![]() ![]() Attendees of such games often come away wildly enthusiastic about the success of the wargame in which they often “learned a great deal.” Yet when pressed they are hard-put to provide a single insight that most of the participants didn’t already know when they started. ![]() Perla’s description of the BOGSAT (“bunch of guys sitting around a table”) masquerading as analytical exercise hits the nail on the head. With million-dollar wargames putting out such profound insights as “Cyber will be very important in future warfights,” it becomes hard to justify a method that is often costly, yet generates such paltry and obvious results. It would be easy to dole out a list of examples here, but some time spent perusing the Defense Department’s Wargame Repository (if you have access) will tell the story. ![]() Peter Perla’s 2016 call to improve wargaming, while widely read and commented on at the time, was mostly ignored by wargame practitioners among federally funded research and development centers, universities, and defense contractors, who, frankly, seem largely content to continue on with business as usual. But now demand may be tapering off, as traditional biases for more mathematically based methods begin to reemerge and attempt to reclaim the mantle of analytical validity, further complicated by the uninformed fascination with machine learning and “big data” as an alternative to gaming.Īs an advocate for, and practitioner of, analytical wargaming within the Department of Defense, I’ve witnessed some good things emerge over the past few years, but also enough poor practices to reinforce, to no small extent, the criticisms of gaming made within the operations research community. The last few years have seen both steps forward and backward as supply sought to meet demand. Now that Bob Work has left the building - well, two years ago - what is the future of wargaming as an analytical method in the Department of Defense? That’s not an easy question to answer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |