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  • War Games: A History of War on Paper by Philipp von Hilgers
  • Daniel Bessner (bio)
War Games: A History of War on Paper. By Philipp von Hilgers; trans. Ross Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xii+220. $28.

War games are part of the American popular consciousness. Tabletop games like Warhammer 40,000 and video games such as Empire: Total War encourage players to imagine themselves as generals commanding units and armies across a diverse array of imagined and real spaces. More seriously, war games have become a standard training tool by which the American military seeks to improve, or justify, its strategy and tactics. The war game, however, has German, not American, origins. It was first popularized in the United States in 1879, when army captain William Roscoe Livermore published The American Kriegsspiel, the very title of which highlights the game's transatlantic roots.

In an interesting new book adapted from his Ph.D. dissertation, Philipp von Hilgers traces the German history of the war game from the High Middle Ages through the Second World War, delving into the associated mathematics and philosophy along the way. The book contains a number of powerful insights, and the first four chapters provide a useful introduction to the history of war games. Hilgers demonstrates that the war game was an important "site from which military and mathematical practices first arise, even before concrete applications are able to justify them" (p. xi). Games, he shows, were a crucial heuristic through which military officers, mathematicians, and philosophers developed new ways to think about their respective fields. On a more detailed level, the author offers several discussions of interesting topics, including: Gottfried Leibniz as an originator of counterfactual military history (p. 28); the relationship between "the Kantian philosophy of the enlightened subject" and "the doctrine of the reconnaissance soldier of the Prussian army" (pp. 40-43); Carl von Clausewitz and his influence—or rather, misrepresented influence—on ideas of nonlinear systems (p. 48); how Georg Leopold von Reisswitz's war game, which was premised on making linear moves in real time that occurred simultaneously in game time, anticipated the "out of order execution" of modern computers (pp. 48-51); war games and the collapse of the Weimar Republic and their role in the Third Reich (pp. 65-72); Felix Hartlaub and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht's war diary (pp. 77-78); the contextual meaning of the term Führer (pp. 80-84); the role of the war game in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy (pp. 116-21); and the connections between Carl Schmitt's thought on space and on mathematics (pp. 129-33). The fourth chapter, which focuses on Germany in the Nazi era, is particularly compelling.

Although a useful work for those interested in the history of war games, the book suffers from its somewhat opaque language. It is advisable to have [End Page 395] a background in mathematical theory and philosophy before approaching it. This is important not only for conceptual reasons, but also for understanding some key terms, including "elementalization," "combinatorial," "combinatorics," etc. The prose is also, at times, needlessly jargon-laden, with terms such as "diagrammatic hybridizations," "poetological," and "syntagmata" peppering the text. The book would have also benefited from more thorough discussions of the political, cultural, and social contexts in which ideas emerged. For example, Christoph Weickhmann's war game is unsatisfyingly attributed to a dream (pp. 19-27). This is less a problem in the third and fourth chapters, which are the most traditionally historical.

Still, scholars interested in the intellectual history of war games and willing to put in the time to engage what is a very dense read, will discover much that is of interest. In particular, historians of technology will find the final chapter's discussion of the relationship between game theory and Alan Turing's Universal Machine fascinating (pp. 133-44). In sum, War Games serves as a significant contribution to a captivating topic and opens up important areas of future research. A logical next step for those interested in the history of war games would be to examine their transatlantic history while analyzing their development in the context of the cold war...

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