Comments Off on Simulation and gaming publications, April-December 2023
Posted by Rex Brynen on 09/01/2024
PAXsims is pleased to present a selection of recently-published items on simulation and serious gaming. (OK, we’re a bit behind on this, but we’ve been busy!)
Some of these may not address conflict, peacebuilding, or development issues at all, but have been included because of the broader perspective they offer on games-based education or analysis. Others might address “gaming-adjacent” issues such as group dynamics and decision-making, assessment, forecasting, or related topics. Items previously featured on PAXsims are not included. However, if you have published something recently and we haven’t yet included it, let us know.
Articles may be gated/paywalled and not accessible without subscription access to the publication in which they appear.
This capstone project aimed to enhance the Center for Army Analysis’s (CAA) Strategic Competition and Crisis (SC2) wargame to improve the strategic planning skills of Global Combatant Command (GCCs) staffs. The client, CAA, developed the SC2 wargame two years ago “to capture the discussion associated with ‘Competition,’ and how it supports the Army’s Global Strategic Framework” (Engelmann & Kearney, 2021). The objective of the game is to improve one’s global reputation score through actions impacting Diplomatic, Military, and Economic influence. Last year, this capstone created a model to output perspective-based, dynamic reputation scores based on credibility, capabilities, and stability metrics (McConville, 2021). This year, this project focused on integrating the dynamic reputation model metrics to enhance the SC2 wargame by contextualizing game actions with aggregated data on strategic objectives, increasing realistic factors within the negotiation process, and improving the player’s narrative experience through architecture that automates game mechanics and incorporates a robust game user interface.
This paper analyzes the importance of digital game-based learning within the higher military education system. The advantages of implementing digital wargaming in the learning system are presented, including its risk-free and cost-effective nature, its ability to allow “what-if” scenarios, facilitate knowledge transfer, skill acquisition, attitudinal/behavioral change, time-saving benefits, and the ability to understand the operational environment or test new technologies. The combination of these specific advantages, along with the motivation derived from the enjoyment of the game, should be the focus of military education academics and practitioners. Additionally, the paper highlights the requirements that the chosen game must meet, such as complexity, realism, balance, and providing opportunities for learning and developing skills that are tracked through data collection and subsequent feedback. By integrating digital games and using the principle of “play, have fun and learn”, the learning process in higher military education can effectively improve the development of essential tactical skills that are difficult to achieve through other traditional teaching methods.
Recent years have seen increased interest in the professional use of wargames, and wargames are a potential tool to enable a better understanding of past urban conflicts and to plan for future urban security. Whilst access to professional wargames are limited, hobby wargames have been identified as useful and closely related areas to study. Previous work has identified around 214 manual hobby wargames that deal with urban conflict, but only 5 battles are covered by 5 or more wargames, and so provide a reasonable sample for comparative reviews. The Battle of Hue battle had many of the hallmarks of a modern urban battle, with both symmetric and asymmetric opposition, combined arms, a civilian and media presence, and the use of innovative technology. This article examines how 6 different wargame designers have approached the Battle of Hue, and how their design choices relate to the key characteristic of the Battle of Hue. The article also identifies where the principal deficiencies are. The article concludes by considering the issues highlighted by these games that wargaming has in representing urban conflict, and how these could be addressed in order to make wargaming a more useful tool to model urban conflict and security.
The paper proposes an approach to improving player engagement and learning outcomes in seminar-style games, based on emphasizing player agency, meaningful choices, and uncertainty. As a case study, it introduces a game focused on trust in cybersecurity, whose design incorporates resource management, hidden agendas for each player, and a shared failure condition.
We propose an integration framework for a wargame prototype using the modern game engine – Unreal Engine. This wargame functions as a simulation tool for strategy training, strategy testing, and simulating enemy forces like warships, aircraft, and weapons. Existing wargames come in proprietary and free versions. The former is often expensive and exclusive due to security reasons, while developing a functional wargame is complex, requiring various technological components such as a physics system and artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome these challenges, we propose a rapid prototype using Unreal Engine. This approach leverages advanced technology and ensures the prototype is ready for future upgrades when new versions of the game engine are released. We evaluate the prototype’s system capabilities and expert assessments.
Joseph Chedzoy, D’Andre Tobias, Joseph Miller, Max Hwang, and Trent Geisler, “Reinforcement Learning in Cyber Wargaming Defense,” Proceedings of the Annual General Donald R. Keith Memorial Conference, May 2023.
In recent decades the necessity for cyber security has grown for both private companies as well as government agencies. This growth is the result of increasing ability for organizations to mount cyber-attacks. As a response, organizations have been developing cyber defense artificial intelligence (AI), which greatly improves cyber-security capabilities. This ne- cessitates not only the development of cyber-attack, defense, and vulnerability frameworks to simulate a realistic environment, but also methods with which to train the AI. Further, the number and variety of networks necessitates a framework with which AI can be quickly and cost-effectively trained. This paper will explore how our team has worked to develop an efficient and comprehensive framework under which a variety of AI can be trained to fulfill the need for cyber resiliency
The “new” Great Game suggests that, like the imperial competition of the past, we are witnessing a trans-imperial moment whereby Japan and China are vying for hegemony in East Asia. This is a new moment because East Asia, unlike Europe, has never had two co-existing superpowers. The prospect of a new imperial competition is complicated by the still-present American military power and the non-statist arena, especially in popular culture, where the imperial games are played out. Using two popular anti-Japan videogames, Glorious Mission Online (2013) and The Invisible Guardian (2019) as case studies, I argue these games are symptomatic of the relations between warfare and game in general. I then outline the trend in game development that subverts conventional wargames. Finally, I speculate on alternative game design over the disputed territories in the Southern China Sea that prioritizes ecology over human conflict and development.
Serious games have long been used in domains like defense, management, finance, and environmental protection to improve plans and procedures. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and emergency management organizations are beginning to use such games to enhance their preparedness and readiness activities. In this paper, we present a Knowledge Acquisition Analytical Game (K2AG) focused on understanding and providing training for command, control, coordination, and communication (C3C) functions during an infectious disease outbreak. Unlike traditional game-based exercises, which target strategic, operational and tactical decision making, the K2AG games focus on the cognitive level at which decision-making under uncertainty takes place. Specifically, the C3C Game collects data reflecting the cognitive processes by which players gain situational awareness, make decisions, and take actions. The C3C Game was created through a community-centered design process and leverages methods from human factor engineering, including hierarchical task analysis. This paper describes the game, presents results from a pilot exercise conducting with public health and emergency response decision makers from a large US metropolitan area, and discusses the potential for such games to improve pandemic preparedness and resilience.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising technique to deal with the tough decision modeling problem in the wargaming field. However, to deploy current RL algorithms requires reward-engineering scenario by scenario, which is laborious for massive wargaming scenarios. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes an improved RL method, curiosity-tuned experience replay (CTER), which allows the RL-driven decision model to achieve a relatively effective policy under the sparse reward. CTER uses the curiosity mechanism to regulate the three critical procedures during learning with experience replay: the exploration, storage, and revisitation of the experiences. Based on the prediction-based curiosity, CTER generates an intrinsic reward to fill the sparse reward space, and further provides an adaptive exploration strategy to collect more informative experiences. Moreover, CTER develops a novel prioritized replay and memory updating mechanism to reuse experiences more efficiently. Through the systematic evaluation and comparison on typical game tasks and wargaming tasks, CTER shows its effectiveness and generalization in different scenarios without reward-engineering. Especially, the policy performance of CTER-based RL with the sparse reward is almost equivalent to that of ordinary RL with dense engineered rewards. Our work may offer a relatively universal approach for wargaming decision modeling, which can free the RL-based decision modelers from the laborious reward-engineering.
Wargames and tabletop exercises (TTXs) have existed for centuries in military planning contexts but have seen relatively limited use as methods of inquiry within the human factors community of practice. We argue that that the use of these tools is not commensurate with their value, as they are effective and efficient means to conduct naturalistic inquiry. We demonstrate the value of wargames and TTXs by presenting two case studies of their use in different domains, highlighting how their outputs were used to achieve research objectives and to glean insights about human cognition in the context of work. We also discuss the similarity of wargames and TTXs to other methods of inquiry, and suggest future areas for research.
