Where do the terms Red Team and Blue Team come from?

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Accepted answer

The Prussians Started the Colors

TL/DR: The first-ever wargame had red and blue pieces, which is largely why military forces today use Red and Blue. Military forces do not assign attacker/defender based on color. Cyber actors do, probably based on the historical military situation at the start of cybersecurity.

The Prussians famously were the first to use a "realistic" tabletop wargame to train their officers, which was called Kriegspiel. The game was first published in 1824 and used by the Prussian general staff to wargame various possibilities and train officers. After the Franco-Prussian war kriegspiel took off in popularity as various other nations attempted to imitate Prussian success in the wars of German Unification. The game came with colored blocks representing units for two armies, one red and one blue. However the armies were not color-coded to attacker and defender.source This probably but not certainly is the reason why red and blue became common "friend/foe" identifiers in modern armies. The historical use of Blue for US Military uniforms and Red for communist forces may have kept the "traditional" Kriegspiel colors relevant even after the game itself fell out of use.

Nowadays "Red Team" and "Blue Team" do not refer specifically to attacker and defender in military matters. The "Blue" force is the "good guys" in NATO parlance for want of a better term. The "Red" force is the opposition. So if you're in planning or a wargame you would refer to your own side as the "Blue" force and the opposition as the "Red" force. This also saves time/space because you can say "blue" instead of detail out each ally involved and have to worry about political things like what order you list your allies in. In wargames where both sides are briefed at once, have the same documents, or training where there's a professional full-time "Opposition force" the "blue" force is the NATO force, and the "red" force is their opponent, be it Russians, Soviets, Iraqis, Taliban, whoever. This is the standard regardless of which side is supposed to attack or defend. In the Russian and Chinese military the colors are swapped with the "good guys" being "red" and whoever they might be fighting being "blue" due to the historical use of Red for Communism and the old soviet Red Army.

As for Cyber Blue are defenders and Red are attackers, that is accurate. While I cannot speak with certainty on the subject, that probably comes from the Cold War military. Generally speaking NATO forces expected to BE attacked, rather than attack themselves. So the "Red Army" habitually was the attacking side in wargames. There is also a convention that since Cyber Blue Forces are defending, they are the "good guys" in any given scenario. That also would lead NATO/Western hackers to adopt blue for defenders, making the "bad" side (in this case the attacking force) the Red team by default.

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