Admiral Nimitz is famously attributed to have said that everything the US Navy experienced during the Second World War, with the exception of kamikaze attacks, had already been experienced in table top exercises at the Naval War College. The war games of the 20s and 30s are a subject that deserves serious study. One could approach the war games as elements of professionalizing the officer corps during peace time, or approach them as instruments of futurism to handle rapid advances in naval aviation. They're also interesting as the progenitors of modern war games and military futurism, as explained in Perla's The Art of Wargaming. This style of serious wargaming also seems unique American, at least compared to the other major naval powers of Japan and Britain*. There's a lot of meat in the subject, worthy of a good book. Sadly, it is not this one.

Winning a Future War commits two major errors, it's disorganized and repetitive. Histories can be oriented either chronologically or thematically, or at best both. This book manages to confuse the details of how a culture of wargaming was inculcated at the Naval War College, and the people involved. Interwar military bureaucratic infighting is hardly riveting stuff, but it's hard to piece out who in naval leadership picked wargaming, and how they sustained it as a central curriculum element against what surely must have been a skeptical Washington establishment.

Two major thrusts make interwar naval development particularly interesting. First is the rapid advance of technology, particularly naval aviation. The second were the political limits powers operated under due to the Washington and London Naval Treaties, and a desire to maintain naval parity while avoiding an unaffordable arms race. Naval war games had interesting mixed roles here. They showed that armored 10,000 light cruisers armed with 6" guns were superior to similar ships armed with 8" guns, and an equivalent tonnage of 6,000 ton 6" cruisers. The flight deck cruiser was revealed to be a poor compromise of guns ship and aircraft carrier. Seaplanes and seaplane tenders were heavily overweighted in gaming analyses, compared to their actual role in battle. Though seaplanes served vital scout, anti-submarine, and search and rescue roles, they were dead meat in a stand up fight.

Wargames revealed that ability to launch and recover planes quickly was the key determinant in aircraft carrier effectiveness, and suggested lightly built flight decks that could be easily repaired as compared to armored structure. American carriers were better handled than the British equivalents, but it took painful months to match the effectiveness of the razor-sharp Kido Butai. Perhaps the most import strategic revelation was that the Philippines could not be adequate defended or reinforced without taking Pacific Islands first. The direct 'ticket to Manila' strategy would give Japan good odds of inflicting enough attrition en route to decisively defeat the US in the Western Pacific. Army Chief of Staff MacArthur signed plans that would doom his future command to a ignoble surrender based on Navy wargames. And it's fascinating that the games managed to teach useful lessons about naval aviation, despite being full of elaborate guesses about air and ship combat that were wrong on almost every particular.

But the interesting bits are buried under a trudge of bad writing, even for an academic history. Some odd editing choices in the Kindle version are another blow, even if the pictures of ships are always appreciated. This book doesn't really get at the games themselves, or the culture of serious games.

*Famously, Yamamoto's staff gamed out the Battle of Midway. What happened was the Japanese carriers were ambushed from the northeast and took several disabling bomb hits. Yamamoto fudged the dice hits and refloated his ships. And then the battle played out a lot like the wargame, except that the Japanese carriers were sunk for real.