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Validity and Utility of Wargaming

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Validity and Utility of Wargaming Validity and Utility of Wargaming December 10th, 2017 (updated April 2018) MORS Wargaming Special Meeting October 2017 Working Group 2 Stephen Downes-Martin (Working Group Chair) Michael Anderson, Gil Cardona, Thomas Choinski, Rebecca Dougharty, John Hanley, Frederick Hartman, John Lillard, Roger Meade, Keith Morris, Peter Perla, Merle Robinson, Vincent Schmidt, Gary Schnurrpusch, Bill Simpson, Eugene Visco, Timothy Wilkie Any errors, misrepresentation or misinterpretation in this document of the data produced by the Working Group are the sole responsibility of Stephen Downes-Martin. The authors maintain joint rights to the contents of this document, except for specific sections written by individuals and so marked to which sole rights belong to the specific authors. This Page Deliberately Blank Contents – Validity and Utility of Wargaming Executive Summary ................................................................................................................... 1 Mission and Objectives ............................................................................................................. 3 Process ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Working Group Members ......................................................................................................... 7 Characteristics of Benign and Malign Games ........................................................................... 9 Team A: Benign Games .................................................................................................................................... 10 Characteristics of Benign Games................................................................................................................. 10 Barriers to including benign characteristics ................................................................................................ 13 Team B: Malign Games .................................................................................................................................... 16 Characteristics of Malign Games................................................................................................................. 16 Mitigation of malign characteristics............................................................................................................ 19 Summary Conclusions ...................................................................................................................................... 22 Working Group Papers on Validity and Utility of Wargaming ................................................ 23 Gil Cardona “Thoughts on Wargaming Validity and Utility” ............................................................................ 25 Thomas Choinski “Wargaming, Innovation and the Motivation to Take Action” ............................................ 27 Stephen Downes-Martin “Validity and Utility of Wargames” ......................................................................... 29 John Hanley “Validity and Utility of Pseudo-Experimentation Using War Games and Combat/Campaign Simulation” .............................................................................................................................. 31 Frederick Hartman “Validity and Utility of Wargames” ................................................................................... 51 John Lillard “Thoughts on Malign Wargaming” ............................................................................................... 53 Roger Meade “Wargaming Validity and Utility” .............................................................................................. 55 Peter Perla “Thoughts on Wargame Validity” ................................................................................................. 57 Merle S. Robinson “Ensuring the Validity and Utility of Wargames” .............................................................. 63 Vincent Schmidt “Scientific Perspective of Validity and Utility of Wargaming” .............................................. 67 Gary Schnurrpusch “Thoughts on Wargame Validity and Utility” ................................................................... 69 Bill Simpson “Validity and Utility of Wargaming” ............................................................................................ 73 Gene Visco “Final Thoughts on Malevolence, Malfeasance and Misfeasance in Wargaming” ....................... 77 Appendix: Working Group Bios ............................................................................................... 79 Appendix: Read-Aheads for Working Group Participants ...................................................... 87 This Page Deliberately Blank Validity and Utility of Wargaming Executive Summary Working Group Definitions used during Meeting – These are necessary but insufficient: Validity Utility (can be negative) Sponsor’s objectives are suitable for gaming Wargame is accepted as valid by Sponsor. and drive game design. Stakeholders act on information from the Wargame is played according to the design. wargame in a way that has an observable Forensics and reporting is honest and effect on national security. complete. Participants gain value. Key Takeaways Examining benign gaming provides best practices and lessons learned. However, every phase of wargaming, from initial contact between game sponsor and wargaming organization, is vulnerable to malign deception. At best malign deception is driven by the good intentions of influencers believing they are right and that anything that might contradict them must be avoided. At worst it is driven by careerism, corruption and hostility to other military communities and services. Examining malign gaming provides additional wargaming principles dealing with conflict of interest, intellectual fraud, self-deception, political imperatives and outright careerism. Malign games actively exploit the environment of time crunch, career pressure, resource constraints and the beliefs and opinions of sponsors, stakeholders and players, while poorly designed and executed benign games are exploited by this environment. External – Engage with the Sponsor and Stakeholders: ➢ Ensure the event is a wargame with the possibility that Blue can lose and the gamed concepts can be overcome by Red, do not call non-game events “wargames”. ➢ Recruit, not invite, senior leaders to lead game cells to execute game as designed, do not permit these leaders to derail the game in-stride to fit their non-sponsor agendas. ➢ Playtest the game with sponsor participation or with sponsor’s empowered action officers to ensure sponsor is paying proper attention to objectives and design. ➢ Immerse the players in the scenario and play. Include the sponsor and key stakeholders as Red players. Do not let the sponsor or key stakeholders play Blue or be Adjudicators. Internal – Work within the Wargame Organization and its Chain of Command: ➢ Engage and use an empowered Independent Peer Review Board to examine objectives, assumptions, scenario and capabilities data, design, game play, adjudication, data collection and analysis. ➢ Minimize cognitive dissonance in the mind of the sponsor by ensuring wargame design and play is as consistent as possible with their preconceptions, while not allowing these preconceptions to drive objectives, design, game play, analysis or reporting. ➢ Conduct wargame forensics and reporting to provide actionable recommendations. ➢ Report ruthlessly and honestly, unencumbered by sponsor or stakeholder wishful thinking. 1 Validity and Utility of Wargaming This Page Deliberately Blank 2 Validity and Utility of Wargaming Mission and Objectives 1. Produce a corpus for the wargaming community of theory and practice which identifies: ➢ characteristics of valid wargames that have utility for DoD decision makers, and ➢ barriers to the inclusion of these beneficial characteristics into wargames. 2. and, in addition, identifies: ➢ characteristics of malign wargames that deceive DoD decision makers, and ➢ mitigations of these malign characteristics from ill-intentioned wargames. The hypothesis for this second pair of items is that the opposite of a “valid and useful wargame” is not an “invalid and not useful wargame”, it is “a wargame that appears valid and deceives the decision maker into making poor decisions based on the game”. Looking at valid and useful games gives us characteristics to seek and behaviors that interfere with those characteristics to avoid, i.e. best practices and lessons learned. By looking at wargames that are deliberately designed to be malign (deceptive) we may identify additional characteristics to explicitly avoid in wargame design that are not obvious from looking at a list of characteristics to seek.1 Furthermore, in nearly all cases of scientific fraud, three risk factors have been identified as present: 1. the perpetrators “knew, or thought they knew, what the answer to the problem they were considering would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly; 2. were under career pressure; and 3. were working in a field where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible.”2 These risk factors are clearly present in both wargames and the decision making that the wargames inform, to claim otherwise is to deny human nature and the purpose of the various existing DoD auditor agencies and activities. Note however that the presence of risk factors indicates the need
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