Vebber, CDR, USNR (ret), leads wargaming efforts at the Naval Sea Systems Command Warfare Centers. He has an MS in applied science – undersea warfare from the Naval Postgraduate School and a BS in history of science from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. He is active in the wargaming communities of practice associated with the US Navy and the Military Operations Research Society. He is one of the instructors for the wargaming certificate course affiliated with MORS and Virginia Tech University, with nearly 40 years of wargaming experience in the military, contractor, government and hobby sectors. He was one of the founders of www.matrixgames.com and part of the team that won the 2000 Charles S. Roberts award for Best 20th Century Computer wargame for “Steel Panthers: World at War.” He is active in the Connections wargaming conference organizing committee and has participated as a player, umpire, or analyst in wargames sponsored by a variety of US Navy and DoD organizations for over 20 years.
Jorit Wintjes is senior lecturer in the History Department at Julius‐Maximilians‐Universität Würzburg, teaching in both the university’s History and Digital Humanities programs. He received a doctor’s degree and qualified as a professor in history. He studied classics and history and has published several books on ancient and nineteenth‐century military history. His current research interests include Roman naval history as well as the history of professional wargaming.
Sławomir Wojciechowski is lieutenant general in the Polish Army and has been the commander of Multinational Corps Northeast since September 2018. During his 35 years in the military, he served in a variety of Polish Army units and formations. He commanded the Air Defence regiment and later the Infantry brigade. Additionally, he served in key positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in parallel preparing and commanding the first Polish European Battlegroup. He has been assigned to several high‐level positions in the General Staff, including being department director responsible for strategy and defense planning in the Ministry of Defence. Before becoming Corps Commander, he served successfully on joint level as the deputy, and later as the commander of the Operational Command of the Polish Armed Forces. Educated in the Academy of the National Defence in Warsaw, the UK Joint Services and Command Staff College in Shrivenham, and the US Army War College, General Wojciechowski developed his scientific interests in the area of strategic thinking as well as the state security, defense and development strategies, successfully pursuing a PhD in this domain. He participates in the seminars and conferences covering issues pertaining to problems of geopolitics, military security and NATO or EU military activities.
Prologue to Wargaming and Simulation – An Introduction to the Viewpoints and Challenges
Andreas Tolk and Bill Lademan
Introduction
Since the introduction of the “Kriegsspiel” (wargame) to the Prussian General Staff by Baron von Reisswitz in 1811, which was improved by his son in 1824 by introducing paper maps, unit markers, and well‐documented rule books, wargaming has had a place in military education and planning. From this beginning, General von Muffling, the Prussian Chief of Staff, ordered the use of wargames throughout the Prussian Army, and many allied and visiting armies copied these ideas. Wargames help to think through options, investigate new ideas for operations, and prepare military decision‐makers by confronting them with surprises requiring a quick response. Following disruptive events requiring a reorientation, like the end of the Cold War in the nineties, or the emerging of new nuclear armed rogue nations in our day, wargames help to set the stage by providing dynamic context including the necessary complexity of the challenge for decision‐making.
Wargames are 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
