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  • Perla’s presentation on “Wargaming and Analysis” to the Military Operations Research Society‘s Special Meeting, Oct 2008
    • More than twenty years before this presentation, Peter Perla published “What Wargaming Is and Is Not” (written with Raymond Barrett) where he said “First and foremost wargaming is not analysis in the usual sense of rigorous quantitative dissection of a problem.”  So why was he invited to talk to analysts on “Wargaming and Analysis”? Perla restates his position from 1985 and segregates game designers into three categories: “analyst”, “artist”, and “architect”. The delineation is instructive, although he acknowledges: “Most actual designs incorporate elements of all three approaches.” Perla claims that designers who live only in the “analyst” community are now in retreat, with those incorporating ideas from the other two communities in the ascendency. Text to accompany Perla’s presentation was published in MORS Phalanx magazine (Dec 2008); it provides a deeper understanding and a more nuanced characterization of his points.
  • James F. Dunnigan, Wargames Handbook: How to Play, Design, and Find Them, 2nd ed., HarperCollins, New York, 1992
    • This is the complete text of the second edition that has been made available on the Web. A third edition has been published (see below). The book acknowledges recent advances in computer-based gaming, but it seems like the author’s heart is still in a dingy basement in Manhattan when civilian fans of board gaming felt they could take on the big guys of professional war gaming, like the US Army, and win. Well, they did! But time has passed and computer-supported games of following generations are more than simply the old rules and maps transferred to computers (as Dunnigan reckoned they would be).
    • However, this book is still relevant to game designers for its coverage of issues like roles within a game-designing team and the production cycle to get a game design out to its audience (have you considered the need for quality control in game production? Dunnigan was doing that in the early 1970’s.)
  • US Air Force Schriever Wargame 2010
    • An issue of US Air Force Space Command’s High Frontier magazine was devoted to the Schriever Wargame 2010 (the sixth in the series). The various articles cover the activity from many perspectives: the Commander’s, civilian political leaders’, USAF scientists’, and allies’. The main topics within the games were highly technical — the space and cyber domains — but the focus of the games was to have leaders debate the consequences and other issues though a dialectic approach that would be familiar to the ancient Greeks — it was largely the Socratic Method. The senior participants discussed the impacts of future technologies from the space and cyber realms, and also the implications back on the military of greater engagement of civilians in these areas. The Air Force’s Chief Scientist and his staff found support for various technical initiatives, such as an increasing need for systems that exhibit “cyber resilience”.
  • Caffery on War Gaming Doctrine
    • Lt Col Caffery opens with his views on distinguishing between modelling, simulation, and war gaming. Most of the article is a concise history of the various eras of using game-based methods to develop a stronger understanding of military issues of the day, and to develop doctrines that are relevant and effective for their time. He goes back as far as the origins of games like chess and go for some historical context, but he focuses on a century and a half of development and application that started with the Prussian military schools using Kriegsspiel in the mid-1800s.
  • Air Force Gateway for “Wargames, Simulations, & Exercises”
    • This web page provides numerous further links to pursue.
  • Chief of Naval Operations’ Guidance for 2011
    • This public statement from the Navy’s top leader includes many points on war gaming as an important method in achieving institutional goals of the US Navy. The document gives guidance for a wide spectrum of issues to ensure the relevance of the Navy, so war gaming is only a small part of his guidance, but a vital one.
  • NATO Land Operations 2020
    • In 1996 a NATO study was launched to consider technologies and their applications in land operations circa 2020. As the study proceeded a long list of candidate technologies was winnowed down in what was called the CRITECH exercise (for critical technologies). CRITECH started with 142 technologies and culled this to a list first of 63 technologies and then to 34 technologies. For a subsequent technology seminar war game 12 concept systems were constructed from the CRITECH results. Chapter 6 of the study report provides a summary of the technology seminar war game method as it was applied. The same wargaming methods were later applied to a NATO study of urban operations.
  • NATO Urban Operations 2020
    • Following NATO’s Land Operations 2020 study, a follow-on study was commissioned to investigate specifics of urban terrain and highly populated areas in the same epoch — the NATO Urban Operations 2020 study. Annex D covers the application of a seminar war game, and it followed fairly closely the application in the earlier Land Operations 2020 study.
  • Parameters  1998 “Learning from Wargames: A Status Report” by Robert B. Killebrew
    • This article is valuable from a historical perspective. During his tenure as Army Chief of Staff, General Dennis Reimer initiated seminar war gaming by Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)to “conduct broad studies of warfare to about the year 2025 to frame issues vital to the development of the Army after about 2010”. The series is now called Unified Quest and continues to engage the Army’s leaders in thinking about its future, linked jointly to other military services and to allies as well.
