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I've seen those.Quote:
Originally Posted by M-A Lagrange
Phil Barker, of Wargames Research Group fame (arguably the best rules-writer in the business, ever) has been working on a set of modern company-level COIN-type rules for the past few years. I'm not sure I like the dice system, but they otherwise look excellent. You'll find them here (at the bottom of his page, as a .doc file).
I think this site may have been brought up in the past, but a great resource for classroom wargames is:
http://www.juniorgeneral.org/
Simple, rules, that can be modified easily, and easy to make components.
Pete Pelligino, a contributer to the site, has used the simple rules to run "cocktail party games" on the parque dance floor at the O-Club here in Newport to commemorate Trafalgar, Midway and Tsushima.
Cross-posted from PaxSims, on behalf of the folks at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning, NDU:
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Regular readers of PaxSims will have seen the occasional posts about a series of roundtable events at National Defense University (NDU) on the subject of strategic gaming, hosted by the Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL). The goal has been to create a regular forum for practitioners and scholars to exchange ideas and compare notes about issues relating to game design, the use of games for analytical and teaching purposes, and interesting projects in the field. CASL is pleased to announce that our quarterly series of in-person roundtables will now have an affiliated online component, the Strategic Gaming Roundtable group site at APAN (All Partners Access Network).
The site is intended to be a place to continue conversation from the quarterly meetings, as well as a place to discuss gaming experiences, works in progress, and the state of the field. We hope that the new site will further advance our goals of getting to know and building lasting professional connections between gamers.
If you have a professional or academic interest in strategic gaming (or in simulation of peace and conflict issues, as Rex likes to say) we hope you will join the conversation. Please email Tim Wilkie to request an invitation.
GMT Games recently brought out a GWOT boardgame, Labyrinth: The Global War on Terror, 2001- .
It has generally great reviews at BoardGameGeek, although there has been some thoughtful criticism of its portrayals and assumptions. Obviously it is a hobby wargame not a serious/professional one, but I thought it was interesting.
I recently played (and reviewed) the boardgame Hearts and Minds (Vietnam, 1965-75). It is a solid effort with very playable game mechanics, although I didn't find it especially engaging.
While the victory conditions are largely political (US casualties and NVA/VC successes generate "hawk/dove points" that determine the game winner), although these political outcomes are largely achieved through military force.
That left me wondering--if one was asked to design a strategic (10 year) simulation of the Vietnam conflict, would would be the essential dynamics that the game mechanics would need to capture?
Kim Kanger, who designed the well received Ici, c'est la France! The Algerian War of Independence 1954-62 has a new title available for pre-order on the French Experience in Vietnam.
http://www.legionwargames.com/legion_tonkin.html
Yes--I already have Ici (good game), and have Tonkin on preorder.Quote:
Originally Posted by Misterhawk
NDU Roundtable on Strategic Gaming (May 24)
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The National Defense University’s Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL) is pleased to announce the seventh in its quarterly series of discussions with gaming practitioners on May 24. The Roundtable on Strategic Gaming will be held at the beautiful new United States Institute of Peace building at 2301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC.
The CASL roundtable brings together gamers from the research, policy, defense, and academic communities in order to generate a professional dialogue in our field about issues relating to game design, the use of games for analytical and teaching purposes, and interesting projects in the field. Each roundtable invites a few speakers to present short, informal talks on some aspect of strategic-level games to spark discussion among the group.
In the forthcoming session, speakers will discuss some of the ways in which gaming has been applied to peace and conflict issues. Peace and conflict studies often address areas (such as counterinsurgency, post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, humanitarian intervention, and crisis management) that are persistent challenges in the defense world as well. Given that, there will be something of interest/use to everyone in the gaming community in the presentations and the discussion that follows. In addition, we hope to use the roundtable discussion to gather input on what elements would be important to include in an introductory book on the development of games on peace and conflict issues. The book will be a project of USIP Press and represents a collaboration between USIP, NDU, and McGill University. Whether you are a longtime gamer or a newcomer to the field, your input on the book project will be extremely helpful.
Please note that attendance is by invitation only, and limited to those with professional interest in the issues to be explored. To obtain an invitation, please contact Tim Wilkie (NDU), Skip Cole (USIP), or Rex Brynen (McGill University).
^ yeah - and I'm going to be Dallas that day! (ugh!)
I was hoping the next one would be further into June instead of before Memorial Day. The nerve of CASL - not coordinating with my personal schedule! :P
Michael Peck (Training & Simulation Journal) on the US military and "serious games" :
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For those who don’t know, I’m U.S. Editor of Training & Simulation Journal, a wargamer since age 12, and probably the defense journalist who most focuses on games and simulations.
I thought I’d start with a few lessons I’ve learned about the military and serious games:
1. Serious games need serious reasons. When it comes to games, missiles, or any other military item, the first question I’ve learned to ask is, “What need or requirement does it fulfill?” Because that is exactly what the Pentagon will ask. The people in the military who are in charge of games frequently don’t play games for fun. The military also procures games in the same way that it procures tanks, rifles and boots. Serious games don’t have political clout; no Senator is going to throw a filibuster because a few geeks in a basement office didn’t get a $500,000 contract. I’ve met a lot of people with great ideas for games on topics like counterinsurgency. Bringing those ideas to fruition may be a little easier if it’s a specialized simulation for a select audience, like a military staff college. But a game for all the privates and sergeants and lieutenants? Not going to happen without a requirement, with all the bureaucracy therein. Gamers and bureaucracy mix as harmoniously as dogs and cats. But that’s how the system works.
...
Online registration is now open for the Connections 2011 interdisciplinary wargaming conference in (1-4 August 2011, National Defense University, Washington DC):
Full information can be found here.Quote:
Connections is the only national conference dedicated specifically to wargaming. Since 1993 Connections has worked to advance the art, science and application of wargaming by bringing together all elements of the field (military, commercial and academic) so participants can exchange info on achievements, best practices and needs.
2011 is the 200th anniversary of modern wargaming. See Wargaming. In keeping with this anniversary the theme of Connections 2011 is “The Next 200 Years of Wargaming - Expanding Our Scope.” Connections 2011 will explore how wargaming can evolve to effectively explore; science & technology alternatives, optimizing tooth and tail mix, as well as orchestrating all of government responses. We will explore this theme through keynotes, four panels, three working groups, demos and a play test. .... Still, many believe the most valuable element of Connections is the chance to meet leaders from across the spectrum of wargaming.
Connections is open to all contributors to the field of wargaming; military, government, defense contractor, academic, and recreational. While not open to those who purely enjoy wargames, Connections does define “contributor” broadly and welcomes everyone from the most senior director to the newly assigned lieutenant, the wargame publisher to the play tester.
^ I'll see you there! :)
I haven't finished reading through this thread yet, so I'm not sure if this particular war game has been mentioned yet or not. If so, it's probably worth a 2nd mention:
http://www.hpssims.com/Pages/Product...ve_action.html
I've been using this just to gain a better understanding of what goes into corps level operations. From what I've seen this is the only commercially available game where proper organization is a must. A lot of core doctrine principles also transfer directly to the game. Plus, there's immense strategic depth having to manage moral, op tempo, logistics, recon, PSYOPs, and EW to go along with the fundamentals.
I think it's a good piece of software for civilians and professionals alike. I believe it was used at the Army General Staff College for a couple of years even.
I'm sure some of you guys should find it interesting and useful, and if you ever need a civilian to beat up on, let me know. :)
The Connections 2011 interdisciplinary wargaming conference was recently held at NDU.
As might be expected, there was much discussion of things COIN.Quote:
Connections is the only national conference dedicated specifically to wargaming. Since 1993 Connections has worked to advance the art, science and application of wargaming by bringing together all elements of the field (military, commercial and academic) so participants can exchange info on achievements, best practices and needs.
The agenda is available at the link above. Brant live-blogged the proceedings during the event at Grog News, and I have an after action review at PAXsims.
Side note: Andean Abyss (still in development) seems likely to emerge as my favourite COIN-themed commercial wargame to date.
From the Simulation & Training Journal, 25 August 2011 (by yours truly).
Comments welcomed here or at PAXsims.Quote:
Preparing for an era of uncertainty
As the U.S. military leaves Afghanistan and places less emphasis on COIN operations, how will it prepare for the next unpredictable conflict?
The reduction of U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan certainly does not mark the end of the counterinsurgency (COIN) mission there. However, it does signal a need to think about how military training and simulation requirements might change in the coming decade. With U.S. and NATO forces likely to face unexpected opponents operating in unexpected ways in unfamiliar settings, simulation-based training needs to emphasize creativity and adaptability, as well as hone more conventional skills.
...
Part of the answer is to shift training from its current mission-determined preoccupations with COIN to more generic, full-spectrum war-fighting skills that are likely to be useful in a variety of settings. A second requirement, however, is to also develop training and simulation assets that encourage the kind of critical thinking and flexibility that will allow military personnel to adapt quickly to a range of inherently unpredictable mission requirements.
Here, a certain paradox presents itself. While few in the military would reject the importance of critical thinking skills, military training systems are not always designed to truly encourage them. Training (including simulation-based training) is often about standardization, not original and out-of-the-box thinking. It revolves around doctrine, even though the very notion of prepackaged, doctrinally based solutions may reinforce the dysfunctional tendency to use cookie-cutter approaches in very different operational contexts. Training may suggest there are right and wrong ways of achieving a desired solution, when those on the ground may actually find themselves faced with a difficult series of “least worst” trade-offs where definitive outcomes are elusive. Post-Cold War missions often pose complex moral and political choices, where it is far from clear what the right thing to do is.
What are the implications for simulation design? A number of possible considerations can be identified, many of which stress the value of integrating uncertainty into the training process.
Training and simulation materials ought to be designed to encourage students to ask the right questions, not to impart unvarying “right answers.” Post-simulation debriefing should place at least as much emphasis on how participants decided upon a course of action (and what assumptions were embedded in this) as on the course of action itself....
Veteran journalist Michael Peck has a new article about wargaming / simulating irregular warfare, including COIN and other small wars.
Firmer ground: How the U.S. Army is teaching tough-to-simulate COIN and irregular warfare
starts...
Much, much more at the linkQuote:
Counterinsurgency, vast and nebulous, has long been intellectual quicksand for the defense modeling and simulation community. But the sands may be firming up.
“Frankly, the best modelers in the Army were uncertain what could be accomplished and at what pace, in the face of many new and different challenges to the modeling of military operations in [irregular warfare],” said Garry Lambert, director of the U.S. Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Center (TRAC) at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
Steve Goodwin, director of the strategy and operations division of National Defense University’s Center for Applied Strategic Learning, echoes Lambert’s assessment.
“The exercise community has not generally been successful in developing COIN models and simulations that can predict outcomes with a reasonable degree of confidence,” he said. “This is particularly true of games looking at complex contingencies, where psychological and social lines of operation, such as information operations and political negotiation, are hard to capture in mathematical models.”
But in just the past few years, the mood has changed. Don’t call it optimism. Call it realism, a sense of what is possible and what isn’t. Irregular warfare models and simulations are coming. But if you’re hoping for a computer program to tell you how to beat the Taliban, don’t hold your breath.
ah well... I should've known better
Brant,
Don't get discouraged. There is only so much time to comment on things and I this case I think Mike hit most of the points in his article. Though a few things continue to go unchallenged at our peril...(more later).
