Sources in PrintExpand All
- Michael Vlahos. “Wargaming, an Enforcer of Strategic Realism: 1919-1942” Naval War College Review, March-April 1986, pp 7-22.
- In a period of just over 20 years, the Naval War College gamers went from relatively unrealistic assessments of what might happen in a US-Japanese war in the Pacific to a fairly accurate assessment of what the US Navy and the other US services would have to do if they were to defeat the Japanese Empire.
- Peter deLeon. Scenario Designs: An Overview. RAND, Santa Monica, CA, June 1973
- Although dated, this RAND report contains advice on scenario design for political-military or military war games. Chapter IV on “Scenario Composition” in particular has advice on developing scenarios appropriate to the issues at hand.
- Peter Perla and Raymond Barrett. Wargaming and Its Uses, Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, VA, 1984
- This paper is a summary based on the authors’ involvement with war gaming at the Naval War College in the early 1980s — war gaming that was innovative for its time and had a considerable impact on the US Navy, the other US services, and American allies.
- The authors take the view that: “A wargame is, at heart, an exercise in human interaction, and the interplay of human decisions…”. They also make the point that: “The fourth element of a wargame [of the six they propose] is a set of models, usually mathematical expressions, which translate data and decisions into game events. Models must be flexible enough to deal with unforeseen player decisions”. For some seminar war games an umpire or controller will resolve event interactions (particularly when the interactions are complex and no suitable model is available). It is appropriate to note that from the Kriegsspiel idea the German war games split into “rigid” and “free” Kriegsspiel with “free Kriegsspiel” having similarity to seminar war games for the discretion which is allowed to an umpire or control staff in deciding outcomes. For resolving other event interactions, e.g., the time required to unload an amphibious ship or the results of a combat engagement, reliable models may be available; there may even exist well-respected computer code that can quickly give accurate results.
- Perla and Barrett characterize war games as “either seminar games or system games”. They go on: “In a seminar game (typically an open game), opposing players discuss the sequence of moves and countermoves they are likely to make in a given situation, arriving at a mutually reasonable assessment of what interactions are likely to occur. The control team assesses the results of those interactions and reports back to the players. The process is repeated for each of the “moves” in the game. Usually seminar games use moves of various lengths of real time (time steps) and so tend to resolve different periods of the war at different levels of detail.”
- Peter Perla and Raymond Barrett. “What Wargaming Is and Is Not” Naval War College Review, September-October 1985, pp. 70-78
- Perla and Barrett provide a comparison of gaming, campaign analysis, and systems analysis. At that time, campaign analysis was heavily based on attrition models and gaming provided a means to investigate the human dimension of military operations in a way that allowed players to have more impact on decision outcomes.
- Peter Perla and Darryl Branting. Wargames, Exercises, and Analysis. Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, VA, 1986
- Perla and Branting compare exercises with war gaming: “Exercises usually focus on training, with research interests largely centered on measuring operational capability. War games have also been used traditionally as training aids, but have become more and more popular as tools for exploring decision processes.” Then they compare analysis with wargaming: “Wargaming, on the other hand, is a tool for exploring the effects of human interpretation of information. Wargames focus on the decisions players make, how and why they are made, and the effects that they have.”
- Peter Perla. “War Games, Analyses, and Exercises” Naval War College Review, Spring 1987, pp. 44-52
- This article provides wider public access to a previous publication from the Center for Naval Analyses on the topic. Perla provides a taxonomy if three ways that the Navy evaluates its combat capabilities: (1) war games, (2) systems or operations analyses, and (3) exercises. In a detailed comparison between war gaming and analysis, he points out the many similarities, but particularly elaborates on the ability of war games to ‘allow for the continual adjustments of strategies and tactics by both sides in response to developing results and events not seen in campaign analysis’.
- Thomas B. Allen, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III Today, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1987
- This book has an element of conspiracy theory behind it: the author returns over and over to the theme of: What scenarios are gamed in the secret depths of the Pentagon? Why are the scenarios and results not shared with the public?
- James F. Dunnigan, How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare, rev. ed., William Morrow, New York, 1988 (Now available in a third edition.)
- Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1990
- This remains an essential reference in the study of war games. It represented Perla’s synthesis of many articles of the previous decade that he had authored or co-authored.
