A couple apologetically stream of concsiousness thoughts on this topic:

First on the DoD M&S conference last week.

The conference is young - I think this is the 2nd one, and the Army pretty much refused to play, but its still starting to pick up momentum. It had a good "serious games" related showing. Jon Compton and Joe Miranda of MCSG; Joe in his Hexagon Interactive hat with Cyberwar XXI and a derivative, and Doug Whatley and Walt Cheeks from Breakaway Ltd, John Tiller, and others were there. Shaun Wallace was at the DoD M&S conference last week in the demo room with CCM and other things - they have a lot great things in the works for it.

The old Air Force CADRE 'Connections' conference has been folded into it and Peter Perla of CNA, Barney Rubel, Dean of the Naval War College Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Matt Caffrey of AFRL and several other "heavy hitters" in the DoD wargaming community were there. I'm co-chair of a working group looking at educating and developing a cadre of either M&S savvy wargamers, of wargamer savvy M&S'ers or some combination...

I bring it up as a great place to meet and talk with a lot of the names you've brought up...at about 400 attendees listed in the broshure its small enough to get time to talk to folks, and but big enough to attract some "real people". It needs to grow a bit though, particularly the Connections wargaming track that topped out at about 60 all but 20 or 25 drifted off when the working groups started...

It had a very "game inclusive" feel to it - including a packed panel session on "leveraging gamaing technology" that was an excellent discussion of reasons why more and more of M&S is going to increasingly leverage aspects of gaming technology.

The sad part was the lack of participation from the Army, for what was purported to be reasons of "if there is no direct warfighter payoff the day after the conference, don't waste time on it" - a diasterous attitude that was had all but a few FCS guys (I guess well accepted not to have a pay-off to the warfighter for a while ) representing the Army.

My opinion is that the Army are not as well served by a "video-game" mentality when it comes to game technology as the more balanced approach taken by the USMC. "Wargaming" to understand the strategic, operational and tactical levels and the relationships between them are needed (the point of the leveraging of game techniques - not just technology - to provide context to broader M&S efforts). Anyway the Army seemed to want only to participate if venders showed up with Xbox 360 games to teach convoy, counter IED, and patrolling. Since there weren't - despite some significant successes with modest investment - they unfortunately passed...

BT...BT

On the original topic, tactical is great - and we need attention there, but in my mind the problem is the dearth of operational level (ie tying together strategic goals and tactical means) to really get our arms around "whats the point of winning the tactical game??"

Exploring that space is something I've been working off and on over the last few years icw some NWC efforts. The jist of a lot of complex systems stuff is that we (wargamers and those wargamers are trying to provide insight to) have some fundamental disconnects with what we expect to be true at the oparational level of war:

1) Linear, or at least analytically tractable relationships between casue and effect - the whole "metrics mania" that even Congress is getting into. Part of the snake-oil beig sold as "network-centric assement theory" applies only to 'complicated' not truley '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".

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

3) Everybody nods their head up and done and intones "Ahhhhhhh, Boyd" when we hear about the domains of war beyond the physical, but yet everytime we sit down to play or design a game we want to look at a map and units. That is a necessary, but insufficient place to play...but what does a game in the cognitive or belief domain look like? and how do you merge it with the "regular wargame" to get something insightful out and not just a mismash of conflicting outputs when you "twiddle the dials"? We need to make about 20 clones of Joe Miranda's brain to get at this...

4) My personal hobby horse - how do you implement realistic C2 in such a game, if you every figgered it out? A ton has been done in C2 theory by folks like those at www.DoDCCRP.org and AIAA, but most of it is not amenable to inclusion in a game format. Is the answer "surrogate organizations" - guinea pig groups to experiment with? Thats been tried in several experiments at Navy Fleet commands, but we keep re-recording the same lessons.

While the tactical level needs a ton of work, there is little if anything going on at the operational level beyond a few things like CyberwarXXI a few rudimentary board games to get at these issues. I'm trying to help some of the wargaming dept folks a NWC with these issues, but we are just scratching the surface...

I've run out of steam - but hopefully there is some food for discussion in there...