In mid-2022, after the opening months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of RAND Corporation researchers conducted an internal series of discussions to examine the recent events of the Russia-Ukraine War. All the participants had been involved in the design and execution of tabletop exercise (TTX) wargames involving Russia during the past eight years, mostly centered on the challenges facing a North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense of the Baltic states. The focus of their deliberations was understanding the reasons for the similarities and differences between how Russian forces had fared in those games and the relatively poor real-world performance of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine. This report summarizes the unclassified conclusions of the discussions that followed a comprehensive review of wargaming methods and analysis used. The authors also identify implications for future wargaming and analysis of potential conflicts involving major power adversaries. This is not an in-depth research report about Russian military capabilities or the war in Ukraine but rather the proceedings of an internal set of discussions from experienced wargamers reflecting on recent events.
Although numerous plausible scenarios can be envisaged for wargaming ADF contributions to coalition operations in the western Pacific, there are nevertheless limits to our knowledge based on the immaturity of rapidly evolving US operating concepts; or else they exist only in the classified realm. Based on what we do know, however, and the geopolitical context and rationales for policy, strategy and operations established in other Issue Briefs in this series it is possible to establish different representative scenarios that may be useful for wargaming ADF contributions.
Thus, other Issue Briefs have described how elements of strategy, concepts such as deterrence, identification of types of operations needed to support strategy, and consequent capability development needs can contribute to Australia’s defence planning. While having a viable ends, ways and means articulation of strategy, and the resources to execute it are critical to the ADF’s success, developing a viable coalition “theory of victory” is also essential.
The grid model is the core component of strategy campaign wargame environment model and influences other behavior models. Building multi-level and multi-resolution grid models is the basis of extending strategy campaign wargame, supporting fine-grained environment models and key tactical operations. In this paper, the modeling approach and models of multi-level and multi-resolution equal longitude and latitude division for strategy campaign wargame are put forward based on the military requirements and technical requirements. Firstly, grid map is divided by using the equal latitude and longitude quadrangle. Then the coordinate system cluster of equal latitude and longitude grid and related elements are defined. Finally, an example is given. By comparing with single-resolution hexagon grid modeling approach, the advantages are analyzed. The modeling approach can support multiple-resolution of strategy campaign wargame, and meet the requirements of running efficiency and environment model for strategy campaign wargame.
The paper reviews the literature on simulations-based teaching in the discipline of international relations and associated social science fields, tracing the development of frequently-used simulations platforms over the last half century. It will then examine the application of the Council on Foreign Relations Model Diplomacy program in three courses, International Crisis Simulations, Political Development and Politics of Asia at a small liberal arts college in the South from 2018 to 2019, and consider the effectiveness of simulations-based teaching in achieving desired learning outcomes, such as critical and analytical thinking, oral and written communication, and collaboration. Finally, the paper will provide practical steps and suggestions for the integration of Model Diplomacy and other simulations into an array of Asian studies courses.
Australia’s Defence Strategic Review (DSR) has been completed, with the final report handed to Government (Prime Minister of Australia, 2023). In considering priorities for Defence capability and assessing force structure, posture and preparedness, the DSR is likely to recommend difficult choices for a relatively small Defence Force which must live within necessarily-limited means. Much like in war itself, Defence’s ability to adapt to DSR outcomes will be crucial. Indeed, former defence official Paul Dibb has warned Defence requires ‘serious historical and cultural change’ to implement the DSR’s recommendations (Hurst, 2023). Such change could be painful, especially if each service views the DSR’s recommendations through the lens of a zero-sum game, with winners and losers. Doing so not only misses the point of the review itself, but diverts our attention away from an important—arguably unique—opportunity offered by the DSR: using it as a wargame to practise the kind of adaptability we will need to fight the next war. Australia’s current strategic circumstances, and their trajectory, mean we cannot afford to miss such an opportunity. This article discusses how the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) can use the DSR as a wargame to test its adaptability in a joint environment.
Wargaming is a pre-practice activity to study national security and competition, military conflict and war, crisis management, and other major strategic issues. An intelligent wargaming system needs the ability of artificial intelligence technology. This paper briefly summarizes the research progress of intelligent game, the evolution of wargaming, intelligent wargaming, and strategic gaming methods. From the perspective of game theory, it analyzes the game problem model for intelligent wargaming and sorts out the application mode of intelligent wargaming and the organization mode of a strategic game. An intelligent wargaming service-oriented architecture based on cloud native is proposed. Pre-training method for future decision-making cloud is explored for distributed confrontation at cloud edge, and a meta-game analysis framework for strategic wargaming is constructed for cognition of crisis events. It is expected to provide a scientific and effective reference for the research on the theory and tools of intelligent wargaming and offer theoretical and technical support for the new generation of intelligent cloud-edge cooperative command and control.
With rapid urbanization, the importance of urban warfare is increasing, and it is also required to reflect the characteristics of cities in wargame models. However, in the military’s wargame models, the urbanization factor was calculated and used without theoretical basis. In this study, we investigate techniques for estimating the urbanization factor using Fractal dimension theory. The urbanization factor we propose can suggest a logical and valid representative value when used in conjunction with Agent Based Model and other methodologies.
How do people make their decisions? Searching for the answer in the relevant literature, we can find that decisions are based either on rationality or intuition. Rational thinking is mainly observed in situations characterized by certainty (in terms of data or the consequences of decisions), while heuristic intuitive methods are mainly observed in situations of uncertainty. Training for the enhancement of decision making skills usually employs problem-based activities which mainly focus either only on rationality or only on intuition. However, problems in real life cannot always be solved with the contribution of only one way of thinking. In a decision making process often rationality works up to an extent and then intuition will lead to the final decision. For this reason, we designed and developed a game-based learning activity that enhances both rational and intuitive decision making skills. More specifically, we created a decision scenario in a virtual environment in which participants were provided with uncertainty-based information in their decision making process. As they tried to follow a rational decision making process, most of them realized that based on the given information they were confused and they had to decide intuitively at the end. This experiential learning activity was a tickler for the participants to decide under uncertainty and trust their intuition.
Wargames often include fog of war, i.e. hidden information, and multi-action turns, where each turn requires making multiple, sequential action choices. These properties provide unique challenges for Artificial Intelligence agents. Extensions to Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) allow it to perform well in games with hidden information as well as multi-action games. However, these extensions do not specifically consider both properties simultaneously nor how information-gaining actions could improve agent performance. Information-gaining actions are important in multi-action turns where initial actions can reveal state information, thus improving later action decisions. This paper presents enhancements to MCTS that add an information gain incentive and a risk determinization to balance locating opponent pieces while minimizing exposure to enemy fire. The information gain incentive and risk functions are implemented in Perfect Information-MCTS (PIMCTS) and Information Set-MCTS (ISMCTS) and evaluated on the multi-action hidden information game TUBSTAP. Results show that these additions improve performance over the baseline algorithms and against a Cheating MCTS implementation.
Hao Liu, Yanyan Ding, Haimin Hu, Hongyan Ou, and Junfei Wang, “Thinking of War Game Lab Construction,” International Conference on Man-Machine-Environment System Engineering, 2023.
Actively innovating and developing simulated training means is an effective way to enhance the confrontational, strategic, and actual combat nature of combat training. War game has broad application prospects in the fields of military education and training and war simulation, and wargaming is the origin and important development direction of modern combat simulation. Starting from the significance of the construction of the war game lab of the air defense troops, this paper puts forward the construction objectives, functions and specific contents of the war game lab, and discusses the relevant issues that should be grasped in the construction of the war game lab, which is of great significance for promoting the transformation of our army’s training mode from mechanization to informatization, and further improving the quality and efficiency of combat training.
