MORS 2024 Wargaming Workshop

Wargaming in the Eastern Pacific

The Military Operations Research Society (MORS) once again held its annual wargaming workshop in the Pacific theater, this time in San Diego, California. Here is the short version of the conference notes. A longer form will appear in the next Phalanx. (Disclaimer, I was both the conference chair and wrote this summary.)

From 27 February to 1 March 2024 professional game designers and interested academics met in San Diego, California at the downtown Kimpton Alma hotel to discuss professional gaming, and how it applies to the eastern Pacific area of interest.   Focusing on the eastern Pacific meant that we included missions such as homeland security and homeland defense.  The conference covered a wide range of topics from theory of professional games to how the profession relates to the hobby industry.  Like its predecessor last year in Hawaii, the small conference produced a setting where a lot of in-depth conversations could happen.  The schedule was structured to facilitate this, with the conference moving between learning, discussing, and doing (playing) professional games.  The three-day unclassified conference was followed by a day of classified sessions hosted by NIWC Pacific.

The highlight of the conference was a panel on “Use of Games and Fleet Problems in the Navy’s Campaign of Learning” featuring VADM Michael Boyle, Commander Third Fleet, Dr. Ann Rondeau, (VADM, Ret.), President of the Naval Postgraduate School, and Capt. Michael O’Hara, Chair, War Gaming Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, Naval War College.  The focus of the panel was on building a campaign of learning similar to what happened during the interwar years.  Third Fleet discussed his work to operationalize his command for operations in the Pacific.  This discussion was of keen interest to those in the audience tasked with developing wargames for Pacific scenarios.  Dr. Rondeau asked, “how well do we know our systems?” and suggested that complexity has to become practice as we think about future warfighting.  This includes building “surprise” into our models and analysis.  This led to a discussion of how games provide the ability to have an immersive learning experience, which builds the “habit of mind” necessary to adapt to surprising and complex situations.

Other panels discussed how we game in homeland security, including issues surrounding the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) and the National Exercise Program.  One advantage of being in the Los Angeles area was that we had access to several key hobby wargame designers, who talked on a panel devoted to how hobby games impact professional games.  Another panel brought up the interesting, controversial, and always exciting topic of classification in games, how it impacts game design and play, and how it’s represented in game designs. 

The conference also had many and varied presentations.  One of which was a talk on “We don’t game grief” by RAND analyst Mr. Sale Lilly who talked about how there are many factors that influence warfighting beyond either doctrine or technology.  Sometimes we may not want to believe these factors have the power to change operations, but if you experience them on the ground, you find out they do.  In addition to presentations, we had participation games that included PHOTON LEVER a Group-W/DTRA game looking at nuclear conflict, cyber games on hacking commercial shipping operations, games for training homeland security communications responders, and games built by the CIA.