During America’s counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new terminology entered the military lexicon: that of “nonkinetic” action. In contrast to “kinetic” efforts to destroy an enemy through the employment of weapons, nonkinetic actions are those political, economic, and social measures an army might use to secure its objectives in ways that do not involve directly trying to kill the enemy. This might include anything from political engagement with local officials, to facilitating the provision of water, sanitation, and health services, all the way up to building the general capacity and legitimacy of a host country itself. Naturally, the growing attention devoted to use of these sorts of instruments in war also had its effect on wargames too.
This chapter will examine “gaming the nonkinetic” through the lens of three different groups. The first of these will be the national security community, predominantly the military but also including the intelligence community and policymakers more generally. Wargames here serve the purposes of analysis and of individual and institutional capacity-building. The second perspective to be explored will be that of wargaming hobbyists, for whom gaming is primarily about social interaction and entertainment. For this group, interest in such issues has grown as the nature of contemporary conflict has changed. Finally, attention will turn to those in the conflict resolution, humanitarian assistance and development communities. Here gaming has become increasingly important as a training and educational tool. These are not wargames properly, in that they do not intend to model the dynamics of war. However, they are serious games wherein war provides the essential backdrop to the decisions that players make.
Within the military, wargames typically have as their primary purpose analysis, education, or experiential practice (Burns 2013). Modern wargaming made its first appearance in the Prussian military in the early nineteenth century, and its initial focus was entirely upon the tactical and operational employment of lethal military force. In large part, this reflected the warfare of the day, wherein nonkinetic action was almost entirely irrelevant to the outcome of battles and campaigns. It also reflected the extent to which, as von Hilgers (2012) has argued, the emergence of modern wargaming was intimately linked to the evolution of military science and a belief in the mathematical computability of warfare. Early kriegsspiel thus focused heavily on the size of formations, the rates of march and fire set forth in drill manuals, and the estimated accuracy and lethality of weapons. The social and political dimensions of warfare were both harder to quantify and much harder to represent within rigid rules.
Of course, at the strategic level both military theory and diplomatic practice recognized—as it had always done—that warfare took place in a political context, and for political purposes. The influential Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1976, 87) himself had famously declared that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means,” a “true political instrument,” and that military means “can never be considered in isolation from their purpose” (see also Waldman 2013). The industrialization of modern warfare also meant that factors of economics, transportation, and logistics mattered greatly in both the planning and conduct of military campaigns.
Despite this, wargaming was relatively slow to adapt to the importance of the nonkinetic. It is true that civilian transportation networks were addressed within German wargaming prior to the First World War, notably in the development of Germany’s deployment plans and opening moves for the Western (and possible Eastern) Fronts (Zuber 2002). However, prewar planning and wargames lacked any attention to diplomatic and political factors, with the political situation written into the scenario rather than determined by players and their decisions. This failure to explore alternative political contexts and responses may have come at a price when war came, since the actual configuration and forces arrayed against Germany was rather different than those presumed in many of these wargames.
After the war German military planners sought to address this shortcoming—and, roughly a century after the invention of modern military wargaming, the political-military dimension was substantially integrated into the game and gameplay itself for the first time. In particular, some German interwar games assigned foreign ministry personnel to assume the roles of key diplomatic actors (Perla 1990, 41–42). The Japanese also made some limited use of the technique. In the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere, however, wargames were still only used to explore or teach about kinetic military operations, narrowly conceived. Moreover, no country really explored how nonkinetic actions might contribute to military and political success.
It was during the post–World War II era that such “pol-mil” wargames became fully established, in the United States in particular. There were two major reasons for this.
The first was the growing sophistication of operations research (OR), which had matured substantially during the Second World War in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Operations research confirmed that many of the kinetic aspects of war could be quantified and modeled. Over time, this was expanded to other areas that lent themselves to quantification, such as force structure, defense acquisition, and emerging technologies. Advances in computational power also contributed to the sophistication of OR. However the rise of sophisticated modeling also highlighted the extent to which many aspects of human decision making could not be easily captured in algorithms, despite considerable efforts over the years to do precisely this. Instead it required games that put humans in the loop, not only in military roles (as had been the case since the dawn of modern wargaming) but in political ones too.
A second and even more important reason for the development of pol-mil wargaming was the emergence of a Cold War era characterized by political competition, proxy wars, and nuclear deterrence. On the one hand, the specter of mutual nuclear annihilation through miscalculation heightened the urgency of understanding crisis behavior. On the other hand, the importance of influence, proxy conflict, subversion, and irregular warfare all underscored the need to factor political dynamics into national security gaming.
A key pioneer of this was the RAND Corporation, which starting in the mid-1950s sought to examine the political elements of national strategic decision making through role-played games. Such crisis games were also increasingly used by scholars starting in the late 1950s, partly for research purposes, but also as an educational tool. Some early examples of the latter—for example a series of games held at MIT in 1959 (Bloomfield and Padelford 1959)—significantly influenced the work done by RAND and others, and vice versa. Several key scholars of the time participated in both.
The purpose of these games was not so much to evaluate policy choices or forecast political-military futures, but rather to provide experiential insight into “the pressures, the uncertainties, and the moral and intellectual difficulties under which foreign policy decisions are made” (Goldhamer and Speier 1959, 79). The US Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Wargaming Manual (1969) describes such games thus:
Whereas conventional war games may be used to validate organizational, equipmental, and doctrinal concepts through careful measurement of material, time, and distance factors, politico-military games are intended to educate and inform the players regarding possible interactions between political, economic, psychological, sociological, and military factors. Like war games, some PM games conducted in government are intended to help identify possible future problems and potential opportunities and to provide scenario material for refining operational plans and intelligence collection requirements. Also within government they have additional values: they enhance interagency rapport, they inform action level and senior officials regarding prevailing attitudes and philosophies, and they supplement other interagency study efforts.
PM games feature the illumination of problems from the pseudo-perspective of an enemy or ally in a simulated conflict atmosphere. They provide a sense of personal involvement, the element of competition, and, most importantly, an unrestrained, thought-provoking environment.
Most pol-mil games took the form of seminar or freeform games (Jones 1985), in which the two sides were presented with a written scenario. The teams then met to discuss their options, with players often assigned to role-play particular organizations or individuals. The teams then decided upon these and reported the to the control group or “white cell,” which then adjudicated outcomes and advanced the scenario to the next turn. Adjudication could either be by qualitative expert judgment, through use of a formal computational model, or some combination of the two.
Although there was spirited behind-the-scenes debate among those that conducted pol-mil games as to their cost-effectiveness and whether some might attribute too much weight to their findings (Levine et al. 1991), they nonetheless did generate insight into the uncertainties of crisis behavior. In many such games actors tended to perceive each other’s signals poorly. Strategic decisions, moreover, were often driven as much by the need to reconcile competing views within an actor as by the dynamics of communication and deterrence between hostile parties (Schelling 1987; Brynen 2014a). In short, as Allison would argue in his classic study of the Cuban missile crisis (Allison and Zelikow 1999), domestic and bureaucratic politics and organizational procedures had a great deal to do with how states behaved in crisis—and, potentially, in war. Decision-maker idiosyncrasies mattered too, highlighting the limits of treating conflict or war as a mechanistic process.
By the 1960s, and up until the present, crisis games became fairly commonplace within the American national security establishment for both analytical and educational purposes, with participants drawn from the military and intelligence communities, the State Department, and others (Wilson 1969; Allen 1987). Games were also sometimes conducted for senior Congressional staff and even members of Congress (McCown 2008). Outside the United States, such crisis games were much less used. The Soviet Union wargamed, too (Perla 1990, 156–158), but these games appear to have focused on the military implementation of Soviet policy, rather than treating political decision making itself as a variable. Most other countries typically lacked the resources, think-tank community, or degree of national power to sustain many pol-mil games.
For the most part bringing politics and policy-making into wargaming in these ways fell well within the Clausewitzian conception of war as a tool used to pursue policy goals, and the consequent view that the use of military force must be calibrated to the scope of those broader objectives. However, other aspects of the nonkinetic lie outside Clausewitz’s notion of war as wholly as a physical act of violence, “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” (Clausewitz 1976, 75)—and, indeed, similarly outside the comfort zone of many militaries. Specifically, the end of the Cold War, and even more so the post-9/11 era of US-led intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, increased the salience of military operations short of full-scale war, such as peacekeeping and stabilization operations, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency (COIN), or humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Addressing these required wargames that addressed the political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructural dimensions of a situation (“PMESII” in Western military jargon), and the diplomatic, information, economic, as well as military (DIME) dimensions of national power and policy. It also required examining the various nonkinetic actions that military forces might take.
The US military’s 2006 handbook of counterinsurgency doctrine FM 3–24 (US Army 2006) underscored this, highlighting the central importance of building the political legitimacy of the host government, an endeavor in which “political factors are primary” (US Army 2006, 1-22). As a consequence, “the conduct of COIN is counterintuitive to the traditional U.S. view of war,” in that “sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” and “sometimes some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.” (US Army 2006, 1-26–1-27). While subsequent versions of US counterinsurgency doctrine (US Army 2014) refocused somewhat greater attention on the conduct of armed operations, it retained the idea that legitimacy was key and that nonkinetic actions were an essential part of building this. Similarly, the US military’s main doctrinal guide on stability operations FM 3–07 (US Army 2008) highlights a long list of key tasks that a stabilization mission would need to undertake or support, including disarmament and reintegration of former combatants, supporting reestablishment of the rule of law, restoring or providing civil services, assisting displaced populations, providing emergency food and other emergency humanitarian assistance, supporting public health and education programs, governance reform and capacity building, and economic development and employment generation. As none of these kinds of actions could take place in a vacuum, there would also need to be considerable attention to the “human terrain” of social groups, culture, tribal or ethnic identities, religion, demographics, social and economic dynamics, and local politics. Since most elements of a stabilization operation would be carried out not by the military directly, but rather by other agencies, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations—and, of course, the host country itself—operations of this sort inevitably involve especially complex interagency and coalition interaction and coordination.
