Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[Rex Brynen]

Rex, I have three questions, which I couldn't find answers to on the website, though I may have just missed the correct links.

1. Are the students more likely to reach agreement under lots of pressure, or if someone comes in and relieves the pressure?
   
2. Are they more likely to come to agreement if there's no fighting, or if they've bloodied each other a little?
   
3. What can we learn from these experiments? (Feel free to point me to someone's thesis. There's no reason you should do all the work.)

The military part of the simulation is designed to be a hurting stalemate from the start, with no one actor able to achieve an easy victory on the battlefield. Usually it takes a day or two before they fully realize this, though--and it is not unusual to get hardliner vs softliner splits emerging early on within the government and the various insurgent groups. It is rare that an agreement is reached without some fighting during simulation week, and poorly-framed agreements usually break down anyway.

It is, of course, not intended to be a military simulation (I have lots of experience with those on the hobby side, but this is really about other issues). I sometimes have to restrain the passions of students with military experience who want me to draw up detailed tactical maps of a country that doesn't exist.

After a few days of jockeying, the government often tries to negotiate a partial peace with one of the main combatants, to allow them to concentrate on the others. It is a useful lesson in the fact that peace negotiations and agreements can be as much about gaining operational or strategic advantage as gaining peace.

On the rebel side, meanwhile, they're often trying to hold an anti-government coalition together while fundamentally mistrusting each other. It can go in very different directions at this point.

The simulation is in a vaguely African setting overall, as evident from the weak economy and military, the poor transportation system, conflict diamonds, and the limited levels of international engagement. It is not considered a US vital interest, so the Marine BLT potentially available to the US team (if it does anything at all) is usually limited to evacuations of foreign nationals or offshore backstopping of a UN or other multilateral PKO. One of the things I really have to do in the class is highlight that, in the real world, only limited numbers of forces are ever likely to be available for peace operations, only under certain conditions, and that external actors have much less leverage over civil wars than is commonly thought. They all seem to think you service guys are omnipotent

On a side note, I've run the SIM some years when the US team is all Americans, and the French team is all from France. That can be fun, as I know Tom and Stan can attest from their real adventures in central Africa!

As for broader lessons, it is largely a teaching device, intended to demonstrate things I've lectured on in the classroom during the previous 10 weeks. Usually students manage to reproduce (without any interference from me) all sort of real life problems of coordination, unintended consequences, fog of war/peace, UN Security Council paralysis, national rivalries, military vs UN vs NGO worldviews, etc.

To give one of my favourite examples: one year the UNICEF team did a ton of research, and put together a technically outstanding maternal/child health care project, complete with a family planning component. It was great work, and they managed to get enough donor funds to launch the project in several districts. They did a needs assessment, and decided to launch the project in the areas of greatest need, in the south. It all seemed routine enough, so they didn't consult very closely with the UN SRSG, who in any case was tied up in sensitive negotiations.

The main ethnic rebel group then learned that UNICEF was introducing family planning only in the south--that is, the home base of their "Zaharian" ethnic group. In a civil war that is in large parts about demographics, this was seen as highly threatening--and so the rebels started kidnapping UN staff in response to what they termed the "UN eugenics program." Of course, cynically, the fact that they had found an issue to beat the SRSG over the head with was far from inconsequential. The net result was a severely distraught UNICEF player, and a UN mediator that had to bend over backwards to calm supposed Zaharian fury.

As Rob suggests, they do after action reports/debriefs/lessons learned post-SIM. We may play around this year with embedding a social psychology experiment in part of the SIM--but I can't provide details lest I prewarn my web-browsing students

[Rank amateur]

It is rare that an agreement is reached without some fighting

I have an idealogical axe to grind here, but doesn't that suggest that - under certain circumstances - you can't have peace, until you first have a war?

[Rex Brynen]

I have an idealogical axe to grind here, but doesn't that suggest that - under certain circumstances - you can't have peace, until you first have a war?

No, I don't think that's the lesson they take away. I certainly hope not!

The simulation starts in the midst of a protracted civil war, at a potential peacebuilding moment. Given that students haven't "lived" the previous years of war, its only natural that many test the parameters a bit to see if they can achieve an easy win through armed force.

The way the SIM is set up, they can't--after all, that's why its been a protracted civil war to begin with--no easy winners.

[nichols]

Here's what's going on now with JSAF down at JFCOM. We are also looking at incorporating aspects of PMFserv into a first person shooter that already links up with JSAF through a HLA link.

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~npelecha/...V_CROWDS05.pdf

[jcustis]

Rex,

What is the chance that an outsider could somehow monitor the goings-on the next time that you run the simulation? I am considerably interested in the world of NGO behavior, especially as it applies to personal security protocol, and I think something like this sim would greatly increase my depth of overall NGO/humanitarian knowledge.

[Rex Brynen]

Rex,

What is the chance that an outsider could somehow monitor the goings-on the next time that you run the simulation? I am considerably interested in the world of NGO behavior, especially as it applies to personal security protocol, and I think something like this sim would greatly increase my depth of overall NGO/humanitarian knowledge.

.....PM sent.....

[ltmurnau]

I am new to SWC but I have been designing manual simulation games on irregular warfare generally for a number of years. (Rex, I don't know if you remember me, but we used to play tabletop games at UVic back in the 1980s.)

I'm uncomfortable tooting my own horn, but I thought I would list some of the more applicable ones I've done:

Tupamaro - about the Tupamaro urban guerrillas in Uruguay, 1968-72.

