"What Do Games Tell Our Adversaries?" Topic

"A recent social media post by Sebastian Bae — game designer, wargaming professor, defense analyst, former US Marine (among many other roles) — shared news that members of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) were playing his modern wargame Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacfic. "I did not have the PLA Navy playing my ‘Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific' #wargame on one of their ships on my bingo card for 2026. Absolutely wild," Bae posted. It is an interesting testament to our open-source internet age, where information and products travel the world for use by anyone who wants them…including our potential near-future adversaries. It certainly validates the quality and utility of Bae's wargame. It also raises questions about what adversaries can learn from the games we ourselves design and use, how such games reflect both the designer's knowledge of battlefield capabilities and assumptions about elements affecting the outcome of combat.

Bae's Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific (The Dietz Foundation, 2023) combines more traditional components of chit-and-board wargames with card play, both, as I understand it, cards (and blocks) to track unit capabilities and cards to deploy non-unit strategies beyond those represented on the map-board. It contains several scenarios focusing on Chinese operations in that theater and American naval and marine response, including, of course, the looming near-future confrontation of a potential Chinese attack on or invasion of Taiwan. The game accounts for numerous kinds of vessels, units, technologies, and other strategies working together on various levels, what those in the defense community call "multi-domain operations" (MDO)…"

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