All of this needed to be addressed in professional wargames if they were to be used effectively for decision support, analysis, education and training for contemporary national security challenges. Initially, however, there was a “huge vacuum of [military simulation and serious game] tools to address this new threat” (Smith 2009, 154). As one survey of professional wargamers noted:
As we look to the future, however, we face some “wicked problems” in which the overlap of various political, social, economic, military and other types of issues creates a denser thicket of uncertainties that we have to sort through … It is not clear just how well we actually understood the issues associated with conventional warfare (as opposed to our ability to convince ourselves that we did), but it is not hard to agree that our understanding of irregular, or asymmetric, or fourth-generation warfare is lagging behind our need to know more about it. (Perla and Markowitz 2009, 56)
Military wargaming has sought to adapt. One end of the spectrum has seen the development of complex computational models such as the Peace Support Operations Model, a computer-based model of stabilization operations developed by the UK Ministry of Defense to support force development, campaign planning, and military training and education. PSOM is a “faction-to-faction, turn-stepped, cellular geography, semi-agent-based model that was designed initially to represent a range of civil and military aspects of Peace Support Operations,” using “a human-in-the-loop representation of the leadership of all major factions”—in short, a computer model whereby the actions taken by human players are used as input, and then converted into effects via PSOM’s embedded algorithms, thereby providing some or all of the setting for the next turn of a game (Body and Marston 2011, 69–70). In addition to addressing intelligence and “kinetic” military action, the model addresses such dimensions as the effects of collateral damage, information operations and strategic communications, humanitarian aid, infrastructure, human capital, population attitudes, security sector reform, governance and legitimacy (Appleget 2011; Body and Marston 2011; Strong 2011; Warren and Rose 2011; Gaffney and Vincent 2011; Talbot and Wilde 2011). As does the United Kingdom, the United States also uses PSOM (largely for teaching counterinsurgency), and Canada, Australia, and others are evaluating its potential utility.
Much more commonly, nonkinetic elements have been introduced into traditional wargames and military exercises through the addition of players representing other agencies. Scenario design and the “injects” used to introduce developments in the game may also be designed to explore political, social, and economic dimensions of the conflict. The adjudication of nonkinetic actions and effects may be carried out qualitatively by members of the white cell (with or without input from subject matter experts), or some aspects of the economy and aspects of the human terrain may be modeled computationally using much more limited models than that found in PSOM. An example of this overall approach can be seen in the Swedish military’s annual multinational Viking stabilization training exercises, involving dozens of nonmilitary agencies (Brynen 2014b).
Existing digital wargames and simulations have also been modified to include more nonkinetic and civilian elements, albeit often as backdrops rather than as foreground scenario elements. Bohemia Interactive’s VBS2 (“Virtual Battlespace”) and now VBS3 combat training simulations—widely used in Western and other militaries—have been designed to incorporate civilians with realistic appearances and (user-programmable) behaviors.
US engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq led to the development of a number of purpose-designed game-based educational software designed to teach mission-critical nonkinetic skills in the military. While the development costs of these can be quite high, from the military’s point of view software-based games have several educational advantages. They facilitate standardized teaching across multiple, worldwide locations. Indeed, they can even be made available more broadly via the US military’s milgaming web portal (US Department of Defense 2010). Such games are often less dependent on the availability of skilled facilitators, compared to manual wargames and role-play exercises. They can also be self-guiding and provide structured feedback within the game itself.
One example of this is UrbanSim, a training game developed for the US Army by the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (Wansbury et al. 2010; Mockenhaupt 2010; Peck 2011). This is superficially somewhat similar to the popular computer game SimCity, except the focus here is learning effective population-centric counterinsurgency operations wherein the goal is “a safe, secure, and prosperous population that is the cornerstone to self-sustainment and a functioning Host Nation government” (McAlinden et al. 2008) In UrbanSim a single player takes command of US forces in a simulated town, where they seek to increase the local level of security. While the use of force is part of this, of even greater importance the simulation’s emphasis on the complex nonkinetic aspects of such operations, including mentoring host country security forces, intelligence collection, information operations, improving essential services, increasing local employment, strengthening governance, and respecting local sensitivities. Students are encouraged to learn and manage a variety of intertwined lines of effect, engage in social network analysis of their area of operations, and understand the importance of unintended and second- and third-order effects of their actions. The simulation includes in-game tutorials and a series of learning modules, as well as opportunities for post-game debriefs with instructors.
Another training game produced by ICT is ELECT BiLAT, a bilateral negotiations simulator in which players must interact with 3D simulated local leaders in order to achieve their mission—namely, to discover why a project built with US aid is not being used by the locals (ICT 2012; Losh 2010; see also Elizabeth Losh’s chapter in this volume). It is, in essence, a computer game to prepare warriors for war, but with no kinetic warfare in it whatsoever—a very different thing than nineteenth-century Prussian wargames.
