Simulations miscellany, 15 October 2012

PAXsims is pleased to present its occasional summary of recent (and sometimes not-so-recent) simulation-related news from around the world:

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Don’t have rubber dice in your pocket when you address a military audience? Perhaps you should! Graham Longley-Brown explains why.

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The CBC’s Brian Stewart sees something significant in the growing number of Iran wargames and crisis simulations conducted by US think-tanks:

In the headlines, the possibility of war over Iran’s nuclear program flares up and then fades, hot one week, cool the next. But behind the scenes the war-gaming by global crisis experts has taken on new urgency.

These strategy-and-tactics simulations, which can be found over much of the think-tank universe these days, are much about war, but certainly no game.

Their objective, using all available data and intelligence, is to analyze in advance what’s likely to happen should Iran cross Israel’s so-called red line, the point where it is felt to be only a few months away from being able to build a nuclear weapon.

This means often exhausting debates over questions such as: What happens if Israel attacks Iran on its own? Or acts with U.S. air support?

What would be Iran’s reaction in either case, and would such an attack end the Iranian program, or merely steel its resolve and delay it a few years?

Then there are the questions like: How badly would the world’s economy be shaken? And what are the broader strategic implications for global politics?

You may think these are just navel-gazing exercises. But I always view these flurries of Washington war-gaming seriously because every modern U.S. war has been preceded by just such a mobilization by think tanks and foreign policy magazines setting out the prognoses of former diplomats, conflict resolution advisers and retired military commanders on any looming conflict….

Pointing to the dangers highlighted by many of these wargames, Stewart concludes by warning “we may just never game war enough, before we make it”.

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In the meantime, those interested in conducting their own US-Iran simulation in the classroom can find some helpful ideas in an article by Charity Butler on “Teaching Foreign Policy Decision-Making Processes Using Role-Playing Simulations: The Case of US–Iranian Relations” in the May 2012 issue of International Studies Perspectives:

Most undergraduate courses on foreign policy discuss important models and explanations of foreign policy decision making, such as the rational actor, organizational process and governmental politics models, and groupthink. It is often difficult for students to fully understand how to apply and use these concepts to analyze foreign policy decision-making processes. One way to encourage such analytical thinking is to have students utilize various models to explain a specific event. While this is a useful task, students often gain a greater level of comprehension when they are evaluating a decision-making process in which they have personally taken part in. As such, role-playing simulation can be a very effective tool in helping students learn to understand and, more importantly, apply these various decision-making models and explanations. This paper presents an example of how simulations can help teach these concepts by presenting specific information regarding a simulation of US–Iranian relations.

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Another article from the forthcoming special peacebuilding issue of Simulation & Gaming is now available ahead-of-print from the SAGE website (subscription required). This time it is by Roger Mason and Eric Patterson, on “Wargaming Peace Operations.”

Today’s military personnel fight against and work with a diverse variety of nonstate actors, from al-Qaeda terrorists to major nongovernmental organizations who provide vital humanitarian assistance. Furthermore, the nontraditional battle spaces where America and its allies have recently deployed (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) include a wide range of activities quite different from classic military campaign. How can the United States and its allies train its military personnel to think through the intersection of issues regarding working alongside and against nonstate actors, particularly in culturally sensitive environments? This article describes one such approach, the development of a war game for peace, designed for U.S. military officers and now utilized in the classrooms of several military colleges. More specifically, the article describes how reconstruction and stabilization operation decisions are modeled and worked through in the highly religious environment of contemporary Afghanistan through the use of an innovative board game, suggesting that this model can be applied to many other scenarios and classroom environments.

The Afghan provincial reconstruction game described in the article was previously reviewed at PAXsims here. Given the way things seem to be headed in Afghanistan, the designers may have to develop a Taliban-themed game a few years from now…

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The Guardian (8 October 2012) reports on a recent UNICEF UK emergency response simulation.

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At the blog HiLoBrow, Joshua Glenn ponders H.G. Wells and “War and Peace Games.”

Review: Lewin, War Games and their History

Book review: Christopher George Lewin, War Games and their History (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2012). 288pp. Cover price £25.00 (but available for less).

