PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers. Aaron Danis suggested some of the material included in this latest edition.
The French Ministry of the Armed Forces has released a slick video extolling the virtues of wargaming.
We at PAXsims were pleased to see both We Are Coming, Nineveh! and the Matrix Game Construction Kit make an appearance—mashed up together, no less!
The Leibniz ScienceCampus Annual Conference 2024 in cooperation with Working Group on Military Forces and Violence of the Bundeswehr Centre for Military History and Social Sciences will be hosting a conference on “Playing War: Simulations, Games, Exercises, and the Representations of Military Force and Violence” at the University of Regensburg on 27-29 November 2024.
(Military) Operations: What understanding of warfighting etc. form play- and rulebooks? How does the state perform its “enemy”? What impact does playing war have on ‘real’ conflicts and operations?
Practice: How are war games played? What continuities and changes can be observed in the practices of playing war games? How do war games represent force and violence, and what practices of representation are evident in their portrayal?
Environment: Under what conditions is war played? What are the infrastructures? What could be said about the material culture of playing war?
Design: How are conflict, war, and combat modeled? What informs these processes? What about “playing peace”?
Knowledge: How and what kind of knowledge shapes play? How and what kind of games produce knowledge?
Technology: How does technology enable specific forms of wargaming? What is the significance of (perhaps future) military technology?
While the call for paper proposals is now closed, you can find additional details on the conference here.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has embraced wargaming with an almost religious zeal. PLAN leaders vigorously promote the use of wargaming methods throughout the service. They have studied wargaming’s many potential advantages, from helping the PLAN overcome its lack of recent combat experience to shedding light on how to employ its new weapons and platforms to maximum effect—and they want more.1
Despite its enthusiasm for conflict simulation, the PLAN is also keenly aware of wargaming’s limitations. Service leaders know that, to be effective, games must accurately represent the behavior of the putative adversary—“Blue” in PLA parlance. Since foreign militaries conceal their capabilities, plans, and doctrines, simulating Blue is no easy task. The PLAN confronted this challenge by building a corps of experts dedicated to studying China’s potential enemies to play them in wargames with as much fidelity as possible. This organization, the “Blue Team Center” (蓝军中心), is located at the Naval Command College in Nanjing, Jiangsu.2
The Blue Team Center is small and little known but has an outsized impact on how the PLAN thinks about future conflict. The insights it generates guide the judgments PLAN commanders make, with decisions about peacetime plans, training, doctrine, research, and procurement. And the PLAN expects that, in wartime, these insights will ultimately translate into success on the battlefield.
Understanding this mysterious organization is essential to the U.S. Navy’s efforts to deter or defeat Beijing’s aggression in the western Pacific.
Wargaming collaboration between U.S. and Brazilian Army Command and General Staff Colleges is examined by Richard McConnell (US Army, Retired) and Cleber Simões, Roney Magno de Sousa, Thiago Caron da Silva (Brazilian Army) in an article at Military Review.
This article is the culmination of this U.S. and Brazilian partnership. It captures descriptions of military-planning thinking patterns that effectively employ wargaming, visualization, and exceptional information identification. Researchers explored a scientific method-like approach to military planning, drawing parallels between the two. The wargaming laboratory can aid military planners to scientifically examine the viability of their plans before real-world testing. Recommendations will be proposed for potential wargaming options to improve planning and the scientific-like thinking that supports it.
A brief literature review at the end of this article includes a discussion of the history of the scientific method and its connection to military planning. These sources specifically discuss the scientific thinking at the foundation of military planning. The U.S. military has a history of wargaming that is uneven, which is cited in the wargaming study. At times, wargaming during the military decision-making process is either skipped or given short shrift. Therefore, improvement of wargaming is a focus in many of the combat training center reports on lessons learned. The Brazilian army has a similar history with wargaming, and its leaders are interested in improving wargaming for their army. This collaboration is an attempt to address the need for improved wargaming for the U.S. and Brazilian armies through improved educational approaches.
Matrix Games are a type of unconstrained wargame used by planners to explore scenarios. Players propose actions, and give arguments and counterarguments for their success. An umpire, assisted by dice rolls modified according to the offered arguments, adjudicates the outcome of each action. A recent online play of the Matrix Game QuAI Sera Sera had six players, representing social, national and economic powers, and one player representing ADA, a recently escaped AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]. Unknown to the six human players, ADA was played by OpenAI’s GPT-4 with a human operator serving as bidirectional interface between it and the game. GPT-4 demonstrated confident and competent game play; initiating and responding to private communications with other players and choosing interesting actions well supported by argument. We reproduce the transcript of the interaction with GPT-4 as it is briefed, plays, and debriefed.
PAXsims tried its own (much less rigorous) experiment like this a few months ago—you can read about that attempt here.
Back in January, RAND published a the fourth volume of their Understanding the Limits of Artificial Intelligence for Warfighters report, with a focus of wargames. We missed it at the time, so here it is now if you haven’t seen it.
In the 2010s, rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) for game-playing inspired intense interest in the possible benefits of the technology for playing wargames. Advocates suggested that AI might make wargames more effective or make it possible to apply wargames to novel problems. This report presents an assessment of the limits to applying AI technologies to wargaming and opportunities for future investments to productively employ AI in wargames.
To do this, a taxonomy of wargames by type or purpose (systems exploration, innovation, alternative conditions, and evaluation) and by time-phased task (preparing, playing, adjudicating, and interpreting) was specified. These frameworks are used to assess the technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness of applying AI to various aspects of a given type of wargame under particular conditions.
This report is the fourth in a five-volume series addressing how AI could be employed to assist warfighters in four distinct areas: cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, wargames, and mission planning. It is aimed at those with an interest in wargaming, the history of AI use in wargames, and the application of AI more generally.
Wargaming has surged in popularity in recent years, drawing substantial financial backing from militaries, governments and the private sector alike. But what are wargames and how are they being used within the defence industry to navigate present and future conflicts?
In this episode, Dr David Banks, Lecturer in Wargaming and co-director of King’s Wargaming Network at King’s College London, guides us through the complex world of wargaming and its different applications. He talks us through some of the wargames he has created and how the method is likely to evolve with emerging technologies.
Andrew Reddie is an Associate Research Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and faculty director of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab. Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Andrew about wargaming as a tool to manage risk from war to climate—and beyond.
This year’s participants included 110 students from more than 26 countries who were enrolled in HHI’s Humanitarian Response Intensive Course or Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s International Humanitarian Response II course (GHP 518).
Students were divided into 18 teams representing nongovernmental organizations. They put what they’d learned in the classroom into practice as they worked together throughout the weekend to respond to a simulated complex disaster and conflict scenario. More than 160 volunteers role-played refugees, government officials, and others who responders would likely encounter in the field.
U.S. Army War College recently provided them a great opportunity to apply diplomacy best practices to a hypothetical international crisis through a weekend-long simulation held on campus.
“As a student of international trade, our usual negotiations never reach outside the scope of commerce,” said Felix Naim MAIT ’25, one of two students who conducted their negotiation sessions in Chinese. “This simulation was beneficial for me in that it exposed me to just how escalated an international conflict can become, especially when tied to land and resources.”
The 29 participants included students and faculty from the Middlebury Institute, the Defense Language Institute (DLI), the Naval War College (NWC) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and San Jose State University (SJSU). …
This year’s ISCNE scenario focused on the current challenges in the South China Sea, where multiple nations, including China and the U.S., are competing for influence. Participants were organized into country teams that represented nations with a stake in the issues at hand. …
Each delegation met to strategize based on the scenario parameters, and the representatives of the delegations negotiated with their counterparts from other nations toward a mutually agreeable resolution. Multiple strategy and negotiation sessions played out over the three-day exercise, with initial briefings supplemented by new information—and twists—as the exercise progressed. The exercise provided students with opportunities for public speaking, working in a team, understanding group dynamics, and leadership skills. Students provided consecutive interpretation in Chinese for the negotiations and simultaneous interpretation in French and Chinese for the opening and closing sessions.
Near Peer Simulations offers a free, online wargaming course. Look for details at their website, or watch the course videos on YouTube.
The Long Game Project offers a free Foundational Tabletop Exercising Certification online course, by David Epstein. You can find it here.
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