The very nature of irregular warfare, stability operations, and counterinsurgencies make them hard to predict the most likely action and reactions.
The doctrinal steps of the wargaming process are: (
As a consequence, errors in wargame models tend to persist.Although commercial wargame designers take consumer trends and player feedback into account, their products are usually designed and sold with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. One of the products of MA and COA development was the LOE chart based on the example from FM 3-24.2, Chapter 4 (see Figure 4). The umpire decided what the victory conditions were, if there were to be any, and they typically resembled the goals an actual army in battle might aim for. The actual effectiveness of wargaming in this regard—turning a bad strategist into a good one—is difficult to measure because officers use many tools to hone their decision-making skills and the effect of wargaming is difficult to isolate.In this context, wargames are used to help players understand the decision-making process of wartime command.
Either method has application for the non-MCO environments and boils down to a personal preference. However, with the matrix from figure 10 as their “mental model” they were quickly able to think thru the events and develop satisfactory actions to counter them. Also, figure 10 gives the impression that the "If", "And", and "So What?"
A wargame is a process of adversarial challenge and creativity, delivered in a structured format and usually umpired or adjudicated. Umpires may even be allowed to make arbitrary decisions using their own expertise.
If the wargame is computer-assisted, then sophisticated models are feasible because they can be written into the software and processed quickly by the computer. The convoy system proved effective against German submarines, which typically operated alone.
and the squares on the board were color-coded to represent different terrain types (rivers, marshes, mountains, etc.).
These and other insights from the WATU wargames played a decisive role in the defeat of the German submarine threat.WATU used wargames not only to develop anti-submarine tactics, but to teach them to naval officers.
Figure 8 is from FM 3-24.2, Chapter 4. A wargame, generally, is a type of strategy game which realistically simulates warfare. Therefore, a well-designed model will not describe something beyond what a player needs to know to make effective decisions. Nowhere in our doctrine are there examples of what would constitute a critical event or decisions points in these type environments. This impression leads to a sense of artificiality in the whole game. Some groups do identify various LOE and create likely critical events that could occur and use those to wargame, however that is usually a result of the instructor’s prompting.
Example #2. A modified box method is usually the most logical method because most of the events that you analyze are normally geographically isolated to a small area (see Figures 5 and 6). They would then design counter-measures and test them in wargames. However, developing some type of mental models like the ones offered in this article, we can better think thru likely and plausible critical events, and develop appropriate actions and or reactions. 3/4 ABCT occupies Bilesuvar Rayon immediately following major combat operations (Stability Operations environment). In a strategic-level wargame, the scope of the simulated conflict is a campaign or even an entire war. For manual wargames, simplicity is paramount. If a wargame is commissioned by several clients, then the designer will have to juggle their competing demands. Consequently, for every incremental innovation in submarine warfare that the Germans deployed, the British quickly developed a counter-measure and kept pace, and this limited the impact of submarines in World War I. 911 by International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) A military wargame, specifically, is a wargame that is used by some military organizations to train officers in tactical and strategic decision-making, to test new tactics and strategies, or to predict trends in future conflicts. General Over the years, other officers updated Reisswitz's game to reflect changes in technology and doctrine. columns come from a menu of cause/effects rather than being arrived at by some analytical process or event-driven point in time during the game. Germany didn't even have an army until 1955, so they saw little need to wargame. Over the course of the war, Germany fought well at the tactical and operational level but made many bad strategic decisions.During World War 1, the British learned to protect their ships from German submarines by moving them in convoys which were escorted by submarine-hunting ships. The Soviets actually expanded their wargaming and made them more rigorous.During the Cold War, the Soviets allowed officers from other communist countries to attend its military schools, and wargaming was part of the curriculum. When The staff at WATU used wargames to test various hypothetical submarine tactics against virtual convoys, and if a certain tactic proved consistently effective and produced outcomes similar to what the actual convoys were reporting, they assumed that is what the Germans were in fact doing. During the inter-war years, the German navy experimented extensively with new submarine tactics in wargames (in tandem with field exercises) and developed the Around the turn of the 19th century, a number of European inventors created wargames based on chess.
Specifically during the Course of Action (COA) Analysis step in the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP), there is currently no useful discussion and no examples of COA Analysis (“wargaming”) during other than major combat operations at the tactical level in any of the US Army’s doctrinal publications. The group did encounter some of the exact events they had wargamed, but also encountered many they had not. A particularly noteworthy variant was Prussian wargaming attracted little attention outside After World War I, the Navy suffered severe budget cuts that prevented it from upgrading and expanding its fleet.