Gaming the Wargames

Did you hear about the time Saddam Hussein sunk 19 American ships in the Persian Gulf using explosives-laden civilian speedboats and under-the radar aircraft? It was in 2002 – in a wargame tagged Millennium Challenge. “Virtual Hussein” was actually retired Marine Corps Lt Gen Paul Van Riper, who launched a “pre-empt the pre-emptors” strike, and in 10 minutes the most expensive wargame simulation in history ($250 million, 13,500 service members, 17 locations, nine live-force training sites) was … well, history.

Having spent all that taxpayer largess, and facing a congressional mandate for a live-fire, forced-entry component, the Pentagon simply re-raked the sandbox. The carrier battle group was refloated and the dead sailors revived, as in a nobody-really-dies video game. However, hostile fire against invading aircraft and paratroopers was now forbidden, and Red air defense was to be repositioned in the open for Blue forces to easily obliterate. Chem weapons were also out of the formerly “free-play” scenario.

Van Riper quit less than a week into the rigged exercise, and submitted a 21-page critique, which the Pentagon promptly classified. An official JFCOM report released a decade later admitted “significant limitations and artificialities.”

MC ’02 is said to have been a “watershed ‘eureka’ moment” by the leader of the “winners”.

But was it? The Blues were allowed to use futuristic technologies which would not have been available in the timeframe of the simulated attack on Iraq. Eighteen years later, a wargame scenario of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan invoked capabilities not yet in service to repel Xi Jinping’s forces, such as the Block 4 software upgrade and new weapons for the perennially troubled F-35A. Air Force Lt Gen Clint Hinote, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration, and Requirements, called the result a "pyrrhic" victory.

Hinote said, “We’re beginning to understand what kind of US military force it’s going to take to achieve the National Defense Strategy’s goals. But that’s not the force we’re planning and building today.” Outdated platforms such as massive warships, short-range tactical fighters and heavy tank battalions, greased by corporate lobbyist funding, continue to enjoy support in the Pentagon and Congress.

Much as US contingency planners did after the 1933 War Plan Orange showed a surprising victory by Japan, i.e. change tactics, Gen. John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed that wargame losses to simulated Chinese forces have led to “expanded maneuver”, a sort-of social-distancing concept that disperses ships, aircraft and soldiers across a wider area – rather than the concentration of firepower (vulnerable to hypersonic missiles) that has characterized the futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hyten wants the new disaggregation scheme adopted by 2030, though that may be too late as many observers suggest China will attempt to retake Taiwan within the next 5-6 years.

Critics such as Robert Rubel, a wargaming department chair at the Naval War College, suggest the DoD is “not getting its money’s worth from its extensive investment in wargaming, and it will continue to fail”. RAND defense analyst Sebastian J. Bae observes that wargaming in today’s defense community relies on a small cadre of senior wargamers, defense contractors and civilian experts. “This approach can be costly, doesn’t build long-term institutional knowledge, and can be unpredictable in terms of quality”. He advised that “cultivating the next generation of wargamers will become critical to the field’s future… the Defense Department will need to draw from a much wider pool of talent, inside and outside the military, and change the way it recruits, trains, funds, and promotes wargamers”.

While they may be “visceral” and “consciousness-raising” experiences, do wargames improve learning and innovation? “The truth is that we have little to no empirical research that shows wargaming promotes learning, creative thinking, or problem solving – at either the individual or organizational levels. While wargamers believe wargaming works, the department still lacks empirical research confirming wargaming’s ability to positively impact cognitive processes, knowledge formation, individual and group problem solving, organization learning, individual creativity, and organizational innovation,” according to Dr. Yuna Huh Wong and Garrett Heath, research analysts in the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division with the Institute for Defense Analyses.

When a scenario is supposedly real-world, but the game is gamed, what is learned?