By Scott Cheney-Peters
Join CIMSEC’s DC chapter as it hosts India’s National Maritime Foundation (NMF) for its June meet-up and a lively informal exchange on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific over drinks. Questions are welcome in advance to director@cimsec.org.
Time: Tuesday, 13 June, 5:30-7:30pm
Place: OZ Restaurant and Bar, 2950 Clarendon Blvd, Arlington, VA (Clarendon Metro)
RSVP at http://evite.me/XpAMg4TWAs
By Tuan N. Pham
Who came out relatively stronger from the summit, what are the ramifications for the U.S.-China relations, what to expect when Trump visits China next, and where are the U.S. strategic opportunities?
The heavily choreographed Trump-Xi Summit held on April 6-7 seemed more about atmospherics than substance and did not yield any concrete accomplishments beyond pledges of increased cooperation, new frameworks for dialogue, and a state visit to Beijing by President Trump later in the year. One month later, as the dust settles and more disclosures are made, what can be said now of the summit, and more importantly, so what and what’s next?
Part 1 of this two-part series outlined the perceived and actual outcomes from a Chinese, American, and international perspective. With this as a backdrop, Part 2 now discusses which leader came out relatively stronger, the ramifications for the U.S.-China strategic relations, what to expect when Trump visits China later in the year, and finally where the strategic opportunities lie for the U.S. and how Washington can leverage them.
Who Came Out On Top?
On the whole, Trump came out relatively stronger than Xi in terms of managing expectations and creating and shaping favorable visuals. From the beginning, Xi pressed for an early summit in the hopes that by acting first and boldly, he could seize the strategic initiative and set parameters for the new U.S. president who had yet to fully form his national security team and settle on his China policy. Xi’s advance team pushed hard for exacting protocol demands to make sure that Xi appeared to be a strong and resolute leader who could hold his own against the U.S. president on a global stage, and for China to project an international image of a rising global power that is equal in stature and standing to the United States, a declining global power.
All things considered, Xi gained little and Trump gave little away during the summit. Xi sought, but did not get Trump to publicly reaffirm the One-China policy, endorse China’s new model of great power relations, or give concessions in the areas of trade and commerce, North Korea (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system), Taiwan (arms sales), and maritime sovereignty (South China Sea). Xi did, however, lower heightened tensions, dampen the risk of a destabilizing trade war (for now), and secure an agreement for his proposed four dialogue mechanisms covering diplomacy and security, economics, law enforcement and cybersecurity, and social and people-to-people exchanges.
Still, Trump largely controlled the setting, atmospherics, and strategic narratives from start to finish due to what can essentially be boiled down to homecourt advantage. As the summit’s host, he arrived later and did not greet Xi when Xi first landed in Florida. The tone-setting slight, among other later maneuvers, incrementally diminished Xi’s stature as a world leader – a perception that Xi wanted to avoid at all costs. Hence, Xi calculatingly made a state visit to Finland, a stop-over en route to visit Trump in an initial attempt to sidestep such a suppliant visual. Then at the end of dinner on Thursday, Trump personally informed Xi that he had ordered missile strikes against Syria before announcing the action to the world moments later. Xi was left flat-footed and awkwardly expressed an appreciation for Trump for letting him know and providing the rationale, and indicated that he understood that such a response was necessary when people are killing children. Remarks had to be clarified later by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reiterating that China “opposes the use of force in international relations and maintains that disputes should be peacefully resolved through political and diplomatic means such as dialogue and consultation.” Xi’s perceived failure to stand up to Trump and defend his country’s interests on a global stage will likely have consequences back home. The charismatic Chinese leader rose to power by looking strong, but Trump, Xi’s political opponents will say, made Xi appear weak and consequently made China look weak.
Another possible tell-tale sign that Trump got the upper hand was the subdued summit coverage by the Chinese media relative to their American counterparts. While U.S. media provided extensive coverage of arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world, Chinese media was surprisingly low-key. Normally when Xi travels overseas there is full press coverage as part of a larger public diplomacy campaign to dominate the strategic narratives. For a trip to the United States to meet his equivalent, greater coverage would certainly have been appropriate and warranted. Only after the conclusion of the summit did the Chinese media start to report more details of the meeting, albeit, with only basic information at first.
