By Phillip Pournelle

Much of what the Department of Defense calls wargaming is not actually wargaming and this abuse of nomenclature has real consequences. Wargame-like activities, if conducted properly, are necessary and valuable, but the Department needs to do a better job of differentiating between true wargames, and wargame-like activities. Understanding the types and styles of wargames and wargame-like activities, when which is appropriate, what they look like, and what they can do for you is critical. Without a proper understanding of what a wargame is, and what it is not, the Department of Defense risks wasting money, time, and talent. It has become is all too common that a group of people together having an unstructured conversation is referred to as a “wargame,” and then the sponsor claims to be better prepared for having done it. Such claims are tautological, self-serving, and do not advance organizational learning.

Over the years, the analytic and wargaming community has developed a set of tools with known standards and expectations. Leadership in the Department of Defense should familiarize themselves with them because government sponsors control the larger analytic ecosystem. Better informed customers and sponsors will be able to responsibly choose designers and events appropriate to their purpose and thus generate good strategies.

This article will briefly describe different types and styles of wargames and wargame-like activities, when they are appropriate, what they look like, and what you get out of them (and just as importantly, what you don’t get out of them). It is focused on wargaming and analysis in support of the Department of Defense, not wargaming for education or entertainment.

Wargaming and Strategy

Defense analytic wargaming’s purpose is to assist in the development of good strategy. Thus, we should first examine what good strategy looks like and how wargame-like activities and wargaming can assist in the development of strategy. Defined by Richard Rumelt a good strategy is:

“…in the end, a hypothesis about what will work… A good strategy has at a minimum, three essential components:

• A diagnosis of the situation
• The choice of an overall guiding policy
• And the design of coherent action.“

Consequently, a good strategy goes beyond the minimum elements of “ends, ways, and means” described in most defense strategy textbooks. And, as many can attest to, the enemy has a vote. Accordingly, a good strategy contains a crucial element:

“In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concerted application of effort… the most critical anticipations are about the behavior of others, especially rivals.”

When a military service, or other organization, claims they have “wargamed” a concept, it implies they have followed the best practices described in Joint Publication 5-0; a series of iterative games against thinking opponents in a cycle of research to develop a good strategy. In essence, they have subjected the concept in question to a clash of competing hypothesis (theories of victory) in a dialectic crucible and conducted follow up analysis. To have done less than this means such a label conveys a false imprimatur, but unfortunately it happens all the time.

Often concepts are not ready for wargaming because they lack the essential components of a good strategy. Conducting a wargame on a strategy like this is a waste of time, talent, and resources. Before bringing in teams to participate in wargames or wargame-like activities concepts should be assessed using Structured Analytic Techniques, Intelligence Analysis, Liberating Structures, and Red Teaming techniques to diagnose the situation and divine an effective overall guiding policy. To use an American football analogy, the new coach of a team needs to take a hard look at his playbook with coaches and coordinators over the summer to determine if the playbook will be effective against the other teams in the league before the the season starts. 

Definition Wars

While some experts do not believe the exact definition of wargaming matters, those of us who deliver wargames to sponsors in the Department of Defense and other government agencies in support of developing good strategy strongly believe that discussions over ontology and taxonomy are extremely important. Correct taxonomy ensures the right tool is employed to address the right question. Wargame sponsors need to understand the full set of tools available and when to use them because they control the larger analytic ecosystem.

There is a general consensus within the defense professional community regarding what wargame is. The Joint Staff offers a definition for the Department of Defense: “Wargames are representations of conflict or competition in a synthetic environment, in which people make decisions and respond to the consequences of those decisions.”

The Joint Staff has identified best practices for wargaming in JP 5-0. Wargaming is most effective when it involves the following elements:

1. A well-developed, valid Course of Action
2. People making decisions
3. A fair, competitive environment (i.e., the game should have no rules or procedures designed to tilt the playing field toward one side or another)
4. Adjudication
5. Consequences of actions
6. Iteration (i.e., new insights will be gained as games are iterated)

Other wargaming professional publications agree that the critical elements of a wargame are: factions in conflict or competition (live competitors), people making decisions, and revealing the consequences of those decisions. Talking vaguely about what you might do and not making choices undermines the entire point of a wargame. When wargames are properly done, they provide the participants a synthetic experience to enable an understanding of the perspective of other and thus to anticipate the actions of others, especially rivals, and the range of outcomes which can occur. Wargame-like analysis that does not meet these criteria can still be valuable, but it is important to recognize where it falls short and work toward designing a true wargame if that is the required level of analysis.

