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.

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.

Sigma I-64 and Sigma II-64: gaming Vietnam

In 1964 the JCS hosted two particularly interesting wargames, Sigma I-64 and Sigma II-64. The Sigma wargames were designed to consider the issues surrounding the escalation of U.S. commitment in Vietnam. H.R. McMaster's article in the current issue of World Affairs mentions these games in the context of what they revealed about the weakness of "Graduated Pressure," a strategy of carefully calibrated use of force meant to efficiently change the behavior of the adversary:

The failure of Graduated Pressure was foretold even before it was implemented. In 1964, two eerily prophetic Pentagon war games exposed fatal flaws in the strategy. In those war games, Southeast Asia experts played the role of the North Vietnamese government. In response to limited bombing designed to signal American resolve, those experts decided to infiltrate large numbers of North Vietnamese Army soldiers into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. This, in turn, impelled the commitment of American troops to the South. The war games concluded that the combination of enemy sanctuaries in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the enemy’s ability to sustain itself on meager provisions, its strategy of emphasizing political and military actions to avoid strength and attack weakness, and limitations on the application of American military power, would mire the United States in a protracted conflict with little hope for success. The game ended after five years of fighting with five hundred thousand troops committed in South Vietnam. Bundy, however, found the conclusion to be “too harsh.” Rather than force a reexamination of strategy, the results of the SIGMA I and SIGMA II war games appear, in retrospect, as a roadmap that civilian and military leaders followed along the path to failure in Vietnam.

McMaster goes on to note that "The SIGMA war games had no effect on American policy or strategy in Vietnam." Why is that? On the surface, the games were extremely well positioned to have a major impact. Certainly, there was a need for sober reexamination of the underlying assumptions of U.S. strategy. Harold Ford cited a CIA officer’s comment on Sigma I-64:

“Widespread at the war games were facile assumptions that attacks against the North would weaken DRV capability to support the war in South Vietnam, and that such attacks would cause the DRV leadership to call off the VC. Both assumptions are highly dubious, given the nature of the VC war.”

Gaming with a broad cross-section of participants can serve to identify and challenge the assumptions they bring with them, and in this case there were participants in the Sigma games that did not share the predominant view of the conflict. Sigma I-64 was played by “working level CIA, State, and military officers.” Sigma II-64 also involved high-level policy officials, including National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, DCI John McCone, General Curtis LeMay, General Earle Wheeler, and A/S Defense John McNaughton, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Deputy CNO Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., A/S State William Bundy, and CIA deputy director for intelligence Ray Cline. This is an exceptionally high-level group to find participating in a wargame, but it does not appear that the Sigma wargames of 1964 had any direct impact on policy, despite their dire warnings about the potential consequences of U.S. actions and despite the participation of numerous military and civilian national security leaders. Without a willingness to be persuaded on the part of decision-makers, the games could not make a policy impact. While the results of Sigma I and II were uncannily prescient, the failure of participants to take the results seriously is not the most significant issue; policy-makers are right to be skeptical of a game's predictive value. But by failing to move policy-makers to reexamine their assumptions from a fresh perspective, the Sigma games represent a colossal missed opportunity.

(Thomas Allen's 1987 book, War Games, has a chapter on the Sigma games (pp. 193-208). See also Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968, pages 57, 58, and 67.)

Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare

I am slowly making my way through the papers available at the website of the Center for Naval Analyses (previously mentioned here). Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare is another excellent resource from their archives. Though it deals with more operational concerns than most of the games I focus on here, the concepts that it lays out to address the issue of fourth-generation warfare are applicable to any structure of game.

The paper includes a fairly full description of the development of the idea of fourth-generation warfare as a way of distinguishing the way armed conflict occurs in the modern world from previous kinds of war (e.g., Napoleonic, WW1, WW2). This is the sort of thing that one hears a lot about in security studies, but perhaps not as much elsewhere. Regardless, at its core, fourth-generation warfare is a way to think about the way changes in technology and the phenomenon of globalization, among other factors, have fundamentally altered the environment in which conflict takes place. In a broad sense, this shift is relevant to disciplines far removed from security studies, which makes this paper useful outside of the military or political-military context.