Wargames in the military, especially those that take the form of digital simulations, must often undergo some process of verification and validation. Verification is to assure that the model does what it is supposed to—that is to say, that the original concepts have been correctly implemented in the simulation or game design. Validation is assuring that it simulates what it is supposed to represent with the desired level of fidelity and accuracy. A wargame might be expected to incorporate the concepts and relationships put forward in military doctrine—for example, by treating close air support in a way that matches expectations and approved practices. A game in which the effects of weapons or the course of conflict failed to resemble its real-world counterpart would fail validation.
This is difficult to do with the myriad aspects of contemporary warfare. Certainly some things, such as the technical performance of weapons systems or the capabilities of logistics systems, might be known quite well. When wargames and military simulations address the vast social complexity of nonkinetic actions and effects, however, things become much more difficult. The sheer number of variables that might be considered is overwhelming.
All wargames, of course, face a trade-off between accuracy and parsimony, and must also adapt the employment of models to suit particular analytical or educational needs—focusing on some areas and abstracting or even ignoring others (Sabin 2012). However, modeling nonkinetic dynamics in wargames faces the additional hurdle that the causal relationships between these many variables are often poorly understood, as is the relationship between them and military outcomes. Does increased employment reduce local grievances and hence undermine support for insurgents, as most COIN doctrine suggests? Or does it increase the amount of resources available for diversion to the insurgent cause and create opportunities for symbiotic and parasitical fundraising? Research on the issue suggests this is a rather complex relationship, and not what military planners might presume (Cramer 2010; Berman et al. 2011). In many cases, scholars are simply not agreed on the causal dynamics at work.
The 2007 US troop surge in Iraq provides a further illustration of these analytical and modeling challenges. Some interpretations credit the subsequent (temporary) downturn in violence in the country to augmented US troop strength, possibly combined with the adoption of new COIN tactics. Other analysts however, argue that the critical element was the somewhat earlier “Anbar Awakening,” whereby local engagement encouraged Sunni tribes to cooperate with the United States against jihadist groups. Still others emphasize the importance of the widespread sectarian violence that followed the February 2006 al-Askari mosque bombing, which reduced the prevalence of mixed neighborhoods and pushed former Sunni insurgents into a more cooperative relationship with US forces. Of course, all of these factors were probably at work. However, the failure of the national security community to agree on why violence temporarily declined by over 300 percent between mid-2006 and late 2007 (see Iraq Body Count 2014) highlights how difficult it is to wargame conflicts of this sort with any sort of confidence.
In the context of such analytical uncertainty, wargames and other military simulations tend to look to doctrinal answers to cause and effect: if doctrine suggests a certain relationship between kinetic and nonkinetic actions on the one hand and outcomes on the other (for example, the emphasis in FM 3–07 and FM 3–24 on defeating insurgency through government legitimacy, and building legitimacy through employment and government services), then that is what, in the military’s view, the game ought to depict. “It depends” or “we don’t know” are not the sorts of messages military training usually tries to impart.
Games built on the asserted certainty of doctrine may be less effective—and indeed, even counterproductive—in encouraging military personnel to question prior assumptions and treat each individual case in its own social and political merits. Yet, inculcating a critical and questioning attitude may be essential. As work on Afghanistan and Iraq has clearly shown, local conflict dynamics are often rather different from what Coalition forces have perceived them to be on the basis of their prior planning and training (Ledwidge 2011; Martin 2014). Unintended second- and third-order effects may particularly confound soldiers whose training (whether game-based or otherwise) has prepared them for rather simpler cause and effect. This problem, moreover, is not confined to military personnel; growing research suggests that international organizations and NGOs, critical partners in peacebuilding, stabilization, and counterinsurgency efforts, may also suffer from a failure to fully appreciate complex webs of causality or the extent to which their perceptions and subcultures can generate unintended and perverse consequences on the ground (Aoi et al. 2007; Auteserre 2014).
Like their professional military counterparts, wargame hobbyists have also been alert to the role of political, social, and economic factors in military conflict. However, the hierarchy of gaming requirements for the hobbyists is rather different than for professionals. Specifically, in contrast to the primarily analytic, experiential, or educational purpose of professional military wargames, commercial hobby games need to be enjoyable—this being, after all, the primary purpose for which they are purchased and played. For some players enjoyment may derive from a game’s representation of military history or potential future conflict, and the apparent fidelity with which this is depicted. Others, however, may prioritize the gameplay experience—and especially its social aspects, as Woods (2012) has shown—over realism. In the latter case, warfare may simply provide the thematic setting for a game whose mechanics are not terribly representative of actual conflict. These differences continue to fuel a “what is a wargame?” debate between fans of consims (conflict simulations emphasizing historical accuracy) and euro-wargames (who prefer less complex games with elegant and engaging game mechanics, as in the broader category of “Eurogames”).
Wargamers also generally favor the recreation of active warfare rather than nonkinetic operations. It is noteworthy, for example, that after more than six decades of United Nations peacekeeping and more than seventy UN peacekeeping missions, the hobby website Boardgamegeek lists only two games substantially devoted to the topic—Somalia Interventions (1998) and Global Challenge (2001). Of these, the latter was developed for the Dutch armed forces and had no substantial commercial distribution. Several of the wargames published in recent issues of Modern War magazine also illustrate the point. Somali Pirates (2013) largely eschewed depicting the rather pedestrian initiatives (improved communication and coordination, the outfitting of commercial ships with antiboarding devices and pirate-proof citadels, the deployment of armed private security personnel onboard ships, securing the agreement of regional states to prosecute captured pirates, and the development of agreed standards and best practices) that have characterized counterpiracy efforts in the Indian Ocean, in favor of an imagined future of heightened military naval, air, and ground operations. Kosovo: The Television War (2014) does not depict the war that was actually fought in 1999 with its humanitarian crisis and political constraints, but a much more kinetic “what-if” scenario of a major land campaign.
That being said, however, hobby wargames do often integrate significant nonkinetic elements into game design. Economic production, resource management, and even technological investment, for example, are key elements of many strategic-level hobby wargames.
In many wargames players also need to engage in diplomatic and political efforts to secure the support of potential allies, the attitudes of which are tracked and adjusted within the game. Liberia: Descent Into Hell (2008), for example, has players track the attitudes of regional countries, foreign aid donors, naïve NGOs, and even various criminal elements.
Political, social, and economic events often enter games through random events or other mechanisms. Card-driven games (CDGs) lend themselves particularly well to depicting nonkinetic events.
The influential board game Twilight Struggle (2009) is a case in point. The game examines the Cold War, with players primarily involved in the nonkinetic effort of extending (political, economic, and military) influence so as to bring neutral countries into their geostrategic orbit. The players’ cards depict historical events ranging from brushfire wars and major crises to the “Voice of America,” shuttle diplomacy, grain sales, and even the election of Pope John Paul II. Each card has an associated game effect. Because these effects are unique to each card, the game itself need not feature generalized rules for all the many nonkinetic actions and effects depicted. Instead players simply need read the card when played and follow the individual instructions as to that card’s individual effect. The cards also act as a narrative device, describing an unfolding alternative history in which many real-world events occur, but not necessarily in the same order or with the same consequences.
Not surprisingly, this sort of mechanic has been used to explore other political-military conflicts. 1989: Dawn of Freedom (2012) examines efforts to overthrow or preserve communist rule in Eastern Europe, building political support and engaging in power struggles. Labyrinth (2010) uses a CDG mechanism to depict key elements of the post-9/11 “Global War on Terrorism” from drone strikes and the Patriot Act to theological debates within Islam. While the game contains many kinetic elements—the jihadists undermine governance through attacks and organize terror plots, while US troops can be used to disrupt terrorist cells and even overthrow Islamist regimes—the game also centrally hinges on a nonkinetic “war of ideas.” The COIN series developed by Volko Ruhnke and GMT Games uses a rather different card-based system to explore insurgency and counterinsurgency in Cuba (Cuba Libre!, 2013), Vietnam (Fire in the Lake, 2014), Columbia (Andean Abyss, 2012), and contemporary Afghanistan (A Distant Plain, 2013). Once again, nonkinetic elements figure prominently both in the cards used by players and the basic actions they may take. These, depending on the game, include such things as raising funds through casinos or drug smuggling, drug eradication, extending government control through the expansion of civilian policing, governance and patronage—as well as traditional kinetic actions such as sweeps, patrols, and air strikes. For many players, winning the political support of the population is key, and military force is only one of several means by which to do this.
As the preceding discussion has already suggested, nonkinetic elements often figure prominently in the gaming of insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, and revolution. This is hardly surprising. Guerilla doctrines place heavy emphasis on securing popular support—the people being the “sea” within which the insurgent “fish” swim, in Mao’s classic analogy. Similarly, as we have also seen, contemporary Western COIN doctrine places considerable emphasis on political legitimacy through improving governance and service delivery.
One compilation of current insurgency- and terrorism-related manual wargames maintained at Boardgamegeek by Tom Grant <http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/6478/insurgency-and-terrorism> listed some fifty or so such games, a number which has grown by perhaps a dozen since then. It should be noted that this is only a very small proportion of the over ten thousand manual wargames listed on the website—clearly, insurgency is less popular than more traditional military conflicts. Of those insurgency-themed games he lists, moreover, almost half seemed to be largely focused on the clash of military forces. This is often the case for Vietnam War games, such as Hearts and Minds (2010)—which, despite its title, does little to model Vietnamese attitudes. On the other hand, several COIN-themed games with a heavy emphasis on nonkinetic actions do currently rank among the top-rated wargames of all time, with A Distant Plain currently ranked thirty-sixth, and Andean Abyss, Labyrinth, and Cuba Libre all placing in the top fifty.
In addition to games already mentioned, several others stand out for original game mechanics that address political, economic, and social dynamics. Vietnam: 1965–1975 includes a system whereby South Vietnamese units and leaders are assigned a factional affiliation and regime loyalty rating, and may even support a military coup. US strategy therefore includes not only predominantly kinetic elements but also attempts to stabilize the regime by influencing the composition and attitudes of the ARVN officer corps. Brain Train’s Algeria (2006) highlights the importance of propaganda, urban protests, and counterinsurgent intelligence collection alongside kinetic action. His design, used in modified form for teaching about COIN at the Central Intelligence Agency, was also adapted for the US Department of Defense as the foundation for “Algernon,” a person-in-the-loop wargame exploring irregular warfare (Ottenberg 2008). This was used to help refine wargame scenarios, as well as to train analysts. Joe Miranda’s design for Nicaragua (1988) included an innovative system that linked the political program adopted by the government and guerillas (Marxism-Leninism, Social Democracy, Liberal Democracy, and Oligarchy) to the attitudes of key social groups (Peasants, Intellectuals, Workers, the Church, Indians, Samocistas, and the Middle Class), and included psychological warfare as a key part of the conflict. Although it depicted a Star Wars–like universe of rebellious planets rather than any real-world insurgency, Freedom in the Galaxy (1979) deserves particular attention for its representation of the importance of demonstration effects and identity politics in revolutionary political mobilization, as well as its ability to fully integrate cadre-level covert actions into a much larger strategic game.
Modern War magazine has produced several games that address recent or possible (or unlikely) near-future conflicts. Several of these, such as Decision Iraq (2013), use a Joseph Miranda-designed combat system. This distinguishes between kinetic (regular military) attacks, guerilla warfare, and “civic action”—the latter representing efforts at such things as political influence and service delivery. Each uses a different combat results table, and some units have advantages when performing guerilla warfare and civic action. Others of Miranda’s games of modern insurgency show how varied the approaches to the topic can be. Battle for Baghdad (2009) certainly includes nonkinetic actions and even actors (it includes a “nongovernmental organizations” player), but is in many ways a Eurogame-type multiplayer abstraction that does not bear close resemblance to the actual conflict in Iraq. BCT Command Kandahar (2013), although not necessarily based on actual battles in Afghanistan, gives a much better sense of counterinsurgent campaigns, including planning and the importance of civil-military cooperation. The objectives being pursued by players can also vary from turn to turn, thereby depicting the challenges of operational planning amid higher-level strategic uncertainty.
Nonkinetic dynamics also figure prominently in military coups. However, very few games have focused on this as a central element of the design (Train 2011), and most of these have done so for entertainment rather than simulation purposes. A rare exception was SPI’s The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (1976). Although this drew heavily from SPI’s traditional kinetic games in its depiction of political intrigue—it used a hex map to depict both spatial and abstract relationships, units were rated for attack and defense, and even exerted zones of control—it nonetheless was innovative in many respects. Indeed it might have been too innovative, for it was never very popular among wargamers.
Thus far, this chapter’s examination of wargaming the nonkinetic has largely focused on nondigital wargames. What do war-themed computer and video games add to the picture?
Issues of economic production certainly figure in many real-time strategy (RTS) games, and are centrally important to the entire genre of 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) digital games, such as the Civilization series. Many modern first-person shooter (FPS) digital games are set in scenarios that include political intrigue, insurgency, and humanitarian crises. Rarely do they ever explore this in any dynamic way—instead it is largely used as part of the narrative setting in which players blow things up. Indeed, they might try to blow too much up, with the International Committee of the Red Cross having complained that many FPS games fail to reproduce the constraints imposed on military action by international humanitarian law (ICRC 2013). A rare exception is This War of Mine (2014), a FPS-like game in which players assume the role of civilians trying to survive, rather than combatants trying to kill (Sterrett 2014).
Some digital wargames have been very sophisticated in their modeling of subtle political relationships in warfare. The medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings II (2012) is perhaps the best example of this: while kinetic warfare is a key element of the game, political intrigue, family relationships, strategic marriages, and building coalitions are even more important. A typical game might well involve the simulation of tens of thousands of key aristocrats and other individuals, their attitudes to each other, and the relationships between them. Tropico—not a wargame at all, but rather a series of light-hearted “banana republic” simulations in which players assume the role of the dictator of a fictional Latin American island republic—models the political preferences of factions and individual citizens and their corresponding response to government policy. Under certain conditions, rebel groups may form and launch attacks, or the military may attempt a coup.
Both of these represent in many ways a commercial entertainment application of the sort of computational agent-based modeling used by social scientists, some national security simulations, and serious games like UrbanSim to understand how the aggregate behavior of individual actors shapes larger systems and processes. Similar sorts of approaches are increasingly found in political and geopolitical simulators such as Masters of the World (2013), in which both states and individual decision makers respond dynamically to the actions of others.
