Electronic Strategy

Conventional war games are played on maneuver-area battlefields with sweat, dust, mud, and all the roaring, dangerous machines of modern war. Last week at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, quiet men in a quiet room were playing another sort of strategic war game. The only battle noise was the click of switches as electric impulses flashed through intricate circuits.

Simulated Nations. Wright-Patterson's electronic "air war simulator," developed by Brigadier General Leighton I. Davis, head of the Air Force's Institute of Technology, is based on a rarefied kind of mathematics: the Von Neumann theory of games. It is essentially an analog computer (a tangle of vacuum tubes) that can be set up to simulate two warring nations, each with its cities, factories, fuel dumps, pipelines, air bases, stocks of bombs and fleets of bombers and fighters. All these elements are linked together electronically through the computing circuits. Damage to an "airplane plant" reduces the replacement rate of airplanes, and this shows up on the machine's dials. Each "strike" costs a certain number of bombers, bombs, fuel and men.

The game is played on an accelerated time scale; ten seconds usually equal one day of war. Each side is given elaborate information about its own possibilities and resources, but no more intelligence about its opponent than is apt to be available in a genuine war.

The object of the game is to cut the enemy down to size in the most strategic and efficient manner. A team may decide that the best way to do this is to attack industrial centers, or airfields, or lines of communication. It may use plentiful TNT bombs for some targets and costly but destructive A-bombs for others. It may make many heavy strikes at the start of the war, or try the technique of saving much of its strength until the enemy has expended some of his.

Zero at Last. As each move is made by working the proper switches, the computing mechanism figures mathematically just how much damage has been done to the enemy's air power. A smashed airfield, for instance, weakens him at once, but the damage is soon repaired. When a factory is blasted, the effect is not felt for a while, but it lasts much longer. The side that has lost its defensive fighter bases is penalized by heavier losses when enemy bombers strike. By well-planned moves a skillful team can reduce its opponent to near-helplessness long before his war machine has been destroyed in detail.

As the switches click in the quiet room, cities and industrial centers of both sides turn to electronically simulated rubble. Stockpiles are exhausted. Air bases grow empty of airplanes and bomb dumps empty of bombs. At last the needle of one dial creeps down to zero. This means that one of the contenders--blasted, paralyzed, probably radioactive--has lost all its air power. The game is over.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.