Some of the hallmarks of fourth-generation warfare are the increased importance of non-state actors (clans, terrorist organizations, corporations, criminal organizations, etc.), a related loss of the nation-state's presumed monopoly on violence, and a diminution of traditional distinctions between combatant and non-combatant. The paper describes these shifts in terms of increased asymmetries of worldview, purpose, actions, and means between the relevant world actors, which is not how I have previously conceptualized fourth-generation warfare, but which sets up a useful framework for considering how to model the phenomenon in a game.

The authors address the basic question of gaming fourth-generation warfare: how do you build a game that integrates vastly different worldviews on the part of the opposing sides? The goals of the various relevant actors might be so diverse that their very perceptions of the "battlefield" might be incompatible. Designing a game in which the setup, goals, and options available to each actor allow (and encourage) the expression of each actor's distinct worldview is a huge challenge. As the authors suggest, it basically means designing multiple games, each from the perspective of one of the actors, and finding a way to accommodate or merge them together.

This is a fascinating paper. Presumably there has been more research along these lines at CNA and the Naval War College, since fourth-generation warfare appears to be here to stay, and with it the thorny problems of designing games with it in mind.

Virtual environment for distributed seminar-style wargames

Wired's defense blog, the Danger Room, has an interesting post about the Army wanting a virtual reality space for conducting distributed seminar-style wargames (where participants are not in the same geographic location) to complement its collection of training video games:

What's missing, according to Major Kyle Burley, a staffer at the Army War College, is a game that simulates decision-making at strategic levels -– something to help make better generals. He calls it "a first-person thinker."

Today Burley uses a moderated, text-based game that simulates top command during an imaginary Second Korean War. Essentially, the game is just a series of chat rooms where colonels hash out potential command decisions, and a moderator decides whether they’re good decisions or not. What Burley wants is an "immersive" game with a live 3D environment and avatars for the players. "Ideally, we would have a virtual, online, Web-access roleplaying environment which allows students to be an avatar [that] probably looks much like the student, and they're given a skin like in Second Life that is equivalent to their position, and they go into different moderated rooms and talk to fellow roleplayers that are in that scenario."

It's unclear from the post whether the actual conduct and structure of the game would change much, but if this makes strategic-level gaming more accessible or the necessary suspension of disbelief easier to achieve, that could be a big step forward for this sort of distributed game.

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.

Cyber Storm

In September 2006, the Department of Homeland Security ran an exercise named Cyber Storm to consider the U.S. response to a significant cyber attack. A wide variety of public and private sector agencies and entities were involved, leading to a better understanding of how the patchwork of responses by these groups could be better coordinated in the event of such an attack. The game report is available here.

Apparently, the game referees had to stop (overzealous?) participants from trying to hack the system the exercise was being run on:

In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise. Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.

"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official who oversaw Cyber Storm. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."

The comments on this page have an interesting discussion of this incident, with some back and forth about whether this type of action should be allowable in the context of a game/exercise. A wargame called Millennium Challenge 2002 is referenced early in the discussion. Millennium Challenge '02 was a large-scale wargame conducted in 2002, pitting the U.S. against an unnamed Middle Eastern military. It achieved an unusual degree of notoriety for a wargame because the commander of the "Red" forces used several unconventional tactics to exploit weaknesses, which resulted in massive damage to the "Blue" fleet as it entered the Persian Gulf. The exercise was halted, and the Blue losses were "re-floated," causing some to cry foul. The Red commander himself said that the game was "fixed." The game has been in the news again lately after Iranian speedboats approaching U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf recalled the tactics used in the game to devastate the Blue fleet (though the success of the tactic in the wargame was apparently predicated on a massive number of speedboats, cruise missiles, and other attack vectors making a simultaneous assault to overwhelm the capacities of the warships to track them and respond).

This comment (in the aforementioned discussion of the Cyber Storm exercise) in particular seems to get right at the issue:

My point is just that a particular wargame has a purpose. It's usually not run to find out who's the best or cleverest solider/commander/unit/force, even if that's what some of the participants want it to be. If the real purpose is damaged by people trying to figure out how to change the intended parameters of the game in order to "win", then players shouldn't be doing that.

In particular, I'd say that you shouldn't be trying to exploit the limits of the simulation. Hypothetically, suppose that you're supposed to be learning (among other things) how to deal with poor communications, so your radios have been jiggered to make them unreliable, or else the enemy can listen in, or something. I have no idea whether that's a plausible wargame, but just suppose.

Now, suppose you decide to adapt to your comms problems by using couriers. Fair enough, you'd think, but if the people designing the game didn't think of that, then their wargame might well not account for snipers either. Then all you've achieved, other than "winning", is to show that couriers are great if your opponent can't do anything about them.

