Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[marct]

A friend of mine just sent me this link about attempts to organize a gaming convention in Iraq.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=322013

It may be worth having someone there to probe around.

Marc

[Steve Blair]

Interesting thread, Marc. Reminded me I need to look into rpg.net again (or maybe I don't...got enough going on now as it is... ).

[ericmwalters]

PVEBBER makes a lot of interesting observations and comments which deserve some responses, so I thought I'd take a stab at some of them. He writes:

1) Linear, or at least analytically tractable relationships between cause and effect - the whole "metrics mania" that even Congress is getting into. Part of the snake-oil being sold as "network-centric assement theory" applies only to 'complicated' not truly 'complex' systems, which differ fundamentally by the very fact that cause and effect are discernable in complicated systems, but are not in complex systems - there are two many feedback driven interactions to know where the output needle will swing when you "twiddle the dials."

I see a lot of this--the idea being that we can use wargaming to forecast outcomes in very complex, messy situations and use them as a way to "test" or "validate" commander courses of action. Lots of money is being poured into such efforts, and I am not convinced that such are based in solid theoretical foundations, as PVEBBER writes of above.

Usually when I run across such simulations being used for these purposes, I immediate want to dive into the algorithms to see if it's indeed a complicated versus complex system that is being simulated. If it's the former, then it's easy to attack the simulation design. If it's the latter and somebody is trying to prove that it can validate courses of action, then I start asking how many "runs" were done and with what differences in variables...a good complex system will usually have wildly different outcomes even with the same variables. Typically when somebody is trying to peddle this kind of system, they've only done one run for the buyer who is golly gee so impressed with this latest technology.

[ericmwalters]

PVEBBER writes about the typical situation in wargaming--at least from what we see in the DoD world:

2) The operational level is driven top down by strategy, not bottom up by tactics. Well "ought to be" - you can drive it bottom up, but evaluating "exit criteria until bells and whistles go off is not a 'strategy'.

Unfortunately, most of the theater wargames I've been involved with do exactly what PVEBBER complains of in his second sentence. I'm personally convinced that not many DoD wargame/scenario designers, military officers, and the contractors who support them are not very conversant in strategy as a subject. While it is taught in various command and staff colleges and war colleges, lessons learned there are rarely reflected in exercises run in the operating forces. Most exercises are really tactical evolutions--it's rare to even see campaigning practiced well, mostly because of the lack of time. CPX evolutions normally are run in "real time" with no time compression, so one hour of exercise time equals one hour of real time. Thus, wars are won or lost in a week or two...because that's all the time we have to exercise. Training objectives are overwhelmingly tactical/procedural, so the entire scenario is skewed to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, we learn a lot that we shouldn't learn in such evolutions...