Page 22 - Australian Defence Magazine July 2019

DEFENCE BUSINESS
STRATEGY
“To be clear, this does not simply mean rigging the game. It is about creating the right conditions.”
eerily prophetic. As the rise of Chinese power threatens US military and techno- logical pre-eminence, the use of military simulations to create and inform strategy is coming back into vogue.
Wargames, in a nutshell, are analytic games that simulate war at the tactical, op- erational, and strategic levels. Two teams face off against each other and the results are used to assess new warfighting concepts, train commanders, and test the impact of hypothetical new technologies. They ap- peal to military strategists and planners
because games like Sigma offer a glimpse of the holy grail – a prediction of the future.
The interactions of two self- interested players in a game al- lows strategists to answer two types of questions: confirma- tory questions, which use sim- plifications of the real world to generate a hypothesis for fur- ther research outside the game;
and exploratory questions, which illustrate how variables influence outcomes.
For example, running multiple games and changing one variable at a time (envi- ronments, military capabilities, adversar- ies) illustrates how each of those variables change friendly and enemy decision-mak- ing processes.
Most wargames, whether confirmatory or exploratory, follow a simple logic: put two self-interested actors in a room with certain capabilities, see what they do, and then draw the relevant lessons. Did one
actor surprise the other, and how? Is there a pattern in their actions that indicates the likelihood of that surprise occurring? Does a new capability work well in multi- ple scenarios? If we change the capability, the actors, or the scenario, what happens?
Ends vs means
These are all means-end questions – set the means and observe the ends. This approach is similar in principle to giving two children one cookie, telling them to divide it equally, and seeing what happens. Most parents will tell you that the child holding the cookie will break themselves the larger piece.
What happens, however, if we were to set up the game in a way that guaranteed the outcome we want?
In the cookie scenario, we’d set up the interaction to incentivise both children to work towards the desired result. One child breaks the cookie and the other gets to choose the first piece. The child with the cookie is now motivated to break it as even-
22 | July 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au