Table Top Exercises

Returning to our football analogy, having a playbook and a roster of players does not mean you are ready to play a game, and certainly not a championship. The quarterback and the receivers must know the routes which will be run. The linemen must know which play employs pass-blocking or rush-blocking, etc. Each element of the team must understand a play in order to execute it properly. The team’s walk throughs and practices are our wargame-like events and just as the coach can increase the difficulty until the team is conducting a full scrimmage, game designers can increase the complexity of wargame-like activities until the concepts and the players are ready for a clash with a professional red team.

Continuing our football team analogy, preparation begins with the players talking through the plays in the locker room on a chalkboard, which is akin to a Table Top Exercise. A table top exercise is a facilitated discussion of a scripted scenario in an informal, stress-free environment that is based on current applicable policies, plans, and procedures. A table top exercise is an informal, discussion-based session in which a team discusses their roles and responses during an emergency, walking through one or more example scenarios. The hypothetical situation is introduced, and the team members talk through what the response should be. A good table top exercise will employ maps and other visualizations to enable the participants to have a common understanding of the scenario and the actions of others in their organization. The key value of a table top exercise is to bring together participants from disparate organizations (e.g., Allies, Inter-Agency) to discuss how to coordinate whole of government(s) responses, identify who has jurisdictions, permissions, and authorities. The table top exercise is a wargame-like activity and the most common for many organizations which claim to conduct wargames.

Some table top exercises, such as those conducted by the Joint Staff J-8 Studies, Analysis and Gaming Division (SAGD), RAND corporation, and other organizations, will include the perspective of opposition forces (Red Team) represented by the intelligence community or professional emulation teams. But, the Red team in these cases is a minority member and does not have the full agency of action accorded to the collective Blue team.

Table top exercises are appropriate in a qualitative assessments of strengths and weaknesses. The key value of the table top exercise is to engage all stakeholders in a facilitated discussion to clarify inconsistencies and interpretations and determine if there are coherent policies and procedures. But, they are not appropriate to calculate outcomes as Red does not have full agency of actions nor is there an assessment of how effective any action would be, much less in the face of opposing actions and they do noy convey a full understanding of the risks and consequences of selected courses of action.

So, while a table top exercise is not a wargame, it is a valuable wargame-like activity which tests if a strategy is designed with coherent action known among its stakeholders and in some cases a perspective on the reaction of the opposition.

Rehearsal of Concept

Once our football team has talked through each of their actions in a play on the chalkboard and are now headed to the field to see if they can execute the plays, without opposition, essentially a rehearsal. A rehearsal is a session in which a staff or unit practices expected actions to improve performance during execution. Commanders use this tool to ensure staffs and subordinates understand the concept of operations and commander’s intent. A Rehearsal of Concept drill is a dry walk-through of a plan between a commander and their subordinates ensuring a shared understanding of the plan. Conducting a rehearsal of concept drill will enable a team to execute their elements of a concept within a game or exercise. Further the rehearsal of concept drill is likely to reveal elements of the concept or the execution plan which require additional refinement.

There are several variations of the rehearsal. The Sketch Map Rehearsals is a drill to help subordinate leaders visualize the commander’s intent and concept of operations. A Command Post Exercise is a training exercise that may be conducted in garrison or in the field. It’s the most common exercise used for training staffs, subordinate, and supporting leaders to successfully plan, coordinate, synchronize, and exercise command and control over operations during missions.

The rehearsal of concept drill, and its variants, will ensure the team has a coordinated plan which they can execute and assists in designing a strategy with and overall guiding policy and coherent action. As players demonstrate proficiency in the plan, experienced game designers and referees will introduce complications to see how brittle or robust the plan is in the face of friction. Like adding scrimmage players to a football team’s practice, game professionals will add murphy-isms, such as weather, washed out roads, accidents, injuries, missed communications, and other random (but not enemy induced) elements of friction. However valuable, a rehearsal of concept is still not a wargame. Like a football rehearsals, a rehearsal of concept lacks a thinking opponent ready and determined to undermine the concept and its components.

Wargaming

Our football coach has assessed his playbook, assigned players to their roles, had them walk through their part of the plays, then rehearsed the execution of the plays with greater challenges and scrimmages. Now his team is ready to play against opposition. In the same manner, the best practice is to subject a concept or strategy to Red Teaming and other analytic efforts, then conduct a table top exercise, then a rehearsal of concept before playing in a wargame against the thinking opponent. In our experience, attempting to play an immature concept or strategy with a team unfamiliar with the concept in a game leads to frustration and waste of resources, time, and talent.

Alternatively, a series of wargames is the acid test, a dialectic clash of opposing theories of victory against a thinking opponent. At the heart of this iterative process is a thinking opponent grappling with the mechanics of execution of competing plans or confounding your plan with a judo throw. William McCarty Little, who helped bring naval wargaming to the Naval War College in its early years, once argued that “the great secret of its power lies in the existence of the enemy, a live vigorous enemy in the next room waiting feverishly to take advantage of any of our mistakes, ever ready to puncture any visionary scheme, to haul us down to earth.” 

Fully exploring the consequences of the game and properly set the narrative of what occurred will require adjudication of the actions of the competing sides. Such adjudication will require implicit or explicit models or techniques to be defensible in and after the game. The adjudication techniques can be in the collective minds of the participants (Matrix Game), an expert or group of experts (Free Kriegspiel), or baked into the rules (Rigid Kriegspiel). A good game designer will select rules for a game, or elements of a game, based on our understanding of the phenomena the competition is occurring in and revise them in iterations of gaming and analysis, which should include other analytic techniques.

Rigor Versus Detail

When assessing the proper use of wargame-like events and various types and styles of wargames, do not mistake excessive detail for rigor.

Wargames are a shared experiential narrative that can have a powerful impact on participants, shaping the organizational learning of those who employ it. Therefore, it is crucial the game be founded in reality; using “valid knowledge of the environment.” If not, we risk conveying negative learning to a large group of people and sowing confusion potentially for years to come. It has been said: “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.” Wargame designers should follow the advice of Ms. Virginia “Robbin” Beall, the former lead operations analyst on the Navy staff, when she admonishes wargames must, like the Hippocratic Oath, “do no harm” and avoid conveying improper assumptions which set in the participants’ minds. For example, in one wargame, air-to-air refueling aircraft delivered the same amount of fuel to aircraft regardless of the range of the tanker from its home base. This exaggerated the effects of air power in the wargame, the minds of the participants, and the results.

A good wargame designer will design the game to address decisions the players are expected to make at the level of the role they are playing, and avoid detail for its own sake. There is no reason why the staff of a joint operational command should be involved in details of tactical units.

Conclusion

Much of what the Department of Defense calls wargaming is not actually wargaming, and that matters. These various “not-wargaming” exercises are still valuable as long as we recognize what we are doing and consciously select the appropriate tool in the strategy development process. Using an immature concept or strategy, or forcing a team who is not familiar with it, into a proper wargame is a waste of time and talent. On the other hand, a table top exercise is insufficient to test a strategy to see if it contains the elements of a good strategy, particularly the anticipations of the actions of rivals. The Department of Defense and other agencies must expect a proper level of rigor in its series of games in a Cycle of Research. Actual wargames require: A well-developed concept of operations (theory of victory); people making decisions; a fair, competitive environment; adjudication; consequences of actions; preferably in an iterative cycle of game and analysis.

When someone says they have wargamed a concept, that should mean, they have gone through this specific process and not that they only completed a simple table top exercise, or a rehearsal of concept. The widely used table top exercise is a wargame-like event, a necessary but not sufficient step in the process of acid testing a good strategy or concept. In these dangerous times the Department cannot afford to be complacent and be satisfied with a “good conversation,” but must actually grapple with the opposition in a synthetic environment, where the organization can learn without risking it all. Failing to wargame properly in advance may mean having to learn in actual combat and risk it all.

Phillip Pournelle served in the United States Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer, planner, and Operations Analyst for 26 years. He is an analyst, strategist, wargame designer, and science fiction author working at Group W. He has a master’s degree in operations analysis from the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey.

Featured Image: U.S. Marine Corps officers assigned to the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) conduct a wargaming scenario aboard Amphibious Assault Ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), Oct. 22, 2021. (USMC photo by Cpl. Yvonna Guyette)