How can it prepare you for a battle or to defend from an enemy if you already know it’s coming and the fear of losing life is non existent?
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Military war games often don’t involve actual combat, instead being either computer simulations or tabletop exercises intended to test out hypothetical scenarios with something similar to the d20 system being used to determine outcomes. While it may be hard to believe, these kinds of exercises can produce valuable insight into what might happen during a conflict, and some countries have paid a steep price for ignoring the outcome of a tabletop war game.
One of the most famous examples of this was in the Pacific theater during World War 2. Shortly before the Japanese launched their attack on Midway, their military leaders held a tabletop war game where they did a test run of their attack plan. The outcome of the exercise was a decisive American victory. The Japanese naval leadership dismissed the results as implausible and proceeded with their plan, only for the events predicted by the war game to play out in real life.
Something that I think the other answers miss is that often military exercises aren’t about training, at least not entirely. Often they’re constructed to test out possible, sometimes wacky scenarios and evaluate performance. Such as – China is invading Taiwan and our Pacific fleet just simultaneously sank, what do we do? Can we still win and if so how?
This is why sometimes you get those sensational news articles about how “a fleet of speedboats destroyed a US warship!” and the like, not realizing that it was a fleet of literally dozens of boats against a single ship with no other support that wasn’t allowed to use half its weapons and in unfavorable position to maneuver, and also it was a rookie captain vs a guy who literally specializes in rapid motorboat assaults or whatever. That’s the kind of stuff that gets concocted for exercises.
Something that I think the other answers miss is that often military exercises aren’t about training, at least not entirely. Often they’re constructed to test out possible, sometimes wacky scenarios and evaluate performance. Such as – China is invading Taiwan and our Pacific fleet just simultaneously sank, what do we do? Can we still win and if so how?
This is why sometimes you get those sensational news articles about how “a fleet of speedboats destroyed a US warship!” and the like, not realizing that it was a fleet of literally dozens of boats against a single ship with no other support that wasn’t allowed to use half its weapons and in unfavorable position to maneuver, and also it was a rookie captain vs a guy who literally specializes in rapid motorboat assaults or whatever. That’s the kind of stuff that gets concocted for exercises.
Something that I think the other answers miss is that often military exercises aren’t about training, at least not entirely. Often they’re constructed to test out possible, sometimes wacky scenarios and evaluate performance. Such as – China is invading Taiwan and our Pacific fleet just simultaneously sank, what do we do? Can we still win and if so how?
This is why sometimes you get those sensational news articles about how “a fleet of speedboats destroyed a US warship!” and the like, not realizing that it was a fleet of literally dozens of boats against a single ship with no other support that wasn’t allowed to use half its weapons and in unfavorable position to maneuver, and also it was a rookie captain vs a guy who literally specializes in rapid motorboat assaults or whatever. That’s the kind of stuff that gets concocted for exercises.
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