Yet another anecdotal indicator that Xi underperformed during the summit was the high level of interest among Chinese netizens on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, and Sina Weibo’s attempts to restrict online discussion on the topic by deactivating the comment function on some relevant posts and removing critical posts that attempted to link the U.S. missile strikes on Syria to the summit.
That said, the self-imposed media censorship may have been driven partly by Beijing’s hyper-concerns about Trump’s unpredictability and the high likelihood of an embarrassing atmosphere. Still, subsequent media reports, official public releases, and think tank commentaries in the weeks that followed appeared largely cautious and defensive, and in many cases, in full spin control. They expended an inordinate amount of attention on the intangible personal relationship between Xi and Trump, on the former’s proposed four dialogue mechanisms, and resumed their public diplomacy campaign to underscore the two countries’ economic interdependence, imperative of avoiding a destabilizing trade war, and the importance of preserving the China-U.S. strategic relations.
Ramifications for U.S.-China Strategic Relationship
The Trump-Xi Summit injected much-needed certainty and stability back into the strategic relationship. From Beijing’s perspective, Trump unhelpfully introduced unpredictability and friction to bilateral relations on trade deficits, the RMB exchange rate, North Korea’s nuclear and missile development, Taiwan, and the South China Sea (SCS). So, despite not yielding any concrete accomplishments beyond pledges of increased cooperation, new frameworks for dialogue, and a state visit to Beijing by Trump later in the year; the summit did indirectly bring some stability (albeit temporarily) into the strategic relationship in terms of dampening the risk of a disruptive trade war (for now), setting aside the contentious issue of Chinese currency manipulation (for now), tacitly reaffirming the One-China policy, and repeating the importance of adherence to international norms in the East and South China Seas and to previous statements on non-militarization.
It’s been over two months since Trump took office, but leading up to the summit some pundits were still arguing that the U.S.-China relationship remained in transition. This is no longer the case. The summit signaled the reset of bilateral relations from a collaborative nature (Obama’s approach) to a more competitive one (Trump’s approach) as codified by the guiding principle of “America First.” Washington will now pursue foreign policies that unequivocally put U.S. national interests first, as evidenced by Trump’s inclination to change the status quo and possibly use Taipei as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with Beijing (and possibly North Korea too), focus on the growing U.S.-China trade imbalance and Chinese currency manipulation that puts the U.S. economy at a competitive disadvantage, flexibility to re-prioritize the aforesaid economic interests below the more pressing North Korean nuclear and missile threat, and willingness to use military force to uphold international rule of law or when faced with threats abroad.
What to Expect When Trump Visits China
The Trump-Xi Summit gave the United States “relative, tenuous, and transitory” strategic advantage over China in terms of initiative and narrative. Trump appears to have successfully co-opted Xi as a strategic partner in stabilizing the situation on the Korean Peninsula, in exchange for concessions in the areas of trade imbalance, currency manipulation, and Taiwan. If so, the partnership is strictly transactional. A North Korean buffer state will remain a core Chinese national interest, and Beijing will undoubtedly take steps in the near future to regain the initiative that it enjoyed for most of the past eight years. It will do so more cautiously and subtly this time around, perhaps at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing (14-15 May), Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore (2-4 June), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and East Asia Summits in Vietnam and the Philippines respectively (November).
Xi may be under intense political and personal pressure to do much better at the next state visit to Beijing by Trump, especially if the meeting precedes the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in late 2017. There is widespread speculation that he is trying to build political momentum to ensure that more members of his faction are promoted to the Central Committee and the Politburo, a necessary interim step if he wants to change CPC’s rules to serve an unprecedented third term as president (and/or retain his other two titles of general secretary of the CPC and chairman of the Central Military Commission) and maintain power and influence beyond 2022.
If so, Washington can expect intense shaping and robust deal-making from Beijing in the coming months. Xi will do his utmost to reset the conditions in China’s favor to not only regain the strategic advantage (initiative) prior to the second summit but also to look personally strong and in control during the summit for his domestic audiences (Chinese people and fellow CPC members). He will certainly leverage his homecourt advantage to control the setting, atmosphere, and narratives much like Trump did. Hence, could this back-and-forth jockeying for relative strategic advantage be the start of a new Cold War between the United States and China? Or can Trump and Xi reach a strategic accommodation that manages strategic competition and avoids the Thucydides Trap?
U.S. Strategic Opportunities and Ways Washington Can Leverage
Embrace Strategic Competition. When two powers, one status quo and one rising, with competing regional strategies extend into one’s another security and economic spheres, the geopolitical landscape is ripe for friction. This competition is not to be feared but to be expected and embraced. If Beijing insists and persists on a “new type of great power relationship” with Washington, then give China what it wants – but on U.S. terms. Define, codify, and enforce the conditions of any negotiated bilateral relations such as no militarization of the SCS and balanced trade, and most importantly, be willing to redefine the relationship when necessary. Play the Chinese game of “go” and not the Western game of “chess.”
Leverage the Strategic Advantage. Both Washington and Beijing share the same strategic goals for the Korean Peninsula – strategic stability and denuclearization. Continue co-opting Beijing to exert pressure on Pyongyang to renounce its nuclear ambitions and return to the negotiating table. To be successful, Trump must be willing to give and take with Xi across the spectrum of strategic interests, while making sure Xi clearly understand the risks and implications of not playing an active role in moderating Kim Jong-un and stabilizing the Peninsula. This will allow the two presidents to build trust, which could, in turn, open opportunities in other areas of disagreement (trade, currency manipulation, Taiwan, SCS, etc.).
Protect the Global Commons. In pursuing the aforesaid strategic opportunities, one area where Washington must be careful not to concede too much is in the contested and interlinked global commons of maritime, space, and cyberspace. Giving unwarranted ground in these strategic domains will undermine American preeminence and encourage China to press for additional concessions in return for vague and passing promises of restraint, while quietly and steadily expanding and strengthening its position in the global commons. Play the long game.
Maintain the Strategic High Ground. Do not let Xi unilaterally set the conditions and impose his will when he meets Trump again in Beijing later in the year. Xi will have the homecourt advantage and will be pressured to put on a strong showing, so negotiate for everything to level the playing field and mitigate expected protocol payback from Xi for Mar-a-Lago. Or else, the United States will prematurely return the strategic initiative to China. Remain firm. China respects strength.
Conclusion
From Beijing’s perspective, the Xi-Trump Summit at Mar-a-Lago achieved a great deal. It not only “charted a course and provided a roadmap for China-U.S. relations, but also established a new cooperation mechanism that will enhance and protect the all-important strategic bilateral relationship.” So how much of this narrative is congruent with Washington’s views of the summit? And more importantly, if the summit was as significant as Beijing claimed, then what and how much did it impact the U.S.-China relations? It may be too soon to fully answer this critical question. The latter half of the play has yet to unfold. Until then, it behooves Washington not to give too much ground in one area in exchange for gains in another without careful thought and consideration of any enduring implications. Otherwise, the United States risks inadvertently ceding its strategic position in the Indo-Asia-Pacific, undermining its roles and responsibilities as the global leader, and paving the way for China to become a regional hegemon.
Tuan Pham has extensive experience in the Indo-Asia-Pacific, and is widely published in national security affairs. The views expressed therein are their own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government.
Featured Image: President Donald Trump talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with their wives, first lady Melania Trump and Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan as they pose for photographers before dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Thursday, April 6, 2017, in Palm Beach, Fla. (Alex Brandon / AP)
By Sally DeBoer
Nominations for CIMSEC’s 2017-2018 Officers and Board of Directors are now open! To make a nomination, you must be a current CIMSEC member. Nominees must also be members of CIMSEC. Read more about officer positions and volunteering with CIMSEC here. Use the form below to complete your nomination.
If nominated, you will be contacted during the week of 01 June to confirm your acceptance of the nomination. You will be asked provide a brief biography and description of your qualifications and goals for the year ahead. Elections will take place the week of 05 June.
Please direct any questions to president@cimsec.org.
