Word: dunnigan
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...Make War by James F. Dunnigan; Morrow; 442 pages...
Hold the butter. The annual cost of the world's guns and other implements of war, says James Dunnigan, is currently $700 billion and rising. The U.S.S.R., which has long stressed quantity over quality, will further mortgage its economic future if it hopes to catch up with the military technology of the West. The expensive problem facing the U.S. and its allies is that increased complexity of weapons usually means a decrease in reliability. Service rivalries and political pressure do not help. Getting the bugs out of new machinery may take years, a-which time the molds of obsolescence...
...Make War is all the more chilling for including such bloodless assessments. A hybrid of manual and analysis, the book describes what warriors and their equipment can and cannot do. Dunnigan is no recruiting sergeant. Details of ground, air and sea operations, nuclear and chemical capabilities and logistics are rendered in a neutral tone that amounts to wry understatement on human nature. On the standard of living at the front: "It is very low. The overriding goal is not to get hit by flying objects." On looting: "Arming a man still seems to change his concepts of property rights...
...Dunnigan wants to use games for teaching. His customers, almost all of whom are male, want war, but he has bigger ideas. A recent SPI game is called A Mighty Fortress, and it is nothing less than a re-forming of the Reformation. Play the Pope cleverly, and roll your dice right, and Martin Luther becomes a minor malcontent known only to historians. Dunnigan's buyers are lean and hungry; their rooms are sandbagged with history books. "Games are one step beyond print!" he says, very excited by this idea. "You travel in a paper time machine that lands...
...Dunnigan's largest war game is World War II, which includes nine maps that cover 45 sq. ft. It can take almost as long to play as it did to fight. The least warlike is After the Holocaust, designed around the premise that the U.S. has been sundered by an atomic war into four weak and competing regions. The regions are so impoverished that a war is unlikely to be profitable. The way to win is to cooperate, a concept that is unsettling to most game players...