Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[marct]

Hi Scott,

Welcome aboard. If you can, could you toss up a bit of a "Hi, this is me" post over on this thread? Knowing some of people's backgrounds makes things much easier in an online forum ?

I'm new here, and will apologize in advance for any faux pas I might commit. After reading John's post, I got to thinking about models generated by the nature of stability and conflict, and was just wondering what everyone thought about the possibility of changing the "rules" of wargaming by changing (expanding) some of the underlying assumptions. For instance, what if stability happens on a spectrum, with the US on one end of that spectrum and a destabilized county-in-conflict on the other.

Well, I would argue that "stability" is actually a collection of different factors that are all along continua. For example, resource distribution is one factor that can be looked at as a key component of what we broadly call "stability", but that system has several parts or sub-systems - cultural (how it SHOULD be done), social (how it IS done), and infrastructural (how do they do that?). No individual nation state is perfect by any stretch of the imagination (consider health care in the US as an example....).

There have to be factors responsible for the stability of this country (although they may be hard for us to spot because we live here), that the other country is lacking. What if conflict itself were not the driver here, but was a symptom of the underlying issue. That is, what if lack of conflict is not evidence of stability.

This is going to sound a bit harsh, but the idea that stability = -conflict is, IMHO, a ridiculous ideologically driven illusion that comes from a completely insane (in the technical sense of privileging ideas over reality) view of the world in general and the concept of "stability" in particular. First off, none of the G20 are "stable" countries; we are all in moderately stable vectors of socio-cultural change, but we are not "stable". The associated idea that "stable" just means "no conflict" is also silly, since all G20 countries, which are supposedly "stable", have conflict both internally and externally. This conflict may, or may not, be what most people would call warfare, but it is there.

Could a wargame in which conflict is one outcome/phenomenon (one that requires a response) include non-military variables, such as economic factors, governance factors,etc (I have a few ideas on this but will withhold them for the sake of brevity).

Could such a wargame create a more meaningful and holistic set of variables and shorten or make more effective any military solution?

Is it still a wargame if war isn't the reason for conducting the game?

The short answer, at least IMO, is Yes to all. Most of the older wargames, both board and RPG, included so-called "non-military" factors, usually via something related to production systems. I used to spend a lot of time playing (and running and designing) these types of games, and most were not solely "military".

Were a lot of the current games fall apart is, IMHO, they rely on sets of assumptions that are just wonky. I remember sitting in a session talking about designing a COIN game where the designers admitted that their game could not allow tactics that have been around for 30 years. Most of the modern games I have seen suffer from serious cases of what Freud called "projection"; the designers, or the organizations they worked for, projected their assumptions about "reality" into the operational rules of the game. Reminded me of stories my godfather used to tell me about the British generals he had to deal with at the start of WW I who kept pushing for more cavalry!