3. Tactical success, in terms of:
It then proceeds to analyze four groups in a lot of depth, to wit, the IRA, ETA, al Qaeda and Hamas, and then provides a very brief overview of dozens more in the conclusion. It reproduces a pretty similar pattern: terror tactics might be militarily effective, and even provide some fun and profit for those who don't get caught, but they don't achieve the strategic objectives of those groups - or at least they do so only partially. English's analysis is nuanced enough to recognize that he's chosen four non-state organizations, and that the use of terror by states is quite a different matter which would need its own analysis. That said, insofar as he takes a moral stance, it's that these groups chose spectacularly bloody means which failed whilst comparatively peaceful organizations with similar goals have achieved more influence and reach; there's another potential angle to take here, where these groups are a 'radical flank' that A) has goals which are intrinsically less acceptable to establishments and therefore less likely to be successful through peaceful means and B) strengthens the position of comparative moderates who might otherwise be outside the room in dialogue. (Irish nationalists were not exactly in the political room in Ulster prior to the 70s).
As it's the Year of the Beta, and my last book-blog took too long (AS HAS THIS ONE FECK), have a game I've been working on for a bit (based on my historical study on Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitaries) but which I was inspired to get to the table in very-sketchy form by reading this.
The Ethics of Gaming the Troubles
Anecdotally, pretty much any online discussion about designing a troubles-era wargame is going to descend into 'ew weird' or 'you do you but I would not be comfortable with this' pretty quickly; OR, the designer is going to fall over themselves to justify it.
It was a small war. 3000 people died, which is quite a small number as wars go. Each was a tragedy; ditto the deaths of the Iraq War, Operation Peace for Gallilee', or post-colonial Africa, all of which have wargames.
Frankly, I think the reason people in the imperial core act so shocked about the troubles is that it happened on their doorstep. Similar scales of atrocity that happen in a year rather than 30 can easily be obscured by distance and racism.
All this said, I do think one ethical question comes into play wrt taking a side. Some claims about the conflict are mutually exclusive. It's also hard to escape coming in with a political perspective, when a major British leader for the central chunk of it was Margaret Fucking Thatcher. Personally, I'm sympathetic to the socialists of the period, be they in the PIRA, OIRA, INLA, SDLP, or, yes, the UVF and UWC (whose left wings are often left out of these historical narratives), but it's equally obvious that all of them, regardless of aim, allowed sectarianism to taint and, usually, supplant their positive programme. So I want a game about good and bad intentions both going awry, a game that takes the side of people living through this and asks if it can be worth it. I want to make a game about how everybody fucked up, repeatedly, horrendously, even when acting with utmost efficiency; how they fought in the wrong ways in the wrong places for the wrong causes with the wrong plans, and none of them won. I want to do this not out of a liberal aversion to violence, but a strong desire to not swing the other way and fetishize it as a means. Those of us on the far left in these dark times need a clear-headed assessment of where certain roads lead. At its most serious, I hope this game can package what I've learned of that.
Actual Problems with Gaming the Troubles
Listbuilding for irregulars
We're talking about a deeply asymmetrical conflict. The British Army, at its peak, had some 20,000 soldiers deployed in NI. The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) was the largest active paramilitary for much of the conflict, and during its early period of less-violent street marches it peaked at around 40,000 members. Not to put too fine a point on it, two early UDA members with maybe a shotgun and a brickbat betwixt were not the equal of a soldier in the British Army in terms of relative effectiveness. On the other hand, for much of the conflict the number of militarily active IRA volunteers was measured in the hundreds! Any kind of scale representing relative availability would have them costing an order of magnitude more than British soldiers, at least. On the secret third hand, how many of a given faction there were in Northern Ireland as a whole had relatively minimal impact in any given street confrontation, because concentration of force is relevant to asymmetrical warfare. The security forces were trying to control a perimeter consisting of 'an entire country', to protect targets consisting of 'the entire state and economic apparatus of said country', and thus had to spread themselves quite thin.
There's also a consideration to be made around weapons availability: specifically, that it's a lot harder to arm people than it is to move them for paramilitaries. (Security forces tend to have the opposite issue). Weapons can be manufactured undercover, stolen etc., but all of these things carry risks.
I think the necessary frame for this is therefore one of risk-reward force concentration. Rather than a conventional points system, the pregame needs to be as much a part of play as the tabletop, with players deciding on operational goals and attempting to put them into effect whilst aware that the longer they take, the more resources they put into it, the higher the chance of discovery and the tables being turned on them. Which leads into...
Objectives, Strategic Inadequacy, and Chaos
Nobody had a very good idea of how to win the Troubles. English goes into lots of detail about this from the PIRA and, to a lesser extent, UDA perspective: initial visions of 'driving the enemy into the sea' had to be abandoned quite quickly as not workable, and tactical successes regularly led into strategic failures where i.e. bombing campaigns turned public opinion against an organization, or assassinations prompted crackdowns. Participants in all groups were regularly corrupt, overzealous, criminal, informing on their comrades or just plain incompetent. But it wasn't just the paramilitaries. The British Army's review of Operation Banner concedes as much:
"408. At no stage in the campaign was there an explicit operational level plan as would be
recognised today. This may appear surprising, but two major factors should be
considered. The first is that campaign planning tools only appeared formally, in
rudimentary form, in British Army doctrine in 1994; and then in Joint doctrine
thereafter. It had been entirely normal to conduct campaigns, such as the Mau Mau
or the Malayan Emergency, by a series of directives. The modern understanding of
the operational level of war did not exist in the British Army until the mid-1980s. ... The second factor was that no senior officer
had the authority to write or impose a campaign plan across all the necessary lines
of operation.
