My interest in the moves actors make finds expression in the study and application of conflict simulation and wargaming. Due to their competitive nature, and the way they can allow for multiple variables to interact in unexpected ways, games can help make understandable decisions and political dynamics that often seem intangible. Games also allow for the discovery of new strategies or surprising outcomes that not even the designers or researchers anticipate. This is especially useful in the study of low-frequency events (such as modern great power wars, cyber conflicts, or nuclear exchanges). While I have experience in applied wargaming in research and in the classroom, my research is increasingly focused on understanding the epistemological foundations of analytic wargaming.
This paper proposes a comprehensive research program for determining the epistemological foundations of analytic wargaming. Wargaming has been used in military, government, and private sectors for decades, with tens of millions of dollars spent annually on it. In light of the changing strategic circumstances of the 21st century, it has only become more popular. However, the epistemological foundations of the method are poorly understood. Many professional wargamers contend that wargaming is an ‘art’ and thus unable to be systemically evaluated. Recent work by a small coterie of international relations scholars have contended that wargaming can be reconciled with social scientific standards, typically by evaluating wargaming according to experimental standards. However, this solution strips wargames of most of their unique features and cannot explain why some of the most prominent wargames in history produced meaningful results. In this paper, I argue that in attempt to better understand wargaming’s epistemology, scholars begin by recognizing the prominent features of wargames and research each of these to determine if and how they produce rigorous knowledge. In making this argument, I identify five distinct ‘methodological machineries’ of wargaming – the recurring processes through which wargames may produce knowledge – that distinguish wargaming from other social science methods: (i) they are representative, (ii) they feature consequential decisions made by human players, (iii) they are adjudicated, (iv) they are immersive, and (v) they are bespoke designs. I show how each of these machineries offers potential opportunities and dangers in the production of knowledge through the method of wargaming. In outlining these distinct features, I offer a clear and viable research program for epistemologists of wargaming.
Cyber technology is altering the character of war at the operational level as well as the practice of strategic competition in the 21st century. Despite all this activity, the long-term significance of cyber operations is unclear. How much will state and non-state actors come to rely on cyber operations? What role will cyber operations play in the major international and domestic crises? And what types of cyber strategies will different actors adopt?These questions motivated our research. In 2016 we began investigating how cyber operations United States rivals, such as Russia and the Islamic State, might interact with more traditional security dynamics such as deterrence and coercion. However, at that point in time, large-scale cyber operations—while potentially threatening—had not yet occurred. This absence of real world data determined our decision to rely on wargames to generate synthetic data, as described in Chapter 2. We created two wargames: Island Intercept and Netwar. Although cyber wargames for government date back to the 1990s, our research was among the first academic studies to use wargames in the literature on cyber conflict studies. Using the novel data generated by our wargames, we identified three ‘strategy profiles’ that actors engaged in cyber conflicts might adopt. These strategy profiles in turn informed a survey experiment to determine the strategic attitudes that individuals held toward cyber operations. In 2018, Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity published our initial report, Cyber Operations in Conflict: Lessons from Analytic Wargaming.
Contrary to the headlines and promises of cyber doom, in both disputes between rival great powers and intrastate conflicts between governments and opposition groups, cyber capabilities may produce a moderating influence on coercive exchanges and crisis escalation. We used analytical simulations and wargames conducted with a mix of university students and national security professionals to extract hypotheses about strategic preferences and then assessed these preferences using a large-n experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We found that:
1) the dominant cyber strategy in crises between rival states is a limited response designed to test resolve and states prefer to escalate in the cyber domain (as opposed to military) based on relative power calculations; and,
2) regime type informs cyber strategy preferences with democracies associated with restraint in both government and non-state actor approaches to coercive exchange.
That is, cyber operations do not replace strategy. They simply extend bargaining to a new domain and change the character, as opposed to the nature, of strategic interaction. The inclusion of cyber operations alongside traditional instruments of statecraft and contentious politics therefore is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary.
The use of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is common in professional analytic wargames. SMEs are used to assist in game design, as adjudicators, and as players. Advocates for the use of SMEs in games claim that their inclusion permits a ‘loosening’ of game rules, thus allowing for maximum player creativity and novel and unexpected results while – due to the SMEs’ expertise – without sacrificing rigor. However, this claim is largely untested and the selection of SMEs and their inputs in games generates considerable validity concerns. Drawing on interviews with professional wargame researcher/designers (RD) I gain insights into RD concerns about SMEs and methods to address these. I find that RDs are concerned about the selection of SMEs prior to games, and the bias of SMEs within games. However, RDs are unable and unwilling to address the first of these problems and focuses on addressing only the second.
When many think of serious wargames they imagine ‘rigid kriegspiels’ – games with clearly defined rules and consistent decision and adjudication mechanisms. As a practice, however, many wargames in professional and military circles take the form of ‘Matrix’ or ‘Seminar’ games. In these games, rules regarding player-choices and adjudication are designed to be quite loose in form; the assumption being that the expertise of players and adjudicators will constrain them in ways that prevent unrealistic or improbable outcomes, and that the implicit theories that experts umpires hold in their heads will essentially create the sort of rule-set that more explicitly bounds players participating in rigid kriegspiels. However, this is a strong assumption. How can we ensure that experts are consistently applying their implicit theories of to their decisions? By combining insights from philosophy of science, social science methodologies regarding induction, and studies on immersion, this paper clarifies some of the challenges of these forms of wargames and some potential ways to address these.
In this paper, I outline the logic and purpose of analytic wargaming and offer some direction on how and when games might be designed. I begin by laying out a brief history of wargaming, in which I offer some prominent instances of its use in history. In the remainder of the paper I discuss the theoretical logic of wargaming. I explain that wargaming is a powerful tool not only for generating understanding of complex phenomena in the world, but also for the production of innovative strategies or approaches for tackling such phenomena. I introduce the reader to the core principles necessary for designing useful wargames and explain how variations in game design are useful for researching and understanding distinct dynamics.