In tactical wargames, such as Warhammer 40K, two or more players control asymmetrical armies that include multiple units of different types and strengths. In these type of games, unit are assigned point costs, which are used to ensure that all players will control armies of similar strength. Players are provided with a total budget of points they can spend to purchase units that will be part of their army lists. Calculating the point value of individual units is a tedious manual process, which often requires long play-testing sessions and iterations of adjustments. In this paper, we propose an automated way of predicting these point costs using a linear regression approach. We use a multi- unit, turn-based, non-balanced game that has three asymmetric armies. We use Monte Carlo Tree Search agents to simulate the players, using different heuristics to emulate playing strategies. We present six different variants of our unit-point prediction algorithm, and we show how our best variant is able to almost reduce the unbalanced nature of the game by half.
Wargames and wargaming have been used by military planners since the Middle Ages. Games have been employed to model evolving strategies and emerging technologies. There has been an absence of research regarding wargaming non-traditional and uncertain domains such as disinformation warfare. The problem is further complicated by the unfamiliarity of the military leaders confronting disinformation warfare. This chapter demonstrates how to develop wargames to evaluate the strategies and tactics of disinformation warfare. The key is developing games that employ familiar operational elements such as terrain, maneuver, and combat in the design. This design method should include some adjunct forms of validity such as construct, content, and face validation. Aspects of a disinformation wargame can also be employed in workshops and tabletop exercises. This research indicates that disinformation warfare can be understood and strategies to employ it or counter it can be developed using wargames.
The study to be presented is about observing the war and crisis games research domain regarding the Chinese BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). In this respect, it will be necessary to detect the trends and uses of wargaming as a tool to train and predict, considering the state of the art of discipline. Given the transitions and developments of Chinese projection in the international system, it is intended to qualify how the arrangements under development collaborate with the project to expand the influence of the Belt and Road Initiative. Likewise, there is the need to segment the principles and models in progress for a possible exploratory typification derived from the study. For this purpose, we use primary and secondary sources related to the government structure and the intelligentsia system, primarily from think tanks and universities. As such, the understanding is that observing the characteristics in progress can allow for estimating the synergies or gaps between the model of influence and expansion in progress and the domain of wargaming developments. Then, we highlight that the wargaming knowledge is part of building upon the national security agenda to uphold Chinese international participation from the constitution of the Chinese national identity. Furthermore, we identify ways wargaming could help with the challenges and opportunities in the literature on BRI. We note that alongside the wargaming national security perspective, the technical training apparatus marks an influential trend for Chinese defense development by the West.
Scholars have been using the wrong card games to analyze Carl von Clausewitz’s analogies in On War, which has led to errors in understanding his ideas. This article identifies the games Clausewitz discusses, allowing for a more accurate interpretation of his original meaning for the study of war. Since Clausewitz’s ideas underpin strategy development within service education systems, it is critical his ideas are fully understood in context.
The military has developed wargames to explore their doctrines and train operational concepts. Wargames are often designed to teach educational objectives and share and produce knowledge. The success of a wargame design depends on how it achieves these objectives. Players are the main actors in wargames and often group into teams. The final result of the wargame depends on the collaboration and interaction between the members of each team. Therefore, this work aims to understand how collaboration occurs in wargames. Moreover, we observed the activities and processes during a large-scale wargame to gather how the players collaborate. A better understanding of collaboration in wargames may provide insights for game designers to improve the wargames design process to consider how the players collaborate.
The recent literature has inquired how media, official discourses, popular culture, or even sports and toys, can shape political imaginary into thinking that military intervention is the only relevant course of action. In this endeavour, the role of wargaming in justifying further militarisation remains largely understudied. By building upon the RAND Baltic 2014–2015 wargame and the subsequent NATO decision to deploy troops in the Baltics and Poland, I propose that certain wargames can legitimise the use of force in three ways: by reflecting the security community’s concerns in the storyline of the game, by designing the game in such a manner that preparation for war becomes the only well-founded means of tackling the issues posed by the game, and by enhancing its circulation in the defence field, notably by presenting the wargame as having the same level of credibility as science. Drawing upon assemblage theory, I propose that wargaming encompasses more than the individual experiences of its players. It encompasses the extensive sociotechnical assemblage of practices, technologies, networks of actors, and resulting emergent properties that together can amplify the conditions of possibility favourable to military deployment.
How do emerging technologies affect nuclear stability? In this paper, we use a quasi-experimental cyber-nuclear wargame with 580 players to explore three hypotheses about emerging technologies and nuclear stability: (1) technological uncertainty leads to preemption and escalation; (2) technological uncertainty leads to restraint; and (3) technological certainty leads to escalation through aggressive counterforce campaigns. The wargames suggest that uncertainty and fear about cyber vulnerabilities create no immediate incentives for preemptive nuclear use. The greater danger to strategic stabil- ity lies in how overconfidence in cyber exploits incentivizes more aggressive counterforce campaigns and, secondarily, how vulnerabilities encourage predelegation or automation. Both of these effects suggest worrisome relationships between cyber exploits and inadvertent nuclear use on one hand and cyber vulnerabilities and accidental nuclear use on the other hand. Together, these findings reveal the complicated relationship between pathways to escalation and strategic stability, highlighting the role that confidence and perhaps- misplaced certainty—versus uncertainty and fear—play in strategic stability.
War-Gaming is recognized as a valuable tool for commanders, leaders, and managers. Well-executed War-Games have delivered significant competitive advantages in numerous conflicts. The war-game confirmed the commanders’ knowledge of weapon systems and performance, as well as the time and space necessary to carry out battlefield maneuvers. One of the primary missions of each army on the battlefield is weapon target assignment. The weapon target assignment (WTA) is a critical problem to command to be solved in battlefield decisions. In a WTA problem, we should assign available weapons to determined targets appropriately to optimize the performance criteria. This study discusses a problem in relation to allocating and scheduling in WTA considering the mobility weapons and mobility targets. Bi-level linear programming problem is defined so that each level independently optimizes its own objective functions but is influenced by actions taken by another unit. To solve the under studied problem, three famous meta-heuristic algorithms including simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithm (GA) and grey wolf optimizer (GWO) methods are proposed. Since the performance of meta-heuristic algorithms depends on setting the parameters, the Taguchi method has been used statistically for set parameters of the developed Algorithms. Performance evaluation of the presented algorithms is conducted through numerical experiments involving randomly generated test problems. To compare the results of proposed meta-heuristic algorithms, ANOVA and Tukey tests were used. The Computational results have shown that proposed GWO algorithm worked better than the SA and GA algorithms.
There are multiple arguments for and against wargames. Many scientists do not recognise the science in wargames. It is suggested that there is not enough literature relating to wargaming, for there to be any large-scale research into wargames. This is primarily because scientists often refuse to publish results, thus creating a vicious cycle where research is not published because there is not enough research being published. This ultimately deters researchers from studying wargaming in any serious fashion. Owing to this limitation, published work on the results, and protocols of wargames are scarce in scholarly research. Wargaming has considerably less academic focus with a fragmented and practical focus on design and benchmarking. This is surprising given the long history of wargaming (dating back to the early 1600’s), when compared to the relatively recent history of other domains such as software engineering. To better understand the current state of research into wargaming in reference to benchmarking and validation, a scoping review (SR) was conducted. The scholarly research into wargaming reveals papers on general modelling, conflict modelling, influence modelling, evaluation of wargames, analytical tools, use of AI in wargame design, evaluation of predictive modelling in wargames, improving command and control through wargaming, and cost-benefit analysis for decision making. The initial analysis of the coverage of wargaming research, together with the limited number of papers found, indicate that there is a distinct lack of academic research into wargaming. Additionally, there is a wide variety of areas that are interested in the wargaming field, however, with no universal method of analysis or benchmarking, this limits the reproducibility of results, and the ability to judge the overall effectiveness of wargaming efforts. Wargame designers need to be able to assess wargame components to validate, compare, and predict the effects on gameplay and for decision-makers to draw conclusions with more confidence.
