Wargaming: Exploring the Future of Defense
In a suburban corporate conference center, several hundred men and women work intently in small groups, consulting wall maps, poring over documents, and listening to presentations. To the casual observer, there's nothing out of the ordinary here — it's just another business day.
In fact, these are some of the country’s top military and civilian defense leaders. And what they do and learn in these meeting rooms will affect US policies around the world for decades to come. What they’re doing is wargaming.
Since 1997, Booz Allen has been helping the US Army and its Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) conduct wargames that provide Army leadership with a long-term view of the service’s possible future. The first games, labeled “Army After Next,” focused on issues such as handling potential conflicts in various parts of the world, conducting military operations other than war, and controlling weapons of mass destruction.
The most recent series of games, called Army Transformation Wargames (ATWG), are now investigating the challenges and advantages of a future force that is lighter, smaller, and more mobile, in a world where conflicts are likely to be regional, asymmetrical, and dependent on information technology.
Wargaming: Solving Hard Problems
In wargaming, teams of players representing opposing forces, methods, or ideologies compete against each other within a defined scenario. In TRADOC’s games, for instance, the teams are denoted by color — the Blue team represents the United States and the Red team is the opposing threat. Sometimes, a Green team is included and plays a related interest, such as a coalition force or commercial enterprise.
The players — highly skilled and seasoned military professionals — are briefed on the “situation” and game setting. The game is put in play when one team initiates an action. The other team considers the impact, looks at its options, and responds with an action of its own, and so on.
Although often used in private industry to examine competition or market forces, wargaming is an analysis tool well suited for military organizations. Because it can be impractical or impossible to stage a live exercise to gather warfighting information, DoD looks to gaming for developing data. “Wargaming is a good way to get at things that you don’t understand and can’t quantify,” says Booz Allen Principal Bob White. “The key data that comes out of wargaming is qualitative. It depends on the intelligence, skill, and quick thinking of people. Technology can be modeled, but people’s reactions and creativity under stress cannot.”
The issues are typically complex and may touch virtually all military functions, as well as civilian government and the commercial sector. “Games often involve several organizations that have conflicting missions or purposes, or tackle problems that have not been analyzed in a way that can provide a clear course of action,” says Robb Kurz, wargaming specialist at Booz Allen.
Army Transformation Wargames
The ATWG are a series of games, workshops, and conferences involving up to 450 participants at a time. Planning a single wargame, much less an entire series, is itself a complex undertaking. Says White, “It’s a highly collaborative process between Booz Allen and TRADOC that requires putting a lot of pieces together. Planning each game usually takes about a year.”
The up-front thinking and design is extensive. “The first thing we do with any wargame is identify the objective,” says Booz Allen Vice President Mark Herman. “We ask, ‘What are you trying to do? And why are you trying to do it?’ For each game, we get a very clear articulation of what the Army wants to accomplish.”
For the ATWG series, the overarching objective remains the same — to identify and frame the vital issues that will shape the Army’s policies and operations 15 to 25 years out. But each game also has its own objective that involves a different aspect of the 21st century defense environment, such as multi-agency cooperation, national security, or the operational setting in a certain region of the world.
Creating an Alternate Reality
Once the objective is set, Booz Allen’s wargaming team spends the next several months working closely with Army experts to fashion the scenario that will define the reality of the game.
“We write the history of the future,” says Kurz. “We lay out a picture of the world between 2001 and 2025, so that the players can get a feel for living in this alternate reality. What should the Army look like in 2020? What kinds of technologies will be available? What will be the political make-up of the world?”
In the actual game, environment is important to setting the mood. Often, Booz Allen meeting rooms are transformed into future military command posts, for example, with large wall maps, lots of computers and television monitors, and tables with microphones for each participant. Pre-produced videos of “live newscasts” using trained TV reporters punctuate the game with up-to-the-minute bulletins about the situation the players are dealing with.
Booz Allen and the Army prefer that the players attend the games in business casual dress, rather than in their uniforms. “In the real world, military rank is very present, but in a game, you’re allowing everyone to come to the table as an equal participant. Everyone’s contributions and opinions are valued,” says Kurz.
For a week — or two — of long days, the teams play their roles. “The players are told, ‘This is the situation and here are your tools. Use them in whatever way you can,’” says White. Applying their expertise, the teams try to defend a position, defeat an enemy, or come to grips with what they don’t know.
Lessons Learned
At the very end of the game, the Chief of Staff of the Army hosts a Senior Leader Seminar at which the major issues and findings are weighed and analyzed against their implications for the future. Most of the lessons from these wargames have broad consequences. In one of the first games, the Army realized how important the use and protection of outer space would be to US interests. Another game revealed potential vulnerabilities to terrorist attack on the US homeland or our information systems.
“These are hard issues to face,” says White, “But wargaming forces people to start thinking about the unthinkable. These games help the Army discover the strategy or defense that could deter war from happening. The goal is not to go to war at all.”
story posted May 2001
