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Restoking the Pentagon's wargaming engine will multiply ways to
explore defense and national security futures, Deputy Defense
Secretary Bob Work has said multiple times this year.
Work
and Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, both have written about wargaming and how the Defense
Department could revitalize the valuable practice, which would
generate ideas and integrate new technologies into doctrine,
operations and force structure.
In a May 8, 2015 memorandum
to military department leaders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Work laid out three initiatives that together, he said,
would help align department decision-making and the wargaming
enterprise.
“We are entering a critical period for the United
States,” Work wrote in the memo, referring to resetting the joint
force after 13 years of war, “[and] we must turn our attention to
numerous emerging challenges to U.S. global leadership.”
In
such a dynamic environment, he added, department leaders are making
programmatic decisions to meet the challenges, and wargaming is an
important way to inform those decisions and spur innovation.
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Airmen of the New York Air National Guard's 152nd Air Operations
Group man their stations during Virtual Flag, a computer wargame
held Feb. 18-26, 2015 from Hancock Field Air National Guard Base.
The computer hookup allowed the air war planners of the 152nd to
interact with other Air Force units around the country and in
Europe. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Eric Miller)
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Future Wars
More
recently, Work and Selva wrote a Dec. 8 commentary on
wargaming and the new initiatives -- titled "Revitalizing Wargaming
is Necessary to be Prepared for Future Wars" -- for
warontherocks.com.
The web-based publication on national
security and foreign policy has contributors who are defense
officials, former diplomats, military officers, noncommissioned
officers, intelligence professionals and war scholars.
Work
and Selva began the commentary with a historical look at the topic
-- in this case the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s, when
militaries around the world were adapting to new inventions like
radar and sonar and rapid improvements in other militarily relevant
technologies.
“To help navigate through this period of
disruptive change, the United States military made extensive use of
analytical wargaming,” Work and Selva wrote. “Wargames were an
inexpensive tool during a period of suppressed defense spending to
help planners cope with the high degree of contemporary
technological and operational uncertainty."
Revitalizing Wargaming
With
the initiatives he introduced in May, Work said he intends to
revitalize wargaming, embed wargaming more firmly
in DoD's suite of analytical approaches, and do a better job of
sharing wargame insights with senior leadership.
“This effort
is part of our broader commitment to foster greater innovation
within the department, make the most of increasingly constrained
resources, and avoid operational or technological surprise in
tomorrow's dynamic security environment,” Work and Selva said in the
commentary.
The first step, now underway, is for all
services, combatant commands and wargaming centers to contribute to
a wargaming repository that will help everyone better understand and
guide current wargaming efforts and share insights across the
defense enterprise.
The repository, which so far contains the
results of more than 250 wargames, the defense officials said,
offers a single place to access wargame results and insights and to
learn about upcoming wargames and tabletop exercises.
The
second step is to form a Defense Wargaming Alignment Group, or DWAG,
to share senior-leader priorities with the wargaming enterprise and
to help ensure that feedback and insights from wargames that align
with department priorities are communicated to department leaders,
Work and Selva said.
Including
Partners, Allies
The DWAG will inventory wargaming capacity and capability
department-wide, particularly among the services and combatant
commands, and institute a regular series of senior-leader wargaming
events, they added.
The third step, because the department
relies heavily on allies and partners in almost everything it does,
is for the department to examine better ways to include them in its
wargaming efforts and how best to share results, they said.
Wargames are useful for exploring the integration of allied
capabilities and helping develop cooperative concepts of operation,
the defense leaders said, adding that wargames play an increasingly
critical role in informing interagency partners about complexities
and challenges the department would face in a high-end conflict
against a great power.
“For example,” Work and Selva wrote,
“we recently held a specific wargame on space that illuminated some
of the challenges and opportunities we could face if a conflict
extended into that domain.”
Going
to School on Wargames
The department also will
consider the value of using wargames
that explore joint multidimensional combat operations in pursuit of
joint professional military education goals, they said.
Today, wargaming courses are generally electives, Work and Selva
explained, adding that building school curricula around wargaming
might help spark innovation and give the joint force a better
understanding of transregional, cross-domain, multidimensional
combat.
Entering the force is a new generation of young men
and women whose exposure to commercial multiplayer gaming is greater
than that of any previous generation, they said.
“Should they be
introduced to wargaming in their accession programs? We have not yet
answered these questions,” they said, “but we are considering them,
as well as other initiatives to reinvigorate wargaming across the
department.”
By Cheryl Pellerin
DOD News / Defense Media Activity
Copyright 2015
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