To assist the U.S. Department of Defense and other stakeholders addressing the subsiding interest in and knowledge of a continued nuclear threat, RAND Corporation game designers and subject-area experts developed A Strange Game, named in reference to the 1983 techno-thriller movie, Wargames, which presents thermonuclear war as a conflict that no one can win. A Strange Game, however, very much concerns the present day and the future in that it gives players an opportunity to explore the problems of near- or longer-term future intra-war deterrence where the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has broken down.
This report provides the scientific and theoretical background that informed the creation of the A Strange Game prototype. This report also offers relevant context that went into game design. Therefore, it should be useful to those considering adopting the game, game masters who will want to conduct fully informed gaming sessions, and players wanting a first-hand account of the diplomatic and military concepts used in the game. The information presented in this report can also assist other game designers as they work toward the development of further games that immerse participants in environments designed to improve decisionmaking before, during, and after conflict.
Wargames are essential simulators for various war scenarios. However, the increasing pace of warfare has rendered traditional wargame decision-making methods inadequate. To address this challenge, wargame-assisted decision-making methods that leverage artificial intelligence techniques, notably reinforcement learning, have emerged as a promising solution. The current wargame environment is beset by a large decision space and sparse rewards, presenting obstacles to optimizing decision-making methods. To overcome these hurdles, a Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) based wargame decision-making method is presented. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), joint action-value function, and the Gumbel-Softmax estimator are applied to optimize MADDPG in order to adapt to the wargame environment. Furthermore, a wargame decision-making method based on the improved MADDPG algorithm is proposed. Using supervised learning in the proposed approach, the training efficiency is improved and the space for manipulation before the reinforcement learning phase is reduced. In addition, a policy gradient estimator is incorporated to reduce the action space and to obtain the global optimal solution. Furthermore, an additional reward function is designed to address the sparse reward problem. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed wargame decision-making method outperforms the pre-optimization algorithm and other algorithms based on the AC framework in the wargame environment. Our approach offers a promising solution to the challenging problem of decision-making in wargame scenarios, particularly given the increasing speed and complexity of modern warfare.
The Secretary of the Navy disperses Navy forces in a deliberate manner to support Department of Defense (DoD) guidance, policy, and budget. The current strategic, laydown, and dispersal (SLD) process is labor intensive, time intensive, and less capable of becoming agile for considering competing alternative plans. SLD could benefit from the implementation of artificial intelligence. We introduced a relatively new methodology to address these questions which was recently derived from an earlier Office of Naval Research funded project that combined deep analytics of machine learning, optimization, and wargames. This methodology is entitled LAILOW which encompasses Leverage AI to Learn, Optimize, and Wargame (LAILOW). In this paper, we developed a stand-alone set of pseudo data that mimicked the actual, classified data so that experimental excursions could be performed safely. We show LAILOW produces a score from a wargame-like scenario for every available ship that might be moved. The score for each ship increases as fewer resources (e.g., lower cost) are required to fulfill an SLD plan requirement to move that ship to a new homeport. This produces a mathematical model that enables the immediate comparison between competing or alternate ship movement scenarios that might be chosen instead. We envision a more integrated, coherent, and large-scale deep analytics effort leveraging methods that link to existing real data sources to more easily enable the direct comparisons of potential scenarios of platform movement considered through the SLD process. The resulting product could facilitate decision makers’ ability to learn, document, and track the reasons for complex decision making of each SLD process and identify potential improvements and efficiencies for force development and force generation.
Brian Train, a renowned figure in the world of wargaming, has dedicated his life to the art of designing and playing war-themed board games. With a background in political science and a passion for history, Train has become a respected authority in the field. His impressive portfolio includes games that cover a wide range of conflicts and historical periods, from guerrilla warfare in Algeria to the intricacies of modern warfare. Train’s extensive knowledge and innovative game designs have earned him a well-deserved reputation as a wargaming expert.
Recently, Train had the unfortunate experience of coming across a book about wargaming that left much to be desired. While he maintains a respectful and constructive approach to most aspects of the wargaming community, he couldn’t help but express his disappointment with this particular publication. Without delving into specifics, Train noted that the book lacked the depth, insight, and accuracy that wargamers typically seek in their literature. While not going into detail, Train’s critique is a reminder that even the most seasoned experts can encounter underwhelming resources in their field, and it serves as a valuable lesson for those seeking to expand their knowledge in the world of wargaming.
Well, that’s the ChatGPT summary of Brian’s recent review of a wargaming book, coupled with some AI artwork. Go read what he ACTUALLY said about this ill-fated purchase here.
The Centre interarmées de concepts, de doctrines et d’expérimentations (CICDE) of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces has released its new wargaming manual, which is available as a free download.
Le Manuel du Jeu de guerre (Août 2023) produit par le CICDE donne une définition, en accord avec celle de l’OTAN (parution 2023) :
Les jeux de guerre sont des représentations de situations de compétition, contestation et/ou affrontement dans un environnement dans lequel les participants prennent des décisions et réagissent aux conséquences de ces décisions.
Un wargame répond à l’une des trois finalités suivantes :
Analytique : pour tester un concept, une doctrine, un dispositif, en appui à une planification opérationnelle.
Educative : pour la formation générale ou particulière, l’apprentissage et l’entrainement, la découverte des ressorts d’une situation de crise.
Expérientielle : pour expérimenter la décision, la coopération entre acteurs, la constitution d’une équipe.
Les rôles du CICDE pour la fonction wargaming interarmées sont les suivants :
Fédérer toutes les initiatives de wargaming (armées, directions services) : faire le lien avec les partenaires académiques, le secteur privé ainsi que de s’assurer de la compatibilité de notre pratique avec les alliés.
Assurer une fonction de conseil pour la conception de wargames et de serious games.
Produire des wargames pour l’encadrement, les autorités militaires.
Générer et assembler des compétences pour permettre la pratique de wargames. La création d’un Centre français du wargaming dans le cadre du projet ACADEM (Académie de Défense de l’Ecole Militaire) est sous sa responsabilité.
S’assurer de la compatibilité de notre pratique avec les alliés.
Le CICDE a publié un guide pour aider tous ceux qui souhaitent se lancer dans un projet de conception / développement de jeu de guerre. Le jeu de guerre est un outil complémentaire à la simulation. Il n’est pas un outil de prédiction. En revanche il offre un espace privilégié pour le débat contradictoire et la meilleure connaissance des ressorts d’une crise.
The four chapters of the 55 page manual address:
What is a wargame?
What are the uses of a wargame?
The fundamentals of wargaming?
How to develop and implement a wargame
Altogether it is a thoughtful, clear, and well-organized introduction to professional wargaming.
Marine Corps University Press has released Charles J. Esdaile’s book, Wargaming Waterloo, as a free online publication.
Wargaming—the simulation of complex war situations—is becoming increasingly more relevant to political and military discourse as U.S. armed forces lean more heavily on it as a training tool to hone warfighters’ decision-making skills and to shape defense plans and policies. And while wargaming can be useful for informing predictions of future military conflicts, it is also an excellent tool for understanding past conflicts.
Wargaming Waterloo explores three key aspects of wargaming as a practice by focusing on the iconic battle that led to Napoléon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815. A longtime subject of both fascination and controversy, the Battle of Waterloo presents particular problems as a board, map, or tabletop wargame and also poses a serious research question: just how good a chance did Napoléon have at victory when he confronted the duke of Wellington at Mont Saint-Jean and how would the strategic situation have to be different to enable Napoléon to prevail?
Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) has recently published an article at Critical Inquiry 50, 1 (2023) on sand tables—the moveable mineral media used in the military and many other contexts.
A sand table is an intentional structure that is an early, indeed ancient, interactive platform for visualization and simulation. An intellectual furnishing that is also a tangible instance of speculative infrastructure, the sand table offers a tactile space for the rehearsal of tactics, staccato words whose roots lie in haptics and arrangement. While common in military settings, sand tables have also been used to teach the blind, train wilderness firefighters, conduct therapy for trauma victims, illustrate stories to children, and play imaginative games. Today there is a direct line from this seemingly modest technology—an implementation of what has been called elemental media—to augmented reality and other tangible interfaces. Part media history, part media archaeology, this article argues that sand tables belong to the lineage of platforms for speculative thinking and world-building that culminated in the rise of the digital computer amid a Cold War complex of scenario-driven futurology (whose centerpiece was the so-called situation room). It also suggests that sand, in its literal granularity—the physical affordances of the minute particulars of its particulate matter—offers an alternative to the binary regimen of ones and zeros that is the extractive product of the refined silica out of which semiconductors are still made.
At War on the Rocks, Sebastian Bae argues that more needs to be done to “revitalize and expand educational wargaming at the tactical echelons” so that it might “reclaim its historical position as a critical educational tool for the entire force.”
The concept of developing a diverse educational wargaming ecosystem is not entirely new. The TACWAR wargames were designed to be a family of wargames, each tailored for its principal educational audience. Similarly, the notion of a wargaming list for education has been considered since the early 1990s. But in both cases, the efforts were not sustained, and the learning environment was allowed to fade away. To avoid repeating history, the joint force should consider several further steps.
First, establish an annual educational wargaming fund to support wargaming in tactical units — particularly for designing bespoke wargames for tailored learning objectives. Admittedly, the current Wargaming Incentive Fund has increasingly supported educational wargaming. However, analytical and educational wargames competing for scarce resources are a recipe for the status quo.
Second, identify and adapt successful professional military education wargames for distribution across the joint force. There are several wargames — like War at Sea, the matrix-style games at Army War College, or Kingfish ACE — that could be further developed and modified for widespread use in tactical units. A wide range of accessible educational wargames will better address the varying needs of a diverse joint force.
Third, build wargaming infrastructure —in terms of funding, personnel, and physical space – to support wargaming within tactical units. Wargaming experts and facilitators, who are not subject to the constant churn of their uniformed counterparts, will reduce the burden of establishing and maintaining wargaming in units and foster institutional memory. This was a critical element to the success of TACWAR.
Fourth, integrate wargaming literacy and skills into the enlisted educational pipeline. This does not mean creating an enlisted force focused on designing wargames. Instead, enlisted leaders should be equipped with the experience, tools, and skills to leverage and teach wargames at the small unit level. The recent successes of wargaming at the College of Enlisted Military Education reflect the untapped potential of enlisted-led wargaming. Sustaining wargaming will require widening access to the broader joint force.
Finally, embrace various media for educational wargaming, blending established methods with new technologies. An excellent example is the Marine Corps University’s cloud-based wargaming initiative, which combines commercially available tabletop wargames with the accessibility of cloud-based computing. Open source AI, augmented reality, and other technologies also offer interesting possibilities.
To avoid the historical boom-bust pattern, the joint force should provide the necessary tools and support to build and maintain a diverse ecosystem of educational wargaming at the tactical unit level. Yet directives without funding are destined for failure. Without new and sustained support, current educational wargaming initiatives will stagnate and become artifacts of the past. The success of educational wargaming in preparing the next generation of tactical leaders may determine whether the next conflict tilts toward victory or defeat.
The latest edition of Simulation & Gaming 54, 4 (August 2023) is now available.
Editorial
What Does A Game Need to Become A Classic?
Marlies P. Schijven and Toshiko Kikkawa
Research Articles
About Gamifying an Emotional Learning Companion to Teach Programming to Primary Education Students
J.M. Ocaña, E.K. Morales-Urrutia, D. Pérez-Marín, and C. Pizarro
Using Various Types of Embedded Participants to Enhance Culturally Congruent, Family-Centered Simulation-Based Education
Desiree A. Díaz, Andrew D. Todd, Gregory E. Gilbert, Humberto López Castillo, Mindi Anderson, James P. Jackson, Marlee R. Linnell, Kristen Y. Ng, Alison G. Walker, and Rubén Z. Díaz
Article
Maximising Undergraduate Medical Radiation Students’ Learning Experiences Using Cloud-Based Computed Tomography (CT) Software
Minh Chau and Elio Stefan Arruzza
Erratum
Erratum to “Digital Games as Media for Teaching and Learning: A Template for Critical Evaluation”
The UK Ministry of Defence (Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre) Influence Wargaming Handbook is now available.
The Handbook is divided into four chapters and an annex:
For sponsors
Chapter 1 – Why wargame influence? This chapter describes influence and wargaming. It explains why influence is important, and why wargaming is particularly suited to exploring and representing influence.
Chapter 2 – Sponsoring influence wargames. This chapter outlines the various factors that influence wargame sponsors must consider. It then highlights key risks associated with wargaming influence and suggests how to manage and mitigate these risks.
For practitioners
Chapter 3 – Challenges to wargaming influence. This chapter outlines the challenges facing influence wargaming practitioners. These are explained by illustrating the differences between conventional and influence wargames.
Chapter 4 – Addressing the challenges to wargaming influence. This chapter suggests how the challenges raised in Chapter 3 might be addressed.
Annex A – Case studies. Annex A presents recent case studies that illustrate how wargaming methods and techniques have been applied to influence-related defence and security problems.
This report presents findings from CETaS research undertaken on behalf of the Dstl-sponsored AI Research Centre for Defence (ARC-D), examining the potential for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in wargaming. The research focused specifically on segments of manual analytic wargames with partially simulated elements and aimed to identify ways that AI could 1) increase the efficiency of preparing and implementing a game, 2) support player decision-making and 3) improve the insights that can be gained through wargames.
Given advances in non-defence AI, and game AI in particular, there is growing interest in leveraging AI for wargaming and simulation. The envisaged benefits are specific to the context of use, but examples include reducing the number of personnel required, increasing the speed of development of game mechanics, improving player immersion, speeding up game execution, and identifying innovative strategies and actions.
The research identified two key features of the current landscape of AI-enabled wargaming that make it harder for decision-makers to determine whether AI can in fact achieve these benefits: 1) This is a nascent debate, which has been heavily influenced by AI hype. While many ideas are circulating on how AI could improve wargaming workflows, few real-world case studies offer concrete evidence of effectiveness. And 2) AI-enabled wargaming is a subject that prompts highly varied opinions between subject matter experts. Much disagreement can be attributed to differences in expertise and experience, for example between wargamers and experts in modelling and simulation, or between technical experts and strategic decision-makers.
Within this context, this report aims to advance the debate by taking an evidence-based approach to assessing the feasibility of specific AI use cases for wargaming, outlining both their risks and potential benefits. Beyond specific AI applications, this report explores two possible investment pathways for AI in wargaming: 1) narrow, specialised AI applications for the near-term, and 2) high-risk, high-reward AI investments. We conclude that the benefits AI can bring to wargaming could be significant, but there would be benefit in first introducing automation in specifically tactical or abductive wargames in the near term to manage risks. While some narrower applications of AI can be deployed in the near-term, the most ambitious and transformative applications require further research and investment. Similarly, further investment in cross-cutting enablers is required before AI can be introduced effectively into strategic-level wargames.
The following report has been cleared for release by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory .
In May 2021, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory published a lengthy (165pp) report entitled How Can Dstl Expand Our National Security Gaming Toolset To Generate More Meaningful And Reliable Insights? This addresses a broad range of related issues, including the experiential value of games, identifying genuine insights (as opposed to artifacts of the game design), and post-game analysis.
Section 1 – Introduction
Section 2 – How Is An ‘Analytical Game’ Defined?
Section 3 – How Can We Develop Creating Knowledge Games That Are More Analytical?
Section 4 – How Can We Conduct More Analytical Games Within TheConstraints Of Engaging Very Senior Players?
Section 5 – How Can We Encourage More Representative Red Cell ResponsesTo Blue Cell Actions?
Section 6 – Proof of Concept Escalation Dynamics Game and Concept of Analysis
Section 7 – Conclusions and Recommendations
Section 8 – Closing Summary
This report has now been approved for general public release, and can be found in its entirety below (DSTL/PUB131779 1.4).
Wargaming Experiences: Discussions is the second volume in a series by Natalia Wojtowicz (Hague University of Applied Sciences), the first having been Soldiers, Scientists, and Civilians (2020).
