The Wargame I Want

I've seen a few articles floating around the blogosphere about the red vs. blue wargames we play at our Professional Military Education schools. No one thinks they have much relevance to the wars we actually fight. I tend to agree. I've thought a lot about how to improve the wargames I've played in the Air Force. Is it possible to make an game relevant to small wars? If Air Force wargames mostly consist of assigning aircraft to missions, how can we do that it in a way that teaches young officers to think critically about the human terrain of a counterinsurgency environment?

I read an article at Air & Space Power Journal a couple years ago about the way that the Air Force generally does bomb damage analysis (I can't search for it now, because Air University's site is firewalled here in Jordan). The author explained that BDA was usually treated as little more than a percentage of destruction. You kept sending sorties until a target was destroyed. That's certainly how the wargames tend to work. The author argued that we need a richer, multifaceted system for bomb damage analysis. We wouldn't just measure enemy killed or infrastructure destroyed; we would measure the political effects of each attack among key population groups. I have no insider knowledge, but I suspect this kind of analysis is happening much more regularly now. If we could work this mentality into our wargames, I think they'd be far more applicable to the real world.

This is the wargame I want: a simple, elegant game designed to teach new lieutenants how to think about the strategic effects of airpower. A game demonstrating that airpower is about more than destroying targets; it's about creating effects in a complex human landscape. A game where overwhelming firepower might achieve your political objectives in some scenarios, but limited strikes against the right targets is more effective in others. A game where you can destroy every target on the board and still lose.

Here's how it would work. You'd have some kind of basic map with various elements of civilization scattered around it: towns, villages, etc. You'd also have potential targets, like enemy strongholds, water and electrical infrastructure, government offices, communications facilities, etc. You would also have a political/human map that is largely invisible to the player when the game begins: a web of relationships between all the factions that have a stake in the country. These are your ethnic groups, your tribes, your government parties, your insurgents, your criminals. These are also your outside actors, like neighboring countries. Every mission you fly would have effects in this human landscape. Intelligence missions might identify which factions are present in which locations. Airstrikes against one faction might cripple them, win you support among their arch-enemies, and appall everybody else. Or let's say you're trying to root out criminals in one town. Too little firepower will allow some to escape to neighboring villages, complicating your problem. Too much firepower will kill civilians and alienate the broader population.

Scenarios would be customizable, and your goals would be expressed in terms of this political, human terrain. Theoretically, such a game could bridge the conventional/COIN debate. One scenario (or an early phase of a multi-stage scenario) could simply require destroying a faction--say, the Iraqi government. A John Warden-style strategic air campaign would do the job nicely, but the amount of damage you do the country's infrastructure could have a big impact on the difficulty of the following stage: stomping out a multi-pronged insurgency while winning legitimacy for a new government. Good intelligence would become of prime importance. Airstrikes would have to be used with great care. Trying to maintain the allegiance of various factions who despise each other would take considerable skill.

That's the general outline, anyway. Now, obviously, the Air Force isn't going to go fight these kinds of wars all by itself. You really would need to include ground forces, development, and political elements to make a comprehensive game. You could possibly give the playing team control of these features, or you could let the game's AI control abstractions of them. The point isn't to create a full-scale simulation of a counterinsurgency environment; the goal is a simplified exercise that teaches new Air Force officers how to think critically across the full spectrum of conflict.