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.

Center for Naval Analyses

Peter Perla, author of The Art of Wargaming, works for the Center for Naval Analyses, which has a number of his papers available online, along with others related to wargaming. A few of particular interest are:

An Introduction to Wargaming and Its Uses and Wargames, Exercises, and Analysis
Two short papers from the mid 1980's, these provide a good basic introduction to the terminology and the concepts that the military (particularly the Naval War College) applies to wargaming. Most notably, in both cases, wargames are presented in the context of other types of analysis. These papers also demonstrate the way that strategic-level political-military games (of the type this blog spends the most time considering) are viewed as one segment of the broader wargame genre. I found that seeing this sketched out helped me better understand the approach that some military and defense sources take when discussing these pol-mil games.


Wargame-Creation Skills and the Wargame Construction Kit
This paper and accompanying kit are not a complete course in wargame design, but they do lay out some of how the Naval War College approached creating such a course. Some of the material was deleted when the report was declassified, so the kit is no longer a complete wargame in and of itself, but I found a lot of useful ideas in both the report and the kit.


Game-Based Experimentation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness and Gaming and Shared Situation Awareness
These papers describe two series of experiments conducted using a simple computer game (called SCUDHUNT) to measure the degree to which players developed a common mental model of their operational environment. The focus of the game is tactical/operational rather than strategic, but the approach represents a new and fascinating way to study fundamental questions of perception, decision-making, leadership, and other issues, all of which have great relevance when considering human action at any level. In addition to the practical military consequences of understanding shared situational awareness, it seems to me that a better understanding of how these shared mental models are formed (or not formed) would help game designers address the fact that different participants in a game (particularly a large one) will have very different experiences, which could lead to vastly different conclusions being drawn. I don't know if anything has come of the authors' proposal for a game-based laboratory to apply this sort of technique, but I hope something will.

The Global War Game at the Naval War College

From 1979-2001, the Naval War College sponsored an annual exercise they called the Global War Game. I've already mentioned John Hanley's excellent summaries of the 1979-1990 games in his dissertation, but there are some other, more easily accessible descriptions of these games as well. Bud Hay and Bob Gile put together a review of the first five years of the game, and Gile returned to the subject later to write up the second five years. Both summaries were published in the Newport Papers series at the Naval War College, but only the second appears to be available online, here. The second of these provides more information about the way the games were structured, and includes a brief summary section on the first five years, so I would recommend starting with that one anyway. Both of these papers are available at some university libraries.

Beyond these summaries of the early games, few articles or other accounts have been published dealing with the Global War Games, particularly the later games. One of the few I have seen so far is Kenneth Watman's article on Global 2000. Watman was the head of war gaming at the Naval War College.

This post from an arms control blog last year is an indication that potentially useful insights might still be available from these games, which is why it is fascinating to me that no one has written a systematic review of the later years. The review of the second five years, mentioned above, was published in 2004, which suggested a new interest in studying the games, but nothing more has been forthcoming.

Hanley: On Wargaming

John Hanley's 1991 poli sci dissertation at Yale (On Wargaming: A Critique of Strategic Operational Gaming) is one of the best single sources I have found.

Unfortunately, this dissertation is not available online. It might be difficult to get a hold of via interlibrary loan, as well. I had to order it from the University of Michigan's dissertation express site, and have it printed from microfilm and shipped to me. But for me it was worth it, and I highly recommend this dissertation to anyone serious about studying pol-mil gaming.

Particularly helpful are Hanley's chapters analyzing the Naval War College's Global War Game from its debut in 1979 through 1990. I'll write some more about the Global War Game soon. Hanley provides a lot of information about how the games were organized and structured, what the critiques at the time were, and how the objectives of the games changed over time. This is in contrast to most publicly available game reports, which often focus on substantive results rather than the methods employed during the game. This can be a major frustration for those of us who would like to learn more about the way these tools are employed. There is much, much more to this dissertation, which will hopefully show up from time to time as I go forward with this blog.

The only journal article to cite Hanley's dissertation, as far as I can tell, was Robert Rubel's piece I discussed here. To date, it appears that no one has cited the Rubel article in a journal. In part, both Hanley's dissertation and Rubel's article aimed at starting a certain type of conversation about epistemology and methodology within the gaming community. That doesn't seem to have happened yet, at least not in magazines and journals. Why is that? I have some thoughts, but I'll save them for another time.

What Can We Learn From War Gaming?

"The Epistemology of War Gaming" - This article from the Spring 2006 Naval War College Review addresses the question of how one can assess the knowledge gained from a war game. Can you extract valid knowledge that will be of use in future, while avoiding drawing unsupported conclusions? This is a fascinating piece, and it ends with a call for a "guild" of war gamers to professionalize the discipline. The author, Robert Rubel, was head of the War Gaming Department at the Naval War College when he wrote this, but has moved up to the position of Dean of Naval Warfare Studies.

I can't find much else on the internet referencing this article, or anything that provides any indication of whether this has prompted the debate that Rubel wanted to start. It's a worthwhile discussion. As I have noted previously, "war gaming" encompasses much more than the seminar-style games I am focused on, but most of the points made here are very relevant to games at the strategic level.