By Major Jeff Wong, USMC
Interwar-Period Gaming Insights and Recommendations for the Future
The militaries of Germany, Japan, and the United States utilized gaming between the First and Second World Wars to help them overcome challenges relating to doctrine, organization, training and education, and capabilities development. The Versailles Treaty prohibitions prompted Germany to use means other than live-force exercises to study and mature its combined arms concept, test naval and air doctrine, and drive planning for the invasions of Poland, France, and the Low Countries in the European theater. Japan effectively used wargames to inform doctrine and war planning, but biases affected game outcomes and subsequent planning of future campaigns, particularly the Battle of Midway. Japan gamed both strategic and tactical elements of its ambitious Pacific campaign, studying in detail essential tasks as part of its Pearl Harbor and Midway operations plans. Game insights prompted planners to change parts of its Pearl Harbor attack, but failed to sway leaders to examine more closely a critical element of the Midway campaign. The United States, particularly the Navy, combined wargaming with analyses and live-force exercises to study upcoming likely threats and advance naval concepts and capabilities such as carrier aviation. In the United States, Naval War College games of different variations of Plan Orange exposed officers to the theater, operational, and tactical challenges of a conflict against Japan. Many games played over the years between the world wars created a baseline of understanding about how naval officers would fight when war broke out. Now, nearly a century later, today’s U.S. military should apply best practices from those interwar years to spur innovation and overcome the kinds of strategic, operational, and institutional challenges that plagued these adversaries before the Second World War.
This is the final part of a three-part series examining interwar-period gaming. The first part defined wargaming, discussed its potential utility and pitfalls, and differentiated it from other military analytic tools. Part two discussed how the militaries of Germany, Japan, and the United States employed wargames to train and educate their officers, plan and execute major campaigns, and inform the development of new concepts and capabilities for the Second World War. This final part offers recommendations, taken from effective practices of this period, to leverage wargames as a tool today to provide a strategic edge for the U.S. joint force tomorrow.
Wargaming for Today
First, the U.S. military must expand and deepen the use of wargaming at PME institutions as a training and educational tool. Similar to the interwar period, wargames should be used to train officers to make decisions from a commander’s perspective, gain insights into likely adversaries, and learn about the war plans to counter or defeat them. Wargaming design should be part of the regular curriculum to reinvigorate this technique within the uniformed military, since PME institutions are intended to broaden officers’ professional horizons and allow them to explore new ideas.
At the interwar-period Kriegsakademie, some students had never experienced the brutal combat of World War I and never faced decision-making under fire. Wargaming woven throughout the curriculum gave these future leaders an opportunity to practice “commandership” from the commander’s perspective. Thus, students playing in wargames estimated situations based on given scenarios, outlined courses of action after assessing situations, executed plans, and then absorbed honest critiques of their decisions. In the 1920s and 1930s at the Naval War College, students also received a primer in commandership against the backdrop of a Pacific naval campaign. The students who played the games, as well as the faculty members who designed and umpired these events, shaped and fed a shared mental model about the strategic, operational, and tactical challenges of fighting the Japanese in the coming war. Officers returning to Newport as faculty members brought with them recent operational experiences, including fleet experiments that shaped carrier aviation and informed the requirements of new capabilities.
Beyond the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, current U.S. PME students are not taught how to plan and develop wargames as part of their regular course work. At U.S. Marine Corps University, for instance, wargaming is taught during a six-week elective at Command and Staff College (if enough students express interest in the elective), but the course fails to relate how games are relevant to real-world war planning and critical U.S. defense processes such as capabilities development.
At the next-level PME institution, students of the Marine Corps War College (lieutenant colonels and commanders) participate in a wargame as part of the curriculum’s Joint Professional Military Education II (JPME II) requirement, but they are never taught how to plan, execute, and analyze a game themselves. Within the Air Force, the Air Force Materiel Command offers three-day introductory courses with curricula tailored to the needs of a client command or organization, but these courses fall short of the integral nature that wargaming fulfilled for the German Army, Japanese Navy, and U.S. Navy during the interwar years.
To yield substantive benefits, wargaming must be integrated into service PME starting with captain-level career courses. The first exposure should be at the rank of captain in order to give young leaders intensive, virtual decision-making experience before they assume company command. Company command is the appropriate time to introduce gaming to an officer’s development because his unit gets four times larger (a Marine rifle company has 182 personnel by table of organization, compared to 43 personnel in a Marine rifle platoon) and he must have the mental acuity and confidence to operate without constant supervision from superiors. Gaming gives leaders this experience.
As an officer’s career progresses, the wargaming curriculum should teach students how to develop, plan, and execute wargames on a larger scale. At top-level schools, an officer should be expert at applying game insights into the vast U.S. military bureaucracy, feeding future-leaning commands and organizations within the supporting establishment that play a key role in developing future strategies, concepts, capabilities, and resource allocations. With its emphasis on decision-making and reflection on the implications of those decisions, wargaming provides a tool to foster imagination and intellectual growth inside and outside a formal schoolhouse setting. Teaching wargaming design to uniformed military members empowers them to create the intellectual venues themselves when they return to the fleet, flight line, or field – much like the officers of the German Army, Japanese Navy, and American Navy did during the interwar period.
Second, the U.S. military should more closely bind service-level wargaming, analysis, and live-force exercises to provide the intellectual and practical test beds to explore and develop new concepts, capabilities, and technologies to overcome unforeseen warfighting challenges. The games and exercises should be conducted as distinct events that are separated by weeks or months, unlike the infamous Millennium Challenge 2002 event, which attempted to synchronize a wargame, experiments, and exercises involving live forces around the world.
Wargames, analysis, and exercises are complementary elements of a cycle of research that offered fresh approaches and shaped new capabilities during the interwar period. Wargaming provides an environment for players to make decisions and understand their implications without expending blood or treasure. Insights derived from games are generally qualitative in nature. Analysis uses mathematical tools – primarily computer-generated models in today’s military – in an attempt to duplicate the physical processes of combat. Insights derived from analysis are usually quantitative in Both wargames and analysis, however, are only abstractions of reality. Together, they can inform exercises that give real forces the opportunity to implement in the physical domain the new approaches and ideas suggested by wargames and analysis. (See Table 1, Comparison of Campaign Analyses and Wargames.)
U.S. Navy Commander Phillip Pournelle writes that each of the tools “suffer from their own biases, simplifications, and cognitive and epistemological shortcomings. When integrated judiciously, however, the cycle of research gives leaders at all levels critical facts, synthetic experiences, and opportunities to rehearse a range of events in their minds and in the Fleet or the field.” (See Table 2, Comparison of Exercises and Wargames.)
The cycle of research has increased momentum at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory’s (MCWL) Ellis Group, which hosts weekly wargames to examine emergent Marine warfighting challenges. The games serve as an incubator for concepts and capabilities under development. During a game in 2015, dozens of uniformed officers and civilian experts gathered around a large sandtable separated by a barrier. A young Marine infantry captain explained how he planned to land his company. On the other side of the barrier, red cell members – retired field-grade officers and staff noncommissioned officers – determined how they would oppose the landing. On the group’s periphery, analysts recorded observations made by the participants. Scribes filled whiteboards with insights from the game, which they matched against the command’s prioritized list of warfighting challenges. U.S. Marine Corps Brigadier General Dale Alford, MCWL’s commanding general, adopted the weekly games after observing the Naval War College’s Halsey Groups use operations analysis and wargaming to examine naval warfighting challenges. “It was mostly about getting the right people involved and in the same room,” he said.
Third, wargaming leaders must ensure an accurate and intellectually honest representation of the enemy. Most games played by the Germans, Japanese, and Americans during the interwar period featured two sides: friendlies and adversaries playing against one another. Some of today’s large service-level games are one-sided, with friendly “blue” actions being played against pre-scripted enemy reactions or a control group attention divided between representing “red” and running the overall event. However, if war is “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,” as Carl von Clausewitz suggested in On War, these games must adequately portray the adversary’s will. One-sided wargames lose the essence of the opposing will when the enemy’s actions are not represented by another human being seeking to win. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, who previously served as director of Command and Staff College, required all Command and Staff College games to be two-sided affairs. “You need two free-thinking wills … within the bounds of the problem,” said Van Riper, who has consulted on many joint and service games since his retirement from active duty in 1997 and served as the red cell commander during the Millennium Challenge event.
This honest portrayal goes beyond using an expert versed on enemy (e.g., “red cell”) capabilities, limitations, and doctrine. During the Wehrmacht wargames before the invasion of France and the Low Countries, the red cell correctly suggested that French-led Allied Forces would be slow to respond to a German main effort thrust through the Ardennes – prompting planners to shift resources to the army group approaching from the forest. The red cell did not portray an idealized version of the French doctrinal response, which would likely have prompted German planners to shift resources to a different army group and resulted in a different course of action. From the Japanese wargames before the Battle of Midway, historians and professional gamers often cite the sinking – and revival – of two Japanese carriers as an admonition against biases, poor assumptions, and predetermined outcomes.
Fourth, future wargaming efforts should use different types of games for different purposes and desired outcomes. A greater variety of games can attack a problem from different perspectives. A larger number of games provides more opportunities to create fresh solutions. For a new, evolving subject, a wargame with more seminar discussion, less action-counteraction play, and fewer rules might be more appropriate in order to generate player insights and spur creativity. On a topic for which much is already known, a wargame with less seminar discussion, more action-counteraction play, and more rules based on hard data might be more suitable to refine players’ understanding of capabilities.
Back to the Future
The German Army, Japanese Navy, and U.S. Navy used wargaming to shed light on strategic, operational, and tactical uncertainty during the interwar period. In the German Army, wargaming formed the bedrock for the education of officers and provided opportunities for commanders and staffs to rehearse complicated operations such as the offensive against France and the Low Countries in 1940. For the Japanese Navy, planners utilized wargames to examine different ways to employ the Combined Fleet in the opening salvo of the Pacific campaign. The Germans successfully used red cells during their wargames to accurately and honestly portray French forces’ actions during the 1940 campaign, while the Japanese demonstrated the dangers of predetermined notions during wargames before the Battle of Midway. The U.S. Navy found wargaming to be an effective tool for educating officers as well, inculcating the practice among generations of officers who attended the Naval War College and fostering a shared mental model through hundreds of wargames that focused on a potential future war with Japan. Likewise, American naval officers also wargamed carrier aviation, discovering optimal ways to employ forces that massed firepower and extended the reach of the Pacific Fleet. These insights fed the cycle of research that allowed American naval officers to study, experiment, and develop new concepts and capabilities leading up to the Second World War.
Interwar-period wargaming provided users with a chance to shed light on an opaque future. Although the threats are different, senior U.S. defense leaders face similar ambiguity now. The reassertion of Russia in world affairs, a militarily stronger China, and a multitude of powerful non-state actors have dramatically changed the strategic landscape. Fast-developing capabilities, nascent technologies, unmanned weapons platforms, 3D printing, and human-machine interfacing are among the potential factors of the next great conflict. With no cost in blood and minimal in treasure, wargames can empower U.S. military leaders to exert intellectual leadership and innovate to be better prepared for the future.
Major Jeff Wong, USMCR, is a Plans Officer at Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Plans, Policies and Operations Department. This series is adapted from his USMC Command and Staff College thesis, which finished second place in the 2016 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Research Paper Competition. The views expressed in this series are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
1. Commander Phillip Pournelle, USN (analyst at the Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense), interview by Jeff Wong, September 24, 2015.
2. As discussed previously, wargaming is different from COA Wargaming, which is a phase of the joint and services’ planning processes, e.g., the Military Decision-Making Process and Marine Corps Planning Process.
3. Colonel Matthew Caffrey, USAF (Retired) (wargame instructor at the Air Force Materiel Command), interview by Jeff Wong, October 15, 2015.
4. Gary Anderson and Dave Dilegge, “Six Rules for Wargaming: The Lessons of Millennium Challenge ’02,” War on the Rocks, November 11, 2015 (accessed April 1, 2016): http://warontherocks.com/2015/11/six-rules-for-wargaming-the-lessons-of-millennium-challenge-02/.
5. Philip Pournelle, “Preparing for War, Keeping the Peace,” Proceedings 140, no. 9 (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval Institute, September 2014), accessed October 15, 2015: http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-09/preparing-war-keeping-peace.
6. Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming, 287.
7. Brigadier General Dale Alford, USMC (commanding general of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory), interview by Jeff Wong, November 23, 2015.
8. Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 75.
9. Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, USMC (Retired) (faculty member at Marine Corps University), interview by Jeff Wong, February 2, 2016.
10. Pournelle, interview by Jeff Wong, September 24, 2015.
Featured Image: NEWPORT, R.I. (May 5, 2017) U.S. Naval War College (NWC) Naval Staff College students participate in a capstone wargame. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jess Lewis/released)