This book is, in a word, a delight. In it, Christopher Lewin reviews the development of wargaming as an activity of both soldiers preparing for battle and civilians playing at war. Lavishly illustrated, its 318 colour photographs depict military training games and public boardgames from ancient and medieval times up until the present (well sort of, as discussed below). The author’s style is highly readable in a sometimes quirky, but always engaging, manner.

The book is not, it should be emphasized, an academic treatise on the topic. It has footnotes for some sources, but not others. The author does not present a social history of military-themed gaming, nor does he much comment on the many ways in which games have reflected changing technology, economic modes of production, or the nature of warfare itself. It is not an encyclopedia of wargaming either. Grognards will be quick to note that the last four decades of boardgaming are given very sparse coverage, while miniature gaming is scarcely addressed at all. The last two decades of computer wargames also get little attention, with the few examples given, one suspects, drawn from a few titles that the author himself likes to play. Examples of modern professional wargaming are cited, but here the treatment reads as if it were put together from a few accounts found online rather than serious research. Readers wanting a more detailed and structured discussion of these areas are well advised to read Thomas Allen’s Wargames (1987), Peter Perla’s The Art of Wargaming (1990), James Dunnigan’s The Wargames Handbook (2000), Philip Sabin’s Simulating War (2012), or the many works preserved by John Curry’s impressive History of Wargaming project.

However, these shortcomings are rather beside the point if this volume is recognized for what it does offer.  War Games and their History shines is in its rich and loving description of scores of now-forgotten games played in the period from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. In most cases, photographs of the game in question are coupled with enough descriptive detail to get a solid sense of how, and by whom, it was played. There are the games glorifying the era of colonial expansion, whether it be Uncle Sam at War with Spain (1898), Siege of Havana (1898), or The Conquest of Sudan (1899). Invasion (1889) explored the threat to England by European armies via a Channel Tunnel a century before the first Eurostar pulled into St. Pancras station. Der U-Bootkrieg (1914) gave young players an early image of unrestricted submarine warfare, while the Royal Aerial War Game (1914) could be purchased at the local Boots the Chemist, and presciently envisaged aircraft and airships as strategic bombers capable of striking enemy cities. Readers of PAXsims—where we tend to focus on conflict gaming in the broadest sense—may also be interested in such gems as a World War I-era boardgame devoted to battlefield medical care (Unterm Roten Kreuz), a light-hearted 1939 card game about internally displaced persons (Vacuation, about British wartime child evacuees), or the incorporation of political-military dimensions and asymmetrical victory conditions into a 1940 naval commerce raiding game (Tactics). As these few examples suggest, even if Lewin doesn’t offer much broader or contextual analysis himself, the book certainly would serve as a very useful resource for those interested in the depiction of war in popular culture, the evolution of game mechanics, or the evolution of the boardgame industry during this period.

Amazon currently has the volume for sale for only $29, considerably less than its cover price. Given the book’s many colour illustrations (and hard covers), this seems a pretty good deal for a very enjoyable read.

Newsweek’s Iran Wargame

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the United Nations General Assembly with a cartoon bomb to highlight the dangers of Iranian nuclear enrichment. A few days later, Israeli intelligence officials noted that some Iranian Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) had been used to make nuclear fuel, making it unsuitable for weaponization. And in the media and think-tank world, the increasingly popular pastime of Israel-Iran-US crisis gaming this past week had its latest entry, in the form of Newsweek magazine’s Iran War Game.

In point of fact, the Newsweek wargame isn’t a wargame at all, since it involves only one side and no moves or countermoves by the participants. Instead, it was more of a policy options exercise, in which participants were assigned roles—in this case, as members of the National Security Council Principal’s Committee (NSC-PC). They were then presented with a scenario, and asked to assess risks, interests, and possible policy options:

As part of the war game, Newsweek convened seven former political and military officials and staged a mock meeting of the “Principals Committee”—the team the president calls on for recommendations about matters of the highest importance. Assuming the roles of Obama’s key advisers, including his chief of staff, his national security adviser, secretaries of state and defense, directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the panel was roughly analogous to the group Obama consulted before ordering the operation against Osama bin Laden last year.

Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, now at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Mideast Policy, prepared detailed briefing papers on the Israeli attack, during which Israeli strikes knocked out some facilities but left other key parts operational. The documents indicated that Israel had set back the Iranian nuclear program with its attack but hadn’t managed to destroy it. They also outlined international responses to the operations: denunciations across Europe, rocket attacks on Israel by Iran and the Lebanese Hizbullah group, and small-scale street protests around the Muslim world.

The group then heard from their simulated CIA Director, played by former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr:

Principals Committee meetings often start with assessments by intelligence directors. In ours, Kerr, as the CIA chief, predicted worse things to come: Iran would likely step up its attacks on Israel, and, viewing Washington as implicitly involved, could try indirectly to strike at American targets as well. The easiest ones might involve U.S. troops in western Afghanistan or in Iraq. In both cases Iran would likely operate through proxies, keeping its fingerprints off the operations. Kerr, who in real life helped manage the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan in 1990, said the administration should also brace for Iranian cyberattacks, another way for Tehran to lash out at Washington from behind a wall of anonymity. “They will be very cautious about a direct confrontation with the United States, but there are a number of things … they might be able to do,” he said.

In what could easily cause shock waves to the world economy, Kerr also warned about Iranian attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf. (Some 20 percent of oil traded worldwide flows from the Gulf out through the Straits of Hormuz.) “I don’t think they’ll try to close the Gulf, but they can make the Gulf a difficult place to operate in, and raise the cost for everybody,” he said.

[Former CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin, in the role of director of National Intelligence, said street protests in the Muslim world could precipitate the kind of violence that killed four Americans in Libya last month, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Not everyone agreed. Kerr estimated that the Gulf countries would be happy to see Tehran cowed and that Sunni Muslims would not come out for Shia Iran. But McLaughlin pointed out that the ouster of autocrats across the region in the past two years meant the Muslim street was less predictable.

I tilt towards Kerr on this one, and in any case don’t think the “Arab” or “Muslim” street is a very useful concept in any case. However, this could simply be the article’s rendering of a more complex conversation. In any case, as the Newsweek report notes, the real challenge in the view of participants was how to develop a response that deescalated tensions, and showed support for Israel’s security without endorsing Israel’s unilateral action:

The assessments helped frame a main quandary of the discussion: how to scale back the tension without signaling to Iran that the U.S. was weak or hesitant, a message that might tempt Iran to actually escalate the violence; and how to put distance between the U.S. and Israel, which explicitly defied Obama in launching the operation, without emboldening Iran and, again, potentially raising the flames.

Acting characteristically assertive—but rather unlike the real Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Bing West suggested that the US pile on by attacking Iranian assets even before Iran had taken any actions against the United States.

West proposed a 10-day military campaign to neutralize much of Iran’s offensive capability. Others ruled out such an operation for the time being but agreed that an Iranian attack on an American ship would trigger a broad military response against Iran’s Navy. “We have multiple ways of taking on their assets,” said Rudy deLeon, in the role of defense secretary. [John] Podesta, as Obama’s chief of staff, asked lightheartedly if the uranium–enrichment plant at Fordow was part of the Iranian Navy. In other words, he wanted to know if the U.S. would see an Iranian provocation as an opportunity to destroy those parts of Iran’s nuclear program still standing after the Israeli attack. The question raised chuckles, but Podesta predicted later in the discussion that an escalation would likely result in American strikes on Iran’s remaining nuclear facilities.

So, while the team would urge Obama to focus on de-escalation, it was also acknowledging that much depended on Iran’s actions after the Israeli operation. An Iranian attack on American targets would inevitably lead the U.S. to war.

The group wrestled with how best to deal with Israel, with participants’ views apparently running the gamut from full backing (including military resupply) to a much more cautious response. Although Podesta had urged participants to ignore political considerations and the pending US Presidential election, it seemed to be implicitly accepted that US criticism of or pressure on Israel could come at an undesirable domestic political price for the Obama team.

Considerable concern was also expressed that the Israeli strike might have harmed US security interests by facilitating or accelerating Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons:

Several participants voiced concern that the Israeli assault would, perversely, undermine Washington’s ability to keep Iran from getting the bomb. They estimated that Tehran would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) after the attack and expel international observers from their facilities—something Iranian leaders might have been looking for an excuse to do. “I think there’s a chance this is a gift to the Iranians,” McLaughlin said, describing the Israeli operation as a possible “get-out-of-the-NPT-free card” for Iran. Without the observers, the U.S. would have a harder time determining what Iran was doing at Fordow, Natanz, and the other sites, and, specifically, at what level it was enriching uranium, a key component of nuclear weapons. On top of that, given international anger at Israel over the attack, the broad weave of international sanctions against Iran that Washington has pulled together over the past year would likely fray. “We have to avoid the rapid unraveling of sanctions,” Podesta said.

