GrogHeads Contest for Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm

Our buddies over at GrogHeads are running a contest called GrogHeads Strike Back! The Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm Contest

GrogHeads has partnered with On Target Simulations and Matrix Games to bring a fantastic year-end shootout, with a chance to win some excellent prizes from Matrix Games and the GrogHeads prize vault.
Here’s how it works:

1. You have to play a game. We know, right?! Let us say that again: You have to play a game. See, you’re loving this contest already.

1a. Specifically, you have to play this game: Flashpoint Campaigns: The GrogHeads Strike Back

1c. This is a custom-modified self-contained game and scenario for Flashpoint Campaigns. This scenario is not available as a part of the standard install, so even if you already have the game (and OTS loves you if you do!) then you still need to download and install this package to play.

The rest of the rules are over there, but you can win $65 for the Matrix Games online store, or some other stuff. Just for playing a free game!


By: Brant

Video Coverage of Connections UK

By: Brant

GrogHeads.com Calls for Research

From the other site I work with, GrogHeads.com

GrogHeads Staff, 26 August 2013

Hobby games and gamers - especially in the strategy gaming and wargaming world - have rarely been the subjects of much serious published research inquiry. And yet, some of us know from personal experience that such research is, in fact, being conducted in graduate schools and academic institutions all over. Distinct from marketing analyses in that they are not focused on improving commercial performance, these studies are frequently conceptualized and executed by members of the broader gaming community who are seeking to fuse their love for the hobby with an academic persuit in the social sciences or humanities. Although there are a few academic outlets for such research - the journal Simulation & Gaming springs to mind - not every paper was written with the intention of journal or conference submission. Nevertheless, the research is still interesting and useful, and for GrogHeads everywhere it is certainly relevant. Papers shared may inspire better research by later investigators, and the ideas discussed may help designers and developers craft better games. Here at GrogHeads, we're kicking off a new monthly series on Research and Gaming. The first of these papers was published in early August, and we plan to follow with one each month. And we'd like you to submit your research to us. We're not a peer-reviewed journal, but we do have some academics on our staff and among our "Friends of GrogHeads" network that include PhD's in history, political science, and business, as well as other grad degrees in social sciences and the humanities. So if you've got something interesting that you want to share, here's your chance. Email us your papers at research-at-grogheads-dot-com . Make sure you include all of your citations and footnotes in the document, and attach any graphics as separate files. We will also need a short bio from you about who you are and how people can contact you. One great way for people to contact you is to create an account in our forums, so that you can join any discussions of feedback that go on there. We even have an area dedicated to references and research. A few caveats, of course:

• Don't send us something you're hoping to see presented at a conference, or in a peer-reviewed journal
• Don't send us something you expect to try to claim on a CV when you're hunting for a future academic job
• Don't send us blatant marketing, political, or religious tracts
• Don't expect detailed, in-depth critiques of your work from our advisory team, but do expect a lot of questions from our audience, many of whom do not have a great academic background, and for whom there will need to be some gentler discussion of the finer points of how your research got to where it is.

So please send us your tired, huddled research projects yearning to breathe free, and let's share them with the wider gaming audience. Who knows what great insights they may spawn for someone else to build on, what feedback you'll get to improve your own work. Either way, it'll be in the public and being discussed, which sure beats languishing on a digital shelf somewhere, next to the Ark of the Covenant.

The idea here is not to start some guerilla journal, but rather to give folks an outlet for cool papers they write but are never going to publish or disseminate beyond their classroom.

By: Brant

Battles Magazine

By: Brant

CONNECTIONS 2013 Conference on Professional Wargaming

CONNECTIONS 2013 Conference on Professional Wargaming
The Connections 2013 conference will be held 22-25 July in Dayton Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Connections is the only national event dedicated specifically to professional military wargaming. Organized and chaired since its beginning in 1993 by (now retired) Air Force COL Matt Caffrey, the annual Connections conference has worked to advance the art, science and application of serious wargaming by bringing together all elements of the field (military, commercial and academic) so participants can exchange information on achievements, best practices and needs.
The theme for 2013 is: "Enhancing Wargaming Support to Budget Decisions." Given the current and future uncertainty over US Department of Defense budgets, this is a timely theme indeed.

Another valuable element of Connections is the chance to meet leaders from across the spectrum of wargaming. Past attendees and speakers have included Larry Bond, James F. Dunnigan, Joe Miranda, Al Nofi, Peter Perla, John Prados and many more.
Keynote speakers for this year are:
- COL Chris Froehlich, Chief Strategic Planning Division, Air Force Material Command
- Dr. Peter Perla, author of The Art of Wargaming, Lead, Wargaming, Centre for Naval Analysis
- Dr. Thomas Allen, Deputy Director for Studies and Analysis, Joint Staff

Connections is open to all contributors to the field of professional wargaming: military, government, defense contractor, academic, and recreational. It is an unclassified event. Many of the attendees are recreational wargamers in their spare time, but the emphasis of the conference is on discussion of activity and issues in professional wargaming, from the military, commercial and academic perspectives.

See the conference website and agenda at http://connections-wargaming.com/
Contact Matt Caffrey at matthewbcaffreyjr - at - gmail.com for further information.
Thanks for your interest,
Brian Train

By: Brant

A Nifty Online Wargaming Tool

A great clickable, online wargaming map & counters that you can use for a variety of simpler games, including the ones in Dr Sabin's Simulating War.
The Portable Morschauserscope

By: Brant

GrogHeads Readers' Choice Award Voting

Go check out the voting over at GrogHeads. There's a lot to choose from.

Grogheads is kicking off our annual look back at last year's great games, and letting the readers weigh in. This is your chance to vote for the best games in a variety of categories, and have your voice heard about the best of 2012.

By: Brant

When Wargaming Was a "Sport"

Yes, there was an article about wargaming - tabletop minis gaming - in Sports Illustrated. That's right: Sports Illustrated.

The observation post I picked to watch the battle was about halfway between a railroad yard and the plateau on which the opposing armies were deployed. I had to squint to see through the blue haze and intermittent puffs of smoke that floated across the terrain. Some of the troops to the east were about to haul an artillery piece over a bridge, and behind them a group of cavalrymen was preparing to charge. To the west, the enemy had concealed some of his men in a pass behind a mountain. It occurred to me that I was one of the few war correspondents in history who ever had been afforded such a splendid panoramic view of an engagement, and again I peered through my glasses at the troops moving into position.

The men looked very small at that distance. For that matter, they looked very small up close, for each was only 1[3/16] inches tall. Their battlefield was a 5-by-9-foot piece of green-painted plywood set atop a pool table. The blue haze came from a gel placed over a flood-light by a photographer, and the smoke came from a smoke-pill apparatus made for him by a friend in the Special Effects department at NBC-TV. The rolling stock in the railroad yard behind me was all Lionel, my observation post was an aluminum tubular kitchen chair and my glasses were not field but nose. I was in Bristol, Conn. to cover a war game that was about to be played by two devotees of this little-known sport, the brothers Bob and Charlie Sweet (left).

President of the North Side Bank, a graduate of Washington and Lee (he played guard there on a Southern Conference championship team in 1934), Charlie Sweet is a 50-year-old outdoorsman whose husky body imprisons, although not very effectively, the spirit of a boy. For years he took time off from his various civic activities (he is on virtually every public-minded committee in Bristol) to make model aircraft, both gas-and rubber-band-powered, as well as model boats, trains and other toys. As a boy he had played with tin or lead soldiers, and around 1950 he found himself thinking that it might be fun to play with them again.

Today Charlie Sweet is one of the foremost collectors of tin soldiers—or military miniatures, as they are called more formally—in the country. He owns around 6,000 figures, most of which he designed, cast and painted in his basement workshop. Sweet is just one of approximately 10,000 collectors, a figure vouched for by Jack Scruby of Visalia, Calif., a military-miniature manufacturer who also serves as a kind of information center for this breed of hobbyist. "Collectors are divided into three major categories," Scruby said recently. "There are those who just collect soldiers—some of the more famous ones are Churchill, Eisenhower, the writer James Jones, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and King Farouk. Then there are those who get their kicks out of making their own figures, usually in plaster-of-paris molds, casting them in lead and painting them—or who just like to paint the unpainted figures I make and sell. Finally, there are those who play war games with them. Some collectors have really tremendous armies. Leon Chodnicki of Baltimore has more than 40,000 figures, and Gus Hansen of Chicago has at least that many also."

There's a LOT more. Seriously. We excerpted part of page 1. It's 4 pages. Go read.

By: Brant

Fractures in Army's Training Sims Community

In what can only be described as shot across the bow to any Army agency not called "TCM-Gaming" the new new TRADOC command policy letter #21 pretty clearly lays a smack-down on any attempts to localize procurement to support training. The secondary effects, of course, are to (a) consolidate power in the hands of TCM-Gaming, an organization staffed by non-gamers with little/no interest in actually learning about wargaming or participating in the wargaming field in any sort of professional manner* and (b) ensure the continued flow of tax dollars to the 'big boys' of the wargaming/sims world - BAH, LockMart, Boeing, Northrup - who have the battalions of contractors needed to support the bloated legacy sims that are waaaaay to complex for their actual usage.
The interesting question will be how it impacts the training for the FA57 community, whose curriculum often includes non-standard COTS games with the intention of showing the FA57s what the state of the art is among civilian designers. No good idea should go un-stolen, so there's no reason not to teach the FA57s what's out there, unless you're an Army agency intentionally trying to stifle independent thought so as to maintain iron-fisted control over the acquisitions of toys you approved but don't actually fully understand.

click images to enlarge and read the entire memo

* Quick, name the TCM-Gaming attendees at Connections this year. Can't do it? Neither can they - there weren't any.

By: Brant

Anniversary: Black Hawk Down

October 3-4, 1993 were the two days of the Battle of Mogadishu.

The Battle of Mogadishu (more commonly referred to as Black Hawk Down or, for Somalis, the Day of the Rangers (Somali: Maalintii Rangers) was part of Operation Gothic Serpent and was fought on October 3 and 4, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, between forces of the United States, supported by UNOSOM II, and Somali militia fighters loyal to the self-proclaimed president-to-be Mohamed Farrah Aidid who had support from armed civilian fighters. A U.S. Army force in Mogadishu, consisting primarily of US Army Rangers from 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment; B [Bravo] Company, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (1st SFOD-D), better known as "Delta Force"; and helicopters from 1st Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, attempted to seize two of Aidid's high-echelon lieutenants during a meeting in the city. Shortly after the assault began, Somali militia and armed civilian fighters managed to down two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters over the city. The subsequent rescue operation to secure and recover the crews of both helicopters drew the raid, intended to last no more than an hour, into an overnight standoff in the city. The battle resulted in approximately 20 deaths, 80 wounded, and 1 helicopter pilot captured amongst the raid party and rescue forces, including Pakistani and Malaysian troops. US sources estimate between 1,500 and 3,000 Somali casualties, including civilians; SNA forces claim only 315 casualties, with 812 wounded.

The crew of Super 6-4 a month before the Battle of Mogadishu. Winn Mahuron, Tommy Field, Bill Cleveland, Ray Frank and Mike Durant. (h/t Doctrine Man)

Want to replay the raid and try your own hand at the mission? Check out LNLP's Lock'n'Load: Day of Heroes, and refight Mogadishu on your own tabletop.

By: Brant

US Army Does WH40K

Slate has a great article about US soldiers and Warhammer 40K.

As an Army officer, Maj. Stephen D. Carey has served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his spare time, he fights a different kind of battle, one that rages in the apocalyptic 41st millennium. The distant future would be a terrifying realm for a mere mortal, what with all the Necrons, Tyranids, and Tau on the loose. To survive the war-torn galaxy, Carey enlists the help of marauding, green-skinned Orks. He also presides over an Imperial Guard army, because some days, defending mankind is more fun than trying to destroy it.
This is the intricate, intense world of Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop war game played with hand-painted, miniature figurines. Warhammer 40,000, which its devotees call 40K, first hit shelves in 1987 and is the product of Games Workshop, a British corporation whose influence extends far beyond the United Kingdom. Around 70 percent of the company’s sales come from abroad, and the retailer has 86 official stores in North America alone.
What kind of people stage make-believe wars with armloads of Space Marines? A lot of the time, it’s real Marines. Games Workshop’s U.S.-based outreach manager estimates that 20 to 25 percent of Games Workshop’s American customers are active members of the military. If you include veterans, she says, that number jumps to about 40 percent. “The bottom line is, there are nerds everywhere,” Carey explains. “I’ve been an infantryman for 20 years. I’m no stranger to fighting. But I’m a total nerd.”

Much more at the link

By: Brant

Just To Start To Tease You

By: Brant

A Walking Wargame Analysis of the World

Up in the DC area, there's a giant walkable map of the world that General Dempsey uses with other staffers to work out visualizations of real-world challenges facing the military.

