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Fun and Games
The Battle of the Fulda Gap was probably the most heavily war gamed scenario of any battle in any war. How to fight and win a tank battle in a maneuver box roughly eighty miles wide by two hundred miles long? You are out numbered by a factor of 5.5 to 1. The opponent has capable equipment, sound judgment and enormous mass; you have better equipment and more skilled soldiers plus the traditional advantages of the defender, shorter lines of supply, knowledge of terrain and ability to shape the battlefield. Success depends on whether the Dutch, German, British and American forces, sharing very little common equipment or language can prevent the Soviets from shattering NATO in the main battle area and then breaking out into Germany west of Frankfurt. At the western end of the box was the Rhine River and France, at the opposite end was the east - west German border, the region just northeast of Fulda. The geographically correct name for the corridor entry point would have been the Eisenach - Bad Hersfeld Gap. Bad Kissingen and Daley barracks usually is included in the southeastern corner of the map box. At stake is the future of Europe, this was the largest battle ever visualized that never happened.
How to train for this possibility? How to even begin to visualize the size and scope of the battle, to test your plans, tactics, equipment against the weather and terrain with any sort of validity? Questions that have haunted the minds of leaders and commanders from 1951 to 1991. Beyond command discussions and CPXs, a new approach based on an old idea began to address this issue in the 1970s. It was a child's pursuit tailored to a high stakes question. It was the stuff of generals and armchair generals.
Thousands of unknown troopers have maneuvered everything from individual tank counters across foam rubber terrain boards to divisions in collision as modeled by super fast computers trying to account for hundreds of variable factors influencing the first minute of the First Battle of the Next War. From 1978 to 1991, if you were at Fort Leavenworth or the Army War College for more than a week, you probably could have participated in, helped to develop, modify or critique a simulation event or written an after action report on yet another iteration of a training simulation of the Battle of the Fulda Gap,
Seventeen year old kids have achieved complete Soviet victory in less than two hours of scaled maneuver, seventy year old men have brilliantly commanded the Eaglehorse through a series of delaying actions and spoiling attacks to thoroughly frustrate the Soviet attack. For about twenty dollars, you can simulate the battle with a nicely detailed board game thirty years old. For a few more dollars, you can fight the battle on your PC and endlessly experiment with whether the 2/11 ACR GDP positions would have survived the first five minutes of Soviet assault. The PC based computer game, available on E Bay, is amazingly more sophisticated than the first computer assisted simulation that the Army brought to Daley Barracks in 1978 to drive an Eaglehorse CPX training event.
Millions of dollars and thousands of both military and civilian personnel are allocated to constantly refining simulation events to support the needs of current Army training. Along with the arrival of the digital battlefield, the importance of simulation based training is probably the single largest leap forward in Army training methods in fifty years. We present a series of brief articles that survey game and computer simulations from both the active Army and hobbyist perspective. As always, we seek to find the Eaglehorse on the terrain board, on the game board and on the computer screen. Ever want to command the Eaglehorse, run the Regiment or try your skill as the V Corps Commander circa 1985? Here's your chance.
Kriegspiel and the US Cavalry, 1914
CAMMS Event, Daley Barracks, 1978
Where's My Beer, Where's my Battalion? Strategy and Tactics 1980
RAM Power and Warp Speed, the Future Now
The Lead Soviet Regiment has been Destroyed at Bad Neustadt
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