409. If Operation BANNER was a campaign without a campaign plan, how was it
conducted? GOCs received directives from CGS. They were not the strategic
directives of modern doctrine, but many of their features can be seen in them.
GOCs and CLFs then issued directives for tactical operations within the theatre. The
gearing of tactical operations to strategic or operational purpose was generally not
particularly close. Coordination with other Government Departments was also of
variable quality. The independence of the RUC and PSNI in being answerable only
to the Law has been mentioned, as has the poor leadership displayed by some Chief
Constables. The lack of coherence between political activity on the part of SSNI and
the NIO on the one hand, and the security forces on the other, has also been
described. In terms of structure and process there were regular high-level security
meetings such as the Northern Ireland Joint Security Committee. Initially they were
poorly run: agendas were not circulated in advance, and minutes were not kept.
410. In practice much depended on individuals, their personalities, and how they got on
together. Overall the picture is of generally able and well-intentioned men doing
what they believed best with a generally similar common purpose. In practice, too
many things that were everybody’s job were nobody’s job. It could have been better."
The simple solution would be to ignore victory points entirely. Just play the game, and let people argue about who won after. But this would essentially encourage a freeform sort of role-playing where people inhabit their idea of what a faction would want to do, what youtuber Fredda critiques here at some length. I've taken a slightly different approach: awarding Victory Points not for what moves a faction closer to its actual objectives, or not exclusively, but for behaving in a way that mirrors operational incentives. This also allows for a degree of added complexity and representation of differences between organizations, as some of them are much better at i.e. understanding what will work, or controlling what their rank-and-file want to do, than others. In the pre-game, the player therefore takes the role of some operational-level organizer, whilst in the game itself they play 'as' the messy psyches and plans of the men and women on the ground, realizing or wrecking that vision.
'Armies' of Fuckups
They don't necessarily wreck it deliberately. One of the reoccurring themes of the conflict is that people weren't very good at their jobs, partly because those jobs were made up new jobs with fuzzy goals, carried out in complicated environments under massive pressure. The number of casualties lost to friendly fire etc. is quite staggering, as is the number of failed assassination attempts. Even a relatively competent (in his own assessment, anyway) killer like the Milltown Cemetery shooter and UDA hitman Michael Stone describes in his (ghostwritten) autobiography dozens of instances of times that the timing or the weather or a stubborn door saved one of his targets, not least his most famous attack where in attempting to kill Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein he successfully killed two civilians, one IRA man, and wounded around 60 members of the public; this after clearing the normal hurdles of being loyal to the cause, having correct information on the place and time of the event, being able to secure arms and not getting caught, delayed, or killed in an unrelated incident on the way. The army report above should dispel any illusion that this was limited to the paramilitaries, especially in the early years.
Frankly, wargames tend to have absurdly high casualty rates compared to real battles, and to dislike rolling dice for every single activation when large numbers of models are on the table. This assumes, I think, that killing people is the interesting part of war - I on the other hand am going in with the assumption that all the things you do to get to the point where you can are the interesting part, which creates a much more even playing field between state security services and paramilitaries. Thankfully, with the exception of some early parts of the conflict this game should top out at clashes with a few score models featuring, so we can afford to have quite a lot of activation rolls, providing a lot of chances for things to get fucked up. I've also included rules for missing your target and hitting somebody nearby, for petrol-bomb fires spreading out of control, and for a few other little things that collectively drive home the same feeling of chaos.
That said, I hope the game doesn't lean into the kind of 'oh fuck it' silliness of a
Hell and Uncivil Disorder. (Fine game - different genre) It looks at the consequences of the Troubles too, up to and including civilian casualties. In that sense it may not be for everyone, which is totally fine. I wouldn't feel respectful of those people if their suffering from the conflict fought in their streets weren't included, personally. Very incompetent people's actions can have serious, awful consequences, and they can justify those consequences to themselves. I'd like to come back to that, giving people a sense of how being a participant felt through the rules.
Making a game that addresses these
I could probably say more about all this buuut this post's already over a month late and I have another for July to produce :) TL; DR, the game is made. It's called Unrest: A Tragedy of Errors, and its current distinguishing features are:
- You can always fuck up! The activation rolls system means no action is without risk of tripping over and attracting an angry crowd to kick you to death. High levels of random chance.
- The crowd is probably justified in doing so! We're not shying away from the fact that if you fire bullets in an urban space, people who live there might get hit. Inhabit the mind of a worse person in real time.
- Thankfully you can cover it up! Manipulation of your own objectives and your opponent's is a critical part of the game, and it'd always be wise to try to cover all your bases even if they aren't a starting aim.
- Non sequitur: squares! Grid-based movement system, abstract terrain allowing for true hidden model movement and easy measurement.
- Probably too many d6s! Warhammer 40k numbers for a skirmish game! YMMV on if this is good.
- Vampires, at some point! There's going to be an urban fantasy 'weird war' expansion tacked on, amongst other things.
Until next time (SOON I HOPE),
Jago
Also read for pleasure this month: Douglas Rushkoff, Aleister & Adolf; Natalia Tamruchi, An Experience of Madness: Alternative Russian Art in the 1960s-1990s; Nigel D. Findley, Corporate Shadowfiles: A Shadowrun Sourcebook; Robert Chernomas & Ian Hudson, The Profit Doctrine: Economists of the Neoliberal Era
Also reading for pleasure this month: S.T. Joshi (ed.) Black Wings of Cthulhu 2: Eighteen Tales of Lovecraftian Horror; J. Doyne Farmer, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World; Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials; Courtenay Raia, The New Prometheans: Faith, Science and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
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