CNA - Wargaming Strategic Linkage and Conversations with Wargamers

Two recent papers from the Center for Naval Analyses are great examples of the benefits of robust professional dialogue in the gaming field.

Wargaming Strategic Linkage was the result of a project conducted for the Naval War College, looking for ways to structure wargames to include more than one level of war (strategic, operational, tactical). While this was undertaken in support of the revived Global War Game, most of the ideas involved would apply equally well to gaming outside of a military context. Traditionally, the divisions between the levels of war have been more clearly specified than those between the policy and implementation levels of other issues. However, there has been a blurring of the lines between strategic, operational, and tactical concerns, an ambiguity that Wargaming Strategic Linkage has to deal with.

As noteworthy as the results of the project is the process by which it was undertaken. As a part of their research, Peter Perla and Michael Markowitz consulted a number of other wargaming experts (including CASL's Erik Kjonnerod). Even better, they decided to release their notes on these discussions as a separate paper, Conversations with Wargamers. These detailed interviews provide a great deal of insight into the gaming process, not all of which was directly relevant to the problem Perla and Markowitz had set out to address. Together, these two papers are a testament to how much different gaming practitioners have to teach one another, especially when guided by a targeted research question and researchers who are themselves experts.

Gaming's contribution to the new maritime strategy

The Navy released its new maritime strategy in October 2007, and gaming played a critical role in the development process. Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of the Naval War College Review, Robert Rubel explained how (the article begins on page 69 of the magazine, page 75 of the .pdf file).

Here are some key paragraphs:

From the outset, this project would not simply derive from existing strategic guidance, such as the National Security Strategy or the National Defense Strategy. This may seem somehow subversive to those who are used to military planning processes in which guidance from higher headquarters is regarded as holy writ. However, consider our situation—the project was undertaken at the end of the Bush administration and our requirement was to look ahead twenty years. We could not responsibly make the assumption that current U.S. security strategy would remain in place, and there was no adequate way to predict the direction of the next administration’s policies. Our solution was to postulate four different potential strategy vectors of a future administration, which resulted in having four U.S. teams in a strategic war game we conducted. The first team represented a “Primacy” strategy, in which the United States would attempt to maintain its near-hegemonic status in the world. The second team adopted a “Selective Engagement” posture, in which the United States would focus its efforts on averting conflict among major powers. The third team played a “Cooperative Security” strategy, in which the nation committed itself to seeking security through multilateralism and international institutions. The fourth team represented an “Offshore Balancing” strategy, in which the United States retracted certain security guarantees and caused major powers to balance each other.

. . . .

The Strategic Foundations Game took about six weeks to play and involved the four U.S. teams, one for each potential policy future, and five “strategic entities,” countries and nonstate groups selected for detailed play. Teams were directed to develop grand strategies for the next twenty years that would maximize their security, aspirations, and interests. Non-U.S. teams were not required to demonstrate hostility to the United States unless that made sense in terms of their grand strategies. This represented a departure from normal gaming, in which worst-case scenarios are the rule. In the open adjudication sessions in which each team proclaimed its strategy, a compelling central thread emerged. Each state had an intrinsic interest in the effective functioning of the global system of trade, even such “rogue” actors as Iran and North Korea. Only al-Qa‘ida and associated groups had endemic hostility to the system. This insight produced the “big idea” that the protection of the existing global system of trade and security (as opposed to the process of globalization) provided both the context for the new strategy and the intellectual glue that tied together all regions of the world. Thus the notion of system security and defense figures prominently in the maritime strategy document, both “up front,” in its introduction, and in the description of the maritime strategic concept. This could not have been more important—even, in its way, more revolutionary. It provided a basis for not only a maritime strategy but a national grand strategy not aimed against a particular country or threat but positive, without being aggressive. The strategic concept upon which the maritime strategy is based—defense of the global system of commerce and security—offers the opportunity for future administrations to adopt a clearly articulated grand strategic defensive posture,with all the political advantages that brings. As a defensive strategy, it makes global maritime cooperation much easier to attain.