- Peter Schwartz. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future. Doubleday Paperback, April 1996
- Schwartz singles out Herman Kahn and his “thinking about the unthinkable” which started with Kahn using scenario building for the US Air Force in the early Cold War (when at the RAND Corporation). The book describes a method of using scenario building to foster institutional learning and to assist long-range planning. The author has experience in using this method with major corporations (notably Royal Dutch Shell) as a way of encouraging leaders to see beyond the limits of their own perspectives, biases, assumptions and expectations. The book constitutes a handbook on the process of scenario planning, with a road map included. His approach consists of the following:
- Define a common question
- Reflect on individual biases and assumptions
- Engage in broad and creative research
- Think critically about the most important factors and driving forces
- Act out the implications of decisions in multiple futures
- Develop a shared analysis and plan of action that is “sound for all plausible futures”
- The book has appendices with a step-by-step guide to developing scenarios and a user’s guide for incorporating scenario building into “strategic conversations”. Schwartz is a co-founder of GBN Global Business Network (now part of Deloitte), a company that continued to develop scenarios for the business community. The Ralston and Wilson book is more recent than Schwartz’s book and structured even more in the format of a handbook. The Kees van der Heijden book covers similar ground and is a more recent view of scenario building by Royal Dutch Shell.
- James F. Dunnigan, Wargames Handbook: How to Play and Design Commercial and Professional Wargames, 3rd ed., Writers Club Press, San Jose, CA, 2000
- John F. Schmitt. A Practical Guide for Developing and Writing Military Concepts. Hicks & Associates, Inc., McLean, VA, December 2002
- The author is a former captain in the US Marines who became a doctrine writer and concept developer. He subsequently produced this handy guide on developing military concepts. While targeted for readers with a similar background — service personnel assigned to a concepts or future-thinking team — the contents are valuable to all engaged in developing, proposing, testing, and promoting future military concepts. In the context of seminar war games, this guide covers what is necessary in concept development to get to the start of the war gaming process, which is covered in the epilogue, along with a spectrum of other methods used to develop and validate a concept.
- TRADOC Analysis Center. Constraints, Limitations, and Assumptions Guide. TRADOC Analysis Center, 255 Sedgwick Avenue, Fort Leavenworth, KS, May 2005
- This guide provides analysts with advice on maintaining a list of constraints, limitations and assumptions (CLA) within a study. While not intended specifically for seminar war games, the guide remains of value for those preparing to use seminar war games for any analytic study. Ultimately the results of the study will depend on CLA associated. It is best to maintain a list as a “living document” as CLA can emerge unexpectedly and should be recorded as they become apparent. (This is available as a PDF at the Sakai site for OA 4604.)
- Bill Ralston and Ian Wilson. The Scenario Planning Handbook: Developing Strategies in Uncertain Times. Thompson, Mason, Ohio, 2006
- This book opens with an introduction on using scenarios of the future to develop strategic plans in the corporate world. While not intended for those who plan and execute seminar war games in a largely military setting, there is still a lot of valuable advice for those who do. As the title suggests, the authors provide a series of steps (18 in all) that go from developing a case with clients, customers, or sponsors on scenario-based thinking through to communicating the results once scenarios been developed and the consequences studied. The book is not about war gaming, so has little to say about how to arrange that aspect. However Step 15 is for “rehearsing the future with scenarios”, and has advice on how to engage a team in playing decision-making roles where they have to delve into the scenarios developed in earlier steps and consider the consequence. Since scenario-based thinking (and this book) is more about developing scenarios and since the book is for those working largely in a business setting, the procedures of Step 15 are hardly adequate for planning and executing a seminar war game in the context of military conflict.
- The book includes handy appendices with checklists on running workshops — valuable for any brainstorming workshop, not just those related to scenario development.
- Kees van der Heijden. Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. 2nd ed. Wiley, Chichester, UK, 2005
- The author was also associated with the successes at Royal Dutch/Shell in scenario-based thinking. His book is a worthy companion to the Ralston and Wilson book. However, this book is a bit less of a handbook. Nevertheless it well-structured to teach scenario-based thinking. Operational research analysts will find Chapter 9 “The Practitioner’s Art” valuable for its advice, inter alia, on interviewing, running a SWOT workshop, and eliciting feedback in other forms. Chapter 12 on “Scenario Development” provides excellent advice on the topic (with recipe-like clarity) and includes using influence diagrams for the alternate reality that will ultimately be captured in the scenarios.
