Excellent stuff! Had never heard of Guy debod's "The Game of War," and wish there was a copy for sale somewhere. (Know of any? Could find no links whatsoever.))
I note that on Game of War page's own description it is self-described as rooted in the Napoleonic warfare tradition, but that cutting supply lines and disrupting communication are somehow made more important objectives for victory. I did not see any links to purchase the original Debord game (no pun intended there) or the revision to it that Classwargames.com has apparently made.
Related, does anyone know of any research or essays that have explored the confluence of the social sciences w/ military science? (Not military history - but military science.)
For one thing, a running question I mind the past years has been: Is military science a social science? I have emailed UT instructors of military science and other military professionals exactly this simple question, and between the answers nothing consistent appears. It's almost as frustrating as the act that there exists, in 2008, no documentary on the life and idea of Karl Marx or a comprehensive documentary about Capitalism, its origins, and how it works.
The US military does officially abide by Guiding Warfighting Paradigms (GWPs), the doctrines that provide the ideological lenses through which warfigthing should commence, and these have changed dramatically in just the last 30 - 35 years in the US. "Manuever Warfare," "AirLand Battle," etc., are the names of some of these past warfighting paradigms (like Kuhn's scientific paradigm, in a sense), and they are often developed by civilian academician eggheads (Naval War College civilian professors, RAND think tank types) in collaboration with generals and other "military scientists," and much of what I've read on the topic of GWPs reminds of Foucault's notion of epistemes.
The Debord "Game of War" is interesting because a) it comes from Debord, but b) still seems to be trapped in an anachronistic paradigm where the players have God-like omniscient viewpoints over the battlefield & there seems to be no assymetric warfare aspect of it from the get-go (imila to chess), and c) the "soft power" (one of the belligerent's cultural influence through cultural media, films, music, psychology, PSYOPS, etc.) does not seem to figure into the equation, either. It seems to present a fairly conventional land war scenario ("Napoleonic," as it admits?) that almost no one expects to be the fighting norm of the future. Hence the retention of more people from the social sciences into the US armed services, to act as advisers to the military during assymetric warfare, where psychological and "soft power" aspects act as force multipliers against threat forces. (Gary Brecher's _The War Nerd_ explains this much better)
I know Paul Virilio has covered this some, and in the late 1970s Foucault seemed interested in it (_Society Must Be Defended_), but the confluence between military science and the social sciences is an area that seems to be under-explored. Unless I am looking in the wrong places. Engels wrote a couple of letters about it. There are hints here and there, but nothing full-on. That I have found.
-B.
James Heartfield wrote:
"you might be interested in these Situationists' revival of Guy Debord's (whose name is surely some French anagram for Board Game) 'Game of War': http://www.classwargames.net/ http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/class-wargames-revises-guy-debords-game-war-london"