Storming the CASL

In August I started a new job at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL) at National Defense University. Until recently, CASL was known as the National Strategic Gaming Center, which I've mentioned before. This is, quite simply, my dream job.

I hope to get back to blogging more regularly, now that I've made the move to DC and have settled in to some degree. The first few posts will just try to get through a backlog of material I've been meaning to blog about for a while. Watch this space.

Perla: Design, Development and Play of Navy Wargames

Peter Perla, wargamer extraordinaire, wrote this paper for CNA in 1985 as a broad overview of wargame design and development. I meant to write this up shortly after discussing several other CNA papers in the past, but it took me a while to get to it. That's a shame, because this is a great introduction to wargame design. Much of the content remains relevant today, nearly 25 years later. While the focus is on Navy wargames, the principles expressed pertain to a much wider variety of games. Perla went on to write The Art of Wargaming, which is one of the premier works on the subject, covering both the history and practice of wargaming. I highly recommend the book, but this CNA paper is free and will do in a pinch: Design, Development, and Play of Navy Wargames

Gaming economic warfare

Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design posted a link to a Politico story on an attempt to game economic great power conflict at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory. This is a fascinating concept, and I hope it's something that gets developed further.

“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” said Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”

Several participants said the event had been in the planning stages well before the stock market crash of September, but the real-world market calamity was on the minds of many in the room. “It loomed large over what everybody was doing,” said Bracken.

Bracken is precisely the person you would want at this sort of event. I've mentioned Bracken before here. It's not clear if he had any role in the design of the game, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. Details are (as usual in this sort of story) sketchy but intriguing.

The event was unclassified but has not been made public before. It is regarded as so sensitive that several people who participated declined to discuss the details with POLITICO. Said Steven Halliwell, managing director of a hedge fund called River Capital Management, “I’m not prepared to talk about this. I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you.”

Officials at UBS also declined to comment.

Participants described the event as a series of simulated global calamities, including the collapse of North Korea, Russian manipulation of natural gas prices, and increasing tension between China and Taiwan. “They wanted to see who makes loans to help out, what does each team do to get the other countries involved, and who decides to simply let the North Koreans collapse,” said a participant.

There were five teams: The United States, Russia, China, East Asia and “all others.” They were overseen by a “White Cell” group that functioned as referees, who decided the impact of the moves made by each team as they struggled for economic dominance.

At the end of the two days, the Chinese team emerged as the victors of the overall game – largely because the Russian and American teams had made so many moves against each other that they damaged their own standing to the benefit of the Chinese.

Bracken says he left the event with two important insights – first, that the United States needs an integrated approach to managing financial and what the Pentagon calls “kinetic” – or shooting – wars. For example he says, the U.S. Navy is involved in blockading Iran, and the U.S. is also conducting economic war against Iran in the form of sanctions. But he argues there isn’t enough coordination between the two efforts.

And second, Bracken says, the event left him questioning one prevailing assumption about economic warfare, that the Chinese would never dump dollars on the global market to attack the US economy because it would harm their own holdings at the same time. Bracken said the Chinese have a middle option between dumping and holding US dollars – they could sell dollars in increments, ratcheting up economic uncertainty in the United States without wiping out their own savings. “There’s a graduated spectrum of options here,” Bracken said.

It is rare to find such a perfect example of the right way to frame the benefits derived from a game in a press report. The result that 'China won' is next to meaningless, but Bracken's comments have some real value.


On an only tenuously related note, here is a clip from Bloggingheads.tv that touches on Nassim Taleb's ideas about uncertainty, previously discussed here and here, as applied to the financial crisis:




This isn't directly relevant to gaming, but it does reinforce Bracken's point about the economic game not being about predicting the future, but rather about identifying issues to think about. Gaming in general is a very poor predictive tool, all the more so when applied to something as ridiculously complex as the global economy.

Disclosure: I work for Bloggingheads.tv on an irregular basis.