“Strategic seminar” is the name Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has chosen for these daylong sessions, which were not exactly a war game more than a tabletop military exercise, and unlike anything the Pentagon has done to plan its future.

Shortly after being sworn in as chairman last October, a decade after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, General Dempsey said the military was confronting “a strategic inflection point, where the institution fundamentally re-examines itself.” The seminar project he started fits his goal: to try to build the right military force for five years from now — and not be driven by the budget cycle into a series of year-by-year decisions.

The overarching question is whether the Pentagon’s war plans need to be rewritten to take into account how the military has been affected by a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now by orders to shrink to fit mandated budget cuts. While the list of potential adversaries and the rising threats remain classified, the assessments from the sessions already are reshaping military planning. Initial findings have been presented to President Obama by General Dempsey, officials said.

One realization is that under any situation in which the United States is in an armed conflict within five years, American territory most likely would be attacked as part of an adversary’s actions, regardless of where the major fighting was focused overseas. That attack might be direct, by missile, or more asymmetrical, as in terrorism or via a computer-network cyberattack.

“In the future, our homeland will not be the sanctuary it has been,” General Dempsey told a recent military conference, during which he pulled back the curtain — a bit — on the strategic seminar project.

As a result of that seminar, General Dempsey said, the military’s Northern Command, responsible for defending United States territory, has begun work with the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies to assess how potential demands for military forces overseas might affect security at home, and how any shortfalls could be resolved.

Another lesson from the seminars is that the Pentagon might have to organize and deploy forces in a different way than war plans now dictate if there is another major conflict overseas and simultaneously a significant attack at home, or the need to manage a catastrophic, domestic natural disaster.

“We assumed a conflict someplace, and we flowed the forces required to that conflict,” General Dempsey said.

By: Brant

GrogHeads is Down, Thanks to Anonymous

GoDaddy, the online host for GrogHeads, is down right now and Anonymous is claiming responsibility.

GoDaddy, the domain registrar and Web hosting company, is down, perhaps taking millions of websites down as a result.

"Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it," @GoDaddy tweeted Monday.

While GoDaddy.com's site is up and running, websites hosted by the company are still experiencing outages.

TechCrunch reports that GoDaddy email addresses are down, as well. The blog suggests customers concerned with that their site has been affected can check online status at Down For Everyone Or Just Me.

A quick call to the company's customer service line resulted in a voice message stating that the company is aware of issues involving several services, including web hosting and emails. The company suggest following its Twitter page for updates.

Twitter accounts claiming to be associated with the hacking group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack.

"Basically, every GoDaddy site on the planet just crashed," @TibitXimer tweeted.

"#TangoDown - godaddy.com," @AnonOpsLegion tweeted Monday, claiming that the Twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r was responsible for the breach. "TangoDown" is the term that Anonymous generally uses to signify that a website is down.

By: Brant

Helicopter Combat on Your Tabletop

FOGN Michael Peck has a review of Hind Commander, a minis wargame that focuses on helicopter combat.

an excerpt:

As expected in a helicopter warfare simulation, victory in “Hind Commander” tends to center on exploiting the technical characteristics of your equipment. Helicopters are rated for speed, ceiling, sensor effectiveness, range and tracking capability, plus electronic countermeasures and armor. The helicopters hunt, while anti-aircraft weapons hunt them. Naturally, helicopters are far more mobile than the plodding ground-bound troops and armor, which are treated more abstractly. There are fixed-wing aircraft, but they are also treated in less detail. The whirlybirds are the stars of this show.

An interesting feature of “Hind Commander” is that for a given battle, players have a certain number of points to spend on various configurations of “strike groups.” A regular strike group will have a balanced mix of, say, a dozen heavy and light helicopters. On the other hand, a special forces group will have fewer but more high-tech choppers, while a reserve group will have more but older equipment. In addition, players can buy stratagem cards that offer bonuses such as elite helicopter crews or enhanced jamming. So there’s a fair amount of unpredictability on the tabletop battlefield.

Sounds intriguing... I'm curious how big the "minis helicopter-centric wargaming" market is.

By: Brant

Kickstarting Some Fantasy Wargaming

This is off of our usual stream of topics, but it's from a FOGN, so we're running with it. DGS minis, run by a retired Army officer and wargamer, has posted a project over on Kickstarter to raise some funds for the Urdaggar Tribes of Valor Fantasy Miniatures line that they're building out. From the CEO...

Well, finally got a kickstarter project going for my little game company DGS Games. Kickstarter is a crowd source funding website where companies post product ideas and ask for public support to get the funding for their projects, in our case to hire some sculptors and pay for production molds. While I learned a lot about producing baordgames over the years, it's incredible what the up front the production costs are for quality miniatures. So, please take a look and help if you can.

Yes, it is for some fantasy miniatures -- but, we do have a T-Shirt reward level for just a $20 pledge, and a variety of other reward levels. If you really want to help, there is an $800 reward level where we will immortalize your likeness in one of our production miniatures. Imagine millions of gamers everywhere using your figure to fight off their enemies!! Okay, maybe not millions yet, but it could happen - with your help.

Check out the excellent illustrations, and lend a hand if you can to help them get these figs into production.

By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, Luminaries Demo'ing Games

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, afternoon sessions

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Afternoon session

I missed some of the introductions when I was in the wrong room. D'oh!

Anders Frank (Swedish Defence College) is discussing the development of wargaming in the Swedish military.
Low-fidelity wargames that focuses on "good enough" and capture the major attributes of warfare without detail overkill. Designed for good gameplay to learn by doing.
Pros: shorter dev times; day to learn & use; increased freq of use; engages students
Cons: Some responsibility shifted to instructors; well-suited for their base design purpose, but not more generalizable; require certain pre-req level of knowledge

First game was SSM: Simple Surface warfare Model
Cadet course in naval/littoral warfare for basic tactics
(video demo of the game)
Another game: MAO - Master of Air Operations

Lo-fi wargame issues
-- Maintaining students suspension of disbelief
-- Over-enthusiastic team "Gamer mode"
-- Not enough time for iterative use
-- essential/delicate relationship between gaming & debriefing

Wargaming research
-- Document structure & knowledge of wargaming
Build off of pedagogy, interaction, etc

"Gamer mode": desire to win over-rides the desire to learn, and rational game-based decisions take over rational real-life decisions


Ellie Bartels (CASL) talking about GEMSTONE.
Originally created to support a CISA/SPOLIC program in ICTF; mostly foreign students (20-30 nations represented)
Models US FM 3-24; doesn't have to model reality, has to be in line with doctrine
Why multi-method gaming? Social science of COIN / Systems Dynamics Modeling
-- Social science of COIN: complex causality and mix of hard/soft metrics
-- SD: dynamic adjudication that lets red & blue impact the environment
Discussion of Pearl Conflict, the actual scenario run last year
-- Blue team is 5 sub-teams, 1 nat'l gov't, plus 5 regional subordinate gov'ts
-- Red team is 5 independent non-coordinating teams; red team played by alumni from host nation
Turn sequence (will post graphic later) in which 1 day of game-play = 1 year of game time.
A lot of coordination btw blue teams in which they move resources / assets / budget around the country.
Player outputs are metrics (scaled scores + GIS data) and qualitative feedback (headlines & narrative)
Key findings:
-- GEMSTONE fills hole in DOD model, strat level, limited resources, host-nation focused
-- MMG eases staff burden while maintaining complexity
-- SD model provides a consistent underpinning to inform students



Dr Stephens Downes-Martin, talking at the level of serious, high-stakes wargamers
The Three Witches of Wargaming: Boss, Sponsor, Players
They are the three people who will interfere with your game
Even if they were once expert wargamers, they are not now (their experience will be perishable)
They will want to 'help' your design process; if they do it at the beginning of the process you can recover, but if they do it on day one of your game, it's too late
You need to have the professional courage to stand up for your design and face down higher-ranking leadership
The gamble is when the holes in your design will show through (before or after your sponsor rotates out)

The boss: research shows that once a practitioner ("doer") is moved to leadership (responsible for overseeing "doers") and then moves back to doing (i.e., giving you advice as a practitioner) they are not as effective as they were before. You can reduce these conflicts by ensuring your boss stays informed with your developments.

The players: you're not "inviting" senior leader to play in your game; you're "recruiting" them. Keep the players focused on the objectives of the sponsor (the four-star who may not be there) instead of their personal thoughts on what's happening. Explain what the sponsor is wanting and recruit them to lead the game cell through the game as designed.

The sponsor: fixing the sponsor can potentially fix the other two. You want the sponsor to bring to you a clearly-articulated problem and some guidance on participants. What you usually get is a poorly-thought-out solution with no real problem articulated. Or you get a sponsor that's too busy to talk to you, and puts an "action officer" in the middle of the communication flow.
You need to meet with the sponsor, not the action officer, not matter how much their subordinates claim to represent it. Don't start until you meet the sponsor. Need a full-scale analysis with the sponsor
4 questions:
-- What do you want?
-- Why do you want it? (and if they mention stakeholders, drill down about why they want it)
-- Why don't you have it already? (a wealth of information: bureaucratic issues, incompetence, etc?)
-- When are you leaving? (establishes your time horizon)
(No known correlation between being good at your job and being good at analyzing your job)


By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, morning sessions again

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

As per Connections tradition, we didn't make it past the first panel and we're already off-schedule.

---

1030 – 1200 "Needs Pull," Defense Decision Support Wargaming Today
Co-chairs: Prof Stephen Downs-Martin & Col Westy Westenhoff
Speakers:
Approaches to Title X Gaming: Concepts or Capabilities, Doug Ducharme Shawn Burns, Naval War College
Wargaming In Support of Science and Technology Decision- Making, Paul Vebber, Naval Underseas Warfare Center
Aids to Effective Contingency Planning, Westy Westenhoff, Col USAF (ret) Checkmate

---

Shawn Burns
Talking about Title X wargaming, which are the Congressionally-mandated annual (or semi-annual) exercises that are supposed to look forward to future force requirements, capabilities, strategies, and commitments. Great slides that lay out the legal requirements for the Title X wargames, by citing and highlighting the legal/policy documents that specify the requirements.

How do diff's btw service approaches matter? (analytical vs educational)

Paul Vebber, who is not here representing NUWC, associated with NUWC, affiliated with NUWC, or any way whatsoever on the same planet on NUWC.
Talking about how wargaming can be used in support of science and technology, and using wargaming to explore S&T concepts
"It's all fun & games until someone loses an eye. Then it's fun you can't see." - James Hetfield

Don't argue over what's a "game" or what's a "simulation" but focus instead on the verbs: "gaming" and "simulating".
Types of games being used for S&T
-- BOGSAT
-- Semi-adjudicated, resembled COA wargaming w/ action -> reaction -> counteraction
-- Contested, with head-to-head performance, but with the caution of "black box" effects where players can't see "why" certain things work.
-- Full CPX, w/ live and non-cooperative red-team

Building an S&T game requires a solid understanding of the customer and purpose. Also want to understand what decisions have already been made, and whether or not your purpose is merely to advocate on behalf of the sponsor. Perhaps you need to "help" the sponsor identify the likely ways in which his product/process/idea will be attacked.

SW, Ep3 - RotS scene with flying robots carrying buckets of lava - what is the question to which "Flying robots carrying buckets of lava" is the answer?
Why are we putting xyz gadget into the game? BECAUSE WE CAN

Design to detail or design to effect
--- "simulation fidelity" - cram in all the details vs "player understanding" - how much time and effort the players can muster for it
--- scenario design that matches echelon of analysis with echelon at which effects are discernible
--- design and implementation of the red force



COL(R) Westenhoff now addressing contingency planning

Feasibility, cost, time, and risk estimation
- National decision-makers have big questions and few big questions have a pat answer
First task in a wargame: Don't lose
- Avoid failure, and anticipate an active adversary
(will admit to getting a little distracted in here, and didn't take great notes while listening... sorry)
Wargames can influence decisions about wars, and can alleviate burdens of cognitive fallacies.
Participants should strive for integrity and fidelity.


By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, morning sessions

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Dr Kjonnerod kicking off the real sessions with a discussion of how the wargaming community needs to pull together more and meet their counterparts and find solutions that other people are already having success with.

Uh, we tried that after last Connections, and were met with stunning indifference on the part of most of the professional wargaming community.

Matt Caffrey loves to talk about the importance of wargaming, and loves to address lessons of pre-WWII wargaming at the Naval War College and how lessons learned in those events informed their decisions, especially in the Pacific. When I get Matt's links to those articles / stories / books, I'll link or post them.

Dean Robert Rubel (NWC) is talking about current status of wargaming at the Naval War College. He notes that the topics that their constituents are interested in are among the toughest to wargame, and are going in new and different directions.
"Fast and objective" are still key requirements for wargaming. Can we use computers as an impartial umpire? If so, how do we impartially adjudicate non-kinetic factors?
Participants are a key component of wargames, and where senior staff/flag officers would show up for weeks at a time for the exercise, these days they only show up for a few days, max. "Fast" now means that useful game feedback comes quickly enough to be meaningful to the participants, not just that the computer calculates it quickly.
Networking players is not enough - need a way to make the interactions more meaningful.
No such thing as machine objectivity, since all machines are programmed by people. Can run tactical-level games that address kinetic actions, but at the operational/strategic levels need to bring in non-kinetic factors.
Three ways to bring in other factors into a wargame: portray it, represent it, or talk about it.
Talk about it = bring in SME's to address the exercise on how their domain will impact what's going on.
Represent it = some form of rules-based mechanism to account for the effects.
Portray it = played as a full partner.
Systematic vs Heroic vs Disruptive Warfare: disruptive warfare is based around "outlasting" the other guy (insurgency, commerce raiders, etc). A great example of "disruptive warfare" is Washington in the AWI.

Dr Philip Sabin is being web-conferenced in through a video link, and it sounds like he's in an echo chamber on his end.
First slide of Sabin's talk is

Dunnigan was WRONG
Rubel was WRONG
Perla was WRONG
Sabin was WRONG

As 2 of those guys are in the audience (and one of them was just speaking), it got a chuckle.
Dunnigan was wrong in that manual wargaming has not died out, and in fact, the numbers of titles are expanding. Among the reasons it's not died out include the lack of technological obsolescence (can still play board games from 40+ years ago, but can't play computer games from 10 years ago), and budgetary issues. Sabin's key reason that board wargaming is still popular is the accessibility and transparency of the designs.

Rubel was wrong because he was advocating a professionalization of the wargaming community in an attempt to weed out the poor designs. Sabin's argument is not to narrow the wargaming field, but to widen it as much as possible so that you have more educated consumers who can recognize poor design, as well as customers who may be capable of creating their own game rather than have to bring in someone. As an example, he shows some of the works of his students who have created games within the parameters of his master's program at King's College and had students turn out some great work, despite never having played a wargame.

Perla was wrong in that trying to account for the "black swans" ignores the variability in war that's not caused by them. (Here we go again...) Is every bit of variability in war due to "black swans" or are there other ranges that can inject necessary variability, but still with a reasonable likelihood of outcome?

Sabin war wrong: "Lost Battles" was intended to be a form of scholarship as well as recreational game. However, for ancient warfare, the volume of scholarship generated by the academic world far outweighs the amount of evidence available to scholars. Wargames force players to make decisions in the eyes of the participants.

Sabin admits he's being deliberately contrarian to make some points.
- Manual wargames are increasingly vibrant and useful even in a digital age
- Wargame design is more art than science and needs to be more accessible
- Chance is essential to wargames, but the unexpected cannot dominate
- Wargames are only taken seriously by those who actually play them (if then...)


Dr William Lademan, MCWL
"Wargaming as a Substrate for Innovation"
Without a good definition of what a wargame is, we're all partitioners, if not professionals.
Without those definitions, there's no lexicon that can unify the discussion of terminology such that we're all speaking the same language.
As a substrate, wargaming is required for innovation.
Wargaming is a great vehicle for innovation to influence and drive strategic changes. Better to have 2 cardboard carriers sunk and learn the lessons rather than learn them with real people.
Comment of MCWL as the "headlights" of the Marine Corps to look forward.
Title X wargaming - fundamental responsibilities enshrined within the the US Code that created DoD' includes the execution of annual wargames to address future capabilities in context of Title X responsibilities
Wargame definition: an artificial vehicle made up of a field of variables that replicates conflict and allows the human intellect to consider a real problem.
-- Variable - a function that may assume difference values in time and space. Too few variables and it's just tic-tac-toe; too many variables and it's too unwieldy.

Start off with objectives of the wargames
Develop an estimate of the situation: Force, Domains, Threat, Risk
Strategy / Theory of Action to help shape the enemy through Freedom of action (maximize yours, eliminate his); Cohesive user of power; Misdirection --> allows operational decision-making
(Discussion of how to wargame Joint Operational Access Concept, using a model that incorporates a series of "bands" of enemy activities as you approach the area where you want to access.)
Wargaming process:
-- Preparation (organization of variables)
-- Execution (entanglement) - not there to control, but to facilitate
-- Assessment (coherence)

(Q&A, but I'm not going to try to capture it)


By: Brant