In this volume Wojtowicz intersperses her ideas on wargaming with a series of short interviews with wargamers such as Tom Mouat, Eric Collin, Volko Ruhnke, and others. Topics addressed include civilian and military wargaming, evaluating the effectiveness of wargaming, feedback and wargaming. The challenge of how best to define wargaming runs as a central thread through much of the content in the first part of the book. There is also some attention to gaming cybersecurity.
PAXsims is pleased to present a selection of recently-published items on simulation and serious gaming. Some of these may not address conflict, peacebuilding, or development issues at all, but have been included because of the broader perspective they offer on games-based education or analysis. Others might address “gaming-adjacent” issues such as group dynamics and decision-making, assessment, forecasting, or related topics. Items previously featured on PAXsims are not included. However, if you have published something recently and we haven’t yet included it, let us know!
Articles may be gated/paywalled and not accessible without subscription access to the publication in which they appear.
This chapter aims to explore the ethical tensions between the objections raised against the use of lethal autonomous weapons generally and the potential of lethal autonomous weapons to mitigate some of the key challenges of urban warfare. Our argument originates from the premise that the ethics of war is an ongoing negotiation between recognizing the necessity of war and minimising the destructiveness of war. If this is true then we argue that the ethics of using lethal autonomous weapons in urban warfare cannot be appropriately weighed without the ability to have a reasonable sense of what operational impact they are likely to have. To generate an understanding of this operational impact, the UNSW Canberra Future Operations Research Group conducted an experiment using a wargame-based methodology. We present the potential merit of wargaming as a tool for applied ethics research and go on to describe the project and outline its findings. We contend that these findings represent a significant contribution to this debate.
Jeffrey Appleget, “Wargaming: a structured conversation [editorial],” Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology (2022).
[excerpt] I was asked by a colleague of mine to give a keynote presentation on wargaming at the 2022 Nordic Military Operations Analysis Conference. In our discussion of wargaming, Laura Wirola, principal researcher with the Finnish Defence Research Agency, offered that she saw a wargame as a structured conversation. Her words were a simple yet elegant way to not only describe what wargaming is, but to also differentiate wargaming from computer-based combat simulations. Too often today, we have senior leaders do a Mach 2 inverted fly-by of a wargame and declare “this could all be digitized.” True, we can digitize maps and animate the movement of unit counters, but that misses the point: wargames are about the conversations, not the means by which conversations are generated!…
This article argues that a culture of deliberate professional gaming helps develop a military’s intellectual edge. Deliberate professional gaming is where people actively choose to play and practise games to enhance professional development and education. A key element of such a culture is an acceptance of, and willingness to use, games. Wargaming is an example of professional military gaming. To explain how gaming supports the profession of arms and decision-making, the article first summarises the foundation of human decision-making: the heuristic. With this understanding, the article identifies the similarities between human heuristics and the Military Appreciation Process (MAP). Recognising these similarities allows the article to highlight how gaming provides two cognitive outcomes. First, games can enhance the mental skills that underpin decision-making. Second, games can help build new mental models for military officers. New mental models help increase professional creativity in decision-making. Combined, both benefits enhance military planning and decision-making. Yet contemporaryWestern militaries rarely use gaming to enhance military thinking. Given the benefits games may provide, the article proposes that the military should adopt a culture of deliberate and professional gaming. To assist, the article suggests some approaches to introduce professional gaming within military education. As the scholars cited earlier indicate, gaming within education helps build a pluralist habit of mind and enhances military planning, decision-making, and thinking about competition, conflict and war.
This report examines how games can be used to communicate and teach complex system structures. In collaboration with the total defense research institute, a game is being developed to introduce op- erational analysts to the Swedish total defence. The target group for the game lacked both experience in systems thinking and total defense, which is why the game was considered a good method to test.
The study has a design science research approach and used Arnold and Wade’s systems thinking matrix as the basis for the game’s learning objectives. The development of the game is largely based on methodology taken from serious gaming, war games and game pedagogy.
The result of the studies was that a number of points of interest for game development linked to complex systems are identified. Among other things, the result strengthened the idea of using games as an educational tool. The study also demonstrated certain difficulties with games and complex systems, where sometimes challenges were connected to creating a game that fairly depicts even the hidden relationships within a system.
In this thesis, we will study the naval component of Operation Sealion, the proposed 1940 German invasion of Britain. This never happened as during the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe did not achieve the level of air superiority required for the invasion to start. We aim to answer the question of whether the Germans could have gotten a sufficient force ashore. We developed two counterfactual scenarios, a 2-sigma scenario and a 6- sigma scenario, where the Luftwaffe win the Battle of Britain by a small and large margin, respectively. We used these counterfactuals to wargame the final German preparations, such as the laying of minefields. In the 6-SD wargame, the Germans were able to lay approximately 75% of their planned minefields, but only 20% in the 2-SD wargame. We then developed a simulation of the initial three days of Operation Sealion, where around 120,000 German troops would be shipped across the Channel using barges and transports, with the Royal Navy attempting to sink them. During each run of the simulation, parameters such as the effectiveness of British destroyers against barges were chosen from a prior distribution, allowing us to estimate dependencies between different quantities. We discovered that the most critical factor in Operation Sealion was the effectiveness of minefields. We found that if the outcome of the Battle of Britain was similar to reality or even slightly in favour of the Luftwaffe, as in the 2-SD simulation, then the Germans would not be able to get a sufficient force ashore, hence the invasion would be unsuccessful. However, if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain by a very large margin, as in the 6-SD simulation, then the Germans could have gotten a large army ashore, potentially paving the way for a successful invasion.
To meet the requirements of high accuracy and low cost of target classification in modern warfare, and lay the foundation for target threat assessment, the article proposes a human-machine agent for target classification based on active reinforcement learning (TCARL_H-M), inferring when to introduce human experience guidance for model and how to autonomously classify detected targets into predefined categories with equipment information. To simulate different levels of human guidance, we set up two modes for the model: the easier-to-obtain but low-value-type cues simulated by Mode 1 and the labor-intensive but high-value class labels simulated by Mode 2. In addition, to analyze the respective roles of human experience guidance and machine data learning in target classification tasks, the article proposes a machine-based learner (TCARL_M) with zero human participation and a human-based interventionist with full human guidance (TCARL_H). Finally, based on the simulation data from a wargame, we carried out performance evaluation and application analysis for the proposed models in terms of target prediction and target classification, respectively, and the obtained results demonstrate that TCARL_H-M can not only greatly save labor costs, but achieve more competitive classification accuracy compared with our TCARL_M, TCARL_H, a purely supervised model—long short-term memory network (LSTM), a classic active learning algorithm—Query By Committee (QBC), and the common active learning model—uncertainty sampling (Uncertainty).
Wargame is an important tool that enables training units to develop various strategies by allowing them to experience unexpected situations. There are three methodologies that determine the behavior of the Computer Generated Forces(CGF) in wargame—rule-based, agent-based, and learning- based methodologies. The military determines the behaviors of the CGF mainly based on the rules because a doctrine and an operation plan are well established. However, the advent of intelligent weapons and the accompanying changes in tactics will make it difficult to expect an environment and situations of the future battlefield. Therefore, we studied the automation of CGF through reinforcement learning in order to give unexpected situations, so that the training unit would be able to establish various strategies and tactics through the wargame model. Based on the combat functions of the ground forces, we configured multiple environments that the ground forces CGFs will learn in. First, infantry and artillery CGFs learned in the close combat environment, which is the basis of ground forces combat. Second, the trainee CGF learned in the context of military training. Third, the drone CGF learned how to reconnaissance and attack in a multi- drone environment, and finally, the combat service support CGF learned under the mission of supplying ammunition. As a result, we confirmed that the reinforcement learning methodology is applicable to CGF through these experiments.
‘Chance all’ is a simple 3D6 dice game that explores a player’s attitude to risk vs reward. Strategies for playing the game are explored ranging from zero risk to more complex forms of risk, based on an appreciation of the odds; those strategies more likely to win are identified. In addition, the game may be an indirect measure of an individual’s bias towards risk vs reward and how that bias alters through the game as the likelihood of winning and losing changes. It can be used as a simple introductory teaching tool for the Gaussian distribution to examine chance and probability, in evolution and computing science, together with psychological aspects of gameplay.
