The same reason we don’t simulate Facebook Farmville plots to produce all of our food.
War isn’t some hobby soldiers play at to earn points for their side, it’s the continuation of policy by other means. There is no “simulating” it anymore than you can force someone to kill themselves and all their friends and family by asking nicely.
The point is eventually all that matters is algorithms. If everything is automated, if a lot of war is cyber war etc, you know already that the best algorithms applied to physical stuff will win, so why not just pit them against each other virtually?
As for the argument of "why wouldn't they just go at it in the physical world next", well they could, but after 10 or 20 wars where you see the outcome is going to be aligned to the algorithmic winner anyway you see there's no point other than to kill your own population.
For what it's worth I don't think this happens in 10 or even 100 years - it's stretching it to a much longer timespan.
But that's not the point: the point is "who's going to make me?" when our disagreements are significant.
And significant is minor details like "I believe I own this land" and "I have a right to exist".
EDIT: it's also worth noting that we resolve wars by simulation all the time - that's what diplomacy and it's supporting institutions are. Both sides present their objectives, tend to outline their military forces and escalation priorities to each other, and then go away and decide if they believe the outcome is substantially worse then what could be achieved by negotiation - which with war it usually is.
That’s not how that works. The nation that gets to impose its will is the one that can put boots on the ground and hold them there. Doesn’t matter if they’re cyborg or robot boots, but they have to physically be there. That’s a lesson as old as history.
I understand what you’re getting at, and maybe someday smaller powers will participate in “simulated warfare” (which means something else) in lieu of total destruction like some hunter-gatherer and monkey tribes do, but it will always be in the physical world and involve death or destruction.
Otherwise, why would anyone go to war even now? If any other mechanism other than physical violence would have worked, we wouldnt go to war.
If you don't invade, you haven't taken control.
Or putting it from other perspective, you could run the simulation between 2 parties, be the winner and "impose" your will. But I don't think that the other side will now leave their houses and leave their own city voluntarily, at that point you need to invade anyways.
It probably is :) Any other ideas you'd like us to come up with a Star Trek episode for? There are nearly a thousand to select from these days!
Meanwhile a delay in real time while the virtual war is prepared and fought would almost alway be significantly more beneficial to one side over the other.
So many other factors, but that’s a start.
I'm dead serious here.
There is the issue that Biden or any other elected leaders are answerable to their electorate, and other institutions in their country, in a way that authoritarians are not, so it’s a matter of the commitment of the nation too, but that’s not directly an issue with the simulated war concept. It’s nonsense for purely practical reasons.
Early eSport if you will.
This only works if the consequences of losing are no big deal.
If all that changes is which set of leaders get to collect taxes vs having to swear off politics and go into industry or whatever, then sure.
If instead the losing population is removed to provide more land for the winners? Maybe expecting them to do as the simulated result says is a bit much
.
Also on a vaguely related topic, I'd like to note that bank robberies are still a thing despite being well known to be approximately impossible to get away with.
How do you prove the fidelity of the simulation with respect to actual military capabilities? How do you prevent a party from claiming capability in the simulation that they do not actually possess? Countries like Russia constantly churn out supposed super-weapons that are routinely found out in real combat.
If war became all about simulation engineering rather than actual capability, a country is going to recognize the arbitrage opportunity and take advantage of it in the physical world.
It is a bit like conflating e-sports with the real thing. One is not a substitute for the other because the constraints and incentives are fundamentally different, optimizing for very different things in execution.
Not if we can't even get belligerents and defenders to uphold their treaty agreements.
War is effectively just an escalation of using force to impose one's will over another. You don't need a war if you're China and trying to get your shipping passage rights through Suez or Panama. You'd need a war it you're Russia trying to obtain land illegally from your neighbors.
The same way mythical armies of literature used champions to fight it out - causing less mysery, why not just simulate the war itself and figure out who wins?
I guess the main issue with this is that right now there's multiple components that help you win a war that are still super relevant, logistics, manufacturing and so on. Once algorithms become the dominant aspect and those other physically bound ones are no more, could we move war fully to the digital realm?