The massive growth of the digital gaming industry has had substantial impact on the evolution of professional military wargaming and simulation, as well as on the wargaming hobby. The computational power available to the average computer or video gamer has increased exponentially, and with that has come much greater ability to model complex situations. There have also been corresponding improvements in the realism of animation, graphic imagery, and virtual reality. Within the military, many increasingly understand wargaming in largely digital terms. Why, after all, use paper and cardboard when so much can be done with software?
This technological revolution also presents challenges, however. If a designer is not careful, too much simulated complexity can easily overwhelm a player, who may be unable to conceptualize the vast array of causal relationships at work and hence become frustrated in trying to decide upon an optimal course of action. Most hobby gamers, wargamers and video gamers alike, want to play God to some extent, with the ability to make armies clash and determine outcomes through their choice of strategy and tactics. They do not want to be fully embedded in a realistic messy social, economic, and political environment where it is difficult to rapidly effect clear and significant change. From an instructional perspective, software hides relationships within the black box of computer code, making it difficult for a player to know, understand, or critically assess the assumptions upon which a model is built. The increasing realism of graphic imagery can be beguiling, enticing users to forget that the virtual world in which they immerse themselves might be based on dubious analytical assumptions (Turkle 2009). Finally, some professional wargamers have expressed concern that contemporary digital games and gaming culture create expectations of immediate gratification, and encourage players in serious games to enter a sort of “win at all costs” gamer mode that can interfere with the learning process (Perla and Markowitz 2009, 83; Frank 2012). None of this invalidates the very great contribution that digital gaming has to make to the simulation of nonkinetic aspects of war, but it does raise some issues that will need to be addressed as digital entertainment has ever greater impact on serious gaming for professional purposes.
Recent years have seen a growing use of games to address such topics as peacebuilding, humanitarian assistance, and longer-term development in fragile and conflict-affected countries (Hockaday et al. 2013; Brynen and Milante 2013). Most such games are educational or experiential in nature, intended to build the capacity of groups and individuals to address complex challenges. Often, they seek to highlight the operational difficulties of operating in real or potential warzones in ways that do not put participants at risk. As with professional wargaming, it is far better to develop skills and learn from mistakes in a simulated conflict environment in which no one actually dies.
The genealogy of most such efforts however, generally does not trace its roots through wargaming as either a hobby or profession. Instead, the primary conceptual influences have been military and disaster-response exercises, negotiation role-play, and a broader growing attention to e-learning and digital games.
In the case of the former, many humanitarian agencies have developed training programs for personnel that mirror field exercises by militaries, police, and emergency services. These often take the form of “skill drills” in which participants are asked to apply their acquired knowledge in situations that resemble some of the difficult conditions they might find in the field, including political tensions, hostile militias, coordination problems, and even feckless officials or NGOs that complicate operations (for a typical example, see McCabe 2013). Usually such exercises are at least partially pre-scripted to assure that participants are exposed to all of the required training components. They thus have less of a “game” element to them, in that the choices made by participants may not fully determine sequences or outcomes. Such exercises also often serve a networking function too, bringing stakeholders together to “gain a better understanding of individual personalities and how they can better work together in the event of a real emergency” (Hockaday et al. 2013, 3).
International institutions involved with peace and stabilization operations have also adapted traditional military command and map exercises (Brynen 2014b). The United Nations uses the fictional country of Carana as the basis for an array of exercises and training modules for peacekeepers and other UN personnel. This includes maps of the country, and full descriptions of its history, economy, society, and politics, with training modules addressing a range of topics including conflict analysis, mission planning, civil-military coordination, protection of civilians, and sexual and gender-based violence. Carana-based exercises have also been used, in modified form, by the African Union to develop an African Standby Force with the capacity to mount regional stabilization missions. The emphasis in such exercises is often on planning aspects, and much less upon interaction with an adaptive adversary.
Negotiation exercises have long been used to train law and management students, and are now often used for training about conflict management and resolution (Kumar 2009; USIP n.d.; PILPG n.d.). In some cases, role-playing games have even been used to help humanitarian agencies plan for the future (Brynen 2013a), or in an effort to assist those actively engaged in conflict to find a mutually acceptable political compromise. These sorts of games typically bear far more resemblance to role-playing games than to any hobby wargame, although the fundamental focus remains one of conflict and conflict resolution. The World Bank also uses the same basic approach to teach staff about development in fragile conflict-affected countries, basing its own role-playing in the same fictional setting of Carana used by the UN and others. Perhaps the largest and most complex simulation of this sort is the week-long “Brynania” simulation, used for more than a decade at McGill University (Brynen 2010). In it, more than a hundred students play the roles not only of governments and insurgents, but also aid workers, journalists, and civil society organizations.