- Peter P. Perla, “So a wargamer and a black swan walk into a bar…” in Phalanx, Military Operations Research Society, Vol. 41, No. 4, Dec. 2008
- Perla’s article provides background from his talk to a MORS workshop on “Wargaming and the Analyst”. While the text accompanying the original presentation provides a glimpse of Perla’s thinking, this article provides a more complete development of his points. One of his points, with the provocative use of ‘black swan’, is to point out that much of the campaign analysis he has seen is based on the most expected outcomes. Thus ‘black swan’ outcomes, unexpected results, must be addressed in some other manner — Perla proposes war gaming to deal with this.
- Mark Herman, Mark Frost, Robert Kurz, Wargaming for Leaders: Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009
- The authors have all been associated with seminar war games that Booz Allen Hamilton developed and conducted for US military commands. The book briefly covers some of these, including DESERT CROSSING done in 1999 for Gen Zinni when he was CINC CENTCOM. The authors reveal little of the mechanisms their company’s consultants have used to develop and conduct seminar war games. They provide compelling arguments that seminar war games have been valuable in military decision making in the past and are growing increasingly valuable in contributions to developing strategies in the business world.
- Andrew Krepinevich. 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century. Bantam, 2009
- Krepinevich asserts that “Scenarios can help Pentagon planners confront difficult questions that the secretary of defense poses to them”. To assist, he proposes seven scenarios he has crafted to take them “out of their comfort zone”. He does not claim his book will inoculate DoD planners against all surprises: “Does this [that the seven scenarios cannot cover every eventuality] mean that the United States may still find itself surprised? Yes, but properly done, a scenario-planning process will reduce the likelihood of its being caught totally unawares.”
- Joint Chiefs of Staff, Force Structure, Resources, and Assessments Directorate (J-8). Capabilities-Based Assessment (CBA) User’s Guide Version 3. Department of Defense, Washington, DC, March 2009.
- This is a practical guide for military desk officers working on future concepts and deals with assessments of potential concepts. For example, section 2.6 deals with sources of expertise for assessment, from the leading “action officer” who typically has considerable experience from a specialization within military operations, through all of the supporting expertise that needs to be available, from doctrine specialists, to analysts, and on to cost estimators. This check list of necessary expertise is just as applicable to a seminar war-gaming project, which can be a component of an assessment study. Thus the steps in the user’s guide provide a valuable and practical road map to conducting studies by applying seminar war-game techniques. War games are mentioned frequently as one of many methods that can and should be used in assessments, with an operator’s view on the merits of these diverse methods, and their costs.
- Peter Perla and Michael Markowitz. Conversations with Wargamers. Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, VA, January 2009
- As preparation for a report to the Naval War College on the future of its gaming procedures, the authors interviewed a number experts and practitioners in multi-level seminar war games. Participants ranged from those in the private sector through academia to the four military services — army, navy, marines, and air force. This report is a summary of those interviews. Since this report was largely a transcript of interviews, the contradictions and different perspectives between experts is evident along with significant points of agreement.
- Peter Perla and Michael Markowitz. Wargaming Strategic Linkage. Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, VA, January 2009
- This report constitutes advice to the Naval War College on its future Title X games (predominantly the Global War Game series). The scale of these games is at the extreme of seminar war game applications, with hundreds of players representing tactical, operational and strategic levels simultaneously — typical seminar war games have tens of players working at either the tactical or the operational or the inoculate level.
- The authors call previous activity like a Global War Game of the 1980s an early 1990s ‘a melded seminar game’. In this report they provide the term ‘multi-level war game’ for games we are likely to see in the future at NWC. In large-scale seminar war games, the controller functions are divided between a Game Director and his principal supporters (a Director of Assessment and a Director of Adjudication), and these may have large staffs in their own right. While seminar games on a smaller scale may not have the luxury of such a robust control staff, it is well to keep the functions intellectually isolated to ensure each role is properly addressed.
- Another notion that can be adopted in seminar gaming at all levels is ‘a hybrid process of closed planning and open adjudication’ (a term the authors attribute to gamers at Quantico). This means that player sides are sequestered from each other for planning activity but meet for ‘an open adjudication process’. This is to retain critical aspects of ‘surprise and uncertainty’, fundamental characteristics of most military operations.
- The US Army and the Army War College — Seminar War Games for Education and Professional Development