At present, under the realistic demand of precise command, wargame, as a common means of combat simulation, is more and more widely used in deduction simulation and tactics research with command institutions and personnel at all levels. As the core link in the command system, information communication elements urgently need to build a matching information communication wargame architecture and logical method. However, the elements of information communication are quite different from other synthetic elements in terms of interaction and action logic. This paper studies the modeling of information communication wargame behavior system, briefly analyzes the current situation of information communication wargame research, puts forward a modeling method based on agent interaction, constructs an interactive modeling system based on interaction layer, action layer and adjudication layer, makes detailed analysis and standard description of each layer model, and completes the systematic behavior modeling of information communication wargame.
Wargaming can be a powerful tool for educating soldiers, developing military doctrine, and determining future investment strategies. However, wargaming also has real limitations: if misapplied, wargaming can reinforce bad assumptions and be used to justify unrealistic or faulty battle plans.
In Fall 2020, political science instructors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) partnered to conduct a virtual-learning wargame centered on Taiwan. This article presents its design and execution along with the results from pre- and post-game surveys and interviews with the participants that were conducted to measure the achievement of its learning objectives. The game conduct and empirical results demonstrate two main findings. First, wargames are effective tools of active learning that aid in classroom instruction and grab the attention of students—even over Zoom—in a way that traditional methods of instruction do not. Second, wargames can bridge gaps between different fields. The MIT–NPS wargame tackled the civil–military divide by bringing together military officers at NPS and academics from MIT. These results show that wargaming holds promise as a bridge-building tool of instruction that can engage students, scholars, and practitioners in achieving positive learning outcomes.
A war game between two matched fleets of equal size and capability is designed and simulated in this work. Each fleet is composed of a carrier vessel (CV), a guided missile cruiser (CG), and two guided-missile destroyers (DDGs). Each vessel is equipped with specific weapons, including fighters, missiles, and close-in weapon system (CIWS), to carry out tactical operations. The maneuverability, maximum flying distance, and kill probability of different weapons are specified. Three goal options, a defense option and two more aggressive ones, are available to each fleet. A particle-pair swarm optimization (P2SO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the tactical parameters of both fleets concurrently according to their chosen options. The parameters to be optimized include take-off time delay of fighters, launch time delay of anti-ship missiles (ASHMs), and initial flying directions of fighters and ASHMs, respectively. All six possible contests between options are simulated and analyzed in terms of payoff, impact scores on CV, CG, DDG, and the number of lost fighters. Some interesting outlier cases are inspected to gain some insights on this game.
To achieve and maintain decision and mission superiority, the Navy has prioritized research in computational technologies and data analytic methods for automating and improving battle management and decision-making. This project studied novel automated techniques using a multidisciplinary systems analysis approach and developed conceptual designs for automated wargaming systems to support tactical decisions and operational planning. The research approach revealed three different applications for automated wargaming: (1) to support table-top wargames as an automated white cell for adjudication or as a red team cognitive agent, (2) to support operational mission planners as a non-real-time course of action (COA) engine, and (3) to support the tactical warfighter as a real- time COA engine that considers second, third, and nth order effects as it evaluates and recommends possible tactical COAs. The study found that automated wargaming battle management systems (leveraging game theory, prescriptive analytics, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, etc.) are needed to support enhanced situational awareness, reasoning and problem-solving, faster decision timelines, and the identification and evaluation of tactical and operational COAs. The study recommends further research into the use of automated wargaming systems, the emerging field of course of action engineering, and the applications of these novel techniques to support table-top wargaming, operational planning, and tactical decision-making.
Living in a world where crises and conflicts, both on a national and international level, are not uncommon, officers’ knowledge of the ethics and laws of war is crucial. This is particularly important in the case of urban warfare due to the presence of civilians during the conduct of hostilities and the imminent danger of hurting them or damaging their properties. Our chapter aims to discuss applied issues related to the development, testing, and use of war games and simulations as a tool for enhancing ethical decision making, promoting awareness and education on the ethics of urban warfare.
Reinforcement learning has received broad attention from multiple areas due to its remarkable successes nowadays. And the intelligence about decision making is becoming the new frontier of artificial intelligence. Among various real-world scenarios need accurate decision making, military decisions, however, been studied by few people. This paper describes a reinforcement learning environment powered by a war game, which is considered as a high level simulation for military operation. We define the observation and action space for this environment, along with a system designed for programmatic access. We also provide a series of mini-games for evaluation.
The purpose of this qualitative exploratory single-case study was to explore the perceptions and social interactions of participants in an online role-playing game campaign. Six participants were recruited from social media groups. All participants were over age 18 years and had 3 or fewer years of experience playing the traditional role-playing gameDungeons & Dragons. Game play was conducted, managed, and observed through a virtual tabletop simulator during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic. Methods triangulation including semistructured interviews, journal prompts and entries, and observations were used to gather data from the study participants and game manager. Narrative data were coded and analyzed weekly to monitor for saturation and other quality controls. The data provided information from the perspectives of the game players leading and cooperating as a team. Data analysis resulted in three main themes (skill identification, social interactions, and leadership skills) and nine subthemes (weakness identification, problem identification, problem resolution, teamwork, delegation, conflict resolution, decision-making, emotional response, and empathy) demonstrating new learning capacities that were transferred socially to various life interactions. Results indicated that the participants gained the ability to recognize learned skills and how to transfer the new knowledge and skills from the campaign to their personal, social, and work lives. Study results increased the body of contextual knowledge on how professionals may view learning from gamification and role play opportunities and their recognition and perception of how to obtain new and transferable skills.
The Secretary of the Navy disperses Navy forces in a deliberate manner to support DoD guidance, policy and budget. The current strategic laydown and dispersal (SLD) process is labor intensive, time intensive, and less capable of becoming agile for considering competing alternative plans. SLD could benefit from the implementation of artificial intelligence. We introduced a relatively new methodology to address these questions which was recently derived from an earlier Office of Naval Research funded project that combined deep analytics of machine learning, optimization, and wargames. This methodology is entitled LAILOW which encompasses Leverage AI to Learn, Optimize, and Wargame (LAILOW). We began by collecting data then employed data mining, machine learning, and predictive algorithms to perform artificial intelligent analysis to learn about and understand the data. This data included historical, phased force deployment data among others to learn patterns of what decisions were made and how they were executed. We then developed a stand-alone set of pseudo data that mimicked the actual, classified data so that experimental excursions cold be performed safely. We also limited our data to include ships. Our efforts produced a first-ever, relative, and optimal, score derived from a wargame like scenario for every available ship that might be moved. The score for each ship increases as fewer resources are required to fulfill an SLD plan requirement to move that ship to a new homeport. This not only produced a mathematically optimal response, but also enabled the immediate comparison between competing or alternate ship movement scenarios that might be chosen instead.
NATO’s Dynamic Messenger operational experimentation exercise, scheduled September 2022 (DYMS-22), investigates the role of maritime unmanned systems (MUS) in operations. To mitigate the limits of an at-sea exercise and further explore the benefits of MUS, a synthetic environment based on the use of Modelling and Simulation (M&S) supports immersive war-game events. This approach continues the team’s long-term research aim; supporting decision making by blending human, technology and data.The synthetic environment consists of three main elements: A NATO Architectural Framework (NAF) dashboard, a comprehensive federation of maritime simulators and an interactive suite of data analysis tools. Together, they allow players to test emerging technologies and extend exercise vignettes in a safe-to- fail environment.During war-games, the web-based NAF Dashboard facilitates the player’s debate and selection of MUS technologies and vignette extensions. Using the federation of maritime simulators, the players visualize the selected vignettes while generating a representative dataset to populate the DYMS-22 key performance indicators (KPIs). Utilising the data analysis tools, the players investigate the effect of their selections on the KPIs in detail.
