Irregular warfare (IW) is the Kobayashi Maru of the wargaming world—the no-win test in Star Trek II that plunges eager young Starfleet Academy midshipmen into impossible, public, and highly stressful situations for the entertainment value of seeing how badly they fail. (I won’t insult the geek cred of anyone reading a book on wargaming by reminding him or her that James T. Kirk was the only one to pass the test—by cheating.) The whole affair seems designed to crush a person’s spirit and inflict a lifetime of self-doubt, rather than to impart any moral, confidence, or useful instruction. The situation is not quite so deliberately cruel when it comes to IW wargames, but IW wargames truly are a test of how one confronts an impossible problem. It’s not a matter of if one fails; merely how badly you fail and at what point you realize it, and how you recover, or at least continue.
Understanding IW involves understanding the conflict dynamics simultaneously faced in a given area and their interrelated connections with other conflicts, from the local level to the international. What is driving the insurgency in Afghanistan? What is causing this most recent wave of international terrorism? What does the Syrian civil war have to do with renewed Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq and how does that relate to Iran? As complex as these types of questions seem, they are actually the ones where we know the most and have the most experts to consult.
Gaining insight in IW also means getting a handle on the whole range of IW-related actions and goals that the United States and its partners are trying to execute to affect the conflict dynamics. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world that if anyone would understand the activities of the US government, it would be the US government. But the US national security apparatus is so vast and complex that people can spend their entire career without a good grasp of how other agencies perceive the world, define their mission, and conduct their activities. Nor are there a ready number of experts who are up-to-date on the dynamics within the government, because former members of the bureaucracy begin to have dated information as soon as they leave.
Achieving a basic understanding of just the Department of Defense is hard enough. Fifteen years after I started dealing with DoD in various professional capacities, I still encounter entire communities of people within DoD that I have never run across before. There is even a book, Assignment Pentagon: How to Succeed in a Bureaucracy (Smith 2007), that tries to explain the Pentagon and its bewildering ways to career officers who have been part of the military their entire adult lives. Truth is stranger than fiction. I can only imagine how opaque and impenetrable it must look to those completely on the outside. I’ve had the experience of trying to explain organizational dynamics to a highly intelligent and accomplished outsider helping us on a study. She furiously took notes and sent them to me afterward, at which point I realized that nearly all of it was wrong. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, enormous amounts of data on DoD activities were not captured or were extremely difficult to find after the fact. This is despite the tremendous effort spent on generating briefings, e-mails, and reports and compiling databases.
Compound this steep learning curve across DoD, State Department, USAID, the sprawling number of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and other US government organizations involved in IW, and add White House national security staff and Congressional dynamics. This is because one of IW’s unique features is the extent to which DoD must interact with other agencies in the US government. This does not even take into consideration the other partner and host nation actors that the US government is supposed to be working with. Theoretically, someone should be able to understand what is going on, but the practical challenges can be enormous.
Another aspect of understanding IW is trying to understand what happens to conflict dynamics when the US government takes action. The difficulty here is in understanding what actual impacts are caused by US activities. What is the effect of State Department public diplomacy programs in areas of the world hostile to the United States, if any? What is the effect of development programs in Afghanistan on the insurgency? What would happen to the dynamics in Syria if the United States were to intervene? These types of questions are the most difficult to answer. Even though the United States has been heavily involved in a wide spectrum of activities continuously since 9/11, the answers to these types of questions are not clear—nor in some case are they even knowable. Despite the amount of research that has been directed at questions such as these, the level of complexity and structural uncertainty in these types of cause-and-effect questions is extremely high. And it is this last set of questions that makes IW wargaming so very difficult: How to depict all this in a game?
The US government is not the only actor attempting to change the situation in the way they prefer. There are other nations, international organizations, host nation actors, and local actors who are all reacting to the United States and to each other, all trying to change the course of events in their favor. Rather than thinking of a static environment waiting for US action and direction, it may be better to think of a pile of crabs trying to climb on top of each other, with the United States being one more crab that has arrived late to the scene.