That doesn't prepare you for a real war - obviously modern forces do have snipers, and your couriers would have a great deal more difficulty operating in a warzone than they did in the simulation. You've made the scenario be about couriers and snipers, when it was designed to be about something else (strategies that are robust against broken communications, maybe).

I agree that couriers should be considered in future planning, but if the consideration is, "they wouldn't last five minutes out there", then there's not much point allowing them in the simulation.

Of course for the Millennium Wargame, one accusation was that the envisaged scenario was a sweeping Blue victory no matter what Red did, with no intention to discover anything about real war. But such a "politically motivated" ruling, if that's what it was, doesn't detract from the fact that in general, wargames might have a reasonable purpose, and might need to use "unrealistic" restrictions to achieve that purpose.

I had initially intended for this post to go further into the whys and wherefores of things like "refloating" in the midst of a wargame, but so much has been written about Millennium Challenge 2002 over the years that I haven't finished going through it, much less finished thinking about the issues it presents. There have been a few blog posts this year that have been especially good at identifying the underlying issues. Yet another thing I'll have to come back to in a future post....

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.

Thesis: Decision-Making and Gaming

Here is my Fletcher thesis, looking at how decision-making theories from political science and psychology can be used to better understand free-form games. I can't help but think of this as a work in progress, which is why it has taken me a while to get comfortable with the idea of posting it in its present form. The bibliography (which I may revise and post separately) might be the most useful part of the paper for people interested in this sort of thing.

The Application of Decision-Making Theories to Free-Form Gaming

Comments and questions are very welcome.

(Google Documents seems to have done something strange to the footnotes. Anyone who is interested can email me or leave a comment and I'll send a file in .pdf or .doc format directly.)

Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III - A Wargame Scenario

I really wanted to like this book.

An ex-Air Force wargamer, the editor-and-chief of Aviation Week, and a published author of techno-thrillers teamed up to produce Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III - A Wargame Scenario. Their goal was to publicize the threat of space attack in an unusual format, drawing from actual wargame scenarios that have been played out over the years by the Air Force. By publishing this book as a novel, I imagine they were hoping to reach a broader audience.

Unfortunately, the choice of format more or less dooms the book from the outset. They seem to have had a laundry list of points to make, and arranged the story, such as it is, to cover the list, nothing more. Admittedly, I am not the normal target audience for techno-thrillers. I haven't read one in years, though I did enjoy the first five or six Tom Clancy books back in the day. Even given that characterization is not the strong suit of the techno-thriller, in Space Wars the characters are such ridiculous stereotypes that it's hard to see them as anything but mouthpieces for the points the authors want to make.

Perhaps this material would have been better suited for a movie of some sort. Dirty War was an HBO/BBC production about a dirty bomb attack in London that quite successfully presented a number of very real issues in the context of a gripping story. For the most part, the policy issues are integrated into the broader story quite well. I was at a screening at the Kennedy School of Government, with Graham Allison and Richard Clarke (and possibly Rand Beers?) in attendance, and when asked after the movie what they thought of the portrayal of the issues involved, the consensus seemed to be that it was pretty much on target. No one would make that comment after reading Space Wars. Space Wars would have been a lot harder to film than Dirty War, but maybe decent acting could have stood in for characterization, and maybe the film medium would have made it easier for the creators to show their main points rather than have their characters deliver them in stilted dialog ("show, don't tell" is a cliche, but a useful one) . A movie format would also have forced them to edit out whatever didn't fit in a fairly compact script.

There is a lot of information packed into the book, but it could have been expressed in a nonfiction book in a more engaging manner. The potential events the authors describe are scary, but they should have resisted the urge to pile them all into a single storyline that becomes progressively more strained as the book goes on. It was difficult to finish.

The most frustrating aspect for me was the treatment of wargaming. The authors clearly have a great deal of respect for the practice of wargaming. So much so that they set up a wargaming group within the story that produces most of the important insights and decisions that take place. The lead wargamer character even convinces his superiors to integrate the battle staff of USAF Space Command into the wargame he is running, to use the game as a real-time decision support tool. It looks like a case is being made to use wargames in this fashion in reality, but there is so little information in the book about what actually goes on in the game (besides having characters pop up every so often with another idea or insight gained from the exercise) that it is impossible to see how this vision of wargame-centric planning would work. Somehow it's related to Taoism, apparently, but what that means is never explained. Without more explanation of just how the wargame is supposed to be operating, and given the book's highly unrealistic account of higher-level decision-makers essentially abdicating their responsibilities to independently consider choices by accepting virtually every recommendation that comes out of the game, it's hard to see what the value of this depiction is from the standpoint of advancing the stature of gaming as a tool.