Changing peoples attitude and belief systems (what is often the object of the stuff we recently have been lumping togeter as "COIN") is not an easy task. In the case of simulations and COIN, you have a case of Simulation community (owners of a very nice set of woodworking tools) being told that this weekend, they have to entertain their 3 young grand-daughters who want their friends to come over. Totally outside their wheelhouse. But gosh darn it if they are not going to have the best weekend building birdhouses, and learning to use tools.
Not able to proedict outcomes. Really? I'm shocked...SHOCKED!Quote:
“The exercise community has not generally been successful in developing COIN models and simulations that can predict outcomes with a reasonable degree of confidence,” he said. “This is particularly true of games looking at complex contingencies, where psychological and social lines of operation, such as information operations and political negotiation, are hard to capture in mathematical models.”
The crux of the issue is that Combined Arms warfare has been a very determinsitic and mechanistic discipline. Moving large military units, supplying them in the field, applying their firepower, and assessing the results were subject to encapsulation in mathematics that gave a sence of predictabily (those pesky outliers always gummed up the REAL execution, but IN THEORY we knew what was going on...)
Now we have moved from the realm of turning the crank on a really complicated machine, to one of trying to convince people to change their mind, to accept new - to them radical - ideas about how to live. The closest thing to a theory for that is Everett Rodgers theory of Diffusion of Innovation.
And unfortunately it is a descriptive, not a prescriptive theory. It tells you the relationships between elements and effects, but there is no math associated with it that lets you predict what will happen in a given situation.
So this group (the M&S crowd) that has really nice tools for building things, has to look beyond their toolset if they are going to succeed in entertaing their grand-daughters all weekend. One which they are sure they can accomplish by employing their tried and true tools.
WOW! So if someone has only guns and experts in using guns, they use guns all the time, but if you give them alternatives to guns, and experts in the alternatives, those get added to the mix. $6million dollars of simulation engine to figure that out???Quote:
“We were able to show when there were additional civil affairs teams, the presence of those teams changed what tasks the company commander chose to conduct,” Lambert said. “Company commanders did less kinetic events. It wasn’t how they were thinking in the beginning, but they changed because the civil affairs teams were talking to them, and convinced them to use a softer approach. This changed the number of kinetic actions that took place. And those that did take place, they were getting better information, more pinpoint targeting, and less collateral damage.”
You bring home the new table saw to build those birdhouses, and the girls all start playing in the box it came in... They just don't appreciate the creative building process...
3 guesses what the outcome of THAT is going to be...Quote:
Another exercise is planned this year to test the effects of adding company intelligence support teams.
Is this stuff really that significant? Is this really the best we can do? Do we REALLY believe that we are going to come up with simulations that can predict outcomes of efforts to get people to give up generations of cultural baggage and "come into the 21st century"? Can these guys predict how many times tears will erupt in the midst of a weekend alone with the grand-kids??? Might they have to look beyond building birdhouses?
And anybody who says they do have a bridge they are selling too. ITs not rational, its not measuable, its constantly changing and challenges the basic tenets of what it means to "model" something (i.e to represent it in simplified form so the behavior of the actual system can be understood.)Quote:
"If we’re talking about how a foot patrol in Baghdad affects how the populations view their government and the insurgents, I’ve got no idea how to model that.”
How do you do that when it is part of a truely complex system that cannot be simplified without losing the salient behavioral characteristics?
That assumes that is an overall governing ruleset that allows these dynamics to be characterised. From everything we know, there aren't. Read Rodgers Diffusion of information and how simple things like getting people to use a source of clean water work when you add in all the cultural baggage.Quote:
“As we get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and start looking toward Africa, what we would love to do is to prevent any sort of armed intervention from being necessary, by understanding the way those populations are reacting and maybe getting in on the ground floor to help them be more stable,” Appleget said. “We are not going to forecast irregular wars happening in Africa. But what we understand from [irregular warfare] is that it’s all about the population. We’ll get a sense of those populations, how they change over time, and how they react to different stimuli.”
