Why the U.S. Military Must Get Creative About War Games-and How It Can

by RC Porter

July 2, 2016 

In other words, war games must move beyond the Department of Defense to become fully interagency and international; include both the public and private sectors; and expand the horizons of the possible futures they explore.

Recognizing the value of war games, Work and Selva have begun restoring them to the vital role they had in the 1930s. This is important but must be pushed further. In an age when security depends on more than simply battlefield success, the entire U.S. government and its web of international and transnational partners, in both the government and private sector, must use the war-gaming process to confront an onrushing and dangerous future.

Soldiers during a war-game exercise, Fort Bragg, N.C., May 4, 2011 (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Mike MacLeod).

Among his many mangled yet astute observations, the legendary New York Yankees baseball catcher Yogi Berra once noted, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This is a dilemma that the architects of American security policy often face. Prediction is hard. But the time it takes to develop new military concepts, organizations and technology, added to the potentially catastrophic consequences of being unprepared, makes it imperative nonetheless.

Exploring ways to identify possible futures demands creativity, but that is often rare in large, bureaucratic organizations, particularly inherently conservative ones like the military. To get around this, the Department of Defense relies on collective creativity-the “hive mind”-rather than individual visionaries. One of the most important methods for this is the use of analytical war games. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote, “Wargames help strip down a strategic, operational, or tactical problem and reduce its complexity in order to identify the few, important factors that constrain us or an opponent.” As Work and Selva went on to explain, the other benefits of war games are that they provide “structured, measured, rigorous . . . environments” that “permit hypotheses to be challenged and theories to be tested.” Perhaps most crucially, they allow the participants to make mistakes under circumstances where they can learn from them. They concluded that “wargaming is one of the most effective means available to offer senior leaders a glimpse of future conflict, however incomplete.”

Since war-gaming offers one of the few ways to wrestle with future security challenges, the Department of Defense takes them seriously. That’s good. But as the strategic environment becomes increasingly complex and the cost of miscalculation increases, the United States must expand the way it approaches war-gaming. War games must become fully interagency in their scope, integrate thinkers and organizations outside the government, and grapple not only with near-term problems-like further Russian aggression, the collapse of a major nation, or the spread of violent Islamic extremism- but also “black swans,” defined as improbable yet high-impact events.

There are many examples of black swans begging for analysis. For instance, in today’s war games, even those set a decade or more in the future, the United States remains the world’s dominant power and has global influence and interests. Hopefully this will be true, but what if it’s not? It is unlikely but not impossible that a decade or two down the road, the United States might not have maintained its pre-eminence, but rather is returning from self-imposed global disengagement or even a major military defeat. The political and psychological challenges of regenerating power and influence are not the same as sustaining them. Only a rigorous series of war games can provide clues on what the United States would have to do to come back from disengagement or defeat.

What of a global pandemic combined with climate change or virulent ethno-nationalism, one that causes a collapse of global order, cascading state failures and multiple armed conflicts? The United States has long equated its national security with the maintenance of a favorable world order, but what if that world order no longer existed due to a combination of circumstances beyond America’s control? How should the United States use its military, economic and political assets under such conditions? As with national defeat, Americans will hopefully never have to deal with this, but if the nightmare does come to pass, they should have given it serious thought in advance.

As the strategic environment becomes increasingly complex and the cost of miscalculation increases, the United States must expand the way it approaches war-gaming.

There are other black swans that merit war gaming. But that would only be the first step for improving the strategic value of these exercises. Another way to grapple with a complex future is to let a talented, creative and deceptive red team define the contours of major war games. Currently, the U.S. military war-games scenarios are designed by architects with a particular purpose in mind, often one focused on procurement. Instead, it should give a red team-and one comprising representatives from a diverse range of national and professional backgrounds, rather than simply from the U.S. government and military-a free hand to decide how they would sow disorder and profit from it.

Incorporating participants and concepts from outside the government should be the norm for the next generation of war games. Security experts constantly remind us that contemporary insecurity and armed conflict come less from traditional state-on-state violence than from nonstate sources. To capture this, war games should integrate people with some sort of direct knowledge of-or even experience in-terrorism, insurgency and transnational crime. Surely there are many who would participate for a fee. The global online gamer community should be tapped as well, as should the alternative worlds of virtual reality. War games should be ongoing and open-ended: Rather than covering a few weeks at a specific point in the future, they should be living entities that ebb and flow, and continue for years, even decades.

In other words, war games must move beyond the Department of Defense to become fully interagency and international; include both the public and private sectors; and expand the horizons of the possible futures they explore. 

Recognizing the value of war games, Work and Selva have begun restoring them to the vital role they had in the 1930s. This is important but must be pushed further. In an age when security depends on more than simply battlefield success, the entire U.S. government and its web of international and transnational partners, in both the government and private sector, must use the war-gaming process to confront an onrushing and dangerous future.

Steven Metz is the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR column, Strategic Horizons, appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz.