The Acrasian Security Blog

The Problem with the Long Run

2011-09-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

"In the long run we’re all dead." -John Maynard Keynes

The problem with the long run is that eventually it gets here.

Military planning spans the gamut from large potential near-peer conflicts, to small, asymmetrical engagements across the globe. Lately, the trend is toward thinking about China. Whether it is over the Taiwan Straits, the Spratly Island chain, Vietnam, or North Korea, China is the new pacifier for all the cold-war enthusiasts who pine for the simpler days of bipolarity in the international system.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the notion of fighting a war with China is absurd. What’s more, from a strictly military perspective, there are much more immediate and problematic issues that require greater focus, such as a Mexican failed state on our southern border. But in truth, I now believe that all of that thinking ignores the 600 pound gorilla standing in the room. What planning exists in the military to cope with a collapsed dollar?

One reason I say that the idea of a war with China is absurd is because that war has already been lost. It’s time, once again, for some economics. Let’s start with a number:

14,713,992,331,505.17

That number, at the time I’m writing this, is our national debt. Let’s have a look at what our national debt has been doing over time (according to the US Govt.):

That debt is currently increasing at a rate of 4 billion dollars PER DAY. Who is lending us all this money? Let’s have a look at who owns our national debt:

China owns seven and a half percent of our national debt, which works out to $1,103,549,424,862.89 (1.1 trillion dollars). Worse yet, oil exporters hold a large portion as well. And just who are these "oil exporters?" Why it’s Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.

This very morning, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed would likely try even harder to lower interest rates, and since short-term rates are pretty much already zero, they’re going to go back to the 1960’s playbook and move short-term securities into longer-term holdings in an attempt to bring long-term yields closer to short-term. What is the point of that? It’s to try and push you, the consumer, into doing one thing: spend your money. For some reason, the Fed and our government have adopted the notion that the only sign of a good economy is people spending money on consumable goods. (As an aside comment, this is what happens when you put cool-aid-drinking modelers in charge of something.)

So take a wild guess what the national savings of the United States is. It’s -619,175,676,960.00 (that’s NEGATIVE six hundred BILLION dollars). There aren’t very many countries out there with negative national savings rates and the bulk of those are third world countries and failed states.

Well here’s where things start to get problematic. As of August of this year, our inflation rate according to our kind and benevolent government was 3.77 percent. Compare that to the ten-year yield on a US Treasury bill which is currently just under two percent, and perhaps you see a problem? If not, let me spell it out for you. If you bought a ten-year T-bill today, when it matures it will be worth less, in real money terms, than when you bought it. In other words, what is going on here is that the Fed and our government are purposely devaluing our currency for the express purpose getting you to consume, using borrowed money, in order to artificially pump up the economy. Do you truly think that can last? Well it can’t. Here’s why.

Let me first talk a little about the inflation rate. What I listed above as the inflation rate is called the "core" inflation rate. That rate of inflation is calculated using a basket of goods and tracing the price of those goods over time. What’s in that basket of goods is much less important than what isn’t: food and energy. Ostensibly, these two items are left out because it is feared that including them would bias the numbers because of short-term price issues. But in reality, including them always makes the rate higher, often much higher, than the core rate, which is the inflation rate that our government chooses to tell us about. In reality, our current inflation rate, accounting for food and energy, is substantially closer to ten percent. This imbalance between inflation and interest rates is why we constantly hear about how the purchasing power of US consumers has actually decreased relative to necessities, even though it has increased relative to other consumables such as electronics, etc. It is also why our currency is being devalued.

So why aren’t we seeing much more severe inflationary effects? The reason is because of trade imbalance. Most of the goods we consume are made in China, which means the money we spend for them go to banks overseas, and are not part of the money circulating in our economy, but rather in someone else’s. This is possible due to the reserve status of the US currency. Foreign nations hold US dollars due to its reserve status, and I’ve already shown you above just how much money that actually is.

Currently there are movements in the international system to move away from the US dollar to some other reserve currency. Chief among the folks wanting to do this are Russia, most of the oil producing nations and, you guessed it, China. So what happens if the US currency is no longer the reserve currency of the world?

Very simple. Nations holding US reserves will seek to spend those reserves in the only place that they can: the United States. Imagine, for a moment, the inflationary effects of a sudden infusion of several trillion dollars into our economy, as foreign nations seek to purchase anything that they can in the US. To put it simply, our economy will collapse under the weight of cripplingly high inflation rates as other nations dump their holdings in US currency, which is to say nothing of the exacerbating effects of "quantitative easing," which the Fed also announced this morning it is considering another round of. When you add to that the reality that US manufacturing has all but disappeared, the ramifications are staggering.

China will have won the war without ever firing a shot. In truth, they already have. All they need do is pull the trigger. Which gets me back to the opening points in this discussion. What plans are being made in the US military to help this nation survive that trauma? I’m fairly certain that the answer is none. The US military industrial complex currently operates under a single over-riding assumption: that the gravy train of the defense budget will never end. I’ve got bad news. It’s about to.

As much as we love our expensive gadgets, they are simply untenable. If the US Military does not start planning on how to remain an effective force using a fraction of their current budget, then they do a disservice to our country.

It is my belief that at this stage it is simply too late to prevent what is going to happen to our economy. It will happen, and it will happen sooner rather than later (and the longer we put it off by artificially propping up the economy, the worse it will be). We need to start planning on how to survive the event, and come out the other end a stronger, more agile, and more fiscally responsible nation. The members of our military take an oath to defend our constitution. It is time for them to do some soul searching over what that really means when the financial status-quo changes drastically for the worse.

Standing Inside the Outside Box

2011-09-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

In his book Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, George Box made the now semi-famous statement "All models are wrong, some are useful." In summing up mathematical modeling and statistics, this comes about as close to ground truth on the subject as possible. Aside from those of us suffering from the side effects of cool-aide poisoning (dispensaries have sprung up at universities across the country) many of us who have worked through the detailed mathematics that underlie statistics and formal modeling realize the metaphoric nature of the structure and the perilousness of the assumptions behind it. Despite that, we continue to oversell the "truth" of what we do.

We excuse this behavior with a simple expedient; give the customer what he wants. The general wants an answer, so he is provided with a point solution to a broad spectrum question. He’s happy, we’re happy, everyone’s happy. At least until they start bringing the boys home in boxes. But don’t worry, how will the bullets in those corpses ever be traced back to that product handed to the general. It’s what he wanted, after all. Conscience clear.

Not in my book.

We're accosted on all sides. In the press we continually see where someone or other has invented some new method for predicting the future (which usually turns out to be something already done wrapped in new clothing, e.g. Gourley, BMD, etc.) and the money starts to flow. Hard not to be envious of that.

When we read reports about some new wizbang method for predicting the future, our first reaction should not be one of optimistic hope and excitement. Instead, our first impulse should be to reach for our crap detector and to start figuring out what it's doing, what context it works within (and what context it doesn’t), and then to firmly place it within our hierarchy of tools in such a way that it is optimized to perform only on the issues on which it is effective.

Our other challenge comes in the form of poorly defined problems being posed by the technically incompetent (who, unfortunately, usually hold the checkbook). "If I could predict what the terrorists were going to do next, I could stop them and better defend the country." How many times have you seen some formulation of that sentence/sentiment?

It's mostly our fault. In the mad dash for social sciences to gain respectability by donning the trappings of the scientific method, we've made promises we can’t actually keep. Of the list of things that all good models are supposed to do, predict is one of them. This comes right out of formal methods 101, and it's based upon a gross misunderstanding of reality. As Stephen Downes-Martin has so effectively pointed out, F=MA is a very effective model at predicting things, except that it is not a social science model.

In quantitative academic literature on civil wars, insurgencies, and non-state actor violence we see a broad range to empirical evidence used to back all sorts of claims. One of my favorites is the notion that suicide bombings are primarily the result of occupations in foreign countries. As a result of this correlation, Robert Pape has recommended rather broad policy prescriptions that have gotten traction in some circles. Except that the correlation is so obviously spurious and driven by a particular political perspective. Beyond that, try and reproduce the results. You can't. Pape won’t share his data (I’ve asked him more than once for it, and so have other professors. Pape won’t even respond to the request). Another favorite is the work of James Fearon and David Laitin out of Stanford. They claim to have empirical evidence that the presence of mountainous terrain is a primary determinant for insurgency. This author has gotten their data and run their regressions. If the original R Squared value of low twenty percent doesn’t give you pause, then when I tell you that if you take the lagged dependent variable out of the model the whole thing collapses it should at least raise an eyebrow.

But beyond the shortcomings of quantitative work being done in the social sciences (there is good work out there, it’s not a complete calamity), we have a problem with approach. "If I could only predict what the terrorist is going to attack next" is really not the problem we need to be thinking about. What if we instead ask "what can the terrorist do that can really hurt me?" and it’s corollary "what are the responses to bad events that are most appropriate?" These are questions we can actually answer with some degree of confidence, and by doing so, mitigate against their occurrence. Similarly, if I ask "what COA will defeat whatever Red does against it?" I have an intractable problem. But instead what if I ask "How can Red defeat my COA?" then I have a problem that is more tractable by not relying on attempting to predict what he might do, and instead causing me to think about making my own actions more flexible and responsive to potentially changing situations. The wargame response to the latter question is not to have accurate predictive PolMil models informing the game, but rather to harness the creativity of a large number of red cells as they attack a single Blue COA.

By understanding and cataloging our own vulnerabilities, we don’t get a tool to predict, but we do get a tool that anticipates and mitigates. But there’s no panacea here. We live in a sea of risk, and there’s no real way to create certainty out of chaos. In trying to form a future based upon predicted outcomes we create a system highly vulnerable to black swan events that could easily destroy the very future we wish to create. But by anticipating events by understanding what we are vulnerable to and then mitigating against them, we create a ship that can weather most storms.

Overcoming the PolMil Prediction Addiction

2011-09-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

(from the intro to a paper I’m writing)

The dealer calmly dealt two cards to each of the eight players who sat around the table. I look at my cards and see a pair of queens. My first impulse is to fold, as pocket pairs seldom win hands in Texas Holdem, but they’re face cards so I pay the blind and play the hand. No one raises the ante, and the flop reveals two more queens. I have four of a kind, the best hand I’ve ever had and am certain that I will win this round. Yet, try as I may, I am unable to slow-roll anyone into raising my bets and ultimately the best hand of cards I’ve ever had nets little more than the antes of the players who chose to stay in.

A few hands later I’m dealt an ace and a queen. The flop reveals another ace and queen. I’ve got the top pair with good odds of winning the hand. The turn card is of no help to anyone, and I’m successful in slow-rolling another player into investing into the pot. The river card reveals a king. The odds are well in my favor that the other player doesn’t have the cards to beat my two pair, so I go all in and he calls. Thinking I’ve just won a big pot, he turns over an ace and a king. He beat me on the river card.

Two important lessons to be learned here: the best hand does not equate to the best payoff, and if you play the odds rather than the player, you lose.

I account myself a pretty good poker player, having participated in numerous tournaments, and even won a few. I have several strategies I use as guidelines to play, and they serve me fairly well. But there’s one thing I know with certainty: no matter how much I study the game, the player I own today may own me tomorrow. Poker is a game of psychology so much more than it is a game of chance, and to win you have to play the player, not the game. Thus, despite having calculable odds and bounded rules, poker is an unbounded game, where the best hand doesn’t always win, and the very best hands often net poor payoffs.

What does this have to do with prediction in PolMil you ask? The analogy of poker is, in fact, very applicable. With poker, as in PolMil, I have numerous indicators about my opponent’s likely choices. I can observe his play, discern his patterns of cautious vs. aggressive play, observe how he bets when he has a good hand, or bluffs, or I can simply watch for tells. All of the observations give me insights into what he is likely to do in any given situation. So in some limited respect, I can attempt to predict what he will do and adjust my play to suit. Given enough observations about a single opponent, I can even build a mathematical model that will predict his play in any given situation.

But there’s a problem. That problem is that he is doing the same thing to me. It’s not a one-way system, but rather a complex interchange of observation and adjustment to suit what we each believe the other is likely to do. That model I’ve constructed tells me what he will do in the aggregate. It does not tell me what he is likely to do relative to me and my particular style of play. What’s more, if I adapt my play to rigidly adhere to my model’s predictions, I am certain to lose, as my play will become, in turn, predictable. Give me an opponent with a deterministic (read numeric) view of play any day; I will get rich off of him in short order. To defeat an opponent who believes they’ve predicted my behavior, I need do little more than roll dice.

The key notion to understand is that politics, like poker, is an activity in which the ones who are most successful are the players who are the most adaptable to any given situation, and, most importantly, understand their own vulnerabilities. Stated simply, players whose actions are predictable lose (and players who strictly play the odds are always predictable).

In the example above where the hand was lost by paired aces and kings, I was playing the odds. But here’s the thing: so was the other guy. He knew he’d paired the ace, so his chances already looked pretty good. When the king hit the table on the river, he knew the odds were very high in his favor (just like me). This is black swan country. From our individual perspectives, we viewed the probability of the other guy having a hand better than ours as a very low one. For him the probability paid off. For me, I was bitten by that shady swan, as the low probability event took the entirety of my chip stash. Thus, another reflection of reality is revealed. Despite the fact that the odds of particular hands appearing have very defined probabilities, those are modified by the fact that players are interacting and making conscious decisions about risk due to necessarily incomplete information. So while the math may look very well behaved, the reality is that the tails are, in fact, very fat.

So the overall point of this lengthy preamble is two things. First, where we intend to interact with an opponent and that opponent is anticipatory and adaptive, accurate prediction is simply not possible. Second, if we fool ourselves into believing that it is possible, we add more vulnerability to our portfolio. In more scientific parlance, the problem is not generalizable, and no amount of data makes it tractable. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some very good ways to model specific situations or anticipate the actions of an opponent (anticipate is not the same as predict), but it is to say that the traditional thought methodology of hypothesis testing is very likely to be misleading due to the afore mentioned lack of generalizability.

Of Drugs and Decontextualization

2010-07-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

Anything can be decontextualized. It’s a tactic used every day by those who would sway us to some alternative point of view. Without trying to get too deeply into the weeds of meta-consciousness, all truths are filtered through our own particular sets of personal, institutional, and cultural biases. But some biases are more apparent than others.

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency has it’s own sets of biases, and, given their mission, that’s understandable to some extent. According to them, the US war on drugs is a success. Cited as proof, they claim that they’ve reduced cocaine use by “an astounding” 70% during the last 15 years. So I get that they have a vested interest in making such a claim. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact that they apparently think I’m stupid.

Personally I’m not particularly fond of things that alter my consciousness. My need for rational control is way too strong to be tolerant of things that deprive me of it. But one doesn’t have to be particularly intimate with drug culture to know that cocaine ceased being a glamorous drug after the demise of the “cocaine cowboys” of Miami in the 1980’s. Cocaine has long since been supplanted, first by crack, now by methamphetamine. Drug trafficking is the single fastest growing business globally, followed distantly by human trafficking according to the UN.

So just who does the USDEA think it’s fooling? That international flow of drugs is primarily going to a single destination: the United States of America. A success? Let’s measure that success by some broader objective measures than the reduction of cocaine use. How about we measure it by its cascading effects. Phoenix AZ is now the US capital for kidnapping. In the world it’s only second to Mexico City. It’s convenient (and incorrect) to blame illegal immigrants. It’s our demand for drugs produced outside of the US that is the root of that problem. We can attack the supply chain all we like, but so long as the demand exists, the supply will meet it.

But the extent to which domestic cascading effects are problematic, these pale compared to the disaster that awaits us as Mexico becomes a failed state. We already have a lively debate throughout America over illegal immigration. The nexus of our drug policies combined with growing resentment over undocumented aliens consuming US public goods looms close on the horizon, potentially turning a major domestic problem into an international catastrophe. Imagine, for a moment, what it will mean when the status of immigrant is changed to that of refugee. Envision, for a moment, camps established all along our Southern border to accommodate the inflow of people trying to escape the chaos of a failed Mexican state that has torn itself apart over the illicit drug and human trafficking trade.

Drug (and human) abuse is not a domestic law enforcement problem. It is a national security problem. The supply side solution is not to try and destroy the supply; but rather to control it. If we cannot curb our appetites, we can at least attempt to feed those appetites in a way that does not threaten the stability of our nation and our neighbors.

Filtering out the side effects of our drug and immigration policies is no way to deal with issues that are so important to our national stability or that of our neighbors. Such decontextualized proofs of success as the reduction in cocaine consumption is simply insulting the intelligence of those who actually bother to think about this issue in bigger terms than simple law enforcement. Consumption of drugs produced outside the United States isn’t a simple matter of addiction or consenting adults enjoying some mind altering experience. It’s a violation of our security as a nation by contributing to the destabilization of a neighboring nation and to the humanitarian disaster that organized drug and human trafficking has brought about. It is tantamount to funding insurgency or terrorism, and it should be treated in that manner. Such treatment demands new solutions that may seem contrary to our improvident notions of morality, but I, for one, would rather see our actions feed the addictions of my own countrymen by controlling the supply, than utterly destroy the nations and lives of those who aren’t.

Seeing the Trees for the Forest

2010-07-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

So what could you do with $130 billion dollars? Finally get that new roof? Let me rephrase the question. What could you do with 130 billion dollars if you were a criminal?

Okay, maybe that question is a little unfair. 130 billion is the annual total of global criminal trade, comprised mostly of illicit drug sales, according to the UN. So let’s alter the perspective of the question.

You’re an unemployed male somewhere in South America with no prospects and little hope of cashing in on the global economy. Do you:

A. Apply for a job at ADM?
B. Help smuggle cocaine to America?

Ordinarily I like what Thomas P.M. Barnett has to say about things, but sometimes he just can’t see the trees for the forest. In his blog, "Good globalization = $20T in annual trade; bad globalization = $130B in annual criminal trade," Barnett assures us that globalized criminal trade is nothing to get too worried about since it’s less than one percent of global trade overall.

Is he kidding? IT’S 130 BILLION DOLLARS!

Okay, so you’re not an unemployed man in South America. You’re a high ranking member of a terrorist group that has grown a brain and figured out that America is highly vulnerable to certain types of attack, and if you only had the right funding, you could wage an insurgent campaign that could be devastating to America, and finally help you realize your dream of 7th century paradise. Do you:

A. Apply for a job at ADM?
B. Start smuggling drugs to America?

But let’s put the drug issue aside for a moment. Of that 130 billion dollars, the UN states that 6.6 billion of that is in human trafficking (something on the order of 3 million people). So that’s no big deal at all, since it’s only about .1 percent of the global economy. Wait, what?

3 MILLION PEOPLE?

According to Rescue and Restore Campaign, human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world behind drugs. Here’s a sobering bit of data: according to United States State Department data, an estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and children [are] trafficked across international borders each year for purposes of enslavement of some form or another, approximately 70 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. In a U.S. Department of Justice 07-08 study, more than 30 percent of the total number of trafficking cases for that year were children coerced into the sex industry. (wiki)

Personally, I don’t care how small a percentage of the global economy it is, that number is staggering. We read and hear all over that we have an illegal immigration problem. Frankly, the reality is that we have an immigration disaster. We just haven’t fully understood the true nature of it.

While police in Arizona now check immigration status of traffic violators, we are completely ignoring the fact that it is our own appetite that has created this situation. When thinking about illegal immigration, ask yourself the question
Why are these people here? Typical answers include (in order of good to incrementally bad):

Make a better life
Support their family back home
Seek better medical care
Seek better social services
Seek Welfare
Give birth in America, thereby making the child a US citizen
Sell or smuggle drugs
Sell or smuggle people (prostitutes, sex slaves, children)

I find it hard to generate hostility toward those at the top of the list, and difficult to not advocate summary execution for those at the bottom. But I notice one very specific perspective associated with that set of answers: they are all coming from the supply side. The answer that we don't include in the list is the most powerful one:

There is DEMAND from citizens of the US that makes all of the above possible.

Illegal immigration is quite costly to the US, but what do we actually get for those costs? This is an important question, because we do get something. In fact, we get several things (again, listed in a sort of moral order):

Inexpensive food, grown here, and subject to our health standards.
Less expensive construction costs
Inexpensive domestic services (lawn care, child care, etc.)
Potential voting blocks for incumbent powers
Access to prostitutes
Access to a variety of drugs
Access to child pornography
Access to slaves
Access to sex with children kidnapped from other countries

If we intend to address this problem from the supply side, the costs will be astronomical. We are a country of due process, thus, each detained illegal immigrant must be processed, then deported. To secure our border in such a manner that we seal off ingress, the cost is even more enormous, and will pale next to the cost of the deportations.

The reality is that supply side solutions are immensely costly. What's worse, because the supply side solutions do nothing about the demand, the demand will simply be met in some other fashion, further destroying the fabric of our society. Addressing this problem from the supply side will become exactly like fighting a counter insurgency campaign, one that will continue on in perpetuity, costing us tremendous amounts of wealth, and never actually solving the problem itself.

Let's look at the demand component in more detail.

Inexpensive food, grown here, and subject to our health standards.
Less expensive construction costs
Inexpensive domestic services (lawn care, child care, etc.)

Demand side solution: 10 thousand dollar fine for each instance of any individual and 100 thousand for any corporation employing an undocumented worker. This is a law that the state of AZ could have put in place itself had it had the foresight and political will to do it. Use proceeds from fines to cover deportation costs, and to cover the cost of making domestic employment expenses by families tax deductable. The cascading effect is that cost of food and construction rises, but probably less than expected if sensible guest worker programs are expanded and properly run. Enforcement of this is what AZ should have passed.

Potential voting blocks for incumbent powers

Demand side solution: Use the public forum to denounce such politicians and exercise your right to vote.

Access to a variety of drugs

Demand side solution: First, completely legalize the domestic production, sale, and use of marijuana. Legalize the domestic production and sale of other drugs. Impose much harsher sentences on users on national security grounds (financing terrorism, etc.). Go after the demand of drugs, rather than the supply. Result: immediate increase in revenue and GDP as marijuana becomes part of the domestic economy. Casual use (the majority of drug sales) of hard drugs disappears immediately (too costly if caught). Addicts removed from market. Prison costs increase, but likely would be more than offset by tax revenues from marijuana. There is some political will for this, as CA has already demonstrated, re. marijuana.

Access to prostitutes
Access to child pornography
Access to slaves
Access to sex with children kidnapped from other countries

Demand side solution: This is possibly the most difficult problem to solve. First, legalize independent prostitution. What a grown woman chooses to do with herself is her business. Criminalize pimping and trafficking under slavery laws. Make ownership of a sex slave a capital offense. Traffickers who cross the border should be treated as enemy combatants and be subject to military tribunal.

I maintain that demand is the key to dealing with this problem. It is substantially less costly, and actually addresses the root cause of the immigration problem rather than imposing restrictions on our broader freedoms in an effort to treat the symptom. People who are employing undocumented workers are also breaking the law (not just the illegal immigrant). Kill the demand, and the vast majority of the problem disappears, along with all the undesirable cascading effects, such as 12 year-olds recruited as assassins in Colombia.

Building a fence and closing the border is a stupid solution. The biggest threat to stability in Mexico is drug cartels run rampant, and they are financed by our behavior. If we continue down this path, closing our doors to immigrants and leaving them in the hands of the cartels, Mexico ultimately becomes a failed state. Look at all the trouble we’ve had with Afghanistan. Imagine how much trouble it would be if it was on our Southern border. A failed Mexican state is a huge problem for the US, and it’s also a huge possibility.

Mr. Barnett needs to step closer to the forest and have a look at the trees. 130 billion dollars may be a small percentage of the global economy, but it’s more than the entire GDP of most failed states.

No Truth Here

2010-05-21T06:24:00.000-07:00

When I was in grad school, one of my more famous professors usually began any discussion of new material by calling it "crapolla," including his own contributions to the discipline. As a grad student, I was anxious to prove myself and to rise above my peers by working harder and contributing more than anyone around me. Therefore, at first I took the crapolla comment as a sort of cynical sarcasm as I consumed the cool-aid as quickly as it could be served. But once I really internalized things and began applying all this new knowledge in practice, I recognized that he wasn’t being cynical or sarcastic. He was expressing a basic truth about social science methodology: not that it has no value, but that its value must be scrutinized closely before drawing firm conclusions and generating policy prescriptions. It all, truly, is crapolla.

Take Sean Gourley, whom I’ve criticized at length already but who again serves as the quintessential bad example. In making observations, gathering data, and drawing inferences, he has made many policy prescriptions that are based upon severely flawed analysis. The unwary policy makers who takes him seriously will certainly create more problems dealing with insurgency than they will solve.

But the problem that Gourley represents is more insidious and wide spread than that. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’re aware of the recent flap over the use of PowerPoint as a communications tool. PowerPoint briefings can be and often are a complete waste of time. But that is not a symptom of the application, but a symptom of the incompetence of the people doing the briefings. A PowerPoint slide is a prop, and should never be the focus of a briefing. That concept is lost upon most people who make PowerPoint presentations. Often, their goal is more to overwhelm the audience with visuals and complexity. The point of that is a very simple one: it avoids difficult questions by making the material too complex and overwhelming to absorb, and therefore to critically analyze. Thus, the briefer can, more often than not, simply be taken at his word, leaving behind a room full of bewildered and amazed onlookers, too confused (or bored) to question anything that they just heard. The tool isn’t the problem, it’s the practitioner.

PowerPoint briefers have no monopoly on this particular technique. The social science community often acts similarly; and the motivation for it is quite clear. Social science modelers come in two basic flavors: those that drank the cool-aid and actually believe what they’re saying, and those that spit it out, but still have to earn a living.

As G.E.P. Box said, "All models are wrong but some are useful." Their usefulness is the insight they can provide into certain types of problems. But they are models, and all models suffer from omitted variables, and always will. As a community of practitioners, whether that practice is wargames, systems models, statistical analysis, whatever, we are perversely incentivized to sell our product as the best representation of ground truth possible. The danger is that we often inspire more confidence than the tool actually deserves. And that can be dangerous indeed. But the point here must be clear: our tools are not the problem, we are. Our methodologies are quite good, often very advanced, and certainly useful. But we must hold onto the awareness that they are also wrong, and where they are wrong is the part that we must pay closest attention to. Technology and our capacity t exploit it is a wondrous thing, but our dependence leaves us vulnerable, and as time goes on, that problem will only get more difficult to address and contend with. The first step to coping may lie in the understanding that it cannot be solved.

Of Scepticism and Paranoia

2010-03-18T05:04:00.000-07:00

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect. To a large degree, the events of our lives shape who we are. We know this intuitively, but seldom do we stop to think about the actual relationship between those events and our attitudes and concerns. This particular blog entry is deeply personal to me, and thus to some extent, cathartic.

All of my life I’ve had a deep distrust, and, in fact, dislike of all authority figures. I freely admit that to this day when I see a policeman (or similar figure), although I know intellectually that he is charged with a difficult and often thankless job, my emotional response is almost always one of fear and loathing.

I’ve often wondered why that particular response is so deeply ingrained in my psyche. I’m a law abiding citizen, I strongly believe in contributing to the security and welfare of my country, and do so through the work that I’ve chosen to do. I pay my taxes, albeit grudgingly, and contribute to the public discourse. And yet, I’ve always felt a hair trigger away from rebelling and seeking my fortune in some lawless frontier. This dichotomy has often been a difficult one to manage.

My parents lived through the second world war. They were both too young to have participated, but they lived the better portion of their childhood through the event. My father on the American side, my mother on the German. My father’s older siblings all joined the armed services, he, since he was too young, stayed home and built models of airplanes that were used by the Army Air Corps to train pilots to recognize enemy aircraft.

Meanwhile, my mother spent her childhood fleeing from Russian soldiers, allied fighter aircraft, and countless other dangers to life and limb as she watched her country be systematically destroyed by the Allied war effort. Her father, my grandfather, was a colonel in the Luftwaffe. He flew missions largely on the Eastern Front. After the war he was tried as a war criminal, and narrowly escaped execution by the Russians. He passed away in the 50’s from a heart attack. I think by any standard, that is an awful lot for a young girl to live through.

My mother does not blame the Allies for these hardships. Make no mistake, she blames Hitler. She saw first hand what a socialist megalomaniac can do to a country. Her hatred for all things socialistic or totalitarian is palpable. When she was 25 years of age, she came to America and became an American citizen. And ever since she’s never avoided speaking her mind, often without regard to consequence, when the subject came near anything that smacked of oppression, repression, or authority without accountability.

During the war my mother’s aunt passed away. Her death certificate stated that she had died of a blood disease. Since that time the family was skeptical. She was known for speaking out against Hitler and his regime, and one day she simply disappeared. Some time later, my grandfather received the certificate.

Recently my uncle, still in Germany, decided to pursue the matter now that the archives were open. We now know what really happened to her. She was taken by the Gestapo, interned in a concentration camp and tortured. She finally died from a medical experiment that was conducted on her. She wasn’t Jewish or a Gypsy. She was a German citizen who had the courage of her convictions to speak out against her country’s regime and she paid the ultimate price for it.

In trying to come to terms with my feelings toward authority, I came to a philosophical accommodation. My belief is that it is a healthy practice for any citizen to regard all authority with a high degree of skepticism combined with a large dose of paranoia. I believe that such an outlook is in fact critical to guard against the sorts of things that my mother had to live through. To believe that “it can’t happen here” is simply the height of naive stupidity. The recent discovery of what actually happened to my great aunt has simply confirmed my commitment to that belief.

With this blog I have included a photo of part of my family. The woman is my great grandmother. The boy is my grandfather, and the young girl is aunt Martha. The photo was taken around 1912. When I look at that girl I see the face of my own daughter and I tell myself to always keep my dislike of authority in check, but never to let it die.

Those Shotgun Wielding Black Swans

2010-03-15T04:28:00.000-07:00

My last several blogs have discussed what I believe are shortcomings in the approaches we currently take toward understanding and anticipating non-state violent actors. Stepping away from that for a moment, the real dilemma in all this is not whether we are using the right tools, but whether we’re even asking the right question. Permit me to ruminate a little more on the matter.

The failure of existing tools to provide useful predictions about the future leads me to the conclusion that the fundamental premise behind their use is flawed (one to one maps and so forth). That flaw rests upon a series of assumptions that we know are convenient simplifications of perceived relationships that exist in reality (normal distributions, etc.). That we have turned to these assumptions to guide the exploration of future trends leads me to believe that the questions being asked to begin with may rest upon flawed assumptions (how do we predict adversarial behavior is a question that itself presumes that the adversary follows fundamental rules such as rationality).

That we consistently ask such questions leads me to believe that we have constructed for ourselves a "thought methodology" that insists that we couch our solution sets within the contrived notion that we are capable of deducing sets of causal relationships, and that only inference generated from said causal relationships can provide a foundation upon which we can practice the art of "prediction." That we have convinced ourselves that the only way we can approach any such problem is through hypothesis testing bounds us by the collection of data. Because not all data is collectible, we then must further apply the construct of proxies within the data we've collected, which, in and of itself, is susceptible to any number of flaws and mistakes. We then satisfy ourselves that we're explaining things correctly because señor R squared has winked and nodded.

Stepping back for a moment, if we look at things we actually know, we find that few of those things continue to be recognizable within the thought methodology I've described above. Return to case studies. Is rationality real? Are the causes of rebel groups concrete or protean? Do groups behave in their own self interest? If yes, do we have any real way of discerning what that self interest is without assuming the group actually does exist for a purpose other than socialization? What we find is that certain sorts of tools describe things very well, but we are unable to reconcile those tools with our thought methodology. For instance, we know that power law relationships are very robust when we compare frequency of events with their severity. We also know that when we examine social network structures we begin to see fractal patterns emerge. Yet, we are unable to utilize these findings because, again, they do not conform to the deductive/inductive patterns we've defined for ourselves.

So what does all that mean? It means that our entire conceptual framework from which we generate such questions as "what will our adversary do next" are coming from our own concretized socio-cultural-institutional framework. Well that's a wicked problem, isn't it.

Let's go back to assumptions. If we are trying to predict behavior, we are making an assumption that if we know what some individual/group/nation will do, we can act to avert it. Yet we also know that our action (even the mere act of observing) alters the prediction. Paradox ensues, rendering the entire exercise pointless. The question itself puts the ox before the cart; we predict to define action, but the action redefines the reality rendering the prediction invalid. To some extent that’s the point, except that the processes of contingent and collateral effects will render repeated experiments problematic. Psychologically, confidence in the prediction capability is simply the best way I can think of to get a black swan to walk up and shoot us with a shotgun.

Redefining the question a little to "what will happen when we do 'X'," we only complicate the issue, compounding our bad assumptions, handing the swan a 12 gauge instead of a 20.

So what should we be asking? That's a good question. What we have to recognize is that the thing walking around out there that can really hurt us is that shotgun wielding black swan; the rest is risk management. So the question has to revolve around the idea that what we need to be concerned about is not what is going to happen, but how do we protect ourselves from the events that are going to happen but that we cannot predict?

Examples of this sort of thinking:
We don't have to worry about predicting whether or not a sub-national group will use an NBC weapon if they can't get one.
We don't have to predict the supply routes or behaviors of drug runners if there is no demand for the product.
I don't have to predict where traffic is likely to be difficult if I telecommute

I recognize that these examples are obvious and entail their own complications with tractability and so forth, but that's not the point. The point is that we back away from impossible problems by reframing the questions such that the foundational premises become reduced to tractable actions and concepts. In turn, these suggest strategies to pursue that lie within our own capacity to implement, and thus protect ourselves.

That we see fractal patterns emerge in social networks tells us something very important, which is that they exhibit self-similarity. Self-similarity gives a useful tool to describe what a network looks like. Altering that pattern through external action may be sufficient to then break it apart or reconstruct it in less conflictual ways. Power law relationships are also very powerful in that they describe for us an equilibrium that exists because it is governed by very specific constraints. Exploiting those constraints relieves us of the burden of having to predict actions by, instead, removing the capacity for committing the actions we most fear.

A very simple economic principle sums all of this up: There is no free lunch! Thinking that an adversary's behavior can be predicted implies that we think there is a shortcut for guiding our course in the world; that we can view the world's problems from orbit and contend with them via remote control. We are wrong to think that. We're wrong to even waste time dreaming about it.

Just What Are We Dealing With?

2010-03-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has spent much time wading through the literature on violent non-state actor groups, especially literature on terrorism, knows one thing: what we know about the subject seems dramatically different than what we actually understand about it. Blinded by preconceived notions that inform our theoretical structures, all too often we apply the assumptions of rationality, purpose driven behavior, and utility maximization to violent sub-national groups and their members.

One author on the subject of Terrorism, specifically suicide terror, is Robert Pape. His contention is that suicide terrorism is an asymmetric tactic used to expel occupiers. He uses statistical techniques to arrive at this conclusion, then sets forth a rather broad policy prescription that, in a nut shell, equates to something like “if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.” Many have bought into Pape’s argument, believing his methods for arriving at his conclusions are sound and scientific. In reality, they are not. Assaf Moghadam, fortunately, has written an extensive critique of Pape’s book, Dying to Win, in which he identifies in detail the problems with Pape’s analysis, technique, and conclusions. I refer you to the article itself for details.

http://fletcher.tufts.edu/jebsencenter/pubs/moghadam/SCT%20Article.pdf

Another author given great regard is Louise Richardson, particularly for her book What Terrorists Want. Ms. Richardson draws upon her personal experiences with members of the IRA and on several interviews she conducted with other terrorists, and concludes that they are rational actors pursuing specific political goals. Although the case studies she presents are illuminating, the overall prescription, once you’ve read through the bulk of the book, is to discover "how and where terrorists operate, how they organize themselves, how they communicate with each other, how they finance and plan their operations." Apparently the details of how to do that are left to others. I’d also add that anyone who didn’t know that before they started to read the book has been living in a cave.

Applying assumptions of rationality and so forth to violent non-state actor or terrorist groups and the related research is sometimes referred to as the structural or strategic model. From that perspective, counter-terrorism policies usually involve notions of reducing the political utility of terrorism such that terror groups no longer care to pursue the tactic. Evaluation of that frame of reference would seem to indicate failure, as the last time I checked, terrorism is still with us.

Max Abrahms, in a recent article (the title of which plays upon the title of Richardson’s book) What Terrorists Really Want (http://maxabrahms.com/pdfs/DC_250-1846.pdf) pokes some serious holes in the structural approach. He does so by presenting seven puzzles:

1. Terrorism fails to achieve the stated goal almost all of the time
2. Terrorism is almost never used as a last resort
3. Terrorist organizations almost always reject compromises despite significant policy concessions
4. Political goals of terror organizations are, without exception, protean
5. Terrorist attacks are usually anonymous
6. Competing terror groups with identical or highly similar goals generally prefer to attack each other than any other target
7. Terror groups seldom disband despite the consistent failure of the tactic to actually accomplish their objectives

Abrahms’ seven puzzles illustrate clearly that the structural model for approaching terror groups cannot yield useful results because each of the requisite assumptions simply do not, in reality, apply. And that leaves us with a serious problem indeed.

But before we start thinking too hard about the solution, perhaps we should think some more about the actual problem. What is it that we actually fear from terror groups? The clear answer, far and away, is that thanks to the diffusion and accessibility of advanced technology, we fear terror groups could do significant damage through the employment of NBC weapons, or cause significant hardship, economic and otherwise, through cyber or eco attacks and so forth. One reason that the structural model provided us with some level of comfort was that if we assumed a rational actor, we could tell ourselves that specific policy behaviors could deter the use of such weapons or tactics. Removing that safety blanket leaves us exposed indeed.

But it’s an exposure that we’d better get used to. And getting used to it requires that we recognize that withdrawing from the world is not a solution to this problem. In fact, we need to do the opposite. Ms. Richardson’s bromide of know your enemy is particularly apt, despite her reticence to provide some method for accomplishing it. The fact is that any terror group can only be understood and contained by detailing its network and identifying its identity entrepreneur. Accomplishing that requires penetration into societies where such groups are likely to spawn, and we do have some fairly specific understanding of what those societies actually look like. But our marriage to technology and the social remoteness that it has engendered has created obstacles both psychological and physical. Our ultimate salvation does not lie within the walls of ivory towers, but on the streets of the cities of the world. As Americans we have a deep distrust of the word “empire.” Yet empire is what we are, and our security depends upon understanding that being a citizen of that empire means we cannot address it via remote control, stare at it from orbit, or apply convenient assumptions. To do so may give us the sense of security we crave, but it will ultimately prove false, and may cost us all we hold dear.

Common Ecology DOES NOT Quantify Human Insurgency

2010-02-17T04:43:00.000-08:00

Lately much ado is being made of the findings of Sean Gourley and his crew regarding power law relationships they’ve found in insurgency-based conflict. For some quick background, go here: http://seangourley.com/ and watch the 7 minute TED video.

Let me be frank. This is another prime example of academics armed with mathematical/statistics based techniques run amok with statistical inference and a naïve belief that it can predict the future.

First, let’s get some perspective. The discovery of power law relationships in conflict is not new. Lewis Fry Richardson discovered a power law relationship between intensity of conflict and the frequency of its occurrence as early as the 1940s. That discovery has been a result in search of a theory ever since. So far, no one has found a satisfying explanation for why the relationship exists, but it has continued to be one of the most robust findings in conflict literature.

Along come Gourley et al, and suddenly the finding is new again. But his group applied the idea to insurgency to see if the relationship exists there as well, and sure enough, it does. But they take the research a little further down the field and discover that the slope coefficient of -2.5 seems to hold as a common value across all tested insurgencies. On its own, this is an interesting finding.

Wired magazine has published some criticisms of the findings of Gourley’s group, and these criticisms center primarily on the quality of the data they used. I don’t find these criticisms to be particularly insightful, mainly because just about any data can be subjected, accurately, to the same criticism. In the vernacular, it’s all crap, but it’s the crap that we have. To really indict the data, one would have to demonstrate that it has a particular bias one way or the other, and that is a challenging task.

No, where Gourley and crew fly off the rails are in the inferences they make from the finding. On the website I pasted above, have a look at the 14 key features that define a successful insurgency. You don’t really have to read past the first one to see that the train derailed itself before it even left the station. Can you say Mao? How about Tamil Tigers? Shining Path? The “Man-body” feature is an exception to the history of insurgency, not a feature of it.

This sort of inference exemplifies the danger of completely decontextualizing the math from the reality. But it also amply demonstrates the weakness of utilizing descriptive tools to try and predict the future, as so far all of the predictions that this group have made have failed to pan out (see the video for an admission thereof).

Power law relationships are descriptive, not causal. They don’t actually tell us anything other than what an equilibrium condition may actually look like. And that’s really the strength of the work that Gourley has done. If the -2.5 slope coefficient truly is a robust finding, it can provide us with a metric against which we can judge success or failure of particular policy actions. It can also serve as a reality check for game or simulation runs, provided we keep in mind the descriptive nature of the math.

If we can take findings like this one and then contextualize them in terms of other models such as Violent System Theory or other constructs, we might make some headway in understanding how we can interdict a hostile environment successfully. But the inferences drawn by Gourley and his cohorts are not only wrong, they are dangerous, as they stand a good chance of getting American soldiers killed if improperly applied in reality.

Social science academia needs a good dose of humility concerning its own evaluation of the usefulness of mathematics and quantitative tools where human behavior is concerned. If academics like Gourley continue to be taken at their word without frequent and lethal doses of skepticism about the applicability of the tools used to draw inferences, the lesson in humility will be learned at very high cost in human lives.

Just What are Wargames Good For?

2010-02-02T04:42:00.000-08:00

Recently I attended a roundtable discussion on wargaming at one of our national war colleges. During the discussion, a distinguished practitioner of our art mentioned his conviction that wargames were, in fact, good predictive tools. This comment was quite controversial, and it ought to be. Throughout not just wargaming circles, but in the OR world in general there is much ado made about the ability to predict the future. The notion is cast in various terms and syntaxes, most frequently masquerading as anticipatory analysis or behavior.

What’s more, the ability to predict the future is a stated goal of many federal business opportunities (see almost any recent SBIR or STTR solicitation), not to mention various programs already in place in the armed forces (for instance, see Air Force Research Lab’s Focused Long-Term Challenges). As a result, much effort and expense is being put into the notion that somehow there must exist some way to predict what our enemies are going to do, and thus be able to circumvent their actions. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

When we look at both qualitative and quantitative points of view and techniques to gain some insight into how to anticipate the behaviors of adversaries, the level of complexity rapidly outstrips our capacity to account for it. Simplifications usually rely on the description of trends, or the subjectiveness of the subject matter expert. The critical assumption that we’ve taken for granted is that in order to understand what our adversary is going to do, we must understand his culture, his motivations, his environmental influences, and so forth. What we find with this approach is that the problem rapidly becomes intractable.

There are two governing issues. The first I call faith in the one-to-one map, the second is the fallacy of classical determinism. Faith in the one-to-one map is simply the belief that the closer a model gets to reality, ostensibly through the inclusion of as many governing variables and interactions as possible, the more accurate the predictions will be. In truth, this is likely to be an inaccurate correlation. In practice, this approach is simply ridiculous. The problem, of course, is that the amount and accuracy of data required in order to make such an approach feasible doesn’t, and is unlikely to ever, exist. But even if we were able to gather accurately all the necessary data and correctly put together all of the interactions in the system and we could then run experiments with our one-to-one mapping of the world, we still would not be able accurately predict adversarial behaviors. Why? Because the underlying assumption with the approach is that the universe behaves according to the tenets of classical determinism. And the problem with classical determinism is a very simple one: it assumes away random evolutionary variation and the existence of creativity. It also ignores such metaphorical but very real notions as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or the Lucas Critique.

The nut of the argument: the moment free will enters the equation, deterministic approaches become untenable. We are governed by ANOVA in our techniques, while the world of social interaction, or society, is governed by discrete events that do not fall within the assumptive confines of our scientific notion of trend.

This problem is well Illustrated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan. Taleb refers to this problem as the ludic fallacy. It is summarized as "the misuse of games to model real-life situations." Taleb characterizes the fallacy as mistaking the map for the reality.

This is Taleb’s central argument and is a rebuttal of predictive mathematical models, as well as an attack on the idea of applying statistical models in complex domains. According to Taleb, statistics only work in casinos or places in which the odds are visible and defined. This conclusion rests upon the following three points.

• It is impossible to be in possession of all the information.
• Very small unknown variations in the data could have a huge impact (the Butterfly effect).
• Theories/models based on empirical data are flawed, as events that have not taken place before cannot be accounted for.

Taleb is highly critical of the notion that the unexpected may be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are presumed to represent samples from a bell-shaped curve. This point of view is easily demonstrable by showing that unlikely events occur significantly more frequently than the tails of the bell curve would indicate. This falsification proof holds particularly well in the realm of social science. He goes on to claim that better descriptive tools include power laws and fractal geometry.

Taleb’s idea that power laws and fractal geometry provide better descriptive tools may hold some promise for discovering new approaches to the problem, but only if we start to better understand what is actually possible in the realm of the predictive. One place to start might be to recognize that understanding our own vulnerabilities may be the best predictor of enemy behavior we’ll ever have. Wargames can certainly help us with that, but we have a lot of poorly preconceived notions to overcome.

A Mind is Like a Parachute

2009-08-07T04:40:00.000-07:00

“A mind is like a parachute. If it doesn't open, you're fucked!” -- Don Williams, Jr

Occasionally I get an email or comment from someone telling me that I take wargaming way too seriously. It’s just a hobby after all. Maybe they’re right. Nevertheless, as one of those people who is easily bored, I find that what isn’t taken seriously is frequently rather dull.

Take Facebook for example. I’ve got about 50 friends there, and I check in most days to see what folks are up to. It seems a good way to stay in touch with people I’d otherwise never speak with. In fact, thanks to Facebook, I’m once again in contact with my sister, whom I hadn’t spoken to in 20 years prior. But still, browsing the conversations my mind often casts itself to the scene in Impromptu where Franz Liszt is on stage mocking his patrons, complaining that their “conversation is not witty.” Why does anyone think I care if they have a hangnail, or if they’re about to go home from work?

The novelty of the thing wears off quickly; rapidly settling into the mundane as the deeply ingrained narcissistic tendencies we all share rear their head for all to see and approve with a friendly thumb’s up. Not that I’m any better; take this blog for instance. The irony doesn’t escape me. But most of the time I exert a fair amount of effort suppressing my Asperger’s like tendency to lack empathy for people’s obsession with the least interesting things in their life.

Yeah, that’s an analogy. Wargaming is exactly the same. The novelty wore off a long time ago, now we’ve settled down to the mundane as those narcissists I mentioned above, eager to put the “designer” tag next to their name on BGG, lift systems from their favorite game designs and cobble together new titles to the acclaim of those who don't really know any better anyway.

So yeah… I take wargames seriously.

We often think of someone who is not receptive to new ideas as having a closed mind. I’m not certain we have a word or phrase for a mind that’s not open to ideas at all, but we should invent one. I spend a fair amount of my time casting about for new ideas and new ways of conceptualizing things. It’s why I’m often found reading books on physics, or French post modernism, or just lying on my back on the floor staring at the ceiling.

Like most people, I have a job. Like a somewhat lesser number of them, I like my job. Like even fewer, I consider it a profession. Saying that it’s also a practice and intellectual pursuit reduces the number still further. Almost everything I do in life I do to enhance my performance at the work that I do. I suspect now, most folks would start considering that abnormal. But I would guess that there are several others here who will read this blog entry and know exactly what I’m talking about. We’re obsessed. Our wives, if we’re lucky enough to have one, know it, and some of them even tolerate it. We are defined by what we do, and without it, we are nothing.

Wargaming (professionally) is part of what I do, and yes, I take it very seriously. As a result, I’m very critical of the commercial end of it (see my latest installment of Groping for the New Paradigm in the latest ATO). I fully admit that my own early contributions do not live up to my own standards. Yet, they were part of the process of finding those standards. Such is life.

So when someone tells me to lighten up and not to take wargames so seriously, I may smile and nod, but inside I’m conceiving of a mind without a parachute. Sure, it’s a hobby. Sure, there’s no harm in some good clean fun. The point of this pile of words is simply to say that if you think I take it too seriously, I’m not really talking to you. Enjoy yourself.

Oh, and if someone finds what I’m saying incites anger or fury, then we’ll need to figure out that word or phrase I mentioned earlier. It’s also fairly likely that having that parachute would be of little help. After all, one still needs to know how to open it.

Groping for the New Paradigm Revisited

2009-01-21T04:57:00.000-08:00

It’s been a few years now since I sat down and wrote the original Groping for the New Paradigm articles. Since then a lot has happened. Four years of editing Fire & Movement have elapsed, and I’ve had the interesting experience of seeing quite a number of new games cross my desk, much more so than when I was just writing the occasional review or making an occasional impulse purchase. So has that experience altered my opinion in any way?

Sadly, not really. I’ve seen a few things that were very innovative and/or holistic in approach, make no mistake. But by and large, the hobby remains the same. Since taking over F&M, I’ve played more games in the last few years than I’ve probably played prior to that time combined. What’s more, I’ve been particular about which games I would play or review, since, as editor, I pretty much had my pick. Despite looking specifically for innovative and holistic design approaches, and even instructing F&M reviewers to point it out in the games that they reviewed, we really haven’t seen many.

In this article what I would like to do is to couch discussion of what I’ve seen in the last few years in terms of some of the feedback that the original articles received, clarify a few points, and perhaps make a few new ones.

Assessing the Feedback

To be frank, I don’t usually go looking for feedback on published work. To me it feels, well, narcissistic. What’s more, reading comments posted anonymously in public forums can be quite depressing as the veil of civility is often replaced by, what seems to be, a sort of feeding frenzy for people afflicted with anger management issues. Nevertheless, I read through a lot of it at the urging of the good folks at ATO and Wargamer.com. It was nice to see that there were many who gave the pieces a chance, sad to see that many did not. In the beginning I tried to participate in the discussions. However, once it stopped being about the content of the articles and started being about me personally, I decided to drop out. By the time Wargamer.com published the series, I had pretty much lost interest in commenting on them, despite some fairly demanding requests from participants that I do so.

To my surprise, I got much positive feedback through email. To my greater surprise, much of that positive feedback came from game designers and publishers. Joseph Miranda, Dan Verssen, Grant Dalgliesh, and Thomas Cundiff, to name a few, all were very receptive to the critiques and supportive of the effort and ideas. In public forums, however, much of the feedback was quite scathing. Richard Berg, perhaps, provided some of the most negative commentary, calling me, among other things, “uninformed,” which is probably the politest thing I can quote.

Some feedback was downright nasty. One writer claimed that my character was questionable because I recommended reading Thomas Sowell’s Citizen’s Guide to Economics. Apparently Mr. Sowell once wrote an Op Ed piece that mentioned something about Nazis that this writer disagreed with. Now I’ve never read the piece he was referring to, nor, prior to his mentioning it, had ever heard of it. Yet somehow, perhaps through some mysterious process of osmosis, my character was affected by it. Well I’m no expert on such matters, but what I can tell you is that if you’d like to learn something about how basic economics works, it’s a good book. But if you are not capable of reading works by people whose political positions you don’t happen to share, I can’t help you (and frankly neither can anyone else).

Another reader took the interesting and admirable step of creating a list of games that he and others thought were innovative in direct response to the articles. This list was housed at boardgamegeek.com. With some enthusiasm I went and looked at the list, hoping that I had indeed missed things. To my disappointment, the vast majority of the games listed were well over ten years old, some well over twenty, and a few closing in on antique status. The few games listed that were more recent I had indeed already seen. Each had some innovative features, only one was any sort of radical departure. In fact I thought the list did more to prove my point than anything else. But ultimately the list was based upon the mistaken premise that what I was complaining about was lack of innovation rather than flawed design processes.

Just What Did I Mean By That?

An interesting phenomenon one sees when reading commentary on published articles is that if someone disagrees with a piece they will inevitably add that it was poorly written, while the opposite is stated if they agree with it. It’s a curious occurrence, even a bit amusing. What was common with the Paradigm pieces was that folks who generally found merit to them understood that they were discussing a design approach, while folks who disagreed seemed to think that I was criticizing hexes and CRTs, or just complaining about lack of innovation for innovation’s sake. Well written or not, it’s clear that if one feels one’s ox is being gored, one reads into the pieces what one wants.

Hexes and CRTS were most certainly not the point of the series. That my solution to the wargame industry is to design games on modern conflict was also not the point, nor was mere lack of innovation. Criticizing the substance of something on the grounds of items unrelated to its point seems silly. But there is always the possibility that it was indeed poorly written and that some folks just couldn’t fathom it. One criticism did cite that the writing was academic in style, which I certainly realize can be difficult to sift through. Another stated that the articles were bad because of their title, which apparently had sexual connotations. I was unaware of those connotations. I grope for the snooze button on my alarm clock every morning, and Kuhn is probably the least sexual material I’ve ever read. Writing and reading are such treacherous activities, and when we’re mad we often grope for anything we can find to justify our anger. It’s the paradigm of the thing.

So, for clarity’s sake, I’ll reiterate the general point of Groping for the New Paradigm here. The point of the first article was to criticize the fact that many designers took hexes and CRTs as given. More broadly stated, the basic model of move—as regulated by hexes—and shoot—as represented by some seemingly quantitative assessment of firepower, applied to some seemingly thought-out probability matrix—was simply assumed to be part of a game design from its outset, even before the game’s topic was considered. I think that approach has stifled creativity in particular and the industry in general, and led to an endless parade of mediocrity. That is not to say that these techniques should be abandoned, far from it. They are tools in the tool box, to be used when it is appropriate to use them, but they are not what define a wargame.

Interestingly, the first article seemed to generate the most ferocity. The take-away for me was that some folks really are passionate about their games at a deeply emotional level. I’m still uncertain what to make of that. It is, however, fairly clear that this level of emotion seems to be coupled with some very trivial concerns. I recently witnessed a debate on consimworld in which ASL players heatedly discussed whether new ASL counters should be printed on white card-stock or the traditional gray. Don’t get me wrong, I happen to love ASL, but this debate went on for well over a dozen posts. On the other hand, one must look long and hard for designer’s notes that explain where the quantitative aspects of any particular game design (e.g. the combat factors) come from or how they are derived. One must look even harder for complaints about their absence.

From my point of view this contrast is a real paradox. I find it difficult to reconcile such a high level of passion for this hobby with so little concern for how these products are constructed. The last time I recall reading a good explanation for how the quantitative aspects of a game design were put together, the author was Frank Chadwick.

The second installment in the series was probably the best received. It introduced the notion of what I call the holistic design approach. The idea here is that a game design must start with its topic, define what specific issues it is trying to address, and select appropriate mechanisms for modeling it. It was set up to specifically follow up on the first piece, showing that the Hex/CRT paradigm should not be the starting point of any design, and discussing, instead, what should be.

It is this point that makes adequate design notes so important. If one is to assess whether any particular game is a success, it helps to know what the intentions were. These intentions are not always apparent from the game itself; often it seems apparent that the only intention was to just design a game (and grab all that accompanying fame and fortune).

Some examples of designers putting little effort into the topic include such things as smoothbore muskets accurate out to 400 yards, fifteen square miles of African scrub able to contain only a battalion of infantry or vehicles, 7000 square mile scatter area for delivery of nuclear munitions on missiles, cannon unable to unlimber and fire within a two-hour time span, highly mobile modern combat units lined up shoulder to shoulder to invade North Korea in the finest tradition of eighteenth century European warfare, and the list goes on. Had any of these issues been corrected in the games, the designs would either have been completely unaffected, or would have needed a complete reevaluation. Either one is grounds for making the change and doing it right. If it doesn’t affect the game, why not do it right? If it does affect the game design, then the design is based upon an erroneous assumption. In that case it might as well be about orcs and sorcerers (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Problems are not limited to designers, as some developers also put very little attention into the mechanics of games. Examples include three-inch high counter stacks, rules dispersed ad hoc onto play aides, or rulebooks seemingly constructed at random.

All of these examples come from games that have been published within the last few years, and few of these issues garnered much concern among game players. It’s hard to make headway when neither designers nor players care about it. However, the fact that many people were receptive to the ideas presented in the second piece gives reason to be hopeful.

Unfortunately, part three was probably the least effective of the series. Most folks seemed to think that I was proposing that wargaming could only be “saved” if it focused more on modern topics. Although I think that modern topics are important with respect to generating interest among potential new hobbyists, that is certainly not what I was trying to get across. What part three was trying to do was to take a topic, which happened to be one I was particularly interested in, and show how defining the topic and the purpose of the game at the outset leads to more appropriate choices of component design. Nevertheless, most readers seemed to find the article disappointing.

Does This Really Matter?

There was one piece of feedback that I found most disturbing. Its gist was that I should “get over it,” that the hobby was dead, would remain dead, and that only a handful of old folks played anyway and they should be left alone to do what they enjoy with what manufacturers that were left. Had this feedback only come from one person I wouldn’t be mentioning it here. Unfortunately, it came from several.

Reflecting upon this particular piece of feedback yielded little in the way of response. Somehow I doubt that there is anything I could say that would change the mind of someone who thinks the hobby should be left alone to rest in peace. Nevertheless, I’ll try to make a case for why what we do and how we do it matters.

I do conflict modeling for a living. Not wargames, but actual mathematical modeling of conflict, kinetic and political. I use several techniques to do this, and each is chosen, modified, combined, or invented to fit the topic and generate the results needed. A side effect of my work is that I travel to a lot of conferences where I meet other people who do the same or similar kind of work. They come from government, private industry, the military, you name it. And one thing that most of them pay attention to in some form or another is what goes on in the commercial simulation industry. Mostly they look at computer software, but many pay close attention to what’s happening in the board-game industry as well.

Every year the Air Force puts on the Connections conference, now known as the Defense Modeling & Simulation Conference. This year (2008) I’ve been asked to participate on a panel dedicated to commercial wargaming. Additionally I’ll be giving a presentation on initiation of conflict and deterrence and how to wargame it. People attend this conference from industry (e.g. Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc.), military (Naval War College, Air Force Research Lab, etc.), and various other sectors. Just about all of them have a particular interest in wargames, and they’re paying attention.

Last December (2007) Joseph Miranda and I attended the Military Operations Research Society conference. While there we spent several hours one evening entertaining an instructor from the CIA. He was evaluating board wargames to be used as teaching tools in the classroom after hearing that Joseph and I were presenting on wargaming the current situation in Baghdad. Speaking of which, after the presentation we got about a dozen mathematicians, officers, and foreign military representatives to sit around a table and play a game of Battle for Baghdad, a board wargame.

The truth is that the military, policy think-tanks, and various other entities are all on the look out for new ways to model conflict, especially modern, asymmetric conflict and the political environment in which it takes place. Board wargaming is just one of the places that they are looking.

But moving away from the professional end of things, let’s address it from another angle. I recently posed the question in an F&M editorial whether a fun game was all that mattered. Unfortunately not a lot of responses came in, but there were a few. The gist of those that did was that fun, indeed, was the main issue, while historical accuracy came in second. What struck me as interesting was that in each of the responses the preference was always ordinal. The idea that one could demand both a fun came and one that was accurate at the same time did not appear in any response. What’s even more interesting was that the idea of the fun being predicated on the historical accuracy itself was completely absent. This missing relationship seemed odd indeed given that we’re talking about historical board war games that often require several hours just to read the rules, let alone play.

I think that if we as hobbyists ask ourselves just why it is we play these games, to have fun may be a common answer, but if that were all there was to it we’d just play Monopoly instead. We also must, by default, be interested in military issues, historical or otherwise. To be willing to put up with twenty or more pages of rules, I’d say very interested. If we are very interested, and willing to put in the hours that it takes to learn and play these games, doesn’t it also make sense that we be concerned that our investment in internalizing all the nuances of any given design be rewarded by the assurance that the experience we are gaining from the process has some foundation in reality? That whatever the military issue we are concerning ourselves with by learning to play a game on the subject is, in fact, as accurate and useful a representation as possible; that its perspectives and parameters be well defined and its assumptions accurate and justifiable?

And finally, designers, do you want to intellectually explore a topic and represent it from a useful perspective that efficiently and elegantly models the topic, or do you just want to design a game? To quote John Boyd, do you want to be someone or do you want to do something? To put it in the Jon Compton vernacular, are you an artist or an ass?

Is wargaming dead? It’s as dead as its practitioners allow it to be.

Good Vs. Innovative

Although the commentary that thought my purpose was to complain about lack of innovation was a bit off the mark, much of that same commentary seemed to think that I was conflating innovative with good. Make no mistake, there have been several games recently published that were good and yet contained no innovation whatsoever.

A holistically designed game need contain no innovation, it need only use mechanisms, existing or new, that express the point of the design effectively. The problem is that there are many aspects to conflict that can and should be explored for which we have few or no existing mechanisms.

Modern conflict is rife with examples. Today our armed forces are faced with asymmetric threats, non-state actors, cyberwarfare, and are constrained by political considerations more than ever. Insurgency, occupation, and military operations other than war (MOOTWA) occupy the minds of military planners in addition to traditional force on force considerations.

But these sorts of considerations are hardly limited to modern conflict. Fourth generation warfare, as it’s now fashionably called, has been around a long, long time, going back all the way to Belisarius and further. Yet as a factor in wargames, it is either ignored, or relegated to a subsystem that usually underestimates its effectiveness by a wide margin. Many games have tried to tackle insurgency operations, with varying degrees of success. I think one of the best is Joseph Miranda’s Holy War: Afghanistan, while one of the most disappointing is VG’s Central America. The difference between the two games lies in both innovation and lack of it, but more importantly in the use of existing and appropriate mechanisms to model insurgency. But to model insurgency as a feature, there simply aren’t very many mechanisms in our tool box to do so. Thus, any game that aspires to be exclusively about insurgency would by default have to be innovative.

Yet a game does not need innovation to be good. A recent game that was outstanding yet contained a minimum of actual innovation is GMT’s Europe Engulfed. In this instance the designer knew what he was about from the outset, and put together a game covering the entire European Theater of World War II in a playable, digestible, highly enlightening, and exceptionally entertaining package. The perspective is consistent, and the mechanisms appropriate. What’s more, he playtested the hell out of it before he even considered submitting it for publication. The result is what, in my opinion, was one of the best games published that year.

Other games that fall into the excellent but not necessarily innovative category include MMP’s A Victory Lost, and Compass Games’ Bitter End. Each of these utilizes hexes and CRTs, but employed them as means to an end, rather than just an excuse to publish another game.

But what about games that invented major systems to model specific aspects of conflict? Unfortunately there have not been very many of these. One example that does come to mind though is Bowen Simmons’ Bonaparte at Marengo. In this design, Simmons had two specific goals: he wanted to capture the look and feel of the appearance of the maps of the nineteenth century, as well as the depiction of armies on maps in that period and he wanted to design a system that captured the essence of the campaign in a simple and elegant manner. By starting with these concepts rather than taking hexes and CRTs as given, he created a unique and rewarding game that not only tells us something about the battle, but about the era itself.

Another game that fits the bill is Silent War from Compass Games. Brien Miller wanted to capture the operational aspects of the US submarine war in the Pacific during the Second World War in a solitaire game, and he succeeded marvelously. The system is a complete departure from the standard wargame fair, and uses innovative systems to model the relevant aspects of the conflict.

Other designers that deserve mention for their willingness to venture into new realms include Mark Herman, most noted for designing the first card-driven game, he remains, in my opinion, the only designer to do it well. However, my favorite design of Herman’s is one where he is actually credited as developer, Next War. Joseph Miranda also gets a nod in being one of the few designers who recognizes the role that Politics plays in conflict.

The Sum of All Beers (and Pretzels)

Last year saw the publication of well over a hundred board wargames. The years preceding saw a comparable number released. Many of these titles crossed my desk at Fire & Movement. I wish I could say that I thought things were changing, but I don’t think that they are. In fact, the crop of games in 2006 and 2007, compared to 2005, may have gotten a bit poorer overall by the criteria I’ve defined. I’m currently mulling over the list of games published in 2007 for the International Gamers Awards, and frankly I’m hard pressed to pick one that I think deserves the award.

Most publishers seem just as capable of publishing dreck as they are gold. I can only think of two established publishers and one newcomer that seem to maintain a high level of quality consistently. And yes, I’m going to remain coy about whom they are, but all three have been mentioned in this article.

I also must admit that I found this piece difficult to write. One of my editorial policies at F&M has been that reviewers review what comes in the box. My firm belief, and one I’ve taken more than a little flak for, is that the designer had his say when he put the game in the box. I had mine when I wrote the original Paradigm articles. Yet I’ve felt that, while reading through the various commentaries both positive and negative, more than a few folks simply weren’t getting it. Then again, more than a few folks have really liked games that I thought were dismal junk, some of which even won awards. C’est la vie.

Crime of the Century

2008-12-04T04:39:00.000-08:00

A Story of Suckers, Dupes, and Crooks

A 700 billion dollar bailout and 318 billion dollars in stimulus packages; a trillion dollars above and in addition to the normal federal budget, all geared toward rescuing our economy. This is a number so huge that it defies our ability to truly conceive of just how big it actually is. The entirety of our national net public debt is just over five trillion, to give that number some perspective.

So how did we get here in the first place? The answer is complex, and, sadly, is a tail of gross incompetence and criminal mismanagement. Yet it is critical that people understand how this happened. Therefore, allow me to guide you on a journey through some basic economics, some history, and some dot connecting.

Expectation, the Foundation of a Stable Economy

It is a basic tenet of economics that the reason monetary policy works is because when the central bank announces a planned action, it actually does that action. Because the management of interest rates is a prime mover of how people invest in the economy, if people believe that the central bank will do what it says it will do, they will behave according to the announced policy. There is a temptation, then, for a central bank to make an announcement, and then not follow through. This sort of behavior frequently happens in countries experiencing financial difficulties in order to get a short-term alteration in investment and spending behavior; usually where the central bank is controlled by the government. However, once the trust in the word of the bank is broken, uncertainty is introduced, as expectations can no longer be counted upon. At that point the economy begins to break down.

That expectations drive behavior is important to understand in the context of the current economic crisis. When the Fed announces an alteration in interest rates, our expectation is that said alteration will take place, thus, there is a great deal of trust in the American banking system.

For people in the US who are currently approaching retirement age or have already retired, the expectation throughout their business life has been that the return on safe investments, such as government bonds, savings and loans, and bank CDs, will be between 6 and 8 percent. This rate is essentially the Fed rate plus 2 percent. Because these investments were considered safe, people concentrated wealth in these investments in such a way that they could live on the interest returns in retirement, hopefully without digging into principal too much, and thus leaving an endowment to their next generation. These investments were made based upon the expectation that the returns on these investments would remain consistent.

The Tricky Business of Controlling Inflation

Those of you old enough to remember the 1970’s may remember a term coined in that era: stagflation. Up until that period, monetary policy was largely set based upon a device called the Phillips Curve. The Phillips Curve was a product of Keynesian economic thought, and held that there was a persistent negative relationship between unemployment and inflation. As one went up, the other went down.

The economic shock of the oil embargo during that decade caused a circumstance in which both inflation was high and growing, and so was unemployment; a situation which, according to the Phillips Curve, could not happen. As a result, economists such as Milton Friedman strongly criticized the use of government intervention to control the economy, and advocated a return to more market based economics. This situation gave rise to the monetarists, whose prime motivation in monetary policy was to control inflation. Those who remember the Volker recession of the 1980’s will recall that this was a recession induced by the Federal Reserve Bank solely in an effort to reduce inflation.

Since that time, the Fed has used monetary policy almost exclusively to keep inflation in check. Occasionally it would use interest rates to create economic stimulus, but only so long as inflation did not rise as a result.

The problem, of course, is how do you measure inflation? It is done by measuring changes in the price of a certain basket of goods that consumers typically purchase, called the Consumer Price Index. And here is where we experience our first disconnect between the Fed and consumers. The CPI is based upon the consumption of urban dwellers only. Furthermore, it is not strictly a cost of living index, but includes the prices of recreational and electronic goods, which have a known negative cost to value relationship. Thus, the increase in the cost of bread and milk is offset by the decrease in the cost of that computer you purchased two years ago. Thus, while you and I watch our rent, food, and medical costs climb through the roof, the inflation rate appears to remain low.

