to the realization that it was not enough to keep soldiers permanently in position. To ensure the maintenance of a standing army demanded first and foremost officials with cameralistic skills. He recruited them from among the officers of his army and thereby opened up the possibility for them to switch from a purely military career to an administrative one. The offices—those chancelleries that the Holy Roman Empire created for the administration of its provinces—were now increasingly open to officers who had defied all literacy campaigns for centuries. Equipped with the highest official status, they took up their posts in the General-Ober-Finanz-Kriegs und Domänen-Direktorium (known as the General-Direktorium for short) and in the numerous war and domain chambers of the provinces. War contributions and tax revenues now flowed together under one umbrella. Plans for the supplying of the armies and the precise elaboration of deployment plans were managed on site by the war and domain chambers. The administrative structures of the aspiring 32 Chapter 3 Prussian power thereby countered the borders of the German regionalism and created with their war councils an alliance between officialdom and the military. Though the soldier king scarcely got involved in any larger battle in his lifetime, the dimensions of his battle plans alone forced one to look beyond existing borders. Moreover, Prussia’s strategic planning work would extend over generations of Hohenzollern kings. Initiated by Friedrich Wilhelm I, the elaboration of battle plans was continued through Friedrich II and III. But ultimately, the strategic designs for various war theaters encountered a limit. This limit neither resulted from insurmountable natural conditions nor was dictated by superior hegemonic powers. The absolute limit of strategic cabinet wars turned out to be the incalculability of tactical space. Attempts to subsume tactics as a special case of strategy fail on all levels. On the scale of the strategic, the particular does not appear, but rather vanishes as a negligible quantity in the balance of forces. These are delineated in the first population surveys of Johann Peter Süssmilch, reflected in the trade balances of prosperous provinces and embodied in the conscription of ever-larger armies and the recruitment of mercenary armies. The invisible hand taken into account by Adam Smith appears all the more transparent the more effectively the war and domain chambers succeed in revealing the productivity of the body of the people in their documents and orchestrating it by administrative means. The tactical space of the battlefield, however, eludes a cameralistic order: in tactical space, events obey entirely different temporal constituents. Events are beholden only to the moment and transform space into an operational field of visibilities and invisibilities, which refuses any retroactive representability. Three remarkable individuals whose paths cross in Berlin shortly before the wars of liberation show how the Prussian military power was inevitably brought into confrontation with tactical space. The first is Carl von Clausewitz , who developed his theory of the small war in 1810–1811 at the General War Academy. At the same time, Clausewitz provided military education to the princely sons in the court of the Hollenzollerns until 1812, when he switched sides and joined the Russian services. The void that he left behind in the Prussian court was filled in tactical questions by the war counselor Baron George Leopold von Reiswitz. His career as a soldier was preordained by family tradition. A medical malpractice, however, had cost The State of the War Game 33 him the necessary physical integrity. As a result, Reiswitz took up the development of a war game that would cause a stir first within the Prussian...