MORS Journal of Wargaming

The Military Operations Research Society’s new Journal of Wargaming has published its first edition! You’ll find authors, articles, and abstracts below.

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WARGAME DESIGN: ADDRESSING THE TRILEMMA 

Ruby E. Booth and Andrew W. Reddie 

Policymakers often want the very best data with which to make decisions, particularly when concerned with questions of national and international security. But what happens when data are not available, or when the data are cluttered with confounds often present in realworld conflicts? In those instances, analysts have come to rely on synthetic data-generating processes, turning to modeling and simulation tools and survey experiments among other methods. In contexts where empirical data are limited, wargames are quickly becoming an important method for both exploring and analyzing competition and cooperation in an increasingly complex international context. In this work, the authors examine the design decisions associated with using analytical wargaming methods. 

UTILIZING AI IN JAPANESE DEFENSE WARGAMING AND POLICY SIMULATION: A CASE FOR AN ALLIED APPROACH TO DEALING WITH COMMON ADVERSARIES 

Hiroyasu Akutsu 

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have presented Japanese defense and security institutions responsible for manual wargaming and policy simulation with several interesting challenges and opportunities. A major benefit of AI is that it accelerates innovation in both commercial and defense industries. There are two downsides to this that must be handled to gain the benefits of AI. First are the physical, psychological, and resource stresses imposed on staff in the relevant institutions. The second challenge occurs when the speed of innovation outpaces the decision cycle time of the institutional leadership responsible for research and development investments, policy development, strategic planning, and coordinating with other government branches and allies and partners. The risk is that decisions to take advantage of AI innovations are made hurriedly and poorly or are made at the bureaucratically established schedule and fail 

to take best advantage of AI-based innovations. This article argues that Japan should first realize that both the common adversaries and security partners are trying to introduce AI and that Japan should proactively work particularly with the United States in taking advantage of the potential benefits of AI through wargaming. To do so, Japan has to properly embed wargaming within institutions and the cycle of research processes used by them. This is not easy but will improve institutional decision making and wargaming with other institutions nationally and with allies internationally, especially when Japan’s security environment has increasingly been deteriorating in the face of the rising military challenges including North Korea, China, and Russia. 

INDIVIDUALS VERSUS GROUP DECISION MAKING: SIMULATING THE REAL WORLD 

Julie George and Sarah Kreps 

Do group dynamics impact the aggregation of individual preferences and if so, in what ways? Drawing on decision theory, the authors advance hypotheses about the moderating effects of groups away from the extremes and the escalatory preferences of men versus women. To test the hypotheses, the authors develop a three-person crisis simulation game in which participants respond with degrees of escalation—no escalation, low escalation, or high escalation. Their crisis simulation included 180 participants in 60 different groups. The simulation leverages a hypothetical scenario concerning contested territory between two states. 

Overall, the authors find that both individuals and groups favor the moderate option of low escalation. However, they find that more than 13% of individuals’ preferences diverge from the group outcomes. They also find that female participants were less likely to choose aggressive strategies than their male counterparts. Furthermore, the authors observe that groups with a designated leader had more variance than those without, with greater likelihood of choosing both no escalation and high escalation than those without a designated leader. 

The authors also conduct a follow-up study with 36 participants in 12 groups with a vignette that includes more choice to investigate whether tendency toward the middle option was an artifact of their design. They find that participants still do not skew to the extremes but moderate to lower levels of escalation. 

Their analyses underscore the impact of majority rule, gender dynamics, and the moderating effect of group dynamics in the context of crisis behavior and decision making, and the aggregation of individual preferences in realworld crisis escalation scenarios. 

THE ROYAL NAVY’S FIRST WARGAMES, 1900– 1915 

Toby Ewin

This article summarizes what is known of the official wargames designed and played by Royal Navy officers before and during the First World War. It describes the origin and evolution of the Royal Navy’s wargame rules, changes reflecting both the advance of naval technology and the understanding of its use, and including the adoption of a free Kriegsspiel approach to gunnery in wartime games; the games’ prominent role in the Royal Naval War College’s pre-1914 courses (involving many officers who would see prominent war service); 

and instances of the games being played at a naval base, and in wartime in the Grand and Battlecruiser Fleets and in a cruiser squadron. It also indicates where more detailed information can be found. 

THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN AND INSIGHTS INTO MULTI-BLIND GAMING 

D. Sean Barnett 

This paper presents a large, distributed, multi-blind game of the American Civil War Gettysburg campaign to demonstrate the utility of multi-blind (closed) wargames in capturing the effects of limited information on military operations. It also demonstrates how certain details of military operations, such as logistics and communications, can be implemented in an operational game and how they can sometimes have an outsized impact on game events. The paper describes the development of the game, to include the representation of important historical Civil War military capabilities, and it summarizes the play of the game in a Gettysburg campaign. The paper aims to show that limited information has significant impacts on commander (player) decision making and that capturing those effects is important to representing military operations within a wargame. It aims to show further that even in the 21st century, with modern sensor and communications technology, commanders’access to information can still be limited and thus multi-blind wargaming remains valuable for producing useful insights into modern combat dynamics.