Shining Path - for two players. About the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in Peru, 1980-???.

Somalia - about the UN intervention there.

Green Beret - on the military situation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1964-5.

Battle of Seattle: A mini-game inspired by the anti-WTO riots in Seattle November 30 - December 3, 1999.

Algeria: On the 1954-62 French colonial struggle, a slightly altered version of this was used by the Counterinsurgency working group at the recent MORS conference on Irregular Warfare.

Greek Civil War: On the 1947-49 civil war, which was actually the third and final act of a conflict that began in 1941. One of the few times a Communist-inspired insurgency was beaten by a Western government.

Here is a link to fuller descriptions of these and other designs: http://islandnet.com/~ltmurnau/text/mygames.htm

Thanks,

[Stevely]

Here's what's going on now with JSAF down at JFCOM. We are also looking at incorporating aspects of PMFserv into a first person shooter that already links up with JSAF through a HLA link.

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~npelecha/...V_CROWDS05.pdf

I hate to talk down our own products, but I am deeply skeptical of the utility of the "non-kinetic" models being developed here (=JFCOM) and elsewhere, like SEAS and JNEM. Creating a complex, social environment that reacts to a training audience's actions in simulation in realistic ways, is not just beyond the technology as it exists today, I don't think we understand that sort of thing mathematically well enough to model it to the degree where it could be a useful interactive training tool. Maybe it is not even possible?

"Simulation-driven exercise" (as opposed to MSEL-driven exercises) is the latest craze and is supposed to be the fruit of increasingly sophisticated behavioral modeling, but I don't think we'll see the day. Automated red/white/gray forces might work at a very tactical level (like maybe in VBS2), but at a larger scale it gets too complicated, too quickly. I am also concerned we're barking up the wrong tree if we think we can reduce complex social, cultural and political contexts and interactions to something calculable. I know the adage "all simulations are wrong, but some are useful," but improperly used simulation can also be counterproductive, because it can teach the wrong lessons and/ or breed false confidence in the assumptions underlying the models.

Simulation is excellent for creating simulated physical reality that allows training where it would otherwise be impossible or impractical in a completely live setting, but falls far short of simulating human reality.

EDIT: it is nice to see this discussed on SWC

[Ron Humphrey]

I hate to talk down our own products, but I am deeply skeptical of the utility of the "non-kinetic" models being developed here (=JFCOM) and elsewhere, like SEAS and JNEM. Creating a complex, social environment that reacts to a training audience's actions in simulation in realistic ways, is not just beyond the technology as it exists today, I don't think we understand that sort of thing mathematically well enough to model it to the degree where it could be a useful interactive training tool. Maybe it is not even possible?

Which is one reason that design should be more focused on what the audience needs to learn, then on what the sim needs to be able to replicate.

"Simulation-driven exercise" (as opposed to MSEL-driven exercises) is the latest craze and is supposed to be the fruit of increasingly sophisticated behavioral modeling, but I don't think we'll see the day. Automated red/white/gray forces might work at a very tactical level (like maybe in VBS2), but at a larger scale it gets too complicated, too quickly. I am also concerned we're barking up the wrong tree if we think we can reduce complex social, cultural and political contexts and interactions to something calculable. I know the adage "all simulations are wrong, but some are useful," but improperly used simulation can also be counterproductive, because it can teach the wrong lessons and/ or breed false confidence in the assumptions underlying the models.

Defining the scope of a programs capabilities to replicate reality would seem to always be a losing proposition. That said should the main concern with any simulation meant for training be not to replicate reality so much as to have the ability to create in those who use it a similar decision making requirement to that which they will experience in real life.

Much like raising our own children there is too often IMHO the habit of providing direction rather than guidance. By that I mean we tell them what to and what not to do in circumstances as they arrive. This may be effective in preparing them for much of what they will face but it leaves out a key component of learning. By providing solutions we infer a lack of necessity to prepare for that which is different or unplanned for. They may make the right decisions when they see similar things but when it comes down to something completely different what tools have we actually provided them with for effectively making the right choices on their own.

Yes, I realize we're talking about adults here but in order to honestly do our best to provide good tools we must be willing to recognize that which we may not like too. To often adults tend to follow the same pattern of looking for the answers rather than seeking out how to find the answers and as such there is often a repetition of bad answers since those were the ones most readily available. Precedent may be a good thing in some constructs but over all they tend to negatively reinforce bad habits just as much as they help. There is a difference between principles and prescriptions and if we don't make a concerted effort to delineate between them we will continue to fail in efforts to provide workable tools for decision making.

In relation to things becoming too complicated as the training audience gets larger, I simply ask that we consider this. Anything whole is made up of it's parts. If you can train the parts with relative efficiency why does it not follow that training the whole would be any more difficult since each of those parts still have the main requirements to fill which you train at the smaller scale.

This is what I think those who seek to teach how to think rather than what to think really are trying to get at and personally I can't see what the problem is with that.

Simulation is excellent for creating simulated physical reality that allows training where it would otherwise be impossible or impractical in a completely live setting, but falls far short of simulating human reality.

As I said true enough, just keep in mind what the learning objective actually is.

[nichols]

Which is one reason that design should be more focused on what the audience needs to learn, then on what the sim needs to be able to replicate.

This is exactly what we are doing. The requirements from TECOM are based off of Cognitive Task Analysis and T&R standards based training.

About 5 years ago we would get a sim and 'fit' it into training, today the sim has to fit the training requirement.

The drive behind that AI is for mission rehearsal on the tactical level (VBS-2 & DARPA's Real World).