wargaming at the Brussels conference, I well remember G. G. Armstrong of the Directorate of Land Operations Research and Analysis Establishment (DLOR) in Ottawa, who discussed Canada’s evolutionary army wargaming approach that is in fact a package of simulations in either training game or research game formats together with an experience in playing wargames.18 The research game was a manual game with the purpose to produce data from which the sponsor’s questions may be answered involving a great deal of computer assistance required to carry out the assessments and record the data that the games produce. The training wargames were carried out by the same people who create the research wargames with the purpose to exercise staff colleges and formations thus exposing DLOR’s methods and findings throughout the Canadian army. It seems that the Canadian approach was a good fertilizer for today’s renaissance of manual wargaming in most NATO nations.
Armstrong ended his talk by emphasizing that civilian scientist and military officers must work together. “An all‐scientist war game can easily become a ‘black box mathematician’s delight’ which is tactically ridiculous. Conversely, an all‐military wargame can very easily become an exercise carried out without regard to its purpose.”
At the end of this Foreword, let me come back to Stuart Starr’s initially mentioned paper on the changing nature of wargaming by the emergence of sophisticated collaboration tools allowing geographically dispersed individuals to participate fully in the deliberation and decisions in a wargame. Contrary to delegating the participation to subordinates because of short of time, this would allow actual decision‐makers (commanders, heads of agencies, senior executives) to participate and play personally in wargames, thus increasing both the fidelity of the games and the real value of the entire activity by educating the decision‐makers directly about the intricacies and nuances of the problems being considered. In the long term, Stuart was convinced that the state of the art of collaboration technology had already advanced to the point of integrating the available standalone collaboration tools into “virtual buildings” in which participants interact “face to face” in real time. In fact, decision‐makers would, in a crisis, be able to play relevant wargames practically ad hoc provided, however, the military wargaming community had generated, together with battle simulation institutions, the respective data and gaming rules.
Thus, Stuart Starr’s foreseen challenges are facing both of the communities, the War‐Gaming and the Simulation.
Reiner K. Huber
Emeritus Professor
University of the German Armed Forces
Munich, Germany, September 2019
Notes
1 1 It was a project of NATO's Research and Technology Organization sponsoring the research task group SAS‐026 chaired by Dr. David S. Alberts. It was published first by the Pentagon's C2 Research Program in 2002.
2 2 Starr, Stuart H. (2001) ““Good Games” – Challenges for the War‐Gaming Community,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 54: no.2, Article 9.
3 3 Founded in 1962, IABG became, in addition to its engineering facilities for testing military hardware designs, the principal Operations Research and Defense Analysis Institution of West‐Germany's Defense Ministry.
4 4 The mathematical air war model had been developed, together with analysts of the RAND Corporation and the USAF Systems Command, by IABG's Air OR group for the assessment of combat aircraft designs proposed by industry.
5 5 At the time, Mortensen, a senior member of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, was head of STC's OR division.
6 6 The Special Program Panel on Systems Science (SPOSS) was the follow‐on of the Advisory Panel on Operations Research (APOR), which was established by the NATO Science Committee in 1958 tasked to organize conferences and symposia, develop educational programs, and award scholarships for study visits to spread methods and applications of operational research in WW 2 and thereafter, thus facilitating the buildup of both NATO and national military institutions to support defense planners and militaries in sustaining a NATO force structure capable of deterring a Soviet aggression. The initial Chairman of APOR was Prof. Phillip Morse, a pioneer of OR research in WW 2 and chairman of the US Navy's Anti‐Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG). In 1973, the Science Committee replaced APOR by SPOSS arguing that, after 15 years, APOR has accomplished its mission and a reorientation of its effort was necessary toward applying previously developed techniques und theories to deal with real large‐scale systems continuing, however, along the high scientific standards of APOR and its chairmen.
7 7 The War Gaming Center evolved from a classical manual “Kriegspiel” group set up by retired German Army officers in the mid‐1960s, and the Air OR Group mentioned above, to eventually develop air/land games and simulations for investigating force structure and theater‐wide defense operations.
8 8 Reiner K. Huber, Lynn F. Jones, Egil Reine (Eds.): Military Strategy and Tactics – Computer Modeling of Land War Problems. 1974 Plenum Press, New York, pp. 9–12.
9 9 Dr. Payne was a pioneer in army operations research and pre‐eminent leader in the field for more than three decades. He began his career in 1955 as an analyst at the Army Operation Research Office at Johns Hopkins University to eventually become the first deputy under secretary of the Army Operations Research from 1968 to 1975 and the first director of the systems analysis activity of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) from 1975 to 1986. In 1990, the Department of the Army Systems Analysis Award became the Dr. Wilbur B. Payne Memorial Award for Excellence in Analysis in order to honor the memory and contributions of Dr. Payne to the Operations Research field.
10 10 The terms “reactive” and “active” were used as defined by Saadia Amiel to characterize two complementary land force elements within the framework of a defensive strategy. In contrast to the all armor general‐purpose forces of the Cold War designed to fight in both, the reactive and active mode, Amiel proposed a land force structure “…of two components: one consisting of defensive combined arms teams committed to reactive defense where precise and high firepower is at a premium, and the second of offensive combined arms formations where maneuverability is at a premium.” [Amiel, Sadia: “Deterrence by Conventional Forces”. Survival March, April 1978. pp. 56–64].
11 11 Initially, the Bundeswehr Universities in Munich and Hamburg were founded in 1973 primarily as academic institutions to meet the significant deficit of officer candidates at the time by preparing them for professional carriers after leaving the military. As one of the institutes of the computer science departments in Munich, IASFOR's teaching and research emphasized defense and security issues as applications for computer science.
12 12 The categories of reactive defense include: 1) Static Area Defenses characterized by small combat teams fighting from a network of prepared positions and field fortification; 2) Dynamic Area Defenses fighting a mobile attrition‐oriented delaying battle by falling back through a series of prepared and partially reinforced positions; 3) Continuous Fire Barrier Defenses feature a fire belt along the demarcation line acting as a barrier that the enemy has to penetrate; 4) Selective Barrier Defenses are implemented depending on the tactical situation by “barrier