Can Anyone Here Play This Game?

Just tracked down the story of the Afghanistan war games I mentioned previously. The nasty:

The army brass, Dr Johnson said, "were intent on fighting a variation of a war against large tank armies on the central plains of somewhere". At one point, the Pentagon officers involved became so frustrated with their elusive opponents that they asked for the game organisers to have a friendly government's armoured battalion defect to the other side. "They did it to give someone to blast," Dr Johnson said. "Everyone went away feeling viscerally satisfied."

As a result, they missed the point. The terror organisation still had most of its cells in place, and a functioning financial network.

"Within the contours of that particular game, the American forces and their allies simply weren't configured to deal with an enemy like the one we created," said Steven Metz, the head of the Army War College's regional strategy and planning department.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wargame exposed gaping hole in Pentagon strategy

Now of course that was just a game, but somehow it all sounds vaguely familiar...