If this were the movies, an IW game might involve several stiff generals in a cavernous, high-tech room full of photogenic young staff and wall-sized computer screens. There would be computer-generated battle graphics moving around, and video of Godzilla/Megatron/zombies/terrorists. The scrappy hero or heroine, dissed earlier by at least one general, would suddenly discover the enemy’s single point of failure. The generals would urgently call the President of the United States, and the military would go on to implement the solution and save California/Autobots/mankind/Americans.
Clearly, real life is not like the movies. There so many types of wargames going on within DoD that it is extremely hard to make generalizations about them. And my handful of wargame experiences makes me hesitate to suggest that there is such a thing as a typical game. Here though, are a few examples of some types of games:
Game #1: I was an observer who mostly came for the “hot wash” after the game. It was a very large game at a posh facility involving many active duty officers, a few retired generals, and ambassadors. The food was memorable. It was mostly a planning exercise where people discussed issues and problems. As far as I could tell, nobody “played” the bad guys—bad guys were simply part of the background scenario but did not have any actions during the “game.” Nor was there any indication that people faced consequences in later turns from decisions they had made earlier. This was not really a wargame but a Bunch of Guys (and Gals) Sitting Around a Table (BOGGSAT). So nobody really got the full advantage of unexpected insights that wargames are supposed to offer. However, it was typical of DoD “wargames” that I would put into the category of Important People Came to My Huge Event Therefore It Was Awesome and the General Is Pleased.
Game #2: I was an analyst for another “IW game” that was really a planning exercise and not a wargame. Again, the adversary was static and had no life in the event after the briefing. There was a scenario, but then the military officers simply began to plan, and to discuss what type of specialists they might or might not need. Nothing in the event was designed to let them test out their plan against someone pretending to be other actors. The organization hosting the game put repeated pressure on the planners to accept the types of specialists they suggested; instead of asking if someone with such-and-such a skill was required, they would ask, how many? I ran into the colonel in charge a few days later. He kept fishing for compliments, so I finally mollified him by earnestly saying, “The general seemed pleased.” This one I put in the category of Cooking the Books to Get Results That Support My Solution But Without Realizing It Because I Know Nothing About Wargames.
Game #3: I was an observer to an “analytic” game where the point was to use the wargame results to feed further quantitative analysis using a computer simulation. It was a counterinsurgency game depending mostly on die rolls, with rather binary actions that players could make. This one was much more of a game than games one and two outlined above, but I thought the commercial insurgency games by Brian Train were far superior in their understanding of important counterinsurgency dynamics (you know, like the political side of things). This was actually a game though, and involved the simulated use of forces rather than real ones, with one side being the insurgents and making moves that the US forces in the game had to respond to. I have lots of problems with using computer simulation for IW analysis, so I personally put this game in the category of Games that Feed Computer Models Because It’s Become Like The Matrix Where People Exist for the Sake of the Machines.
Game #4: This was one of two games where I was the sponsor’s rep. There were a table of US players, a table of UN players, a table of international actors, a table of players for host nation #1, and a table of players for host nation #2. The US table had instructions on a strategy they were to try to implement. I’d asked the game to be designed to give host nation players a big say in events, rather than having a static population, as was typical in most IW games I’d seen up to that point. The United States was supposed to work with the United Nations to do humanitarian assistance and engagement with the two host nations and to try to help with conflict in the area. Internal politics within the two host nation countries outran the strategy that the United States and United Nations were trying to implement. The United States managed to piss off both host nation governments royally and never understood why. The United States also inadvertently helped trigger a coup rather than help reduce any conflict. I thought it was quite realistic. I like to think that this one belongs to the category of IW Games Where You Actually Let the Host Nation Screw with Your Carefully Crafted Approach.
The life cycle of a DoD wargame typically begins with the sponsor. The sponsor decides there should be a game and pays for or secures funding for the game. It is also in the sponsor’s name that participants are invited and the game is played. But even in this beginning phase, which seems straightforward enough, dealing with IW games can be tricky. Others have written about the challenges of getting the sponsor to articulate what it is that they want to accomplish in the game—a prerequisite for making sure that a wargame is on track.