Regardless, I'm sure I would enjoy sitting down and talking with the authors about these issues and about the role of wargaming in particular. Maybe they have ideas that could be extremely valid and useful. You just wouldn't know it from this book. Read this article instead for a brief summary of one of the wargames they apparently drew from.

WaPo article on gaming a withdrawal from Iraq

The Washington Post ran a piece this week describing several recent games on potential courses that U.S. disengagement from Iraq could take.

The piece illustrates one of the problems about reporting on gaming exercises. Games are not terribly good at predicting outcomes, but the natural question that occurs to a journalist writing about an exercise is: what did it "show?" Lincoln Bloomfield made a wonderful statement on prediction in gaming which I can't lay my hand on at the moment, to the effect that what is often forgotten when discussing games as predictors of events is that the defining predictions have already taken place in the writing of the scenarios involved. Without seeing more information from the games, like the initial scenarios and the final game reports, it's hard to know just what the comments in the article about the lessons of the games are based on. Wargamers are generally pretty careful when it comes to ascribing a predictive basis to their exercises, so it seems likely that the reporters are responsible for giving that impression.

Bibliographies

I've been busily working on my thesis since my last post, but I hope to get back to posting regularly.

Here are a few online bibliographies that have been useful during my research:

The Air Force War College maintains an extensive wargaming bibliography, broken down by subject. This link is to the main page, but the politico-military gaming page and the scenario page are particularly relevant. The bibliography was compiled in 1999, so there is nothing more recent listed.

The Army War College Library put together a wargaming bibliography in 1994, which is available in pdf or html format. As far as I can tell, it remains the most current listing of Army War College Library material related to wargaming, at least that is accessible by internet.

Sharon Ghamari compiled a bibliography covering the use of wargames in the 1950's and 60's for a book on Herman Kahn. The articles that appear on this list that are not on the others mentioned above seem to be primarily of historical interest, but I haven't made my way through them all by any means.

I haven't had the chance to track down everything on all of these lists, but much of what I've already profiled here appears somewhere in these bibliographies. Good stuff. With search engines and online library catalogs the value of a good bibliography has been somewhat obscured. But for a subject like political-military gaming, with its terminological and definitional ambiguities, it can be difficult to come up with the appropriate search terms to find the most useful articles and books without being overwhelmed by irrelevant material. That, at least, has been my experience. A bibliography, even an old one, provides some names and terms and titles that can help narrow searches. That has been my experience, at least. If anyone reading this knows of any other useful bibliographies, please let me know.

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.

Orbis Forum on Political and Military Gaming

In 1984, the journal Orbis published a series of articles on the state of political-military gaming. The exchange is unfortunately not available for free online, but it appeared in the winter 1984 issue, which is probably widely available at university libraries. As a group, these articles are an excellent source of reflections on gaming by some prominent practitioners and theorists.

This is a long post, and it covers four separate articles. If I had known it would take me so long to get around to finishing it, I would have split it up. Lesson learned.

Lincoln Bloomfield was a pioneer in political-military gaming, particularly in his work organizing research-oriented political exercises (referred to as POLEXes) for senior-level decisionmakers at MIT in the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's. All of the POLEX research results are apparently unclassified, but I can't find any reference to them on the web. In his Orbis contribution, Bloomfield discusses the history, practice, and realism of political gaming, based on his own experience. His explanation of how free-form gaming requires experienced participants in order to generate useful policy results is particularly well laid out:

No satisfactory model yet exists of the national security decisionmaking system of the United States (or any other country), nor of the larger system of interactions and perceptions that connects them. Thus one either specifies a crude, oversimplified model or relies on the complex model inside the heads of experienced professionals. How successfully a simulation emulates reality depends on the extent of the players' knowledge of the structures, routines, and probable responses of decisionmakers. Great pedagogic, but little policy value results from putting inexperienced individuals in the shoes of decisionmakers.

