Also, the point of a war game is to practice. Getting your navy blown up teaches you that you need to counter that threat, but it doesn’t give the men on the boats anything whatsoever. Same with the helicopters. Apparently the war game used yank helicopters to land soldiers, but the defenders blew them up en route because of course you would. Wargame still says they successfully land, because the point is to let the soldiers practice disembarking under more or less combat conditions. Realism always takes a back seat to letting the men learn.
Just to clarify for lurkers - Wargames can be physical IRL things maneuvering units to see what actions and practices work IRL, along with providing good training for troops. Wargames can also be more or less tabletop exercises with various observers and techniques applied to simulate a command level view of an encounter, and the assorted issues command might face - fog of war, communications delay, etc. I'm sure they're more digitized in this day and age, but the practice as I know it goes as far back as submarine warfare in WW2, where wargaming was used to eventually identify likely uboat tactics and develop counters for them - and it worked, for the most part.
Stories about people rulebreaking a wargame sounds more to me of the era of early digitally authored wargames, where the computer managed the rules instead of observers, leading to weird things like zero second 'man' communications.
just checked and you seem to be thinking about a 1981 NATO exercise on naval war against the Warsaw Pact where the fucktards in charge honestly expected no Aircraft Carriers to be sunk by the "Red Team" despite the fact the entire fucking Soviet Navy was choke full of subs and meant to do so.
I can't find it, but one wargame I recall hearing about was a full blown WW3 in Europe scenario, Warsaw Pact initiating. The soviet player was off-doctrine initially, and lead with a mass, one way air assault after deciding that their air force was simply hopelessly outclassed and didn't have the staying power to be combat effective. So he gathered all his older migs that wouldn't last in a protracted fight, sent them off to bomb the shit out of every airbase his intelligence was aware of, and then rather than try and retreat, the pilots were ordered to surrender and land or bail wherever they could. They'd land on roads, damaged airstrips, anywhere they could be put down. Because it was a one-way trip, he was able to strike way deeper than NATO had expected, and crippled the NATO air force in return, only really left carrier groups in play for air projection. And all it cost him was outdated aircraft. I don't remember how the rest of the game went, beyond the fact that it was a decisive NATO defeat and he was told he can't do that, which would see most of those older migs die pointlessly trying to sortie against NATO strike craft. Which is more or less what happened in the following runs, which showed a comfortably decisive NATO victory and assured a bunch of people the Fulda gap was as safe as they could make it.
The tactic sounds pretty crazy at first, but it has merit, and wouldn't even be throwing pilot lives away compared to other options. They weren't exactly expected to survive long in WW3 anyway, and if all went well, they wouldn't be prisoners of war for long. Definitely unconventional, but viable as a surprise strike.
