Talk:Sigma war games

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A fact from Sigma war games appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 17 December 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that as early as 1962 the Sigma war games predicted that American intervention in the Vietnam War would be unsuccessful?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2014/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Sigma war games.

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Secret environment[edit]

Virtually every paragraph of this article includes "secretly", "secretive" and similar words. The fact is that war games conducted by the US military and other organizations involved in security planning for the purpose of evaluating different courses of action are normally conducted in a classified (i.e., secret) environment. This is for a variety of reasons: the assumptions on which they are founded may be inflammatory (e.g. that certain allies will be unreliable, or that certain countries will be aggressors), they may provide insight into actual U.S. plans (e.g. that certain key terrain or forces are essential to a plan's success), or they may produce results that are unpleasant to hear or that contradict elements of U.S. policy (e.g. that certain countries are undefendable). This is true not only of the U.S., but most other countries as well. I'm going to go ahead and reduce the frequency of the statement, in favor of a sentence up front that makes it clear.Darkstar8799 (talk) 21:14, 17 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Game mechanics[edit]

I find the topic very interesting. Is there more info about the actual game mechanics?

On a side note: the most fascinating thing about these war games is perhaps not the fact they turned out to be prophetic - it is the fact that the US leadership kept ignoring the outcomes of these games, yet kept running them. What's the purpose of doing something if you don't trust the results? GregorB (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]