"Owen: What’s wrong with professional wargaming?" Topic

"Professional wargaming should aim to provide insights that can inform decisions, based on a degree of evidence. In essence professional Wargaming should equal the test of theory, in that it should explain extant phenomena and enable a degree of prediction. Both the phenomena and prediction would have expression as insights or issues requiring further investigation. If professional Wargaming cannot do this, what use is it.

In other words professional wargaming should tell you why, when, where and how combat occurs, thus give the practitioner a sense of what would occur in reality. Well-executed professional Wargaming of the right type has immense value, though the actual empirical basis for this, while extant, may not be as comprehensive or as rigorous as popularly imagined and there is almost no body of peer reviewed body of unclassified academic research. Most importantly, the problem is that what makes a good wargame seems to be poorly understood, particularly by many who advocate Wargaming professionally. This paper takes the view that the best insights are derived from multiple iterations of truly adversarial wargames, using a number of different valid models and methods…"

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Armand

Two things that came from my mind while reading this wordy piece.

1: I read this and the first thought in my head was "professional wargaming" and thought, he's never understood the concept of The NTC or even the III Corps Warfighter Simulations at Fort Hood, or even the old 70's/80's Dunn Kempf gaming simulations. He puts a lot of emphasis on "professional wargaming" and what seems to be wrong with it in how it is written but doesn't really offer up any suitable fixes for it, and ignores the multitudes of wargaming situations.

2: His statement of:
"In other words professional wargaming should tell you why, when, where and how combat occurs, thus give the practitioner a sense of what would occur in reality."

That's a load of rubbish. A lot of times combat occurs when you least expect it. A professional scenario rarely if ever takes into effect that one squad of amateurs that just by luck happens to blunder into a rear area supply depot and a mad firefight happens, which then causes operational planners to stop to try to see if a major rear area action is going on. There's a thousand things that can happen with when, where, and how combat occurs that the professional wargame rarely covers. He should know this.

I see the point of his article, but then again the point is lost in his reiterations of the same sentence and topic to the point of boring redundancy.

Thanks!

Armand