As with study sponsors, wargame sponsors even in normal times have trouble explaining what it is that they want to accomplish. Having been the sponsor’s rep in the life cycle of a wargame, I can say that this is because establishing wargame goals is challenging. It is not because your IQ drops precipitously between being an analyst and being a sponsor or sponsor’s rep. Those who labor to design and conduct wargames probably think so, but I urge more sympathy. Some of the uncertainty and confusion is because the role is unfamiliar to the person who must suddenly commission a wargame. Even if you have been involved in professional wargames before, involvement may have been infrequent enough that you don’t really understand what is and is not possible with wargames.
This was certainly true for me the first time I had to do this. The first time we proposed a wargame for our IW project, nobody batted an eye, either in our leadership or the Pentagon committee who approved funding after a series of meetings. Wargaming is simply something that DoD does. Asking why you have a wargame is as baffling as asking why we live in North America. What do you mean why? We just do. But the first question that has to be answered in wargaming is: Why do you want a wargame, as opposed to something else? This moves wargames from the category of standard operating procedure to one of specific purpose and design. Peter Perla at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) had to confront me with this question for the first time in my life, poor man, but thankfully the acquaintance survived.
But once you get some notion of what wargames do and do not do, I think the most difficult thing about sponsoring an IW wargame is that the discussion on objectives naturally leads to thinking about the game’s limitations and trade-offs. This is logical, since you cannot accomplish everything but must prioritize what you absolutely want. But the paralyzing moment in IW games comes when you have to make choices, and you hesitate because you realize that you don’t know enough about the problem to be confident about what you are taking off the table. Wargames can offer insights on complex problems—but if you understood enough about a complex problem to make informed choices about a wargame’s purpose and objectives, you would not need a wargame in the first place. You don’t know what you don’t know, but the first step is already to constrain the set of answers you may get. What if you are leaving out the most important thing but don’t know it?
The next stage in the IW wargame—wargame design—is the next impossible test. With so many structural uncertainties, and such a complex problem, how ought a game be designed? Designers working on historical games of revolution or insurgency have the benefit of knowing how things turned out in retrospect (see, e.g., Brian Train’s Algeria [2000] or Ed Beach’s Here I Stand [2006]). A historical perspective helps to identify the major factors that appear to have had the most significant consequences.
In contemporary IW situations, it is pretty much impossible to know which way things could potentially go. It was unclear during the worst days of the 2003–11 Iraq War that there would one day be a Sunni Awakening that would drive the Sunnis from al-Qaeda and into cooperation with US forces. A commercial board game, Battle for Baghdad (2009), eventually emerged and was designed so that the Sunnis might or might not turn from al-Qaeda, and might or might not side with the Americans. But this is because, in hindsight, we are able to tell that the Sunni Awakening was a pivotal point in the war. A whole range of strategic, geopolitical, and technological factors—all subject to change when confronting contemporary or future scenarios—are written in stone for a past case.
Wargames for actual national security purposes, as opposed to those for entertainment, are of more use if set in the present or future. IW games introduce complex phenomena and then try and project them out into the future. How valid are the starting assumptions? How valid is the scenario? Are the key aspects of the problem properly scoped and given enough room for play? Does the game mechanism represent the best one for the problem? Are the roles the correct ones? How should complex dynamics be reduced to a manageable game that can be executed coherently in a few days? All of these demand such a level of expertise in very specific IW contexts, and highly specialized knowledge about game design, that it really does start to become an impossible problem. It is not a matter of if an IW game design is wrong, but a matter of how wrong, and if the effort can still be useful to the sponsor and participants.
A significant part of game design is the problem of adjudication. Stephen Downes-Martin at the Naval War College (NWC) asks the question of who is fit to adjudicate a highly complex phenomenon like IW (see Downes-Martin 2013). Who really is expert enough to understand what outcomes would arise from player moves in a game about Syria? Adjudication is futures thinking, and the more complex the judgment, the easier it is for it to go awry. This is the third part of understanding IW, where there is the most uncertainty and where years of DoD-funded studies have only made progress in certain areas. But adjudication is a critical piece. If the adjudication in IW games is wrong, merely echoing back doctrinal expectations, negative learning can take place in a game and nobody would truly be aware of it. There is the heightened danger of learning the wrong lessons from a wargame about counterinsurgency, but feeling that these were legitimate insights because the shared socialization that comes out of a wargame can be such a powerful and memorable experience. Peter Perla talks about the power of story living in a game, but if the incorrect story was lived and remembered, that too has effects when the players take mental models from the game into future decisions.