  • Parameters 1998 Gaming the “System of Systems” by Robert P. Haffa, Jr. and James H. Patton, Jr.
    • This article focuses on efforts to shape the US’s military forces through “the conduct of simulated conflicts, or wargames, in the laboratories of the nation’s think tanks and war colleges”. It provides a valuable historical perspective dating back to the early twentieth century, and leading into General Reimer’s instigation of a new round of war gaming to consider the shape of US Army of the future. Acknowledging that it would be unrealistic for a series of war games to determine “a precise estimate of requirements”, the authors propose that “the goal is to describe a range of capabilities that joint and combined forces will bring to operations in the first decades of the next century”.
  • Parameters 1999 “The Need for Joint Wargaming: Combining Theory and Practice” by Robert P. Haffa, Jr. and James H. Patton, Jr.
    • The authors start with: “Wargaming is an established and time-honored mechanism through which proposed defense concepts, doctrine, and tactics are explored, and there is a rich literature that describes its uses and applications.” But they observe that towards the end of the 20th century “single-service wargames find it easy to avoid the tough choices likely to be generated in a joint environment”. They highlight several technologies that should be studied in a joint context lest a single-service perspective deem them low priorities for that service: “stealth, long-range precision strike, reduced logistic footprints, and command and control”. In the intervening decade all have emerged as vital in the joint context.
  • Parameters 2001 “Winning and Losing” by Robert P. Haffa, Jr. and James H. Patton, Jr.
    • The authors review Title X war games as played by the Navy, Army, and Air Force at the turn of the century (2001). “The mechanics of the games, each typically involving hundreds of military and civilian professionals, are quite similar, positing a future conflict between the armed forces of the United States (occasionally assisted by allies) and a capable, although not necessarily symmetric, adversary.” The authors are cautious about the use of computer support in such activities: “The temptation to trust the ‘fast, accurate, but dumb’ computer, unquestioned by ‘slow, sloppy, but brilliant’ humans, is one of the greatest hazards for war gamers… Describing most large wargames as ‘model-aided’ is therefore more accurate than terming them ‘computer-driven.'” The authors dwell at some length on how each of the Title X games of that era had ‘a decidedly single-service orientation’ (a point they pursued in a previous article). In the intervening decade determining outcomes in Title X games continues to be ‘model-aided’ (no single computer program has emerged with an ability to adjudicate results), but their nature has tended more towards joint operations, which must allow the authors some satisfaction.
  • Wikipedia on Millennium Challenge 2002
    • This brief entry provides the context of Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, “likely the largest such exercise in history”. As with the whole Millennium Challenge series, the activity in 2002 was intended to illuminate the impending transformation of US military capability.
  • Van Riper and Millennium Challenge 2002
    • Lt Gen Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret’d), started JFCOM’s Millennium Challenge experiment of 2002 as the Red Commander. During the play of the seminar war game he resigned his position in protest over not being permitted to exercise “free play” — at this point in the game many major surface combatants in the US fleet that he had sunk or crippled had been “re-floated” by the game’s umpire. The controversy that followed Van Riper’s resignation contributed to the perpetual debate on just how much (or how little) player creativity should be constrained or allowed within a war game.
  • Canadian Army Experimental Force Exfor 01
    • Under the leadership of MGen Mike Ward, a Canadian Army team conducted seminar war gaming on concepts for the future army operating in open terrain. The intent was to compare and contrast two force structures (EXFOR A and EXFOR B) through war gaming them in a scenario set in 2020.
  • Canadian Army Experimental Force Exfor 02
    • A second seminar war game for the Canadian Army investigated future army concepts applied to urban terrain. In this case there were three force structures played in three simultaneous war games. The benchmark for comparisons was EXFOR C, a slightly modernized version of Canada’s existing Main Contingency Force. EXFOR A and EXFOR B were redesigned for the era (2025), one evolutionary and the other revolutionary.
  • Canada’s Army of Tomorrow
    • In 2006 the Canadian Forces conducted seminar war games on the Army of Tomorrow, a force for circa 2020. Below are links to a handbook prepared for the participants, a primer of background information they could use as reference material, and the proceedings. As a package this trilogy provides prototype documentation how a war game has been planned and executed.
