Most readers of OR/MS Today have played strategy games: chess, checkers and Monopoly, for example, all involve anticipating opponents' plans and trying to outwit them. Many have played games more detailed and more specifically focused on conflict: "Risk," "Diplomacy" and the military games from such companies as Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) and Avalon Hill. Few, however, have seen the extent to which strategic games are being used to shape national and corporate strategies, or considered the possibilities — and limitations — of incorporating quantitative analysis in these studies.

One person who has seen the uses and potential of wargaming is Mark Herman, a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) and leader of BAH's strategic gaming practice. In recent interviews, several people familiar with high-level DoD decision-making called this group "the most influential strategic gaming group in the country." In a recent book, Herman and two of his colleagues described a remarkable range of actual applications, from the planning of the two Gulf Wars to advising one major oil company how to position itself to lower its risk and hence to profit during a disruption of global oil supply.

BAH has a long history in this area, having served as a major resource for the U. S. Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment (ONA), a key group in the strategic decision-making structure. Rear Adm. Kleber S. "Skid" Masterson Jr. joined BAH when he retired from the Navy, where ONA was his last assignment, and was instrumental in building BAH's gaming practice for many years. Washington, D.C., area long-timers might remember a presentation he gave to the local (then) ORSA/TIMS chapter in 1989, describing the "Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)" game in enough detail that at least one person present was able to use it effectively in classrooms for several years afterward. (It was instructive and amusing to choose peaceniks for the "Blue" team and red-blooded American militarists for "Red" and watch how quickly and convincingly the "Blue" team started sounding like Reagan and the "Red" team started sounding like Brezhnev.) Herman et al.'s new book describes this game and the surprising conclusion that a small, uncertain defensive capability would suffice to cause huge problems for even a greatly expanded offensive capability on the other side. Apparently this effort had a substantial influence on the U.S.'s policy decisions regarding SDI.

The book then discusses real exercises run in the 1990s about the increasing value of information ("Nimble Vision"), force structure ("Dynamic Commitment") and possible issues in an invasion and occupation of Iraq ("Desert Crossing"), noting that the military gained important lessons about the value of new systems and doctrine and the difficulties of post-conventional-warfare and non-conventional-warfare missions, including an early indication of the problem of whether forces well configured to win the conventional conflict might turn out to be ill-suited to subsequent support and policing roles. Candidly, the book's authors concede, some ideas seem to have been adopted and others not; but the discerning reader can readily infer that these games were a significant resource in addressing major questions that the high-level decision-makers posed.

While neither Herman nor any other source for this article was willing to comment on specific scenarios they have used or on possible current applications, Herman notes, "Having run some of the war games related to national security in recent memory, I can say that [high-level DoD decision-makers] are using war gaming, and I feel good about what we can contribute."

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is the current home of both John Nagl, who wrote a book about the military as a learning organization that has been widely read and highly regarded in senior DoD circles, and Tom Ricks, who wrote two best-selling books about the U. S. efforts in Iraq. Several months ago, CNAS announced a new project to reexamine high-level national security decision-making; the team appears to be heavy on historians and subject-matter experts and light on quantitative modelers, but reportedly they are looking seriously, at least second-hand, at other analytical output, including some of the war games. As one source puts it, "I'm familiar with their work, they're familiar with war games, and I respect what they're doing."

So the essential idea is to help participants become aware of issues they did not even suspect they had. As Herman puts it, "Wargaming creates the ability to ask fuzzy questions, deal with bad data, and get your arms around what the problem is, so you can frame a broader set of issues and questions." Harvard Business School case studies embody the same idea: start teams with some basic assumptions, an appreciation of the situation and some rules for interaction, and see what behaviors and outcomes emerge.

Is There O.R. Inside?


Like computational modeling of organizations, wargaming has deep roots in operations research, but the two disciplines have diverged. Herman acknowledges, "I'm not a quantitative guy per se, just logic-driven." He adds, "The quantitative community's influence is probably at its nadir right now. The quantitative community has been impotent to give them more than the old standard stuff. Now the DoD wargamers rely on PA&E (the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation) to give them quantitative input [as needed during the games], but techniques like Lanchester equations [the classic O.R. differential-equations, force-on-force attrition models] don't apply to the kinds of problems we study now."