The growing focus on e-learning (Wills et al. 2011), not surprisingly, has also had its impact on gaming conflict resolution, humanitarian assistance, and development in conflict areas. “Country X” (2009), for example, is an educational game developed at Columbia University in which students seek to avert violence and mass atrocity by taking various preventive measures (Harding and Whitlock 2013). Educational software in this area can take the form of multimedia “choose your own adventure”-type games, in which the player’s choices determine the subsequent vignettes they face. This format has also been used for advocacy and awareness generation. The web-based game 1000 Days of Syria (2014), for example, explores the current civil war in Syria. Because such multimedia educational tools have become commonplace in business, several software packages now exist to support authoring and publication. Free online applications are also available to enable the authoring of simpler text-based “adventures” too (Brynen 2013c).
Why has wargaming had so little to do with the evolution of serious games designed to address the mitigation, effects, and recovery from war? There are likely several reasons.
As previously suggested, many hobby wargamers favor the kinetic over the nonkinetic in their games, both out of an interest in military history and hardware, and perhaps because some of the ludological characteristics of such games (competition, conflict, clear winners and losers) too. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that players of historical tabletop wargames tend to have slightly higher social dominance orientation (Vela 2013), a psychological measure of preference for hierarchy that has been shown to correlate with nonaltruistic, power-seeking behaviors.
A second set of reasons has to do with the interaction—or lack thereof—between these different communities. Many professional military and national security gamers are wargamers too, and more than a few commercial and hobby wargame designers have worked in or with the military. By contrast, anecdotal evidence suggests that hobby wargamers are a very small proportion of personnel in the development and humanitarian communities. The vast majority of UN peacekeepers these days come from the developing world, where hobby wargaming is much less common, and military wargaming may be less developed.
Humanitarian workers, if they have any experience with serious gaming, are much more likely to be familiar with medical and disaster simulation and field exercise. While military and national security gamers have increasingly called upon humanitarian and other nonkinetic subject matter experts in the conduct of wargames, there has been only limited effort to cultivate ongoing networks and lasting relationships. The annual Connections and Connections UK interdisciplinary wargaming conferences stand as a rare exception to this, and have sought to engage with those involved in gaming nonkinetic aspects of conflict (Brynen 2012; 2013a). They have also encouraged professional wargamers to think about how they might game nonkinetic military operations such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, a process that has given rise to one game (AFTERSHOCK: A Humanitarian Crisis Game) now used for teaching university students, humanitarian aid workers, military officers, and peacekeeping personnel. (PAXsims 2015).
The peacebuilding and humanitarian community has also largely focused on gaming as a teaching and learning technique, rather than using it as a tool for analysis. Partly this is for practical reasons—aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations can rarely spare the time and resources to do sophisticated analytical gaming. However, it also likely arises from lack of familiarity with the techniques of serious analytical gaming, another area where greater professional interaction across wargaming communities might yield significant benefits.
As this chapter has shown, depiction of the nonkinetic dimensions of conflict has become increasingly common in modern wargaming.
In the case of professional wargames in the national security community, this has reflected recognition of the importance of politics in national security decision making, the importance of social, economic, and political context in contemporary military operations, and of the role of nonkinetic actions in achieving military and policy objectives. Military gaming, however, has encountered difficulty in trying to represent the complex and often only partly understood dynamics at play. At times it has responded to this by asserting doctrinal confidence rather than necessarily encouraging the sort of critical and questioning attitude that might best prepare both soldiers and policymakers for future wars in unknown places. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently noted (2014), too much confidence in the predictability of war is a dangerous thing: “For too many people—including defense ‘experts,’ members of Congress, executive branch officials and ordinary citizens—war has become a kind of videogame or action movie: bloodless, painless and odorless. But my years at the Pentagon left me even more skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories or doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain.”
Within the wargaming hobby, most gamers still show a strong preference for the kinetic aspects of warfare—destroying tank battalions, it seems, is simply more fun than airdropping relief supplies, tangling with host country corruption, repairing electrical grids, or having tea with a tribal leader. However, there have been a number of innovative manual wargames published, especially in recent years, that substantially address nonkinetic issues. Quite apart from their play value, these offer a repertoire of mechanics and ideas to inspire future game design, in keeping with Jim Dunnigan’s oft-cited Second Rule of Wargame Design: “plagiarize” (Dunnigan 2000b, 147). Digital gaming also offers new possibilities to simulate complex nonkinetic dynamics, although it also presents some potential pitfalls in doing so.
Finally, there has been increasing attention by those most involved in the nonkinetic aspects and consequences of war—namely humanitarian and development workers, and those professionally involved in conflict resolution—to the contribution that serious games can make to training, education, and institutional capacity-building. Very little of this has drawn upon professional military wargaming, however, and even less from the wargaming hobby.
Analytically, this points to the interesting role that knowledge communities and game genealogies play in the use and play of games. Practically, it suggests that considerable benefit might be had from greater interaction between gamers of all sorts interested in these kinds of issues.
Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, and coeditor of the conflict simulation website PAXsims <www.paxsims.org>. He is author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of eleven books on Middle East politics, conflict, and peacebuilding, including Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (2012). In addition, he has worked as a member of the policy staff of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, as an intelligence analyst for the Privy Council (cabinet) Office, and as a consultant on conflict and development issues to various governments, United Nations agencies, and the World Bank.