Even today the national security decisionmaking process is not sufficiently understood as to negate the value of free-form gaming. I would suggest that it never will be. (More on this in a future post.) There has been some debate over issues related to the last part of Bloomfield's remark above, and in the 50's and 60's several researchers (Guetzkow and Hermann are the two I can think of offhand) used inexperienced participants in games to study various aspects of crisis behavior, then tried to generalize conclusions based on a number of runs of the same game. Whether or not those efforts are considered to have produced valid results, exercises designed as experiments in that way bore little resemblance to the high-level games Bloomfield is basing his conclusion on. It is reasonable to agree that given Bloomfield's type of political game, he is correct in asserting that inexperienced participants who do not have carefully calibrated internal models of the world situation would not produce particularly meaningful policy-oriented results.

Among the points Bloomfield makes that have a special relevance to the epistemology of gaming is this:

Games do not predict future events or policy outcomes and can be misleading for specific contingency planning purposes. But they can indicate in detail how a future situation might develop and, even more important, why. A little-noticed fact is that in such games he controlling prediction has already been made: the situation the players face is not of their making, but rather is decided by the game designer. Both MIT and government games relied on scenarios prepared by experts asked to depict a specified future situation in a way that would be accepted by other experts as plausible. A prediction was thereby made that partially determined the game results. Thus, such POLEXes have been biased by game designers, whether for experimental, bureaucratic, or merely frivolous reasons.

These remarks remind me of some of H.A. DeWeerd's concerns about the contextual basis for scenarios, previously discussed here.

Although Bloomfield argues that "In a properly designed POLEX, a knowledgeable non-national can often approximate the policy options likely to be considered by another country's decisionmakers," he also notes that:

Given our national tendency to ascribe Western "rational" mindsets to others, crossing cultural barriers to investigate probable foreign reactions is a valuable and neglected use of gaming. A comparable value derives from putting military officers in the shoes of civilians and vice versa. (A survey of several hundred officials who participated in MIT games reported "role-exchange" as the most useful aspect of the games.)

I suppose that the idea here is that worthwhile results can be generated by non-nationals playing a country's decisionmakers, but only if there is an attempt to understand the cultural context in which those decisionmakers would operate. That may be an element, in Bloomfield's thinking, of proper POLEX design.



Paul Bracken (professor of both political science and management at Yale) contributed an article titled "Deterrence, Gaming, and Game Theory." Among other things, this article includes a short discussion of the distinction between gaming and game theory. This is an issue, because there is a tendency to lump the two together, which is part of the problem with gaming terminology. While Bracken's distinction relies on a rather specific definition of "gaming," it illustrates the difference between the two very well:

Gaming and game theory are sometimes confused with each other, because of their similar names. Gaming refers to an exercise in which opposing teams of human players are confronted with a situation or problem and work out responses to the problem and to the moves of the opposing team. The use of human players to simulate specific political or military decisionmakers is the key to gaming. Such role playing gives the game its richness while distinguishing it from a mathematical model or computer simulation. However, models and simulations often are included in political-military games as supporting tools to facilitate human decisionmaking. When there is extensive use of such models and simulations in a role-playing game, or when computerized communication and control systems are included, the entire exercise is sometimes referred to as a "man-machine simulation."

Game theory is a body of primarily mathematical theory concerning decisionmaking. Although often applied to real problems, game theory needs no justification of practicality. It offers a useful vocabulary for making subtle distinctions and precise definitions about phenomena that arise in gaming and decisionmaking.

Despite this important distinction, Bracken highlights the ways in which gaming and game theory can support each other as analytic tools. Both are tools dealing with the study of strategic interaction, and it is no accident that game theorists like Thomas Schelling and Martin Shubik (and presumably Bracken himself) were drawn to the study of gaming.

When many interacting moves are extended over time, the details of information processing, communication, decentralization, and sequencing are of the highest importance in carrying out a strategy. Gaming, especially with a large number of participants on each side, can make this process transparent. This is less likely when strategic analysis is compacted into verbal stories that rely on a handful of words like "counterforce" and "countervalue."

Specifically, Bracken recommends large-scale games that can encompass the complexity of interactions within the nuclear command and control structure: "The play of a large political-military exercise points to the importance of process, informational patterns, and institutional structure." These are precisely the points he felt needed most examination within the deterrence context. Today's context is greatly different from the nuclear confrontation of 1984, but the utility of large scale games for examining organizational/institutional factors would seem to remain. Bracken was skeptical of pol-mil crisis games that only included a few participants for their lack of emphasis on institutions, at least if they resulted in overly complicated or intricate plans for nuclear warfighting that did not take communication and organizational issues into account.



