The Games Behind Your Government's Next War: I've played two of them

Games
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I get that many of you will not watch an hour+ of a YT vid on this subject, but this is near and dear to my… Heart? Brain?

Back in my Army days, we played two officially sponsored and administered war games that stuck with me.

The first was a bit like a roleplaying game for my job in intelligence. I can’t say the name of the game, but it was meant to explore the various ways a guerilla force could trip up and defeat a NATO or BLUFOR military deployment. We, the players, took on the roles of insurgents hidden amongst the populace and we would talk out our moves in reaction to news stories and events the game administrators gave us. (These were civilian contractors from one of the big defense firms you’ve read about.) They, in turn, would have BLUFOR react to our moves, and it would go back and forth. This was all done in a large town hall-style room with groups of 4-6 players at each table acting as “cells” and communication between cells was not allowed unless it was done via messengers and only once per move. Each move represented a 48hr period unless open combat erupted in which case moves would represent an hour.

It was very open-ended and we were only limited by our creativity and some modest imaginary budgets we were given for cell supplies. You could, for instance, spend a move with everyone in your cell tracking troop movements or recruiting fellow sympathizers. Or you could break into a newspaper’s office and kidnap the editor for terrorist impact. Whatever your evil mind could come up.

The goal was to disrupt and confound the BLUFOR admins and either get them kicked out of the fictional country or cause a stalemate that would prompt NATO or the US government to give up. All the games ended in the stalemate condition which was technically the win for the insurgents.

This game was basically a reverse Kobayashi Maru intended to show that insurgents have enormous advantages in asymmetrical warfare and US/NATO militaries should not get bogged down in protracted policing campaigns. Fast in, fast out. Don’t linger. It always stuck with me how we were all taught that just before we got ourselves bogged down in a protracted policing campaign for decades.

The second wargame that stuck with me was at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. This was live-action combined arms shooty-shooty bang bang on a grand scale. Whole-ass Army, Air Force, and Marine units deployed to this desert, shooting blanks at each other while wearing MILES gear (fancy laser tag for the military) and sometimes firing off live rounds like armored artillery or mortars for practice while jets screamed overhead on fake bombing runs. All of this activity tied into a gamesmaster HQ with big screens showing a Harpoon-esque facsimile of the ongoing war. As the unit’s intel guy, I got to attend the leadership meetings in this building and I was agog at how it definitely looked exactly like the games I played on my primitive PC.

It fascinated me for the exorbitant amount of money it obviously cost for the exercise. It was crazy. In one game I attended, the US forces teamed up with a German unit that was flown in for co-op training and the German officers were like WTF at how much money was being spent. Later in my Army career, I attended a combat exercise run by the Germans and the budget difference was nuts. Now, you can obviously say that we spent the money well because our military was bigger and did more things, so we had to be prepared etc, but the sheer cash being blown up was staggering. That really opened my eyes to how much money our military cost.

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Lovely Ft Irwin. I think I did 3 rotations when I was in 1st Cav. One rotation they almost sent a helicopter to grab our team off one the huge hills on the west end when a freak snow/ice storm hit. The antenna for our jamming system was iced over, and couldn’t be lowered. In the end we just hung out up there until it was done. I had to walk down and up that damn hill in the middle of the night at one point because they lost radio comms with a direction finding team that was down somewhere at the base of the hill. Got to the bottom found the team. They apparently got ahold of them not long after I set out, and then I got scolded for using the radio to let my team know I made it down there, and was heading back up.

I also remember helping out with a III Corps wargame. That was a different experience.

I’d love to see the bill that covers the cost an NTC rotation. Moving a brigade to the railhead, sending it on its way, pulling it at Barstow and driving up to Irwin, 2 weeks in down range, and then do everything in reverse.

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That was a really interesting video, thanks. I didn’t anticipate watching the whole thing, but I did. (I think I’ve probably watched one or two SU&SD videos before and maybe I recognized the guy, but I wouldn’t have been able to name him, certainly.)

I think he basically exactly shares my views on the subject, which is no doubt why I liked it so much. (The exception being that at the end when he says “we [the gaming industry and community] have the power to…” I don’t really feel like I do.) The thing I would most like to see, out of the things he discussed, is greater expansion of wargaming to non-military situations. For example, my wife is very active in climate protests and organizing and she keeps harping on the need for local resiliency. I would love to see wargaming in our town about, say, a flood followed by a severe heat wave, or a supply disruption, etc etc. The town does a bunch of outreach; I think if we called it an RPG or “role-playing simulation” or something other than “wargame” it could work (to his point about the name of the hobby).

I also think of the analogies with the defense industry takeover of physics, starting with the Manhattan Project. Basically ~every physicist we learned about who was significant in the birth of modern physics ended up in Los Alamos at some point (or they stayed in Germany, and… yikes). My PhD research was funded by IARPA (the Intelligence version of DARPA) until it was funded by industry. If you become a physics professor you basically take defense money or work really hard to stay purely NSF funded. If you leave the field you pretty much go to the defense industry, or tech, or an engineering firm that’s somehow not part of the defense industry.

So would you say that the outcome was predetermined? Makes me think of the Japanese wargames leading up to Pearl Harbor, arguably one of the most catastrophic wargaming outcomes in history. (Strong recommendation for Eri Hotta’s Japan 1941 for how Japan ended up there.)

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Partly. The admin folks were writing the BLUFOR responses to our moves, so I imagine some steering towards the end, and some of their movements were predetermined by a timetable that was part of the scenario like this political figure died in a plane crash on this date or this unit had to move to X base due to the neighboring country’s provocation.

However, our moves were wide open. There really was no restrictions put on us, so the closest analogue was something like a sandbox tabletop roleplaying campaign.

And I think it’s very hard to come up with any asymmetrical scenario where the insurgents do not have an enormous timetable advantage outside of the actual combat. If the insurgents can strike fast and move constantly, use the populace against the occupiers, twist political pressure in the occupying force’s home country, and manage to stay out of force-on-force conflict I don’t see how they can’t win.

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Well, I guess that doesn’t seem inaccurate.

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I don’t share the same ethics problems with developing games for the military. People will find tools to try and anticipate adversaries or situations, if not games, it’ll be something else, but they will be developed, because that’s a big reason why we have these big brains…

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I enjoyed this piece, but I’m largely with you. I’m not sure I’d have a real ethical problem doing this work, but I can understand and respect people who would opt out for ethical reasons.

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I can understand Quinn’s perspective though, because it’s one thing to go into the work knowing what you’re doing, but in a sense, he has been working for gaming, for entertainment, fun and joy, and bringing people together through the power of good games.

And now, he learns, it’s not just for the advancement of games as entertainment that he has been working for, but also this whole other thing which is much less joyful or focused on bringing people together…