Another difficulty for IW wargames lies in securing the correct roles and the correct players. Determining what roles get to make independent decisions in a game (such as DoD, or a certain insurgent group) is to pass judgment on what actors in real life have the most impact on the IW dynamics. Have too many roles, and the game gets unwieldy. Have too few, and you will miss important decision makers, institutions, and social groups.
An IW wargame’s credibility also comes from the level of expertise that the invited players bring to the table. Who are the right players in an IW game? People experienced in one war tend to take that experience into another situation, whether it is warranted or not. For example, when I watched a group of army officers playing a counterinsurgency game, their conversation and understanding of cause and effect reflected their experience in Iraq, down to what had happened in specific towns; even though it was a game in a totally different geography, they were recreating a stylized version of Iraq in their game. We see how the US experience in Bosnia set the mental map for many going into Iraq and Afghanistan, the 1991 invasion of Iraq set the expectations for those going into the second invasion, and aspects of the Iraq war approach were copied and pasted into Afghanistan. There is a tendency on the part of even those with IW experience to misunderstand the shape and significant dynamics of a brand-new situation, and to bring along the understanding that made them experts on the previous war.
Another set of problems with recruiting the right experts for an IW wargame is that DoD IW games tend to be classified. Because this automatically precludes anyone without a security clearance, it can often mean that the very best experts on the topic cannot be invited to a game. Game participants must come from within the US government or its contractors, which introduces the danger of creating an echo chamber if invitations and viewpoints are not well managed. Even within the US government, there is also an imbalance of who is available to come to multi-day wargames. DoD dwarfs the rest of the US government and runs so many games that other parts of the government can have a hard time sending people to every game where non-DoD participation is desired. This has the potential to skew the perspective brought to the table.
All these issues compound by the time you arrive at the next stage in the life cycle of a wargame: analyzing the results. Analysis for IW games is greatly complicated by the importance of qualitative developments in the game, over quantitative outputs that are more characteristic of games designed to examine conventional war. Although many formal qualitative analysis techniques are available, they are rarely used in wargame analysis. Nor do most typical DoD wargame analysts have the right background to be familiar with them.
So this is the area where I have spent more of my energy in the two games where I was the sponsor’s rep: experimenting with applying qualitative methods to wargame analysis. In one game we tried out a rapid, team-based ethnographic approach to notetaking to study game adjudication, keeping Stephen Downes-Martin’s comment in mind that the adjudicator is a super player in complex games (Beebe 2001; Downes-Martin 2013). In the second, we had someone skilled in narrative analysis at the host nation table, and realized later that structured forms of narrative analysis could be extremely valuable in understanding the dynamics between host nation factions, the transitional government, the United States, the United Nations, and other international actors during a game.
If there are any conclusions to take away from this chapter, it is that IW wargaming is an impossible problem, but that there are sometimes real benefits to failing. And by failing, I mean that you should be aware of the shortfalls in both the design of the game itself, and the unmet objectives or unintended consequences of US actions in the game. When you fail, you can ask yourself what went wrong. If you walk away impressed with the vastness of what you didn’t even realize you were clueless about, then the Kobyashi Maru does actually have value. But if you don’t realize IW wargaming is an impossible test, you’ll draw all the wrong conclusions.
Yuna Huh Wong is an operations research analyst for the US Marine Corps. She was the methodology lead for a Pentagon-level irregular warfare study that ran for three years and incorporated wargames and other methods. Research interests include wargaming, the use of expertise, and futures methods. She holds a BS in political science and a BS in economics from MIT, an MA in political science from Columbia University, and a PhD in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where her dissertation was on noncombatants in urban operations and in military models and simulations.