In the end, several participants offered odds of 50% or higher that the US would end up getting dragged into the conflict, resulting in some level of US military action against Iran.

…the upshot of the simulation is a sobering one: Washington could quickly lose control of events after an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If Iran attacks Americans or goes after Israel too aggressively, even an administration wishing to avoid another war in the Middle East might find itself in the middle of one.

I’m a little surprised there wasn’t more discussion of the economic consequences of all this, given the potential (flagged by Kerr at the outset) for the conflict to spike up oil prices, thereby choking off an already fragile global economic recovery and possibly pushing the Eurozone into an even greater financial crisis. This may have been a function, however, of the predominance of former spooks, diplomats, and military folks in the room, and the absence of anyone playing the Secretary of the Treasury (normally a member of the NSC-PC). Still, all-in-all it seems to have been a thoughtful discussion by a group of eminently-qualified participants that highlights the many policy dilemmas that would face the United States should Israel attack Iran

For a summary of all publicly-reported Iran nuclear crisis games, see the ever-growing Israel vs Iran wargame compendium at Wargaming Connection.

CASL: Barker on scenario design in wargames

As part of its continuing series of “Lectures on Strategic Gaming—Lessons for the Journeyman Gamer ,” the Center for Applied Strategic Learning at National Defense University will feature a talk by Alec Barker on the topic of “scenario design” on Friday, 26 October 2012 (and not, presumably, 2013—which is what the official announcement below says).

 

CFP: Engagement, Simulation/Gaming and Learning

Nicola Whitton  (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Alex Moseley  (University of Leicester) will be editing a special issue of Simulation & Gaming devoted to “Engagement, Simulation/Gaming and Learning.” The deadline for article proposals is 31 October 2012 (details below, click to enlarge).

Simulations miscellany, 6 October 2012

Once again, PAXsims is pleased to offer some recent tidbits of gaming and simulation-related news.

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The current election campaign for State Senate seat #25 in Maine has been rocked by the shocking and scandalous news that Democrat candidate Colleen Lachowicz plays an orc rogue in World of Warcraft. According to a press release issued by the state Republican Party:

Candidate’s Bizarre Double Life Raises Questions

– October 4, 2012

Posted in: Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: David Sorensen, 207-205-7793
Communications Director, Maine GOP

Democratic Senate Candidate Colleen Lachowicz’s Disturbing Alter-Ego Revealed

 Online comments raise questions about candidate’s fitness for office

AUGUSTA – Colleen Lachowicz, the Democratic candidate for State Senate District 25 (Waterville), has been living a time-consuming double life as a member of the World of Warcraft community. World of Warcraft is an online gaming network where people play a fantasy role-playing game in an imaginary world called “Azeroth.”

Today, Colleen is playing at level 85–the highest level one can attain. Studies have found that the average World of Warcraft gamer is 28 and spends 22.7 hours per week playing.

Her character in the game is called “Santiaga,” an Orc Assassin Rogue, and Lachowicz lives vicariously through her, making comments about World of Warcraft and other topics on the liberal blog, The Daily Kos. Here is a sampling of Lachowicz’s comments:

“So I’m a level 68 orc rogue girl. That means I stab things . . . a lot. Who would have thought that a peace-lovin’, social worker and democrat would enjoy that?!”

“Yes, I am seriously slacking off at work today. And I called my congresswoman’s office today. And told them I would probably be calling everyday.”

“I spent my day leveling my alt — an undead warlock…”

“I’m lazy, remember?”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I may have to go and hunt down Grover Norquist and drown him in my bath tub.”

“Or my dream from election season last year where John McCain sat at my childhood dining room table and I reamed him a new a**hole about Sarah Palin.”

“I like to stab things and I’m originally from NJ…. what’s your f***ing point?!”

“Do not send me a campaign contribution or I will have to stab you! Seriously!”

“Yes, join us! We’re progressive… in fact we joke about being a socialist guild.”

“I love this diary because it sums up the teabagger mindset.”

