Page 24 - Australian Defence Magazine July 2019

DEFENCE BUSINESS
STRATEGY
Wargaming different technologies, strategies and approaches is nothing new but the tools used to do it are evolving.
“An additional layer of
complexity comes from the behaviour of the players themselves. Human behaviour is not predictably rational.”
beliefs, assessments, and intentions. The question, then, is whether we can mecha- nism design a wargame.
If we can cause the agents to play to an equi- librium that favours one side, then perhaps it is possible to guarantee success regardless of how the game pans out. What if Sigma was designed to ensure an American victory? The design of the game may then have informed actual US strategy in Vietnam and avoided the forthcoming catastrophe.
In short, can we reverse-engineer a war- winning strategy?
Designing a wargame
The idea is not fanciful. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DAR- PA) put out a request a few years ago for experts to contribute to a mechanism-de- signed wargame.
Specifically, DARPA sought to design “rules, norms, and structural factors that incentivize other state or non-state actors to act in such a way that a desired strategic out- come for a single actor is realized.”
To be clear, this does not simply mean rigging the game. It is about creating the right conditions.
“You can always rig the rules in favour of one player,” Professor Holden said. “But
there’s a big difference between the rules of the game and the strategy that people play. The rules of chess, say, are where the pieces can move, but a strategy is whether I move this piece here or there.”
Mechanism design, then, is not about creating new rules of chess that consistently allow the black player to win. It is about play- ing within the existing rules, but somehow incentivising white to adopt a strategy that falls into black’s hands.
This is where it gets complicated. The fac- tors that might incentivise a state to play to an equilibrium that realises the desires of anoth- er range from economic and trade structures to military posture, diplomatic relations, and infrastructure. Moreover, DARPA ac-
knowledged that “theory for designing mechanisms that fully utilize these many degrees of freedom is largely unexplored.”
An additional layer of complexity comes from the behaviour of the players themselves. Human behaviour is not predictably ratio- nal. It is derived as much from cultural pre- dispositions, immediate judgements, trust, social norms, and pre-existing beliefs as it is from pure analytical reasoning. How do
you account for irrationality in a game? Humans also show individual learning behaviours, and the differences between how two players might learn whilst play- ing the game are equally difficult to in- tegrate into a mechanism that favours a
single player.
“You’d have to specify how players up-
date their information during the course of the game according to what they see,” Pro- fessor Holden said.
Winning by reverse engineering
There is one question, however, that may prove impossible to account for in a game. Let’s assume we can actually reverse-en- gineer a war-winning strategy. The cer- tainty of success may prove irresistible for resolving geopolitical differences. What would China do if it was guaranteed vic- tory in a war over Taiwan? In the absence of meaningful deterrence, war could be- come more likely. So underneath all this there lies a far deeper question: can we reverse-engineer morality?
In reality, we will probably never find out. The DARPA program never got off the ground.
“DARPA periodically issues RFIs in areas of interest to receive input from the broader science and technology com- munity,” a spokesperson said to ADM. “Sometimes RFIs lead to DARPA pro- grams, and sometimes they do not. In this case it did not.”
Perhaps it is all too hard after all.
24 | July 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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