Some Ideas on Simulation and Wargaming

This article contains sections from the free accessible Epilogue to our 2021 book Simulation and Wargaming, John Wiley & Sons. It discusses the increasing role simulation will play in wargames with two major contributions, namely (1) keeping the score and computing results of the wargamers decision and (2) proving operations research support to the decision making process as part of a portfolio of decision making support tools.

The more complex the operations evaluated in the wargame get, the more challenging will it be to provide the environment for the wargamers that exposes all these complexities, which requires a generation of simulations that are by themselves complex and adaptive, or the wargamers will not find themselves in a realistic and challenging environment. In addition, because the environment becomes more and more challenging, the orchestrated set of tools needed to come to a decision will need more dynamic support as well. Furthermore, as each simulation model is the result of task-driven simplifications and abstractions to focus on the intended facet of a problem, more than one model will be needed to create an ensemble that addresses all facets important for the wargamer. From the epilogue:

"The first category deals with providing a realistic environment embedding the wargame. We often use tabletop exercises to experiment with new ideas, but they are inherently linear in nature, and our decision spaces are no longer linear. The current environment is complex, highly nonlinear, and loaded with overlapping effects from modern weapon systems. Effect- and kill-chains are resulting in multidimensional effect- and kill-webs with many alternatives, feedback loops, and often delays in observable effects, to include higher order effects. Even small variations can lead to significant changes in the outcome, and some regions may even expose chaotic behavior. This is the reality of the modern warfighter, so it needs to be the reality for the modern wargamer as well. Multidomain and joint all-domain operations may be just the beginning of allowing for more local self-organization to provide the necessary operational agility to cope with complexity. Command and control and high-speed interoperability of all systems will become a focal point of future research. The introduction of intelligent autonomous systems that need to be integrated in the operations will add more challenges. Such a realistic representation of the decision space and resulting effects is a major challenge for simulation systems and supporting visualization methods.

The second category is directly related to the first one, as it provides the analytic tools needed to cope with the complex situation. Data science, visualization, and other means are needed in real operations, and so they are for the wargamers to support their decision process. The classic use of simulation systems for optimization is based on high-resolution presentations of known systems to be fine-tuned to look for the optimal outcome, confirmative in nature. Such simulation systems often use hundreds or thousands of input parameters and require significant effort to initialize a scenario described by all these data. But the technical challenge of preparation is not even the main challenge, as new scenarios are characterized by deep uncertainty about technical details and even more about the doctrinal challenges. Instead of optimizing for a well-defined but extremely speculative point-case future, these challenges require us to better understand the possibility of space and design solutions accordingly. Decision-makers and wargamers must be enabled to detect, comprehend, visualize, and manage possibilities in the complex battlespace, including anticipating and dealing with emergent phenomena, requiring moving from confirmative to exploratory analysis. Command and control structures need to be configurable quickly to evaluate new, unconventional options. The focus is more on understanding the options than jumping to optimization tasks prematurely. In the complex decision space, it is often as important to exclude bad options early as it is to identify areas to focus on."

A recent Thesis submitted to the Delft University of Technology on "Wargame Simulation: Exploiting the Power of a Flow-Based Design" by Drs. H.B. Hovestadt in 2023, makes similar observations.

It may also be worth to revisit the recommendations of the Command and Control Research Program for the Code of Best Practice of Experimentation for the outer simulation and the Code of Best Practice for the Assessment of Command and Control for the inner simulation, supporting the assessment.

Disclaimer: Andreas Tolk's affiliation with MITRE is provided for identification purposes only and is not intended to convey or imply concurrence with, or support for, the positions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by this author. This article has been approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited. Public Release Case Number 24-01888-7.

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