Garry Brewer (another professor of political science as well as management at Yale) contributed an article titled "Child of Neglect: Crisis Gaming for Politics and War." As might be expected from the title, this is a defense of the crisis game as an analytic tool, and a call for its increased use after a decade of very limited application.

These games never prove anything in a narrow scientific sense. They help to portray the complexities of international conflict; their role-playing aspects provide insights into the special problems of command and control; and they are important educational experiences, providinng participants an opportunity to become aware of facts associated with possible conflicts. Discovery is emphasized and highly valued. Positions, expectations, perceptions, facts, and procedures typically are challenged and improved as the game proceeds. Controllers and referees, who are often experts in particular areas, may question a decision or prevent individuals from making certain moves, but their actions are also open to challenge and debate. Thus, imagination and innovation play central roles in the drama of the manual game. The game also allows players to challenge the initiating scenario, including its explicit and implicit assumptions.

In discussing the original pol-mil crisis games of the 50's and 60's, Bracken notes that:

Political-military games directly addressed a number of important questions:
1) What political options could be imagined in light of the military situations portrayed, and what likely consequences would each have? How, in other words, is force related to political ends?
2) Could political inventiveness be fostered by having those actually responsible assume their roles in a controlled, gamed environment? Would the quality of political ideas stimulated be as good or better than those garnered by more conventional means?
3) Could the game identify particularly important, but poorly understood, topics and questions for further study and resolution? What discoveries flow from this type of analysis that might not from other forms and methods?
4) Could the game sensitize responsible officials to make potential decisions more realistic, especially with respect to likely political and policy consequences?

The flexibility and transparency of the scenario and its relevant assumptions in the crisis gaming technique is particularly important to Bracken:

It is not widely appreciated, but all computer-bassed models and games have embedded scenarios and associated assumptions. The technical problem, however, is that changing scenarios or assumptions means changing many complex instructions contained in the model's embedded codes - something no model builder relishes, especially considering the probable headaches he has already suffered in getting the device to run.

Finally, Bracken makes a necessary point about maintaining a broader view of analysis, incorporating whatever techniques best suit the material, while remaining open to alternative approaches:

A fundamental purpose of manual gaming is to encourage creative, innovative thinking about problems that defy treatment with more conventional analytic approaches and methods. This basic goal has not been achieved to the extent that it could and should be. Furthermore, political-military crisis games are best perceived as key elements in a generalized problem solving process. At present, the analytic community shows an unfortunate tendency to believe that a specific model or analysis will provide answers to a given problem. This is unfortunate for several reasons. The most essential: any given analysis or model can represent only one version and vision of reality. More is needed, and the inherent strength of the manual game in this respect calls it to our attention.

Lloyd Hoffman, Jr. worked at the War Gaming and Simulation Center at NDU, which I assume was replaced by the National Strategic Gaming Center (discussed previously here) at some point, but I haven't looked into the history. Suffice to say, there is no entity with that name at present. His contribution was titled "Defense War Gaming," and it provides a survey of what sort of gaming activity was going on in the Defense Department in 1984. While this is of great historical interest, I won't quote him at length here on that subject. Hoffman covers a wider scope of war gaming than the other authors in the series, delving into field exercises, tactical models, and other such areas.

Wargame blog

(For future reference, comments, suggestions, links, etc., are always welcome.)

Matt Kirschenbaum runs "Zone of Influence," a blog about board-and-counter wargames. While that's a little removed from my own interest in political/military gaming, some of the same issues are relevant in terms of game design. Here are a couple of his posts dealing with two famous recreational wargamers, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson. I haven't read either of H.G. Wells' books on the subject (Little Wars and Floor Games), but the article about Stevenson he links to is wonderful.

"Megagames"

Megagame Makers is a UK-based group that creates and runs very large scale wargames for entertainment purposes, usually based on military conflict represented on boards or maps, but sometimes dealing with negotiation simulation. See the description of their Washington Conference simulation (which they will be running again in November 2007) for an example of a negotiation simulation not too far removed from the seminar-style games I'm trying to focus on here at A Horse of Peas. Their downloads page also offers the basic handbook for their Congress of Vienna game, another interesting negotiation simulation. This group has been around for a while, and looks well worth checking out for anyone in the SE England area.