Interactions with the modular, adaptable and immersive synthetic environment allows DYMS-22 participants to identify the limitations and strengths of MUS technologies in a series of iterating war-game rounds.
Wargames have long been touted as a key avenue to imagine and prepare for the contours of future competition and conflict, but a schism exists within the wargaming community on how best to incorporate technology. Technology skeptics within the wargaming community allege that many wargame technologies are inflexible, challenging to use, and often fail to address the wargame’s stated experiential or analytic end-goal. Technology enthusiasts, on the other hand, point to the lack of scientific rigor and complexity within wargames as reason for technology’s inclusion. Between these two entrenched positions—the skeptics and the enthusiasts—the role of technology in wargames is being adjudicated with broad based implications for the wargaming community and national security, writ large.
While many have sought to identify the ideal blend of wargaming and technology tools by examining game components, such as scenarios, or wargaming applications—such as course of action analysis—this paper takes a slightly different tack. Instead, it employs user experience research methods—by focusing on professional wargamers and their experiences—to identify a path forward. Drawing on a dozen user interviews with the professional wargaming community, eight focus groups, and a technology survey that elicited over 500 respondents of self- identified wargaming professionals with War on the Rocks—the most well-read national security outlet among professional wargamers—this paper outlines areas where technology is best suited to enhance wargaming. It assesses four identified wargaming pain points—adjudication, usability, game immersion, and analytics—and provides recommendations on how technology can best mitigate those challenges.
Within the disciplines of political science and International Relations, rich debates around pedagogy have crystallized into a robust set of scholarly institutions. This review article analyzes the current state of the disciplinary scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by canvassing the field’s journals where SoTL research is published and situating current developments within the broader SoTL ecosystem. We analyze the growth of publications, methodological and topical trends in the literature, and assess the scientometric impact of these debates. Moving forward, we call on these debates to methodologically prioritize rich expressions of student voice and to promote further collaborative practices in SoTL research.
Will-to-defend (försvarsvilja) is central to the Swedish concept of ’total defence’ (totalförsvar). It represents an individual and collective inclination to think or act in support of the defence of the nation. Psychological defence (psykologiskt försvar) shields will-to-defend from foreign influence campaigns that attempt to degrade it. This thesis sets out to create a serious game to teach elements of will-to-defend and concludes that such a game is possible but serious challenges remain with regards to the inclusion of psychological defence and in adjudicating the outcomes of influence operations in serious games.
Current research into will-to-defend and psychological defence are limited to the Swedish context and have not been tested in warfare. This thesis proposes that cognitive warfare is a relevant proxy concept for modern-day attempts to degrade will-to-defend and proposes that elections interference is a relevant proxy context for a serious influence game that aims to teach core concepts involved in attempts to degrade will-to-defend. A systems integrated model for elections interference is composed from existing scholarly research and its core elements are decomposed into essential learning blocks. Finally, a serious influence game is developed and venues for effective in-game adjudication are explored.
Prussian professional wargames (Kriegsspiele) came into existence during the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that the success of these wargames after the Wars of German Unification (1864-1870) was firmly connected with their role as integrative training solutions for the disintegrative tendencies of the leadership concept of mission tactics (Auftragstaktik), which evolved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both professional wargames and mission tactics were actively sponsored by the Prussian-German Great General Staff, and I argue that both were jointly pushed forward by a technological context that included the dramatic increase in nineteenth-century firepower and the military use of Germany’s railroad network.
Lucian Valeriu Scipanov and Valentin Totir, “Wargaming Theory,” Strategies XXI (2022).
In this article, we want to make an overview of a distinct stage in the process of planning military operations, namely wargaming. From our point of view, as specialists in the field of military art, wargaming is a particular aspect of the decision-making process, offering the possibility to identify optimal response solutions, depending on certain variables of the operational environment. Thus, in this approach, we will start from the main historical landmarks regarding the appearance and development of the domain, so that later we can present certain particularities of wargaming, on which occasion we will be able to identify the general theory of the domain, next to developing a series of directions of action, adapted to probable courses of action of a possible enemy. The development of military art, the experience of military strategists, the emergence of new technologies, and the adaptation of tactics to changes on the battlefield, represent a milestone in the way of conducting both warfare and wargaming. The only constant in this field is that human imagination is limitless and we can only hope that the military specialists will find the proper solution to transform fiction into a reality. Thus, we address not only the specialists but also those who are at the beginning of their military career, offering a perspective on the field.
This book offers an overview of how conflicts are represented and enacted in games, in a variety of genres and game systems. Games are a cultural form apt at representing real world conflicts, and this edited volume highlights the intrinsic connection between games and conflict through a set of theoretical and empirical studies. It interrogates the nature and use of conflicts as a fundamental aspect of game design, and how a wide variety of conflicts can be represented in digital and analogue games.
The book asks what we can learn from conflicts in games, how our understanding of conflicts change when we turn them into playful objects, and what types of conflicts are still not represented in games. It queries the way games make us think about armed conflict, and how games can help us understand such conflicts in new ways.
Offering a deeper understanding of how games can serve political, pedagogical, or persuasive purposes, this volume will interest scholars and students working in fields such as game studies, media studies, and war studies.
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in games has been significantly developed and attracted much attention over the past few years. This article not only leverages the reinforcement learning multiagent deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to realize the dynamic decision-making of game AI but also creatively incorporates deep learning and natural language processing technologies in the wargame field to transform game context situation maps into textual suggestions in wargame confrontation. In this article, we effectively integrate reinforcement learning technologies, deep learning technologies, and natural language processing technologies to generalize the semantic text output at state-of-the-art accuracy, which plays an important role in human understanding of game AI behavior. The experimental results are promising and can be used to verify the feasibility, accuracy, and performance of our proposed model in extensive simulations against benchmarking methods.
This paper discusses several concepts for the development of a distributed trainer for command staff trainees learning to develop courses of action (COAs) and wargame. These concepts include how understanding the nature of the team tasks determines the taskwork and teamwork competencies and shapes the pedagogical strategies to be incorporated into the trainer. As well as concepts related to the difficulties in developing assessments for unstructured team tasks and the challenges with assessing team processes, we also discuss the inclination towards a positivist paradigm that relies on the presence of behaviors for indicators, when absence of certain behaviors can also be indicative and used in assessments. We conclude with a preliminary framework for organizing system features for the trainer, and ideas for future research.
Modeling conflict through wargaming is the only option outside of high-cost real conflict for militaries to train their forces and attempt to reveal information about their own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of their foes. This is the function wargaming serves in theory, but in reality, the process of wargaming is undermined by information and incentive problems that cause the real-world performance of wargames to deviate sharply from their performance in theory. These problems resolve the conflicting professional views on wargaming between those who want to use them for predictive purposes and those who want to use them for training purposes in favor of the latter.
In this study, an intelligent wargaming approach is proposed to evaluate the effectiveness of a military operation plan in terms of operational success and survivability of the assets. The proposed application is developed based on classical military decision making and planning (MDMP) workflow for ease of implementation into the real-world applications. Contributions of this study are threefold; a) developing an intelligent wargaming approach to accelerate the course of action (COA) analysis step in the MDMP which leads creating more candidate COAs for a military operation, b) generating effective tactics against the opposite forces to increase operational success, and c) developing an efficient, visual wargame-based MDMP framework for future systems that require a small team of operators to supervise a network of automated agents. Several example engagement scenarios are performed to evaluate the system capabilities and results are given. Moreover, fleet composition issue for automated agents is investigated and the fleet composer algorithm with hyperparameter tuning architecture is proposed.
The Doctrine and Training Centre of the Polish Armed Forces has just published a very useful Wargaming Practitioner’s Guide, written by Mirosław Wnorowski. The English version is shared below. The book explores:
The essence and objectives of wargames (including definitions, benefits and limits, history, and a link to the key elements and dilemmas of game theory).
The use of wargames (in the armed forces, as an element of planning, and a classification of types).
The key elements (participants, scenario, adjudication, data collection).
Game tools (space, time, actors and the interaction between them).
The process of preparing and executing a wargame (including particular attention to seminar and matrix games).
PAXsims 