no longer limited to military planning. Domain‐specific tabletop games are conducted today in various other domains, from preparing local administration and government for conducting large events, like the Olympics or a sports world championship, or for responding to natural or man‐made disasters, like earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, or terror attacks. Even in business, wargames are conducted to evaluate different options, strategies, and possibilities.
The rise of computer simulation changed the role of wargames. Computer simulation systems driving computer‐assisted exercises now play the dominant role, especially in the training and education domain. Simulation systems are used to plan and optimize procurement and development as well of a wide array of physical systems. Even operational testing and evaluation is heavily supported by simulation systems, offering a high degree of fidelity in physics‐based computations. With the increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence methods, simulations also are becoming more realistic in their representation of command and control.
However, wargames are on the rise again. After years of placing trust into the power of computation, using human creativity and intuition in wargames is becoming increasingly important in the search for new doctrines or concepts of operations. The power of our simulation systems rests on our representation of systems; capturing human ingenuity requires us to look beyond our simulated representations.
What I want to show within this chapter is that wargaming and computer simulation are not competing methods, but that with the advances in both domains a new approach is possible that will enable deeper insights into the complex domain of modern operations, in which we take full advantage of both technologies. New wargaming centers will have to take more advantage of the computational power of simulation systems, while the creativity of wargamers will guide the activities. The following sections will provide several domains that will benefit from such a symbiosis.
This introduction presents two viewpoints on the challenges: those of a simulation expert with more than 20 years’ experience in the development and application of simulation systems on many scale and in many domains, and those of a wargaming expert, preparing, conducting, and evaluating wargame events of highest interest in the defense domain.
A Simulationist’s Perspective
Modern wargaming centers provide at least three components to support the wargame, namely the operational components, analysis component, and the simulation component. The operations components prepare, conduct, and evaluate the wargame. Since wargames have been conducted, this group has been the important counterpart to the subject matter experts who participate in the wargame itself. To make a wargame successful, it needs to be defined, planned, designed, developed, rehearsed, and finally conducted. The operations group is responsible for all these tasks, from the first ideas to the detailed game plan. During and after the game, they must analyze the results and prepare evaluation reports, outbrief presentations, etc. Some of them may be given as interim reports to the subject matter experts, others are collected to provide the overarching insights captured in the final reports about the wargame. In the earlier days of wargaming, the experts analyzed the situation by themselves, very much like they would do in headquarters. With the increasing complexity of the situation on the battlefield and a more complex solution space, more professional support needed to be provided. Within the defense domain, this analysis group is referred to as Operations Research & System Analysis (ORSA). ORSA experts assist decision‐makers in solving complex problems by producing the analysis and logical reasoning necessary to inform and underpin those critical decisions. They are as much part of modern headquarters as they are part of wargaming support components. The simulation component provides numerical insight into the dynamic behavior of the complex battlefield. This is the youngest component, as only with the rise of computational capabilities was it possible to develop simulation systems that implement the theory of war, movement, attrition, and other relevant effects through the computational representation of entities, relations, activities, and effects. While traditionally rooted in the domain of physics‐based modeling of mostly kinetic phenomena, recent developments in human and organizational behavior modeling research address such elements of modern warfare as well. As such, simulations did not only replace the rulebooks and result tables of traditional wargames, but also support the ORSA group with the evaluation of decision spaces. Furthermore, modern simulation systems provide powerful interfaces that allow not only the immersive displays of combat simulations, they also provide analytic tools to capture and display wargame metrics interactively.
This section evaluates the role of simulation in more detail to show that simulation is a powerful tool in support of wargaming in many phases, from early design to the generation of after‐action reviews and reports. However, there are also several modeling challenges that must be addressed to ensure the best use of these powerful methods.
In order to better understand the potential as well as the pitfalls and dangers of simulation in wargaming, it is necessary to clearly understand modeling and simulation. Every simulation is based on a model, if this model has been documented explicitly, or if it is just implicitly captured in the form of the concepts, properties, relations, and processes implemented in the simulation. A model is a task‐driven, purposeful simplification and abstraction of a perception of reality. As so often, the modeling process starts with the problem of the sponsor, which can be a research question to be answered, or a training task to be conducted, or ideas for a new system or new tactics, techniques, and procedures – or even doctrine – to be evaluated. The task usually drives the required abstraction level: is the sponsor's problem on the level of system components, or the entity level of weapon systems, or are units and organizations the topic of concern? Once the abstraction level is clear, not everything on this level is important. Just as scientists plan their experiments with focus on the research question, so too modelers focus on only the concepts of interest, simplifying their perception to the essential components. This perception is shaped by physical, cognitive, and even moral constraints: It reflects the understanding of the modeler, and is shaped by knowledge, experience, and other factors. Therefore, two models from modelers with different background can be quite different, even if they start with the same problem and the same references.
A simulation implements such a model. Simulations are often understood as the execution of models over time, and in the scope of this chapter, the focus is on those using computers to execute a programmed version of the model to do so. The implementation is characterized by numerical challenges, computational complexity, and use of heuristics. Different programming languages, compilers, and platforms add more challenges. Even the same model can therefore result in various and quite different simulations. Even the change of the hardware can lead to surprising changes in predicted outcomes, in particular in complex, nonlinear systems with a high dependency on the initial conditions. When NATO upgraded their hardware, some of the important analysis results had to be revisited, as some battle outcomes changed significantly using the new hardware. This is not a mistake of any programmer, it is just the nature of highly complex, nonlinear systems that become discretized and solved numerically.
Despite such obstacles, modeling and simulation is a powerful tool that helps to reproduce well‐known effects, predominantly of physical and kinetic nature, under diverse circumstances and constraints. The next subsection will evaluate where within the process of wargaming simulation can be of help.
During the execution of the wargame, the focus will be on the human players. They provide the creativity allowing for operational agility in planning and decision‐making. They have the insights to support new ideas, such as multidomain operations planning in the national and international context. They understand how to explore human decision‐making and how to react to unanticipated decisions in the operation. In summary, they are the main players in the wargame, providing creativity and the vision for the big picture. However, the role of simulation is similarly important. It falls to the simulation to compute the mission thread by unbiased execution of decisions in the virtual battle space. This includes computing the mission thread effects as well as the effects of the wargamer’s human decisions. Simulations compute all orders of effects, and some higher order effects in complex, nonlinear environments can be surprising. It is not only possible but highly likely that some of these effects will lead to emergent behavior in the