Not everyone in the wargaming community shares quite so pessimistic a perspective. Tom McCormick, senior analyst at Alpha Informatics, also deeply experienced in the analyses that support DoD policy and doctrine, notes, "You're trying to predict what resources you'll need, how much damage there will be, how many bodies. To think of anyone trying to do that without math is just scary."

Still, many other people familiar with the current set of issues and methods do share the view that new approaches are needed. Asymmetric warfare, police actions, community-building, and economic and information competition are all part of current international conflicts, and the analytical methods need to be adaptable enough to address such aspects. "If you go back to the origins of O.R.," Herman says, "it was a multi-disciplinary approach that eventually ossified into a math-physics focus. If we went back to our roots, we'd be better off." Still, he says, "I've been working the problem" of convincing clients that more quantitative analyses would be helpful.

The evolution of how games are played reinforces his point about concentrating on the key issues and downplaying needless sophistication. Herman started his career as a designer of commercial games for SPI, authoring more than 50 of them. Ironically, now that computer-based games have driven the board-game companies out of business, he sees major strategic games returning to manual play with flat paper maps and cardboard playing pieces: "More and more of the total cost of computer-based games is going into the graphics," he explains, "and when you want to modify something, it often turns into a three-month programming job. With a manual game, we just change it and play again in a few days."

Extensions and Complementary Methods


Gaming appears to be both one of the most effective approaches to broadening participants' perspective, and one of the easiest to adopt. However, there are other ways to refocus one's thinking to identify possibilities contrary to one's assumptions. One highly regarded approach is scenario generation, described in Peter Schwartz's book, "The Art of the Long View." His method is, as he wrote, similar to how a writer lays out a plot line for a book or screenplay: What are the driving forces? What is likely to happen? What appears inevitable? What is uncertain? Does the resulting story line seem plausible?

Another method is "red team" analysis, in which a group of people with different backgrounds from the project team, and no direct involvement with the project to that point, critiques the recommendations. The U. S. military has a training program colloquially known as Red Team University as part of its curriculum at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to train people to perform critiques effectively. Presidents and prime ministers might do well to serve as their own red teams; in his highly influential study of political leaders in wartime, historian Eliot Cohen suggested that successful leaders engaged their senior military commanders intensely, not in second-guessing military decisions but in identifying and challenging key assumptions and potential blind spots.

A promising, somewhat more quantitative method is the extension of game analysis to games within games. If, for example, some of "Blue's" possible actions consist of deceiving "Red" about what game they are playing, then we have a hypergame with a number of traditional games as component parts. This idea was first advanced in the late 1970s by Peter Bennett in two O.R. journals, Omega and The Journal of the Operational Research Society. During the past decade, Russ Vane elaborated the concept in considerable detail. Vane is a former U.S. Armored Cavalry officer and Ranger who now works as an analyst and researcher for IBM, supporting mostly national security arena clients. "One of the most valuable things you can do," he explains, "is ask: if the other guy knew my plans, what's the worst thing he could do to me? Now, how could I counter that?"

This approach, in turn, generates some interesting questions about how to validate modeling assumptions, how to decide whether results are reasonable and the very nature of what constitutes evidence. A multi-level games-within-games structure ("hyper-hypergames") provides greater realism but requires much more attention to how well both players and game-runners are handling context and interpretation. If, as some physicists argue, all apparent randomness is just a measure of our lack of knowledge, then the role for applied probability in large-scale strategic hypergames is likely to remain quite large. Some commentators, notably David Schum at George Mason University, have proposed that a full reexamination of what evidence is, and how to decide how much weight to give it, would be a useful area of research. Russ Vane concurs.

At the opposite end of the size scale, some decision scientists are now turning their attention to how individual brains work. Political economist Margaret Polski, now a research affiliate of the Krasnow Institute at George Mason University, was drawn by her studies of "strategic surprise" at the national and large corporate leadership level to the question of whether human brains are, to some degree, "wired" to react to patterns and stimuli.

In her new book, she described a toy bug that could learn about obstacles and improvise its way around them. It performed quite successfully at this until, in a moment of inattention by the person conducting the demonstration, it reached the edge of the table top, a circumstance it had never encountered or been prepared for before, and "unimpeded, marched naively into the void and crashed to the floor." This sort of outcome is what we need to seek to avoid, and that requires learning how to recognize when past experience is likely to be a poor guide.

"Standard models of political and economic decisions-making," she states further on in her book, "are based on unrealistic assumptions about how we are wired to think and choose. All the interesting aspects of life that we routinely consider — whether we realize it or not — are assumed away: individual differences in experience and capabilities; cues in physical and social surroundings; sensations; emotions; bias; uncertainty; change; conflict; and innovation." She concludes, "We need a model of intuitive choice."

What Next?


Clearly new multi-disciplinary, flexible approaches to improved decision-making are important and valued now, and there is opportunity here for those prepared to pursue it. Wargaming and similar approaches offer a good way to explore issues and raise new questions, but more quantitative support will likely be needed as decision-makers probe more deeply into what evidence supports the teams' and game-runners' assessments. Such support will have to be offered, however, in ways immediately understandable and useful to the decision-makers. How analytical results are incorporated — or not — into decision-making, how intuition competes with analysis, and how to improve decision-making to make better use of available information combine to constitute another field of study with great potential for O.R. analysts, among others, willing to acquire the additional knowledge and work with the other disciplines that are also essential.



Douglas A. Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., a research and consulting company in Annandale, Va. He is a frequent contributor to OR/MS Today and Analytics.

References

1. Center for a New American Security, www.cnas.org.
2. Center for Strategic and International Studies, www.csis.org.
3. Fort Leavenworth, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Leavenworth.
4. Krasnow Center for Advanced Study, George Mason University, http://krasnow.gmu.edu.
5. National Defense University, www.ndu.edu.
6. Red Team, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Team.
7. Michael Bennett and Russell R. Vane, III, 2006, "Using Hypergames for Deception Planning and Counterdeception Analysis," Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 117-138.
8. Peter Bennett, 1977, "Toward a Theory of Hypergames," Omega, Vol. 5, pp. 749-751.
9. Peter Bennett and M. R. Dando, 1979, "Complex Strategic Analysis: A Study of the Fall of France," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 33, pp. 41-50.
10. Cohen, Eliot, 2002, "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime," Free Press.
11. Mark Herman, Mark Frost and Robert Kurz, 2009, "Wargaming for Leaders," McGraw-Hill.
12. John Nagl, 2002, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam," Praeger, 2002.
13. Margaret Polski, 2009, "Wired for Survival: The Rational (and Irrational) Choices We Make, from the Gas Pump to Terrorism," FT (Financial Times) Press.
14. Thomas Ricks, 2009, "The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008," Penguin.
15. Douglas A. Samuelson, 2006, "The Hyper-Hypergame: Issues in Evidence-Based Evaluation of Social Science," Proceedings of the Capital Science Symposium, Washington Academy of Sciences.
16. Douglas A. Samuelson, August 2008, "Understanding Organizational Anarchy: Agent-Based Models Help Explain Well-Known Dysfunctions," OR/MS Today.
17. Douglas A. Samuelson, Summer 2009, "The Turnaround in Iraq," Analytics.
18. Peter Schwartz, 1991, "The Art of the Long View," Doubleday.
19. Russell R. Vane, III, 2000, "Using Hypergames to Select Plans in Competitive Environments," Ph.D. dissertation, George Mason University.
20. Russell R. Vane, III and Paul E. Lehner, 2002, "Using Hypergames to Increase Planned Payoff and Reduce Risk," Autonomous Agent and Multi-Agent Systems, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 365-380.

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page


OR/MS Today copyright © 2009 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.


Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Rd., Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060 USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com


Web Site © Copyright 2009 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.