Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[Surferbeetle]

I am currently in CGSC and a SAMS selectee. Deployment experience and now the word of academics has led me to believe the Army no longer has a viable model for wargaming for stabilization / counter-insurgent operations. The linear process is no longer feasible given the number of variables, threats, competitors, etc. (i.e. action, reaction, counteraction is a thing of the past).

I am beginning my thesis research in this area of wargaming. Specifically looking at a model that provides an idea of what questions should be looked at. Honestly, I am not convinced that wargaming is feasible given the complexity of influences along a given LOE.

Thoughts and perspective would be appreciated.

Hi John,

Simulations and models are pretty powerful tools as long as we keep in mind that they are simplifying and incomplete representations of reality (perhaps comparable to Bertrand Russell's table).

SWC threads How to Win and Mathematics of War have some interesting points on the why's and how's of simulations. These post's (here and here) on concepts examined by others have sparked some thoughts.

I enjoy making simple models in excel (on occasion I also use mathcad & mathematica but it's rare) for engineering work and financial modeling. I enjoyed using the commercial simulations offered to us in mba school, and sometimes work with HEC-RAS while dabbling with HEC-HMS, Arcview and AutoCAD Civil 3D.

This is a thesis that I am exploring here at SWC. (Since that post I am presently defining War as being composed of various TTP, or warfare types, i.e. Conventional warfare, COIN warfare, etc. and have not changed my views that the nature of war is constant throughout these TTP).

The Jan/Feb 2010 edition of the Atlantic discusses military simulations in the article SimCity Baghdad by Brian Mockenhaupt.

Lieutenant Colonels Matthew Moore and Kevin Mindak repaired the airport, the bus terminal, and the water-treatment plant. They silenced three insurgent groups and won the support of many in Al-Hamra’. But the mayor, Anwar Sadiq, still spoke out against the U.S. Army battalion stationed in his town.

Steve

[Wargames Mark]

These might be of interest:

UrbanSim

Deep Green

I have been thinking about doing something very similar to the UrbanSim concept, but as a commercial product, and reflecting my own particular view of network defeat.

With regard to the Deep Green concept, anyone interested in it might also be interested in the subject of genetic algorithms (also, see the Robby the Robot examples on the net, such as this one. Read about GAs recently in Complexity: A Guided Tour).

[Rex Brynen]

These might be of interest:

UrbanSim

You'll also find some discussion of UrbanSim, as well as links to some additional material on it, here.

[Wargames Mark]

You'll also find some discussion of UrbanSim, as well as links to some additional material on it, here.

Good site you have!

[BayonetBrant]

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...

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.

Much, much more at the link

[BayonetBrant]

ah well... I should've known better

[pvebber]

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.

“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.”

Not able to proedict outcomes. Really? I'm shocked...SHOCKED!

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.

“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.”

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???

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...

Another exercise is planned this year to test the effects of adding company intelligence support teams.

3 guesses what the outcome of THAT is going to be...

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?

"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.”

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.)

How do you do that when it is part of a truely complex system that cannot be simplified without losing the salient behavioral characteristics?

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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?

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

[Ken White]

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...).

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.

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.

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.

Heh. Got that right. This will likely have even less success than 'organizing' combined arms warfare...

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...

[SWJ Blog]

Wargaming Courses of Action During Other-Than-Major Combat Operations

Entry Excerpt:



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[BayonetBrant]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...-Man-s-Warfare

PART 1 of 2

The Thinking Man's Warfare

by Rob Zacny, 16 Sep 2008 12:48
issue_167

For the past seven years in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies have fought irregular enemies who eschew traditional military confrontation in favor of asymmetric tactics. These wars have been costly, painful and, consequently, highly controversial, both within the military and among the public at large. More than most other areas of popular culture, videogames have demonstrated awareness of their historical moment, as the plethora of military shooters and dystopian plotlines can attest. But thus far, games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding.

[BayonetBrant]

Sorry - didn't mean to break the rules about posting entire articles...

[Tom Odom]

Sorry - didn't mean to break the rules about posting entire articles...

no apologies needed

[Beelzebubalicious]

I'd like to see someone game the interagency collaboration process, perhaps in a PRT like setting in Iraq. the scenario - you are assigned to lead/manage a PRT in Iraq and here's your team, AOR and objective - Get 'er done!

[CR6]

That would be a complex wargame with a lot of competing agendas. A lot more than a binary action, reaction, counteraction.

[SWJ Blog]

Six Rules for Wargaming: The Lessons of Millennium Challenge ’02

Entry Excerpt:



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[Rex Brynen]

In an effort to explore the benefits of bringing wargaming into the classroom, the US Army War College's Strategic Simulations Department is conducting a discussion panel and game play event on 27 August, 2016, at the US Army Heritage and Education Center, in Carlisle, PA. The panel will open with discussion from academia and military institutions. Game play will follow the panel and drive home the theories covered by the panelists. The event is open to anyone, educator, gamer, and hobbyist. The event will run from 10:00 A.M until 4:00 P.M.

Further details at PAXsims.

[Rex Brynen]

I've written up a brief report on the recent "wargaming in the classroom" event at the US Army War College, and posted it at PAXsims:

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2016/0...the-classroom/

[Rex Brynen]

A report on the recent Connections UK professional wargaming conference at King's College London:

• main conference report (via PAXsims)
• Civil War in Binni (pre-conference not-so-serious megagame)
• Connections UK wargaming website (includes slides and video from conference)

While I'm at it, I might as well also point out my recent crisis simulation report for the Atlantic Council:

• Exploring US engagement in the Middle East: A crisis simulation (Atlantic Council)
• More on the game (via PAXsims)
• More on the game methodology (via PAXsims)

[SWJ Blog]

Six Rules for Wargaming: The Lessons of Millennium Challenge ’02

Read the full post and make any comments at the SWJ Blog.

[Rex Brynen]

The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst has recently reintroduced manual wargaming into the curriculum—part of a slow renaissance of manual wargaming methods at a few professional military education institutions in the UK, US, and elsewhere.

You'll find a description of their simple platoon-level game and how it is used at PAXsims: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2016/0...t-kreigsspiel/