Wargaming and Innovation in the USN

Started by bayonetbrant, December 15, 2014, 09:20:09 PM

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bayonetbrant

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2014/12/wargaming-for-innovation.html

from the intro...

QuoteI feel that since I am offering criticism and prescriptions, I should establish my bona fides for doing so.  I have been playing in, designing, directing, analyzing, overseeing and sponsoring professional wargames since 1981.  I served as a professor of planning and decision making at the Naval War College for six years and in that capacity was responsible for executing student end-of-course wargames.  Later, I served as director of the Research and Analysis Division within the Wargaming Department.  In this position, besides analyzing Title X and other games, I served as game director for a major advanced concepts game involving Joint Forces Command and the Navy (Unified Course 04).  Elevated to Chairman of the Wargaming Department, I completely reorganized it and substantially civilianized it, hand-picking the faculty.  In 2006 I was made Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.  I was immediately assigned to design and lead a project to support the development of a new maritime strategy.  As part of that project I conceived of a six-week-long strategy game that produced the central insight upon which the resulting document, "A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower," was based.  As Dean I had seven departments reporting to me.  Three of those departments, Strategic Research, Wargaming and Warfare Analysis, conducted a substantial amount of their work using different types of wargaming, for which I established institutional policy and standards.  Throughout all of this I participated in many Title X games of each of the Services as well as teaching an elective course on wargaming theory and practice at the Naval War College.  I also wrote several articles on wargaming theory.
   
Over the course of the last sixteen years I have observed the Navy and Joint attempts to create innovation centers – the Navy Warfare Development Command and Joint Forces Command J9 – including sitting with LtGen (Ret) Paul VanRiper during Millenium Challenge 02.  I have had a front row seat, as it were, to see how the best institutional intentions, activated by a host of smart, experienced and dedicated people and funded by millions of dollars, failed to generate useful innovation, in part through the misuse of wargames.  In this article I will not provide a detailed critique of what went wrong, but my observations and prescriptions concerning wargaming are based on what I saw fail.
The key to surviving this site is to not say something which ends up as someone's tag line - Steelgrave

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GDS_Starfury

there is no one stop catch all training grade wargame to suit the military.  its a discussion weve probably both had.
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bayonetbrant

this author isn't advocating that - he's talking about ways you can develop wargames for different purposes, specifically, innovations looking forward
The key to surviving this site is to not say something which ends up as someone's tag line - Steelgrave

"their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights'...and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure." Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers