The Games of War

In his essay "The Games of War: A Gaming Review of War Cause Therories," Matt J. Martin applies "game theory" to the causes of war, with a good bit of time spent on World War I, which he thinks Colonel Alfred Redl-- "an Oliver North type" -- finagled into a conflagration. "As an intelligence pioneer, Redl nearly single-handedly escalated the intelligence war between Austria-Hungary and Russia. As a result of his treason, fueled by passions and perversions, he manufactured a spy witch hunt which had the direct result of making the Imperial Government much more paranoid and distrustful of their Russian neighbor. Redl's ultimate exposure as the most infamous of spies, again precipitated by aspects of his personality that had nothing to do with the balance of power, created such scandal and policy backlash in the Empire that Austria-Humgary's intelligence bureau just prior to WWI was so pre-occupied with its own internal problems, that it could not see the Russian forest for the Russian trees." [poorly worded sentence, but you get the idea.... Should be "which was so pre-occupied with its own internal problems, could not see...."]

For the entire PDF article, see home.earthlink.net/~bova/WWIGames.pdf

PS - Redl is not mentioned in The Guns of August, by the way.