Gee, so our stabs at the "easy problem" were not really as good as we sold them to be... We oversold past capability and now are reaping what we have sown.Quote:
“Most interesting to me is how this will play out with senior leaders,” Lambert said. “They are used to the kind of results we portrayed in the past, the combat simulations where you get X percent of goodness via metrics like the number of threats killed. It will be interesting to see how they respond to these softer assertions where we say, ‘If you put five more civil affairs teams in, it changes how company commanders conduct operations.’”
“Our senior leaders were spoiled by the way we did combat modeling. We came up with numbers that they could use to support acquisition decisions. Then we became involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and DoD said, ‘OK, where are my models? You’ve been at this for six months. What’s taking you so long?’ Ignoring the fact that our physics-based combat models took years and years to develop, and if you look under the hood, they’re not perfect, either.”
Maybe instead of trying to make fun out of building birdhouses, it might be better to build a doll house and play with them iinstead. Maybe instead of trying to model and predict what will happen when we perform COIN actions, or to imply that if we train people to perform those activities to a strict enough Measure of Performance, then we will get favorable results.
Maybe we should find ways to educate those we send out to diffuse new ideas with an appreciation of what they are up against? Is a tool that tells me that a given cours of action is better than another 60% of the time, rather than 50-50 REALLY that helpful. Will saying I used it protect my career if i follow it and happen to have the 40% come up 4 or 5 times in a row?
Don't pound people over the head that using the tools is going to get happy results. Teach them to be creative, adaptive and flexible and reward them for taking chances and following their instincts rather than relying on models and sims to give them the right answer.
How about educating leaders to be make decisions under uncertainty based on developing relationships, following their intuition and a basic moral compass, you know, like we all do in "real life" when it comes to our families, friends and collegues? Who would base thier actions in these relationships on a "decision tool" somebody told them they should use?Quote:
“The best you’re going to do is get insights and give senior leaders a kind of probability space of different outcomes if they do this or that.”
Rather than relying on a simulation-based decision aid whose only saving grace is that by declaring it "officially correct" one never has to worry about risk to their career if they do what it recommends.
Secure from Rant Stations ;)
The basic problem is that combined arms warfare has NEVER been deterministic or mechanistic. You're correct in saying they were subject to encapsulation in something -- I'm not totally sure it was all math... -- and that fatal error gave a false perception, not a sense, of predictability.Quote:
Originally Posted by pvebber
It's an art, not a science and every attempt by the US Army -- more than any other organization -- to try to make it into a 'science' has failed and will continue to do so.Heh. Got that right. This will likely have even less success than 'organizing' combined arms warfare...:DQuote:
Now we have moved from the realm of turning the crank on a really complicated machine, to one of trying to convince people to change their mind, to accept new - to them radical - ideas about how to live. The closest thing to a theory for that is Everett Rodgers theory of Diffusion of Innovation.
Warfare, all warfare, is a human endeavor. Attempts to remove or enumerate the human factor are not going to succeed. There are few things more fun than matching wits with a reasonably well matched opponent in a tactical effort, real or exercise but it will always be a close thing. You can stack the deck but that stacking consists of finding guys with great instincts and intuitions. You're not going to do it with matrices or numbers (with apologies to Trevor Dupuy and friends...). I've been told by those who should know that's correct but you can get close.
That only counts in horseshoes...
I've seen difficulties at Staff College arise out of trying to wargame an irregular conflict during the planning phase.
While the computer program sounds interesting, what we need is a easy to apply formula that can allow a simple wargame/chalk talk over a map to assess how are actions of friendly/irregular enemy forces play in such a theater. The simple model of action/reaction/counter-reaction with the assessment of dead tanks and helicopters just doesn't really fit. How do I wargame children throwing rocks at tanks or a the occupation of an embassy?