Why the good guys are always blue in war games: thank Prussian uniforms
In Western training exercises the friendly side is blue and the pretend enemy is red, a neutral way to avoid naming any real country. The habit traces back to Georg von Reisswitz, the Prussian who helped invent tabletop war gaming. His army's coats were Prussian blue, so on the board friendly troops simply wore that colour.
Their game, Kriegsspiel, dates to around 1811 and caught on among Prussian officers. It used dice for a clever reason: to inject friction, the messy realities that wreck neat plans, such as bad weather, sagging morale and the confusion commanders call the fog of war. When Prussia defeated France's Second Empire in 1870 and 1871, some credited the win partly to officers schooled on these games.
The roots go further back. Frederick the Great, king from 1740 to 1786, drilled his soldiers to behave like parts of a clock, firing in synchronised volleys with no personal initiative. Predictable troops meant war could be studied from above as a matter of manoeuvre and command alone, which suited modelling. Abstract ancestors like chess and Go are older still.
After the Second World War, planning migrated partly to the RAND Corporation, often called the first think tank. There John von Neumann's game theory fed war games modelling nuclear deterrence, with players named SAM for the United States and IVAN for the Soviet Union. The prisoner's dilemma, in which two captives each choose whether to betray the other, underpinned the doctrine of massive retaliation. In 1958 the Naval War College installed a computerised war-gaming system costing more than 10 million dollars, shifting results away from individual skill toward data.
Exercises carry political weight too. A 2021 study found that drills within clearly defined alliances tend to deter rivals, while the very rare exercises staged outside an alliance tend to escalate tension. And they can be misread: the Able Archer 83 exercise was perceived by opponents as possible preparation for real attack.
Source: Military exercise