      • Handbook for Army of Tomorrow Seminar War Gaming. In advance of the seminar war game, this document was widely distributed to prepare participants and to apprise others of what was about to transpire. It provides a useful paradigm of the sort of preparatory document that should precede most seminar war games.
      • Proceedings of the Army of Tomorrow Seminar Wargame. Following the war gaming activity, this document was distributed to all concerned. In one package it contains a recapitulation of much of the preparatory material, e.g., rules, scenarios, and force structures. Like the others in this trilogy, it provides a format for communicating the results of a seminar war game.
  • Dunnigan’s Wargames Handbook (2nd ed.)
    • The full text of the second edition of this useful Dunnigan handbook is on line. The text has been superseded by a third edition. All three editions focus on the board games techniques that were popular in 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. While Dunnigan discusses aspects of computer-based wargames, the second edition sees this as largely a way to automate the algorithms of the board games. The third edition (published in 2000) is out-of-date about computer-based gaming, and is little better than the second edition since the text in two chapters on computer wargames has hardly changed.
  • Gen Zenni’s DESERT CROSSING Exercise
    • When Commander-in-Chief of CENTCOM (1999), Gen Zinni commissioned a war game on Iraq that would address a period following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Declassified material on DESERT CROSSING shows how the scenarios were developed, participants chosen, and the seminar war game conducted. The after action report is particularly illuminating. Redacted emails from the preparation phase illustrate some of the issues that were discussed amongst Zinni’s staff, such as criteria for choosing who should participate in war games and what roles they should be assigned.
  • OR/MS Today – The OR Society Newsletter
    • In an article from the OR society newsletter Douglas Samuelson remarks on recent publications on the use of gaming to develop strategy, including a mention of Gen Zinni’s DESERT CROSSING exercise. The author poses a relevant question about seminar war game methods: “Is There O.R. Inside?”
    • John Mingers, a noted British OR practitioner, takes his American colleagues to task for largely ignoring soft OR methods. He outlines impediments he perceives within the structure of the American OR community that seem to draw OR practitioners towards using quantitative methods, even while more “qualitative” or “judgement-based” approaches might suit the problem at hand. While not specifically mentioned in the article, seminar war games should be classified as a soft OR method, albeit with some aspects of math-physics in areas like resolving combat outcomes. The methods that Mingers describes can be valuable in the problem structuring that accompanies preparing for a seminar war game, brainstorming in the middle of a seminar war game, and addressing of the results. Minger’s list of references is available to those who may wish to explore further.
  • Perspective of the Headquarters US Air Force
    • Lt Col Peter Garretson provides a recent briefing (2008) that covers views on the future of war gaming from the perspective of HQ USAF. He playfully charactertizes findings from gaming by four visceral responses: “A-Ha”, “U-Oh”, “Ooops”, and “Hmmm”. He pejoratively characterizes the current US military communities’ Title X wargames as BOGSAT (bunch of guys sitting around a table) and clearly aspires to see the USAF do better.
  • Council on Foreign Relations, MSNBC, and Wargame: Iraq 2002
    • CFR and MSNBC collaborated to develop a hypothetical situation intended to show Americans what could unfold if the US were to invade Iraq. A transcript is available.
  • Steven Metz. Which Army After Next? The Strategic Implications of Alternative Futures.
    • Metz wrote this article in 1997 when the Army After Next (AAN) was the focus of the US Army’s Title X war games. Here he uses four “alternate futures” to encourage thinking about where the Army will be in 2020. In many respects it is a military counterpart to the scenario-based thinking from authors in the business world like Schwartz, Ralston and Wilson, and van der Heijden.
  • Engle Matrix Game
    • Chris Engle focuses on “storytelling games”. While his approach may initially seem juvenile, he highlights some important aspects of seminar war games — that they could be used to tell stories of military operations, historical or fictional. “The Engle Matrix Game is a simple low tech game engine for running a wide variety of games.” More on matrix games is available from the hobby gaming community, notably Wargame Developments.
  • Antony Zegers, Matrix Game Methodology: Support to V2010 Olympic Marine Security Planners. Centre for Operational Research and Analysis, Ottawa, 2011
    • The report has a very detailed description of seminar war gaming for a domestic security issue, planning for the Olympic Winter Games in 2010. A presentation to accompany the report is available. These games were used to draw together agencies with diverse cultures by “helping the marine security agencies organize their planning, and uncover gaps and issues in their plans, and to gain mutual understanding of their respective capabilities and mandates”. The author points out some serious application of matrix gaming that were derived from the Engle Matrix Game.
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