Reacting to the Past at Barnard College

(via PaxSims) Barnard College runs an interesting program called "Reacting to the Past," a set of classroom roleplaying exercises based on historical situations:

“Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

All of the games are set in the past, and thus might be regarded as history, but each game also explores multiple additional disciplines. Part of the intellectual appeal of RTTP is that it transcends disciplinary structures. In addition to games in the published series, the consortium seeks to expand the curriculum by supporting faculty workshops and collaboration on new game designs that explore a variety of historical moments in the humanities and sciences.

Neat stuff. There are some upcoming faculty conferences in different regions for those interested in using or contributing to the program (Paxsims has more about that). What struck me after watching the sample video at the RTTP site was that it was difficult to see what the structure of the exercises really was. Is this a roleplaying debating society, or are there some underlying game elements that aren't shown? Based on the accompanying web pages, it seems that there are some other aspects to the game that I just wasn't able to pick up on. This reminds me of some of the games designed by Megagame Makers (discussed in another post a while back), and I wonder if some of them (particularly the Washington Naval Conference one) could be transferred to this RTTP framework without much trouble. Perhaps that wouldn't be sweeping enough in scope for the RTTP program. I also wonder if the good folks at ChoMUN and MUNUC are aware of this... and vice versa....

More on risk, uncertainty, and Nassim Taleb

To follow up on my previous post on Nassim Taleb and his work, there is a critical distinction that is often overlooked between risk and uncertainty.* Risk is quantifiable. Whether or not it has been properly measured, it refers to something that is measurable. Uncertainty is not quantifiable. Risk can be "bought down" or hedged in ways that uncertainty cannot. A standard example of risk is the sort of game you find at a casino, like roulette, where the odds are clearly known. The state of affairs that will result from a war (the outcome or outcomes), on the other hand, is uncertain, relying on too many variables, complex interactions, and unknown unknowns to be meaningfully quantified. The outcomes of risks have known probability distributions. Not so with uncertainties. Here's an example of these concepts in action, in the context of baseball.

This conceptualization of risk and uncertainty is sometimes mapped onto the "known unknown" vs. "unknown unknown" divide, with known unknowns characterized as risks and unknown unknowns as uncertainties. But the distinction between known unknowns and unknown unknowns is based on the knowledge of the observer, while the distinction between risk and uncertainty is in some respect a difference in "knowability." There are plenty of "known uncertainties" in the "known unknown" category, where we are perfectly capable of identifying something we don't know which nonetheless has a probability distribution we do not or cannot know.

Part of Taleb's argument with regards to the financial crisis could be framed in these terms. Financial managers thought they had transformed some types of uncertainty into risk that could be reliably estimated through new statistical techniques. But they were operating with assumptions about the underlying probability distribution of events that were unwarranted, meaning that all they had managed to do was conceal significant uncertainties (unquantifiable indeterminacies) that ultimately came back to bite them. (See this Wired Magazine article for a fascinating description of how this came about.) The more generalized form of this argument is that we tend to operate as though we are facing risks, rather than uncertainties, in part as a result of our psychological biases. (Taleb discussed a variant of this a bit in the podcast I referred to in the earlier post.)

This may all seem rather esoteric, but in a world where there is a fresh appreciation for the limits of statistical knowledge there needs to be a way to act under uncertainty. The elemental caution reflected in Taleb's advice on operating in what he would call the "fourth quadrant" and what I would call conditions dominated by uncertainty is as reasonable a response as any to decision-making in this type of environment. When faced with less-structured problems, dominated by uncertainties and unknown unknowns, highly structured analytic tools are frequently neither appropriate nor helpful. Gaming can be one of the least-structured analytic approaches, which limits its outputs but allows it to constructively address issues characterized by deep uncertainty.


* These definitions do not conform to popular usage of either term, but they are generally used in this way in policy analysis and represent a helpful way to characterize different types of indeterminacy. Risk in this case is not limited to costs or negative events, but instead applies to probabilistic outcomes both positive and negative.