“These are some very bizarre and offensive comments, and they certainly raise questions about Lachowicz’s maturity and her ability to make serious decisions for the people of Senate District 25,” said Maine Republican Party spokesman David Sorensen.

The Maine Republican Party will make an effort to give voters all of the information about candidate Lachowicz. To that end, the party has established a website, www.colleensworld.com, where people can see Lachowicz’s online activity for themselves. In addition, a series of mail pieces will be sent to the voters of District 25, including the one below.

Voters should have all the information they can obtain about those who choose to run for office. The Maine Republican Party will present that information to them and let them decide who is most able to represent them effectively.

You’ll find more of the story via Reuters, BBC News, Jezebel, and Kotaku.

We at PAXsims are, needless to say, completely and utterly shocked that anyone would ever play a rogue in a role-playing game, or show any affinity for orcs whatsoever. Certainly we would never do anything as ridiculous as that. No sireee.

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At the website mental_floss, D.B. Grady offers a brief overview of 5 Fictional Countries Where the U.S. Army is Trained to Fight.

When the U.S. Army trains for battle, it strives for immersion and realism. To help prepare soldiers for the overwhelming nature of invading a country where the language is unknown and the culture is mostly alien, the U.S. Army invents fully realized countries, from international dynamics to currency. Here are a few fake countries where the United States is prepared to fight.

To that list we could add the Republic of Florabama, where I’m proud to have once role-played (a rather murky) part of the opposition movement that brought President Ortega to power. Below is one of the rather tongue-in-cheek videos we generated during the exercise.

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GAMEON-ARABIA’2012, the 3rd annual Pan-Arabic Simulation and AI in Computer Games Conference, will be held at the Arab Open University in Muscat, Oman on 10-12 December 2012.

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Virtual Mediation Lab (a project devoted to “mediation skills development around the world with Skype”) recently featured a blogpost about Kristen Drucker’s continuing peaceconferencing  initiative, which uses the Open Simulation Platform. (h/t Skip Cole)

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The Educator’s Edition DVD of the video World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements (together with Facilitator’s Guide) is now available. For more on the project and John Hunter’s work, see the website

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Two more articles from our forthcoming special peacebuilding issue of Simulation & Gaming are now available “online first” from SAGE:

• Peter Landwehr, Marc Spraragen, Balki Ranganathan, Kathleen M. Carley, and Michael Zyda,  “Games, Social Simulations, and Data-Integration for Policy Decisions: The SUDAN Game.”

In this article, the authors discuss the development of the SUDAN GAME, an interactive model of the country in the time period leading up to the Sudanese referendum on the secession of the South. While many simulations are designed to educate about their subjects, the SUDAN GAME is intended to be a prototype for policy making via gameplay. It is implemented within COSMOPOLIS, a massively multiplayer online game that is currently undergoing development. In this article, the authors discuss the game’s design and how it can be used for policy development, with a focus on the underlying model and some discussion of the COSMOPOLIS implementation. They situate the game relative to other games that have crowdsourced serious problems and discuss the meaning of the policy solutions and collaboration witnessed along players. They conclude with a discussion of future development to be done to improve and expand upon the concepts used in their game.

• Sean F. McMahon and Chris Miller, “Simulating the Camp David Negotiations: A Problem-Solving Tool in Critical Pedagogy.”

This article reflects critically on simulations. Building on the authors’ experience simulating the Palestinian-Israeli-American Camp David negotiations of 2000, they argue that simulations are useful pedagogical tools that encourage creative—but not critical—thinking and constructivist learning. However, they can also have the deleterious effect of reproducing unequal power relations in the classroom. The authors develop this argument in five stages:
1. They distinguish between problem solving and critical theory and define critical thinking—something not done by the simulation orthodoxy.
2. They describe the Camp David simulation. This is their contribution to the relatively small corpus of literature on simulating Palestinian-Israeli relations.
3. They review the constructivist learning and peer teaching accomplished through their simulation. This section is notable because it is authored by a graduate student who participated in the simulation as a meaning maker.
4. They review the manner in which simulations promote creative, not critical, thinking, and reproduce asymmetrical power relations.
5. They reflect on the overall utility of simulating the Camp David negotiations in the classroom.

A subscription to S&G is required to access the full text.