Multilayer Wargames: Lessons from Gaming Intermediate Force Capabilities, 2023
Information
Date
2023
Summary
Generally speaking, wargames are tools for exploring human decision-making in an environment with incomplete and imperfect information. They can provide important insights into the complexity of military operations or can be used to generate novel ideas. One of the limitations of wargames is that they tend to focus on a single temporal/spatial scale. For example, tactical games can represent minutes to hours of real time, and the area of several square kilometres, whereas strategic games can span months to years and be global in their nature. Usually, if an analyst desired to conduct analyses spanning multiple warfare levels, the only feasible approach would be to select the largest domain and the highest resolution to accommodate even the smallest scales involved. This could lead to oversimplification and aggregation, or to extensive cost due to very high game resolution. While designing a wargame series to support development of the NATO intermediate force capability concept, NATO SAS-151 study developed a prototype multi-layer wargame integrating tactical and strategic levels. We present some lessons learned from this approach, and we propose a more complex approach to integration of multiple wargame layers in order to simulate warfare across multiple scales. This approach avoids oversimplification and enables capturing the complexities of warfare without unduly increasing the cost of analysis.
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Multilayer Wargames: Lessons from Gaming Intermediate Force Capabilities