Some studies have shown that if inflation were measured today using the same basket of goods as used in the 1970’s, we would be experiencing double digit inflation. (A good article on why this is can be found at: http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2008/04/cpi-understates-inflation.html).

Because of the perception that we have had very little inflation in our economy, the Fed has been all to happy to stand on the economic accelerator by keeping interest low, pretty much since the mid-1990’s.

The Housing Boom (As in “Here, Hold This Grenade”)

It’s oft been said that the American dream is to own a home. In bygone years, it’s a dream typically reserved for people who are able to save. But when inflation rates are low, money is cheap and there is an abundance of it to lend. When money stays cheap, borrowing becomes easier, barriers to entry get lowered, and speculators enter the market. Under these conditions, prices rise.

In our case, money stayed cheap, and as a result housing boomed. Because the interest rates were set by the Fed at such low levels for such an extended period of time, people began to conceive of housing not as a long term investment in their family’s future, but as a short-term commodity investment based upon the anticipation that housing prices would continue to rise. And rise they did over a period of a number of years. Some houses saw as much as a doubling of price in only a few years, a tripling in less than ten.

Because of the confluence of the tremendous rise in the price of homes combined with the over-abundance of cheap loans and available cash, loans began to be structured in more and more creative (read riskier) ways. Hence the rise of stated-income (i.e. no disclosure of actual income) and interest only (until that bubble payment hits) loans. Such loans were made with the understanding that no-one would be in them for the long term. They were made exclusively on the speculation that housing prices would continue to rise.

Leveraging: Keep the Money Flowing

At this stage in the narrative a critical term must be explained; the concept of leveraging. Leveraging is essentially the borrowing of money for purposes of investing that money someplace in which the interest rate is higher than that at which it was originally borrowed. How much a bank is leveraged is a measure of how much it has borrowed for this purpose above its actual net worth.

In the case of the housing market, investment banks were borrowing money in order to invest it in the mortgage industry. Because low interest rates created a tremendous incentive to purchase housing, investment banks would borrow money at even lower rates to provide more available funding for home loans.

Here’s where we arrive at our first moral hazard. The incentive to maximize the return on these investments created an incentive to provide loans to riskier home purchasers because they could be charged a slightly higher interest rate. These riskier loans offset the lower rate loans, and thus made the overall mortgage backed investments look on the whole a lot better than they actually were. And, because of the influx of lendable cash, mortgage brokers were incentivized to generate borrowers and thus create loan deals that appeared attractive in the short-term and provide them to people who had utterly no hope of paying the loans in the long-term. It was simply expected that they could sell the property at a higher price in the very near term before they ran into problems.

Talk is Cheap, but Your Money is Worthless

So where did the investment banks get all this money to pump into mortgage backed investments? Remember all the folks at the beginning of this narrative who had invested all their lives in safe places?

When the interest rates are lowered, returns on investments like CDs and so forth also go down. This is not so bad if the rates are lowered for a short period, but when they stay low over a period of years, the returns that retirees expected to live on go down. In this case, way down. Those who invested all their lives expecting to see a return of 6 or 8 percent actually saw returns of around 2 percent. That 60 or 70 thousand a year they expected to retire on is now around 20. So people who made these investments are left with a stark choice: either eat away at the principle or find a new place to invest.

When interest rates are low, money has no value, thus it’s difficult to find safe places to invest that will pay a return worth the trouble. Because retired people have no capacity to recover losses, the stock market is no option. Their only option was the only game in town: IRAs.

An IRA, or Individual Retirement Account, is a form of retirement account that offers certain tax advantages, and gives the investor some control over where their funds are invested. And, dressed up as a bond investment, was the only high-paying secure rated investment around: mortgage-backed securities. Some IRA accounts were vested as highly as 80 percent in these securities.

Which gets us to our first mystery of criminal proportion. These investments were all rated AAA by the rating companies. This is despite the fact that in order to get the leveraged returns, the return rate depended upon the provision of riskier home loans to people whose only hope of staying solvent was a continued housing boom and the sale of their home within a year or two.

Unfortunately for investors, this information was either not disclosed, or obscured by the exuberance of salesmen anxious to cash in on the boom.

Expectation: Another Word for Trust

So let’s recap from the perspective of the safe investor. After working all of his adult life and investing steadily in safe places with the expectation that the return would be a consistent 6 to 8 percent, finds at the end, when he can no longer recoup losses, that his returns are no longer high enough to continue to live on.

But still trusting in the system, our safe investor seeks an alternative place to put his nest egg and finds it in IRAs vested heavily in mortgage backed securities disguised as bonds. They are rated AAA by rating agencies, so he has no need to fear volatility because he has an expectation that the ratings are trustworthy.

Nevertheless, the entirely predictable housing bubble collapse occurs, as the risky loans begin to turn into foreclosures. As this begins to happen, returns on investments in mortgage backed securities decline as the higher risk/higher interest loans begin to default. And what happens when the returns begin to decline? Divestiture by short-term investors (these folks are not our retirees, but money movers playing the markets).

Very rapidly we start to see bank failures. One must ask at this stage why the decrease in returns in a single market, mortgage backed securities, could have such a profound affect on the solvency of banks. As it turns out, it’s due to leveraging. Typically your local depository bank only leverages a maximum of fifteen times its net worth, usually in a broad portfolio. But as it turned out, investment banks such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, etc. were leveraged out as much as 35 times their net worth, mostly in mortgage backed securities. If that’s not bad enough, Freddie Mac was leveraged 70 times its net worth. By leveraging themselves so far into a single market, these investment banks were left holding the bag once the investment returns began to decrease and divestiture accelerated.

By now the trust of our secure investor has been violated three times: first by the expectation on return to his initial investment due to the past behavior of the Federal Reserve, next by the investment rating houses, then by the investment banks themselves. But then it really starts to get ugly.

And complicated. The first investment bank to have trouble is Bear Sterns. As we all know, they were the first to receive a federal bailout, setting up a new expectation. When the bailout occurred, bond values held though the firm actually increased in value. But then came Lehman Brothers.

Lehman Brothers was the next investment bank to experience liquidity problems, but in their case, the federal bailout was not forthcoming. Investors who saw what happened at Bear Sterns had reason to feel safe with the expectation that if anything happened to their investment bank, they would get bailed out as well. They were wrong. Here’s where things get complex… and murky.

The composition of the bonds is not only mortgage backed securities, but all kinds of other debt as well, such as student loans, and so forth. Thus, a bond can hold pieces of many different forms of debt, and many different instances of those debts. This is further complicated by the fact that portions of these bonds can be divided among several investors. There is no real visibility by the investor into exactly what the composition of the bond is.

The value of these bonds is stated as a mark to market. The stated value in the case of mortgage backed securities is the current appraised market value, which in this case, is the value of the cash revenue of people making payments. Because of that usage, the real value of these securities is continually in flux. If they go up, it was a good year and the government collects taxes. If they go down, they become write-offs. When the higher-risk mortgages began to default, the mark to market value of those securities went to zero. That does not mean that there is no asset, the house still exists after all and has some value, but because the borrower had stopped making payments, the value of the security became nothing.

When the mark to market value of those securities went to zero, Lehman Brothers experienced a liquidity problem. In other words, it no longer had enough cash to cover its debt obligations (that of the investor). For reasons that still remain a mystery, the US government apparently used a magic eight-ball to determine whether these investments were worth protecting. When no bailout was forthcoming, Lehman Brothers went into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and sold the assets to an investment group at eight cents on the dollar.

The investment group then turned to the insurer, since these bonds were, after all, insured, to make up the other 92 cents. The insurance company defaulted. By now we all know that the government then bailed out insurance giant AIG to the tune of 160 billion dollars. What we don’t know is where that bailout money went. Those who were invested in Lehman Brothers are getting nothing. Their bonds still have some value, but no one is too excited about cashing in at eight cents on the dollar. Meanwhile, the insurance and investment groups are now engaged in an exercise in trying to figure out exactly what the value of the securities actually is. Remember how mark to market values are determined? The process could take years and those unlucky enough to have had expectations of consistent government behavior can do nothing but sit on their hands and hope the process gets resolved. Meanwhile, ninety percent of their investment in AAA bonds has evaporated.

Trust violation number four is the failure of government to act consistently in its bailout policy, causing people to leave their investments alone when divestiture at a higher value would have been a sounder move. Trust violation number five is the bailout of insurance companies who then continue to default on the assets which they insured with no government directive to the contrary.

Solve the Problem: Screw the People

One critical element to remember in all of this is that a huge portion of our national savings resides in pension plans and retirement accounts. This is money that typically seeks safe investments. Why that is is easy to understand: once you retire you cannot recoup losses. The owners of these assets have had their trust in the system violated on a monumental scale. And now they see that in order to fix the system, unheard of amounts of money are being handed to the very people who violated their trust in the first place. It’s simply astonishing that anyone wonders why there is no credit available. When every safe investment has been taken away, then huge portions of asset portfolios are bilked, and perpetrators are handed huge sums of money in reward, what could possibly be a motivation to reinvest in the system?

Sadly, you’re not going to find many details of this event in the American press. Simply stated, American journalists are not sophisticated, educated, or even smart enough to put any of this together. Sadly, you’ll have to look to the foreign news sources like the London Times to find the details of all this.

At any point in time the Federal Reserve Chairman could have put a stop to this by bringing interest rates back up to a reasonable level. Instead, now they’ve lowered them even further, and soon to be lowered to zero. Not surprisingly, it’s not working. The federal government is pumping a trillion dollars into bailouts and stimulus packages. It, too, is not working and is unlikely to.

The reason is all too obvious. Our economy is in this situation due to either colossal incompetence or through colossal corruption; more likely a colossal amount of both. The only real solution is the restoration of trust, and trust requires accountability. So far we have had none of that.

The people who rated mortgage backed securities as AAA bonds either committed fraud or were criminally negligent. They need to be held accountable.

The Federal Reserve Chairmen who continued to keep interest rates ridiculously low over such long periods despite fore-knowledge that the CPI grossly underestimates the actual rate of inflation in the cost of living, and that these rates were causing a runaway boom in the housing industry should be investigated for corruption and held responsible for driving retirement savings out of secure investments and into investment banks.

The investment bank captains who leveraged their firms way beyond a reasonable amount (and paid themselves ridiculous salaries to boot, see this piece on Robert Rubin: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122826632081174473-lMyQjAxMDI4MjA4MzIwNjM2Wj.html) violated the trust of their investors and must be held accountable.

The politicians who only two years ago were praising Freddie Mac, and legislated the seeds of this fiasco are just as, if not more, responsible than anyone else by cheering on the train wreck while it was happening instead of taking steps to halt it. And now they think the solution is to increase our net national debt by 20 percent in one fell swoop and hand the windfall to the very people who put us here to begin with.

Expectations are the key to a stable economy, and only trust in the system allows for reliable expectations. If we expect the system to be untrustworthy, and at this stage that should be exactly our expectation, then our economy cannot recover. Trust is the problem and accountability is the solution. So long as there is none of the latter, there will be none of the former.

A Farewell to Fire & Movement

2008-11-14T04:37:00.000-08:00

This year saw a long, eventful, encouraging, and frustrating summer. Lots of good things have happened to me this year. I got to brief the assistant Secretary of State, Paula DeSutter on deterrence, got to do presentations at several conferences and universities, and managed to get through my qualifying exams in one piece.

But along with the good things has come a fair amount of frustration, much of it having to do with being Editor of Fire & Movement magazine. To be frank, F&M has been a bit of a strange ride from the outset. On the one hand, it’s opened several doors and allowed me to network and become friends with a number of people whom I’d not have met otherwise. It’s given me a voice in the hobby, and, to some extent, in the milieu at large. For that alone it’s been a great experience.

But right from the start, it was clear that the magazine came equipped with a fair amount of baggage. In my early efforts to try and convince publishers to send review copies of games there was a fair amount of resistance. Many were convinced that, because they had already sent games in the past that never actually got reviewed, their games were going directly into Decision Games’ used game store Desert Fox. Others had their own reasons for not wanting to participate owing to some past disagreement with the publisher. One game publisher even threatened to sue me personally if I so much as mentioned his company in the pages of the magazine.

Despite these early problems, I pushed on with my agenda of trying to get better content. As a result of these efforts I managed to get articles from such people as Thomas P.M. Barnett of Pentagon’s New Map fame, and Dr. Richard Andres, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, the highest ranking civilian in that service. Yet, while I thought such pieces would make a big difference, from my perspective as editor they were hardly noticed. Some folks commented on Barnett’s piece, no one even mentioned Andres’s. Instead, though, we got flak for including articles that updated older games, or complaints about one page of basic wargame tactics in each issue.

But the proof of whether or not the effort was paying off would be in circulation growth. As of this day I have no idea what the circulation of F&M is, whether it’s grown, contracted, or just stayed the same. The one thing I’ve learned about working with Decision Games over the past several years is that they are an information black hole. Around three of four issues into my editorship I wanted to run a survey to try and solidify the direction of the magazine. I wrote the survey and got DG to put in a blow-in card for responses. I never got a single piece of information on that survey. DG kept it all.

But my experiences with them are certainly not unique, and apparently not as bad as some other’s, relatively speaking. Whatever stains the publisher may have on their record, they transfer easily. Although I’ve never been an employee of Decision Games, and have acted strictly as a contractor throughout my editorship or any other of my dealings with them, the stigma of it remains.

F&M was frequently regarded as a Decision Games house organ. This was a perception I struggled mightily to overcome, yet it persists despite numerous issues that had no DG content at all, or had negative reviews of their games. But if it were just that, I wouldn’t care.

There are (let’s now say “were”) a few publishers that, despite not sending review games to F&M, I felt deserved to be covered in F&M’s pages nevertheless. Primary among those was MMP. In the past I’d purchased, or a reviewer purchased, an MMP game for purposes of F&M review. We were happy to do it. At one point, however, I was trying to convince Brian Youse to provide us with review copies, when in stepped an individual accusing me of double standards because DG didn’t send him a free game to review for Paper Wars. DG has a rather dumb policy of not sending out review copies of anything with retail value over $100.00, one that I had nothing to do with and that applied to F&M as well. This individual went so far as to accuse me of colluding with DG on the matter. (The same individual showed up in the International Gamer Awards forum cautioning against including me because I was a “DG employee.”) Suffice it to say we never got any review copies from MMP. I still have the utmost respect for their work and believe that they are one of the premier publishers in the industry. But I stopped purchasing their games for review, nevertheless. The pettiness of the event left a bad taste.

Unfortunately it didn’t stop there. In later issues of F&M I started a column called Scenarios, which was to contain new scenarios for popular games. Scenarios for Memoir ’44, ATS, and Gunslinger have appeared in the column so far. I had hoped to include an ASL based scenario or two as well, as I know that many of F&M’s readers are ASL enthusiasts. Despite several attempts, we never got one. What I did get though was a midnight phone call from a fanatic member of the Southern California ASL Group, who accused me of being a “Decision Games thief” and expressing his disgust at my audacity in requesting a scenario from their group. That was on top of the letter I received from an officer of the group claiming that several members had raised concerns about my request owing to my and Decision Games questionable business practices, and as a result was banned from their little cabal. All that for offering to run one of their scenarios in the F&M scenario column; apparently F&M is beneath the dignity of ASL, which I gather has ascended to some higher plain of gaming existence, which low-lifes such as myself can only aspire to. Some lucky fellow got my entire ASL collection a few weeks later for the happy sum of 800 dollars.

Finding content for the magazine was always a challenge, and I was never entirely happy with what we got. The quality of the reviews was uneven, as were many of the features. A lot of folks don’t want to hear this, but this hobby has lost a lot of its brain trust, and many designers are simply coasting or copying. But they’re also a persnickety bunch. Writers often expected that, after sending me four or five versions of their work over the course of months, I had some magic sorting method to keep track of it all. And when something went in that was not current, I’d get an earful, sometimes in public. The problem of version management was complicated by the fact that any related online content went through DG, and they had, understandably, little interest in maintaining a version history. Had I not needed the content so badly, I’d have rejected any second draft with a note saying “submit when you’re done!”

Sadly, rejecting pieces was something I wish I could have done more of (yes, I ended the sentence with a preposition. Deal with it). The largest portion of my time as editor was not doing editing, but complete rewriting. Sorry to say that many folks out there don’t write anywhere near as well as they think they do; some don’t write at all. Despite the urge to reject, I was often struggling to get content right up to deadline.

But when you get right down to it, F&M was, for me, a charity. I got paid the whopping sum of $550.00 per issue. Out my own pocket I paid for layout, art, review game shipping, and comp copy mailing to contributors and publishers. DG would supply me with about a dozen issues, about all of which I would mail out to folks who contributed in some way. When I got done with all of the expenses, I was pretty much doing it for free, occasionally even paying for the privilege.

As of last month Decision Games decided that they would no longer support F&M with review copies of S&T or WaW magazines. What’s more, it’s no longer even advertised in their dispatches (at least I couldn’t find it). Over the course of my editorship I’ve tried to get advertisers into the magazine. Despite sending several their way, they closed the deal on none of them. So I’m forced to ask myself, if the publisher doesn’t care, why do I?

For me, the downside of F&M now outweighs the upside. To their credit, DG never tried to influence my editorial direction or force me to put in or alter content. But the fact is that with the baggage must come at least some commitment to see it succeed. That commitment appears to be gone. F&M was a great experience, but it is an experience that for me must come to an end.

I resigned as editor of Fire & Movement effective as of issue 150, meaning I will submit two more issues before departing. I wish whoever takes over the best of success and I’ll be happy to help them out in any way I can.

As for the future, who knows? I have a couple ideas I’m kicking around, but it’s hard to imagine any print venture having much success given the Internet. We’ll see.

CyberWar: A Threat Worth Considering

2008-09-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

In the May 31 issue of the National Journal there was a report that speculation is growing throughout defense and security establishments that the recent blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, which occurred shortly after the US Navy demonstrated its ability to shoot down a satellite, was in fact caused by hackers emanating from China, specifically the PLA.

One can never be certain whether reports such as this are simple hysteria, or are based upon real evidence. Another rumor that circulated recently in the Pentagon was that the Southern California wild fires that destroyed so much near San Diego were actually set by Al Qaeda. As someone who spends a fair amount of time looking at terrorism data, I’d place that rumor in the possible but unlikely bin.

But the hacking rumor seems like it may have more substance. According to Tim Bennett, former president of the Cyber Security Industrial Alliance, U.S. intelligence officials have claimed that the PLA gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the Northeaster U.S. Forensic systems analysis had confirmed that the sources was indeed the PLA.

Bennett’s claim was corroborated by a second information security expert, who said that the intention was probably to map the power system, but accidentally triggered the blackouts when they succumbed to a “what happens if I pull on this moment.”
Map the power system? Now why would they want to do that? The less paranoid may say that it’s because the Chinese have large infrastructure problems of their own and wish to learn how we do it. I suppose that’s reasonable enough, but it seems to me there’s plenty of ways to get our help on that legitimately. What’s more, then why would it be done by the PLA?

The Chinese have a tradition of asymmetric warfare, and have invested heavily in cyberwarfare initiatives. DoD and other government agencies have reported huge spikes in cyber attacks on all of their systems, as hackers attempt to gain access and compromise security. This is information that I can personally verify in that I’ve heard these claims come directly from the senior leadership of the Air Force.

But this information is not compartmentalized in the halls of the Pentagon. Representative Jim Langevine said that his staff has examined several hacker networks and claims that the results have shown that China is the primary concern for invasive hacking on American systems.

But the handiwork of Chinese hackers has not been limited to government. The private economic sector has been hit especially hard by cyber attacks. Businesses have related stories in which their Chinese counterparts already knew all of their bottom line positions and would open negotiations there. In 2007, while visiting Beijing, clandestine spyware programs were discovered on devices used by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez that were designed to remove information from those systems.

Stephen Spoonamoore, CEO of Cybrinth, a computer security firm, claims that executives from the Fortune 500 companies had document stealing code planted on their computers while traveling in China.

The attacks on the civilian sector have not gone unnoticed in Washington either. Because most of the infrastructure in the U.S. is privately owned, the government finds it difficult to compel operators to better monitor systems. Of further concern is that much of the security software unitized is designed by others, often off-shore. The concern is that the existence of backdoors or other problems may not become known until after the damage has been done.

The defense department declared for the first time in 2007 that attacks against U.S. Government sites have come largely from China. In March, Air Force General Kevin Chilton, chief of U.S. Strategic Command claimed that the Pentagon has its own cyberwar plan. In a statement to the Senate Armed Service Committee he asked appropriators for an “increased emphasis” on cyberwarfare in order to conduct “network warfare.” Currently the Air Force is in the process of setting up Cyberspace Command, comprised of 160 individuals at a handful of bases.

The issue has not escaped notice by the President. President Bush has crafted an executive order to layout out a broad plan to shore up government network defenses. This ambitious plan comes with an ambitious price tag of 30 billion dollars (the entire budget of Homeland Security is 50 billion).

Unfortunately, “The U.S. government doesn’t really have a policy on the use of these techniques,” says Michael Vatis, former director of the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center. “They take place, and people have strong suspicions…. But as long as they’re not able to prove it, there’s very little that they can do about it. And so there’s often not as much outrage expressed.” I think this attitude is unfortunate, but it’s common. Because I spent a dozen years doing professional programming, I know several well placed IT professionals in industry and government. Few if any feel that there’s a significant threat.

Yet, if Chinese hackers are able to map our energy grids, and then shut them down by hacking into our systems, one has to wonder what else they’ve accomplished. It seems foolish that this threat should be taken as lightly as it is by the civilian sector especially.

In their now infamous book Unrestricted Warfare, by PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, the point is made unequivocally that cyberwarfare is an essential part of Chinese conflict planning with the United States. Russia has also shown the effectiveness of Cyberwarfare in their recent trysts in Eastern Europe. All of this begs the question, why is Cyber Command composed of only 160 people?

In the last round of SBIR RFPs issued by the DoD, there are several initiatives to find ways to train people on the threats of hacking and cyberwarfare. But unfortunately, no initiatives were present for training on how to combat it, or, more importantly, how to incorporate offensive and defensive cyber warfare measures into doctrine, planning, or strategy. So far it seems that the approach to cyber warfare is underdeveloped at best, criminally negligent at worst.

To relate all of this to wargaming, it seems to me that if the old SPI were around today, this is a warfare topic they’d be tackling. Joseph Miranda has made some efforts to design abstract games on the topic, but few seem that interested. This is unfortunate. Cyberwar may in fact be the number one warfare methodology in the 21st century, affecting us economically and socially, not to mention militarily. And, given the technological dependence of today’s armed services, it seems to me it should be a top concern for those involved in defense planning.

Lately I’ve seen several talented designers show interest in designing new games on NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict of the 1980s. I don’t get it. We stand on the verge of new vistas in the development and advancement of modern conflict doctrine, yet our best minds are preoccupied with the war that never happened. Our hobby has a legacy; one that placed our best designers of the 1970’s and ‘80s into professional positions of planning the real thing. Where is that legacy of designers today?

Cyberwar, it appears, is a reality, and one that is much more significant and threatening than most of us probably imagined. I encourage you, whether designer or player, to think about how we can incorporate cyberwarfare into our gaming lexicon. Someone, clearly, has to do it. Why not us?

Fourth Generation Warfare and All That

2008-09-03T04:34:00.000-07:00

There is a debate out there as to whether the notion of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) as a theory is of any value. Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II recently published an article entitled Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths (http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/Pubs/display.cfm?pubID=632), in which he criticizes the idea quite emphatically. I contend that he and others miss the point.

I’ve read a fair amount of the 4GW literature, and to be honest, I’ve never considered it to be a theory, and by the strictest definition, it isn’t. From my perspective, it’s little more than a mnemonic used to describe general yet significant changes in the way warfare is conducted given the evolution of the international system (to include such things as globalization, modernization, proliferation, and whatever other “ations” you care to include). I think as a definition for that sort of concept, 4GW fares well enough.

To my mind, this is where Echevarria really falls down in his analysis. By elevating 4GW to the status of theory, from which, supposedly, we can derive propositions, generate hypotheses, test, and thus infer new conclusions, he undermines his own critique.

Broadly speaking, the crux of his argument is that 4GW as a theory (which it isn’t) is flawed primarily because is rests upon a poor understanding of history; the fallacy of nontrinitarian warfare, and the myth of Westphalia. To my mind this is sort of like saying that the theory of relativity is flawed because it rests upon the misconception of Newtonian physics. My point being that for relativity, the conception of Newtonian physics is irrelevant.

Echevarria claims that nontrinitarian warfare is a non-concept because trinitarian warfare is present in all forms of conflict and therefore is a non-concept in and of itself. The problem here is that the context from which Clausewitz was coming was that the only entities that mattered in the international system were states, who behaved as unitary actors (this concept is obviously borrowed from Realism, but it is applicable nevertheless). When he is referring to directing war towards some end, he is discussing war qua war in the political context. What 4GW conceives of as nontrinitarian warfare is the violation of the concept that war is being conducted for the political ends of the state. What people thinking in terms of 4GW are seeing in this context is the combination of weak governance and globalization/modernization pressures that have allowed the advent of non-state actors who conduct warfare in the transnational arena for transnational ends. While this sort of thing is not so new in the broad construct of history, it is certainly new to our era.

Echevarria then goes on to say that 4GW fails because it apparently relies on the notion that the modern state system sprung from the loins of Westphalia overnight. Why it would depend upon this being so he doesn’t explain. What’s more, I’m not aware of any such claim in the 4GW literature that I’ve read. I think this point is, frankly, a bit silly.

But the thing is, aside from the two cases above, Echevarria really doesn’t seem to have much to say about what 4GW is actually doing wrong. He makes the wild claim that anyone using the term is undermining their own credibility, but he makes no real case to substantiate it, and frankly the statement smacks of pettiness. He makes a brief case for the inaccurate prediction of 4GW analysts that non-state actor groups, rather than executing “Judo throws” are instead providing public goods to the groups they claim to represent. Somehow he seems to think that this very act he describes as contrary to the 4GW claim that non-state actor groups try to undermine government, does not in fact undermine government. Frankly, I can’t think of a better “Judo throw” than for a non-state actor group to provide a public good that the established regime cannot or will not provide.

In one paragraph he describes the use of traditional weapons used in Rwanda and Sudan as things that 4GW fails to account for. Yet this failure in accounting is simple to explain when you consider that 4GW as a concept is strictly Amerocentric, which is to say that it is addressing the asymmetric threat environment of the US, not the symmetric environment internal to third world countries. He also makes, what I think, is a serious gaff when he tries to say that 4GW’s assertion that US capabilities are designed to operate in the nation-state framework is incorrect because in the past the US has successfully operated under the constraints of alliances. It is clear that Echevarria does not understand that this is a level of analysis issue, and that alliances are part of the nation-state construct. What 4GW is saying here is that the US capabilities are ill-suited to deal with non-state actors, which they are, largely due to political constraints, but also due to issues involving the military industrial complex.

In his discussion of the third incarnation, he describes the sequencing of generations of warfare as artificial. Of course it is. If we were to take that as invalidation, then every theory we’ve ever held would be invalidated. But what he seems to misunderstand is that the generational concept is largely applicable to the evolution of doctrine more than anything else, and I think that evolution is quite distinguishable.

Finally, Echevarria makes several statements as counters to 4GW that are, frankly, empirically questionable. His insinuation of the relationship between terrorism and globalization has not panned out in empirical work, he seems to conflate globalization with modernization, which are different concepts, and he seems convinced that a theory is set in stone the moment it is conceived.

I suppose by now you see that I’m not a big fan of this paper. That said, I think he makes one good point, which is that there are some who are trying to operate within the construct of 4GW as something separate from traditional insurgency. I believe this is a mistake. In fact, I think it is a mistake to promote 4GW beyond simple mnemonic device for describing the conditions of modern insurgency and terrorism, and thus the need to address them from a new doctrinal point of view. Constrained to that, I think 4GW is an important concept. But it does not rise to the level of a theory, in my opinion.

Violent Non-State Actors in the Middle Eastern Region

2008-08-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

Just had my paper, Violent Non-State Actors in the Middle Eastern Region, published in Small Wars Journal. Here's a link.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/mag/docs-temp/88-compton.pdf

Those interested in the topic may find it of interest, and I'd be happy to hear any feedback.

Here's the abstract:

The existing body of quantitative research concerning violent non-state actors is sparse at best. It is characterized by disparate definitions of non-state actor violence, and largely fails to discriminate between insurgency, civil war onsets, and terrorism. It also has conflicting theories and conclusions. Meanwhile, defining legitimacy in Arab governments and its affect on non-state actor violence is also problematic. In this paper I look strictly at non-state actor violence perpetrated by actors originating from Middle Eastern States. I use four separate data sources, including the ITERATE, RPC, World Development Indicators, and Witches Brew Homogeneity datasets to relate such factors as RPC, GDP, National Power, levels of instability, and societal homogeneity to examine the notion of opportunity and cause as factors in the advent of non-state violent actors. I find some support among this data for the notion that correlation exists between legitimacy of governance, societal homogeneity, perceptions of wealth inequality and legitimacy, and number non-state actor terror attacks.

Of Rebels and Selectorates

2008-08-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

This summer I’ve spent a lot of time reading and researching irregular warfare, especially in terms of presenting an operational level game that deals extensively with the subject, namely Millennium Wars Advanced. As much as I believe MWA is a breakthrough design, it’s also made apparent to me some of the limitations of trying to approach the subject from a two-player near-peer adversarial perspective.

One interesting book I read through this summer is The Rebel’s Dilemma by Mark Lichbach. The book is decidedly academic in approach, but it makes some interesting points. I looks at the formation of rebel groups from two theoretical perspectives. The first is a psychological one, as exemplified by Gurr’s Why Men Rebel. The gist is that perceived inequalities form cleavages which magnify into revolt at some point. The other is the Collective Action approach, in which rebellion is analyzed from the game theoretical perspective of prisoner’s dilemma. The first overstates the likelihood of rebellion, the other understates it.

The rebel’s dilemma is a simple one: how does he overcome the free-rider problem of collective action, whereas the government’s problem is to increase the difficulties in overcoming that hurdle.

This is an interesting starting premise for a game, one in which two players might vie, through cards or whatever, to increase or decrease the chances for rebellion. Interesting as that may be, it’s still fairly abstract with respect to actual issues on the ground. But more importantly, it fails to account for other issues.

Dr. Richard Andres makes an interesting point in his article The New Role of Air Strike in Small Wars: A response to Jon Compton. He states that, “counterinsurgencies are not won by U.S. armed forces, ground or air; they are won by indigenous governments.” While ultimately this statement is, I believe, true, the principle tool for dealing with insurgency must be military, at least in the short term. The proper handling of insurgency via military means can just as easily decrease chances for victory as poor political policy choices. So what we have is a three player perspective game: insurgent, political policy maker, and military operations control.

But there are further constraints. Rebels are not just constrained by the political capacity of the government they wish to overthrow, but also by the socio-economic and physical environment as well. Both the Rebel and the government can affect this environment, but it must be accounted for in a meaningful way. Is their capacity to recruit increased or decreased by the rising tide of expectations? The presence of more police on the corner? The strong-armed tactics employed by autocratic rulers?

But lest we think that the policy setter can set any policy he likes, we face yet another constraint, that which Bruce Bueno de Mesquita would call the selectorate, or the body of supporters who keep the regime in power. Typically the more autocratic ruler, the smaller the selectorate, the easier it is to gore their oxes with any reforms that may be put into place. So now we have four perspectives and an environment: The rebel, the policy setter, the military controller, and the selectorate. What a complicated web we weave.

So here’s a unique setup for a game. We have three separate decision making actors on the side of the status quo: the policy setter, the military controller, and the selectorate. Ultimately the game looks more and more political. The Policy maker must adjust policy to maximize the free-rider problem of the rebel, yet do so in a way that keeps the military loyal and the selectorate tolerant. The military commander must manage the rebels operationally in such a way that they don’t actually increase rebel support, while still doing enough proactively to demonstrate that they are in fact doing the wishes of the policy maker. The selectorate (which could include the military controller) must insure that the policy maker is maximizing their benefits at all times by applying pressure (the threat of support removal). Meanwhile, the rebel player must act to set one group off against the other, while manipulating the environment in such a way that it becomes less and less hospitable to the government.

Sounds like an interesting multiplayer game that I have no idea how design as a board game (as a computer game I’m full of ideas).Our treatment of this topic in the wargame industry has been sparse, and I think we might consider taking this topic more seriously. So who’s up to the task?

Black Swans

2008-07-29T04:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes seemingly unrelated conversations can come full circle and illuminate the bulb of fresh thinking. In a recent issue of F&M I penned a brief editorial about my experiences at a MORS conference. To my surprise, someone actually read it. Somewhat less to my surprise, that someone disagreed with my findings.

In the editorial I mentioned two related concerns that I had about the complete dependence of professional wargame designers on computers and the quality of research that was going into them. The first was the black box phenomenon, in which a user has to simply take the game qua training tool at face value. He has no way to know or verify that the assumptions, theories, and research in the game are valid. He may only use the interface and get a result.

The second was that some of the research I actually saw being incorporated was simply invented. Now presumably that was only a temporary situation, but, given concern number one above, how would I ever know? My basic point in the editorial was to shill for board wargames as a serious tool because they did not suffer from the lack of transparency problem, therefore could be evaluated for content as well as utilized for results.

The fellow I mentioned above who took some umbrage to my comments was Michael Ottenberg, Principal Military Operations Analyst for AT&T, currently working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and highly respected in the field. I was honored to find that he, in fact, had read Fire & Movement, and what is more, will be sending me a rebuttal piece for publication in the near future. I greatly look forward to that.

Mr. Ottenberg’s point of view was that the wargames that are produced in the field are highly researched and vetted affairs, and that cases where assumptions, theories, or research are simply made up don’t exist due to the levels of scrutiny involved. He and I discussed this point in some detail at a later MORS conference. Yet, another event occurred at this MORS conference that is of interest, but first I must regress a few years.

Sometime in 2005 I was sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture on how bureaucracies changed over time. To be honest, I don’t remember the lecture in enough detail to recount the theory. I can only remember thinking that whomever dreamed it up had never spent a day trying to get a piece of paper submitted at a local motor vehicles office. What was important about this lecture, however, was that I was so struck by how wrong I thought the theory was that a new one occurred to me on the spot. I coined it SHF Event Theory.

My theory was simple. Bureaucracies have a vested interest to remain unchanged. They must continually justify their existence, well beyond the period when the need for whatever public good they provide has ceased to exist. Thus, a bureaucratic institution remains monolithic, even though they exist in a dynamic environment. The longer it remains unchanged, the less relevant it becomes to the current status quo. What causes change are SHF Events. These are unpredicted, unanticipated major events that upset the system to such an extent that the inadequacy of the existing bureaucratic structure is revealed, and it is changed. Thus, the only thing that drives bureaucratic, and thus institutional change, is SHF Events.

At the time I had several other irons in the fire, so I shelved the idea for later development. Fast forward to the MORS conference where I’m sitting next to Michael Ottenberg watching a slide presentation on developing a discipline of study for wargaming, when a slide comes up showing a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is a book that Peter Perla has been recommending wargame designers and developers read for some time, and so, like a good soldier, I went to the book store and procured a copy. Much to my surprise and amazement, here was my SHF Event Theory applied not just to institutional change, but to the entire course of history. Taleb’s position is that all of history is not driven by previous events, but rather by, what he calls, black swans, or completely unpredicted, unanticipated major events that radically upset the system (sound familiar?).

This idea poses some interesting intellectual challenges. First of all, it puts our whole research paradigm in question. In predictive analysis, we depend entirely upon past data trends to predict the future. Even when we develop systems to model larger dynamic systems, we are faced with the inadequacy of using a closed system to model an open one (reality). Commonly when we utilize data in these systems we play statistical tricks, such as logging variables to reduce the effects of trending or multicollinearity, and particularly the biasing effects of outliers. Often, we drop these outliers altogether so that the model behaves “reasonably.” But if Taleb is correct, it is these very outliers that are driving the system. The sad truth is that we have no accepted way to deal with that. There are likely to be quants (“quants" are the loving term applied to folks who do quantitative research, such as myself) who will claim that they can be accounted for, but I challenge them to show me the econometric text that contains the method. Our complete inability to predict even the likelihood of a black swan event would demonstrate the inadequacy of such techniques. The truth is that we’re still largely using very complex methods to essentially say that “it’s sunny today so it will probably be sunny tomorrow.”

I’m still reading The Black Swan, so I don’t know what Taleb’s conclusions are going to be yet, but I can take a guess. For some time I’ve said that the quantitative vs. qualitative debate in academia and elsewhere has to be the stupidest disagreement I’ve ever witnessed. The two are symbiotic. Although black swans are probably not ever going to be predictable (after all, then they wouldn’t be black swans), we can reasonably anticipate where there are vulnerabilities to them. For instance, while we could not have predicted the events of 9/11, we certainly could have anticipated our vulnerability to such an attack. The work of anticipating these vulnerabilities can only be accomplished in the context of both qualitative and quantitative methods. What’s more, I think that wargaming offers a particularly good venue for doing exactly that. In fact, I think that wargaming, if given the opportunity, would excel at this particular task.

Unfortunately, we have some serious problems of our own to overcome. Let me regale you with a personal experience to demonstrate the point. Last year we at MCS Group submitted our game Battle for Baghdad to the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. Not only did we not place, we weren’t even allowed to compete. Why? Because Battle for Baghdad is a board game. Now we didn’t submit the game to the Serious COMPUTER Games Showcase and Challenge, and a careful reading of the entry restrictions mentioned nothing about the game having to be computerized. The implication is, of course, clear. A board game obviously is not considered a serious game. In fact, we were greatly encouraged by the panel to convert the game to computer and resubmit the next year. We’re not going to.

Battle for Baghdad is a game about various political factions (who control military and other forces) vying for control of the city of Baghdad during U.S. occupation. The entire point of the game is to be able to creatively deal with the other faction heads to negotiate or strong arm your way to your own particular factional goals, while maneuvering to prevent other factions from reaching theirs. The game simply cannot be done remotely on a computer without losing much of the point of it. All of this was completely lost on the panel. It wasn’t a computer game, so it wasn’t serious.

This is a serious case of, what I call, glass navel syndrome (you figure it out). Here is a group so completely married to a particular media that they can’t even acknowledge that some other media presentation may have something important to say; which is the same as the quant vs. qual debate. One thing I understood from Michael Ottenberg was that the games he works on and, by implication, that are generally done within the professional wargame industry, must have every assumption vetted with real data. The implication is that where data doesn’t exist, potential interactions are simply dropped or ignored. As a quant, I know that most data is incomplete, that we have relatively little data to work with on most things, and that often the data that we do have is simply crap. Therefore, games that must endure vetting to that extent must face severe limitations in their capacity to teach, but especially predict. Such must be especially the case when dealing with games that deal more with the social science end of the spectrum, as opposed to those that are modeling the impact of a guided missile.

The reality is that many of the things we seek to model in a wargame simply can’t be measured quantitatively. Battle for Baghdad is a prime example of this fact. The game relies entirely upon qualitative research, case studies, and regional history to synthesize its message. What’s more, Battle for Baghdad allows for the occurrence of black swans through creative play, which is something that will never happen no matter how many times you fire up your copy of Joint Operations.

As a community of practitioners I strongly believe that we have to abandon our particular methodology affiliations and become generalists, open to all methodologies: quantitative, qualitative, and even to black swans. Wargames are a hybrid methodology that dictates a broad spectrum approach. Not doing so leaves us vulnerable to SHF Events. And in case you’ve been wondering, it stands for Shit Hits the Fan.

The Demise of Secretary Wynne

2008-06-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

Recently I was privileged to witness a small piece of history. While visiting a friend at the Pentagon, I stood next to the office door of Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne as he left the building for the last time. After he left, and while all the rooms were still empty, I was given a quick tour of the offices. Surrounded by giant paintings of airpower, it was difficult not to reflect upon the current situation and how he got there.

My friend is Special Assistant to Secretary Wynne, Dr. Richard Andres, and once the Secretary had left, we sat down and had a long discussion on current topics. Rick and I have discussed our opinions on air power and the military many times before, and while I consider myself to be service agnostic, Rick is very much biased toward the Air Force, and I think with good reason.

Something I’ve often heard Rick say, and I believe he is correct, is that the Army does not understand air power. Often their plans minimize its use, and their after action reports under report its effectiveness. Case in point, the surge in Iraq. While sitting in Ricks E ring office, he asked me point blank whether or not I believed a 20% increase (or “surge”) in troop strength could really make much difference to the situation. It was obviously a baited question, but it wasn’t one I had to think about much. To my mind, the increase could not have been that effective; there had to have been some fundamental doctrinal change in order for that small an increase to have had the dramatic effect that it’s had. Prior to this discussion, I’d already been pondering the issue for some time.

Sadly, civilians like me who do not have a clearance are left to fend for themselves when it comes to gathering information. Between the coverage of American Idol contestants and Britney Spears’ mental condition, we’re occasionally treated to an update of what’s going on in the world. Taken at face value, all we ever needed in Iraq was an extra 20% troop strength and we’d have had the place stabilized years ago. Unfortunately the penetrating analysis of CNN only goes about that far, but the more discerning among us know that that cannot possibly be the whole story.

But the Army hasn’t helped the perception. According to them, those extra boots on the ground was all that it took to better stabilize the country. Petraeus has even said as much in his testimony to congress and in the reports he’s signed off on in the field. So here is where Rick drops the bomb.

Rick’s office was unconvinced. So they initiated an investigation to see exactly what had changed, other than boots on the ground. As is turned out, not only had the number of troops on the ground increased by 20%, but air strike missions had also increased by 400%. What’s more, air munitions released had increased by over 1000%, all since the beginning of the surge.

What had changed was clear. It wasn’t the extra boots on the ground that was turning the tide, it was the increase in HUMINT and the ability to hit a target with precision munitions from the air within a time frame of only 7 minutes. Gatherings as small as only 3 insurgents were being targeted for strikes, while predators and forces on the ground monitored the movements of any suspected insurgent. This aggressive doctrinal change was preventing insurgents from gathering, planning, and pulling off operations. It was classic COIN (COunter INsurgency) operations, conducted almost entirely from the air. But if we accept the Army’s version of things, it never happened.

One reason that I like to consider myself service agnostic is that I happen to think that service rivalries are counter productive to the national interest. This discussion so far is but one example. Once upon a time, the defense budget was stated simply as an amount, and the services then vied with one another for their slice of that pie. The role of the SECDEF was more or less an arbiter of the struggle. The various services consistently requested 30% over what was available in order to justify an increase in their share. Because oversight between the services and their budget allotments was scarce, there were many overlaps in procurement, each vying to accomplish the same mission. It wasn’t until Robert Strange McNamara and his controversial “Wizkids” that this inefficient and redundant process was overhauled in the 1960s. Vestiges of it still remain today. The most apparent are the service rivalries.

As I said earlier, Rick is fond of saying that the Army does not understand airpower. He’s right, they clearly do not; so much so that they are unaware of the role air power has and is playing in Iraq. Once the news of the percentage increases I mentioned earlier circulate more broadly, the Air Force will certainly rub the Army’s nose in it, further discouraging the Army from wanting to think about airpower.

I was not at the Pentagon just to visit with Rick. I also met with several folks in the Irregular Warfare office in PA&E, OSD (Program Analysis and Evaluation, Office of Secretary of Defense). I had a long discussion there with one old timer who was very direct about the current situation at the Pentagon. He related that the perception of the Air Force among the other services and civilians was that they were arrogant. So much so, in fact, that it was hampering communication and cooperation with them.

The Air Force has good reason to feel proud of itself. They command the largest share among the services of the defense budget, at just under 30%, their capability is unmatched by any other nation, they are perhaps the most progressive of the services in soliciting new warfighting ideas from the civilian sector, and, as they are now demonstrating, can put in place an array of sensors and firepower that is very effective at COIN operations.

Unfortunately, all of this has been done in a culture that appears to take its own prestige too seriously. The figures on percentage increases I mentioned earlier were not just compiled to help build a broad consensus picture of force effectiveness in Iraq, they were also done to discredit the Army’s take on the situation. That is the sort of thing the old timer in PA&E was talking about. However, I’m not letting the Army off the hook either. That they should not even consider the contribution of the Air Force in the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq can charitably be described as petty. At worst it should be described as damagingly misleading, especially for future doctrine planners.

In the news we are lead to believe that Secretary Wynne (and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley) was fired due to the mistaken shipment of nuclear detonators to Taiwan. This is nonsense.

Right now the Air Force has a problem. Its fleet of transports and tankers are aging and need to be replaced. However, the policy in Washington, or at least that of the SECDEF, is that we are at war, and that all procurement must be for the war effort. Instead of obeying the policy of the civilian head of the DoD, Wynne went to congress and advocated to update the fleet. I’d have fired him too.

Wynne is correct to want to replace the ageing fleet. However, the outside observer must ask a simple question: why wasn’t the Air Force dealing with this problem before now? Given that the Air Force commands the largest share of the defense budget, and given that it seems to have had the foresight and budget to develop and procure a fighter plane that not even our own Navy is capable of flying against in a world where the adversaries we’re actually fighting don’t even have an air capability, one wonders what is going on in the planning. Again, it comes down to prestige over substance. As early as the 1960’s, Enthoven and Smith in their book How Much is Enough identify the tendency of the services to develop and procure new items at the expense of the readiness of the inventory they already possess. The F-22 is a classic example of this tendency.

Although I felt privileged to be present at the Pentagon as Secretary Wynne departed the building for the last time, there is no doubt in my mind that he deserved to be fired. Under his watch he allowed a culture to exist that valued its own prestige over readiness and cooperation. He defied his civilian boss in order to improve readiness of the Air Force infrastructure while billions of dollars were sunk into a fighter that is, by most measures, unnecessary. Perhaps the new Air Force leadership can make headway, but only time will tell.

Groping for the New Paradigm, Part III: Process of Design

2005-10-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

Most of us involved in the hobby of wargaming for any extended period of time have developed a context of meaning that the hobby gives to our lives. Whether generated in defense of the hobby or arrived at through reflection, it’s something each of us has likely done.

Because the entire point of these articles is to spur new ideas and to see growth in the industry beyond the confines of those we already have, a brief discussion of the meaning of what we do, and why it’s necessary to define it, is appropriate.

The Meaning of Wargaming: A Personal Perspective

One of the oldest debates in our industry has been about the morality of wargaming. In its simplest form, we play games about the death and destruction of peoples and cultures. Taken on its face, it’s easy to see how such a simple definition of the hobby can raise the eyebrows, if not the hackles, of ordinary citizens.

But beyond that simplistic overview, there are deeper shades of moral grayness that reside within the hobby’s participants themselves. A soon to be published card-game about the War on Terror from Decision Games recently spurred some heated, if not vitriolic, discussion among hobbyists about the morality of publishing such a game, given the nearness of the subject matter to most of our lives. But such moral concerns within our own ranks are nothing new.

In my personal experience at GameFix magazine, when we released Greenline: Chechnya several letters came to our office questioning the morality of publishing such a game while the event was still occurring. The same thing happened at 3W when they released the original Arabian Nightmare in S&T. Other publishers can surely tell similar stories.

The issue of morality is valid to our purpose as a hobby in the sense that it is important that we understand why we do what we do, and have ready answers to such challenges when presented from outside our ranks.

I don’t pretend to offer a universal answer to this question, because each of us has developed our own moral compass, such that we must satisfy ourselves before we can satisfy others. But, I can express my own perspective.

Personally, the question of wargaming comes down to how you define entertainment. If we watch a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and enjoy it, does that mean we are anti-Semitic? Or watch and enjoy the latest action film mean we revel in the death and misery of others? To the majority of people the answer is clearly no, but there will always be a group that screams an unequivocal yes.

The sad part about those who say yes is that, in some cases, they’re correct. As a society we can take solace that in most cases they are not.
Wargaming is no different. Much as I might read a book on a subject dealing with conflict that provides some edification, which in turn, provides entertainment, so it is with wargaming. By competitively playing a wargame, I’m gaining interactive insight into some form of conflict, which, in turn, broadens my understanding of the human condition. The thing to be gleaned from the process of wargaming is the greater depth of comprehension of the nature of conflict. The application of that comprehension is the contribution I make to society in the form of political decisions, voting, discussion, and debate in the public forum.

Taken in that context, the question to me is no longer one of moral ambiguity, but rather one of a moral imperative. The new paradigm of which I speak is one in which we, as members of an industry, produce products that entertain within the context of providing a tool with which we, as members of society, can broaden our understanding of the nature of the world in which we live.

Such a definition of meaning comes with its own challenges. It entails that the subject be approached with a certain sensitivity to its purpose. I do not believe that that sensitivity can be meaningfully defined. Each game designer (and game player) must reach his own conclusion. Awareness of it, though, must reside firmly in the designer’s mind, because it can never serve our purpose to trivialize conflict in such a way that it alienates the hobby further from the rest of society.

Some Definitions

Wargaming cannot be described simply as an activity. To play a wargame, let alone play it well, is to engage in a process that occupies numerous mental faculties, including observation, integration, decision making, and action. This process was defined by Col. John Boyd, by his now famous OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, Loop). That these processes are part of the experience of wargaming make the activity qua hobby something well beyond the simple process of reading a book or watching a documentary about the particular subject.

Before I go into specifics about an approach to a specific topic, I’d like to define some terms and philosophies I hold regarding the matter.

First and foremost, as outlined in part one, I’ve never been comfortable with the definition of simulation in our hobby. That discomfort stems largely from my belief that a wargame not competitively played or competitively playable is of little value. To take that a step further, it’s not enough that I can play the game; but that others are willing to play it with me, and do so at a level that is challenging enough to give the experience some contextual meaning.

In that sense, the real value to be had from the experience of wargaming—the real insight to be gleaned—comes from the competitive play of the game. Thus, a wargame must function as game qua game. A simulation does not have this requirement. Much as we can derive an equation through a regression process that defines a curve, we can derive a system that represents an historical event. Such a system could accurately be called a simulation, but not a game. The primary object of a game must be the play thereof. Lose sight of that object, and the effort is wasted.

Second, now that parts one and two are published, I’d like to define what I mean by Groping for the New Paradigm. First, without wanting to appear too pedantic, a pair of word definitions (courtesy of Dictionary.com):

par·a·digm (pr-dm, -dm) n. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

grope (grp) v. To reach about uncertainly; feel one's way.

When I came up with the title of this piece, the reality was that I had no idea what the next model for wargame design would be. I still don’t. But I firmly believe it needs to be discovered. My intention was, and is, to define and expose the malaise that enshrouds our industry, and to point out some fertile fields of imagination in which better game designers than I can find a new muse. Thus….

Defining the Conflict

Lt. General Matthew B. Ridgeway recognized as early as the Korean War, that the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the future of warfare. In his book, The Korean War, he goes on to describe his recognition at the time of his taking over command of Western Forces in the Korean Peninsula, that there were limitations imposed on his actions there as commanding general that did not apply as recently as the previous decade. These limitations, he posited, would define the rules of engagement for future military conflict from that point forward.

Unfortunately, the US military establishment took its time recognizing the ramifications of General Ridgeway’s observation. While its strategic thinkers considered the next total war conflict with the Warsaw pact, the actual utilization of forces entailed more regional and limited engagement.

This failure precipitated the oft cited quagmire of Vietnam, in which the ultimate fruition of the disconnect between national policy and military planning became apparent, at the cost of 58,000 American lives.

I cut my wargaming teeth in the late 1970’s. My initial interest in high school in such games as Richtofen’s War and Panzer Blitz, gave way later to more topical games, such as The Next War and NATO. Had it not been for the games that dealt with the immediate reality of world in which I lived at the time, I doubt I would have stayed in the hobby beyond high school.

Looking back on those times, the paradigm for these games seemed readily apparent. Of overriding societal concern was fear of a Warsaw Pact invasion, rooted in our belief that the USSR firmly intended to export Leninist Marxism to the rest of the world. And given the economic trends of the time, such as the application of Keynesian Economic theory to fiscal and social policy, which was largely adopted my many elected western governments, there seemed good reason to fear.

But even as intelligence began to appear that indicated an invasion of the West was not a serious part of Soviet planning, the military establishment continued planning and preparation for a conflict that was becoming increasingly unlikely.

Not being privy to this intelligence, the wargaming community continued developing NATO/Warsaw Pact games as well.

With the collapse of the USSR and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it became readily apparent to anyone who cared to look, that the potential for a NATO/Warsaw Pact style total war conflict had faded into oblivion.

All the while, American forces were deployed in smaller, regional conflicts that weren’t reflected in the conventional planning of the military or the hobby. Prior to the 1992 Gulf War, at least three wargames were published modeling the upcoming conflict. How many of them predicted a 100-hour war? How many even allowed for the possibility? Given the systems employed in each of those games, was it even possible for such a short conflict to be modeled?

Why? Because while the world changed, designers failed to take notice. Twelve years later do we as yet have a game system that accurately models the doctrine of maneuver warfare employed by the US Marine Corps during the first Gulf War?

Today’s reality seems starkly different in contrast. The Third World War that we all feared would consume us in nuclear hellfire has arrived at last, and in a form no one in the mainstream predicted. Rather than the sweeping armored engagements on the plains of Europe, we find ourselves engaged in an asymmetric conflict that spans our entire globe, where the contenders never meet in the same place and are often difficult to define, and the battles are fought in isolated areas ranging from Manhattan Island to the caves of Tora Bora.

Meanwhile the most recent wargames held by our military posit an unnamed Asian force invading a small island off its coast, and a western military response that escalates into a full-scale confrontation that Mathew Ridgeway exposed in the 1950’s as unlikely to ever actually occur.

Over the past few years our hobby has released a handful of products that deal with regional conflicts or potential conflicts. But these games fail to address the larger, strategic issue, and as such, seem out of context. September 11, 2001, defined the stakes of the current global conflict in stark detail. The new paradigm of conflict for our time lies before us. Do we have any games in our lexicon that can predict, or even begin to model the new strategic reality?

The new doctrine of preemption in the War on Terror should offer fertile grounds for exploring the ramifications of such a policy, yet no games exist with which to do so. Surely the industry that produced The Next War, or Gulf War is up to the task of exploring the new reality in which the next generation of wargamers must live.

In the next few sections I’d like to demonstrate some ways we can approach this conflict.

Battlespace

The global conflict that is the war on terror is not fought on a battlefield that consists of forests, mountains, and swamps. Rather, it’s characterized by small conflict regions scattered across the globe. The more intense conflict zones occur in globally disconnected zones with little infrastructure. Nevertheless, short, sharp actions also occur in the form of terrorist attacks in metropolitan centers as well.

Yet, trying to visualize the battespace in those terms when trying to develop an environment in which to have a game is of small use. Physical geography has little impact on the strategic struggle, thus a playing surface that represents a world map of some sort may not be an appropriate choice. Further, it’s not terrain that makes fighting terrorism difficult, it’s the disconnected nature of the environment, i.e. the lack of infrastructure.

Thus, a playing surface that might more accurately reflect the nature of the conflict would be an abstracted representation of power centers in both the connected and disconnected regions of the world.

To better explain what I mean by this, a more thorough explanation of the battlespace in which this conflict takes place is necessary.

In my view, the War on Terror cannot be understood without seeing it in the context of globalization. The gap that lies between wealth and poverty today grows most greatly between globalized and non-globalized nations. Nations that have chosen a high degree of isolation have not become the hiding places for organized terror groups only by coincidence. The relationship there is a strong one.

So, just as we managed economic issues in the strategic games of the past, we must manage them in the games of the future as well. Thus, the conflict between what we perceive to be terror and civilization, is really a conflict between connection and disconnection; integration and isolation.

Certainly this is a simplification, or what we would more commonly call an abstraction, but it’s a relatively sound one upon which to model a game about the War on Terror. Using that abstraction as my basis, it is clear that the play environment must be abstracted into some grouping of regions. These regions must then be rated in some fashion that represents their level of infrastructure. Geographic elements are not significant in this context, and therefore should be excluded.

Control of these regions is determined through some system of economic connectedness. That level of connectedness can be affected by deliberate action (military intervention or terrorist attack), random event (elections), or increased levels of internal chaos (economic instability, revolution, coups).

During the course of play, players take actions that affect the connectedness of these regions to one another. In doing so, the broader context of the struggle begins to take shape. One in which we see that the War on Terror is more than the simple pursuit of isolated actors with suicidal tendencies by Western military power. Instead we can begin to understand the struggle for what it really is: nothing less than a clash of visions for the future of whole peoples. A crucible in which the more progress that is made by one, the stronger the reaction by the other.

Actors

From the Western perspective, it’s easy to oversimplify the nature of the actors in this war. We like to couch things in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, the Axis and the Allies, etc. But in the War on Terror, the reality is that the successful prosecution of this war entails much more than the mere hunting down of card carrying Al Qaeda members and shooting them. These people were not created in a vacuum, and it is the environment that creates them that must be the target of any real war on terror.

Given that, how can these actors be represented in a game? What and/or who do the various sides in the game represent?

Once again, the answer must be an abstraction. In my concept of a game of the War on Terror, each side does not necessarily represent a specific government, but instead would represent a particular interest. In a two-player game, the interests could be simplified into those of world integration and world isolation.

But a more interesting game would be a multi-player one, where individual interests of specific countries or groups of countries (e.g. the EU) are tempered by their association with and promotion of connectivity or disconnectivity of other nations or groups of nations. Thusly can players be put in the situation of balancing the needs and desires of their own nation, with that of the larger community of nations.

The Definition of Victory

What, exactly, constitutes victory in the War on Terror? It’s easy to simply say the eradication of terrorism. But any genuine level of reflection on the matter reveals that it’s just not that simple; especially if you view it in the context of what I’ve outlined above.

The extremes of full international connectivity or disconnectivity may not be realistic victory conditions. But if not, what are?

Presumably it’s a state in which one interest is no longer able to effectively disturb the other. To determine that would require a range of political and economic assumptions that are frankly beyond the scope of this article.

But that brings up another important point about the victory conditions in the war on terror: the victory conditions are necessarily a political and economic victory, not a military one. Because the very nature of the struggle is political and economic, the game cannot help but represent a particular political or economic point of view. To my mind, that can only make it that much more interesting.

The Perilous Enterprise of Design

The preceding description is meant to illustrate an approach among any number of approaches to a particular topic among any number of topics. What I want to show is that designers do not need to use old mediums as a starting point for designing games on new topics. Instead, they can begin with observation and integration of the particular idiosyncrasies of the topic to be investigated, and then develop completely unique systems with which to game.

The real difficulty in defining a new paradigm within which to design games is how to benchmark the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the model. Without the twenty-twenty hindsight of history, it’s impossible to be certain of the underlying assumptions. The only thing we can be certain of is that the world changes, and as designers we must constantly strive to observe and integrate those changes into our thinking. Such integration begets the creativity of design with which we, as players, can evaluate the insights it provides.

Although I do not count myself a particularly good designer, as a one-time publisher I do believe I inspired and promoted the design of some fine games. The intention of this series was to do so again.

Modern conflict has always been my particular interest in wargaming. And I believe that wargaming has a role to play in helping us understand it, but in order to do so it must be topical and relevant; by which I mean of interest and competitively playable for ordinary people.

The designers that rise to the challenge and design a game on the War on Terror will find themselves in a storm of controversy. The necessity of the interplay of politics and economics will always find as many detractors as supporters. Nevertheless, I hope more than one designer tackles the problem.

If nothing else, it’ll get us thinking again.

Conclusion (of Sorts)

I believe that giving ourselves a new lease on life entails that we develop products that have relevance to a modern audience. Recognizing the essential elements of insight into conflict, both modern and historic, that wargames can provide to that audience is essential. Competitive play, accessible rules, and vibrant presentation are important elements.

That the hobby of wargaming will remain controversial to many is a reality we must accept. But in the face of that reality, we cannot shy away from tackling current issues, or delving into realms controversial. As hobbyists, most of us have twenty, thirty, or more years of experience re-fighting the battles of the past. Surely we have something to offer the future.

In the bigger picture, if all we are about are tanks, guns, and airplanes, then our hobby truly is a lost cause, and the oft-debated moral argument of “playing at war” is valid. If we cannot see beyond the “sexiness” of panzers and stukas, we truly are a hobby of children playing with more sophisticated forms of GI Joe.

But if we mean what we say when we describe the intellectual stimulation that the hobby provides; when we say that participation in the hobby brings us better understanding and insight into the human condition, then we owe it to ourselves and to our society to produce and play games that can really help us define and understand the struggles that we currently face.

If we cannot or will not step up to that challenge, then what good are we?

More Recommended Reading (and Viewing)

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm

Destruction And Creation by John R. Boyd, http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/boyd/destruction/destruction_and_creation.htm

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, by Daniel Yergin

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, PBS Documentary (available on DVD).

Interview with Hernando De Soto, from The Commanding Heights: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_hernandodesoto.html (Note: I pick this particular interview as important because Mr. De Soto stresses the issue of lack of property rights in third world countries as a basis for the failure of capitalism to work there. Thus he makes valid connections between that failure, and the rise of alternative and/or extremist positions within those societies, i.e. a root cause of the creation of terrorists).

Groping for the New Paradigm, Part II: Through a Glass and Darkly

2005-02-02T04:53:00.000-08:00

One striking statistic that every wargame publisher eventually becomes aware of should it conduct a customer survey is that the largest portion of military wargame consumers play their games solitaire much of the time, if not exclusively. This characteristic begs several questions. Perhaps the most important among them is whether or not the games are played solitaire because of a lack of opponents, or because of something else? Unfortunately, I’m unaware of any empirical research that has occurred attempting to answer that question, but I can take a few anecdotal guesses.

The most obvious, and perhaps most often assumed answer is lack of opponents, but it doesn’t hold up well under a certain type of scrutiny. With the preponderance of Play by (E)Mail (PBM or PBEM) tools available these days, even the most rural denizen of our hobby should be able to play wargames against an opponent. Further, there are many opponent services available through user groups and the like on the Internet. Granted, many people still don’t have computers or Internet access, but I think if they really wanted to find an opponent, they could by putting up a notice at a local hobby store. The answer lies elsewhere.

The players themselves in various wargame forums have offered another solution to this mystery. Many say that they do not view the products as games at all, but rather tools with which they can further analyze and garner greater understanding of the historical situation. This act is done through reading and analysis of the rules and components, and play, if you will, of the game in a non-competitive way to examine how the situation unfolds on the map.

Given that so many wargame customers play their games this way, it is critical that we as designers and publishers pay close attention to this issue. If the second of the possible explanations offered above is true, we have to ask ourselves if designing games at all is what we should be doing. The people playing solitaire aren't really playing a game, they’re futzing around with an interactive illustration. With that being the case, why have a game system at all? We could all save ourselves a lot of trouble by simply producing a map and some counters, along with a few guidelines on how to push the pieces around.

Then again, if the first explanation, lack of opponents is true after all, we have another set of problems to think about. If we cast that explanation for this behavior under a different light, we may just reveal something interesting, not about the customers, but about designers and publishers. People who are using the games as interactive illustrations frankly don’t bare a lot of consideration. We design games. And as game designers, we need to concern ourselves with the people that actually play them. If there is a paucity of opponents out there, we have to ask ourselves the question why. And the simple answer is obvious: there aren’t enough players. And we get more players by designing games that play. Because we have produced games over and over again with the same system, and made that system increasingly complex or arbitrary (or both) depending upon the designer’s personal bent, we’ve lost all the players.

Therefore it behooves us to examine wargame design itself more closely. It’s important that we ask ourselves some hard questions about our craft, examine what we’ve done, and think about what we should be doing instead.

The Question of Scale

Once a topic for a game design is chosen, the first process a designer must go through is choosing the appropriate scale. Wargames generally come in three different scales: strategic, operational, and tactical. By strategic, we’re talking about an entire war or theater of war. Operational typically deals with a particular battle, while tactical gets down to specific troops and weapon types over a limited battlefield. There are sub categories as well, e.g. skirmish (one piece equals one man) or grand tactical (one piece equals a larger formation, such as a platoon).

When it comes to scale, there is one thing every publisher knows. Historically, strategic and tactical games have always done better in terms of sales than operational. The most famous of the games in the lexicon tend to bare this out: Squad Leader, Third Reich, World in Flames, Panzer Blitz, all are either tactical or strategic in scale. On its face, the reason is simple: general interest in the topic among consumers. It is much easier to find people with an interest in World War Two, or in man-to-man combat during World War Two than it is to find people interested in the invasion of Sicily. A game that focuses on a particular battle obviously limits itself to those interested in that battle. Figuring that out is not rocket science.

Paradoxically, the bulk of the titles that are published are operational. One reason for this seeming paradox is that there are simply more topics to tackle. The logic is that at some point no one is going to be interested in another strategic World War Two game, but there will always be some interest in coverage of some battle that hasn’t previously been done before. Personally I think this logic is specious.

Examined from another perspective, given the hex/counter/ZOC/et al paradigm, operational games are simpler to design. It’s only a matter of choosing the map scale, sorting out the order of battle, applying factors, adding whatever randomized movement rules that are the “innovative” flavor of the moment, and play-testing it out. This formula has been used again and again, to the detriment of the hobby overall.

As a player, I’ve frequently found myself faced with the dilemma of either playing a lot of games poorly, or playing a few well. This choice is hardly unique to me and, as our time becomes scarcer with age and responsibility, becomes a choice that we eventually are forced to make. As other realities begin vying for my money, playing few games well becomes the obvious choice. And I can tell you it won’t be anything operational.

Some publishers recognized this and limited their output to games on a particular scale, or even to just a single game or game system. Australian Design Group is a prime example. Although they have published a couple other titles, almost their entire output has been dedicated to support and expansion of the World in Flames game. And as a result of this dedication, that game has a tremendous following among wargamers many of whom play World in Flames exclusively. Australian Design Group in turn has gone through six iterations of the game, and published many expansions and updates along the way. Similar trends and methods can be seen with other games as well, such as Third Reich, or the evolution of Squad Leader into ASL as two of the most obvious examples.

Going outside of the military wargame industry, there are many more examples of the flagship method of publication. Three of the most obvious are Games Workshop and their Warhammer series of miniatures games, TSR (now Wizards of the Coast) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and Wizards of the Coast with Magic: the Gathering.

As designers, only the most egotistical among us design games without consideration for sales. In business, the “art for art’s sake” concept doesn’t cut it. Thus, when we begin the design process, choice of topic and scale should weigh heavily upon us. As publishers, it is not incumbent upon us to insure that every possible topic has a game published on it. There is no mandate, or even clear rational for trying to accomplish that. Thus, considerations for longevity of a product must begin by carefully considering a game’s topic and scale.

Perspective: Just Who is the Player?

I once read a favorable game review in which the reviewer stated that he felt the game in question was excellent because no matter what strategies he or his opponent employed, the game always closely mirrored the historical event itself in its outcome. At the time it seemed an odd criteria for evaluating the success of a game design. Later, the reviewer’s assertion was reinforced by the written comments of a well-known designer (in a Games forum back in the days of GEnie) who stated that he accounted his designs successful based upon how closely they mirrored the historical event they were based upon.

Such a criteria is curious indeed, and it exemplifies a quite specific failing of modern wargame design, that of perspective. If a game is designed with historical parallel as a criterion, then the perspective of the player is obscured. By player perspective, I mean the position in which we put the player, e.g. division commander, squad leader, president, etc.

When a game is being designed, what position we are putting the player in should be clearly defined. And once that definition is made, the design itself needs to be relevant primarily to that perspective. Thus, it is inappropriate to make political considerations a factor in games where the player stands in the shoes of a company commander, likewise it is inappropriate to ask a player in the role of a theater commander to deal with entrenchments. Consistency of perspective will dictate design relevancy (and irrelevancy).

Where perspective is clearly defined, a game where flow of play along historical lines is a primary criterion must fail, assuming, of course, that the topic is worthy of a game to begin with and isn’t an exercise in futility. Where the historical outcome is desired, the design can’t help but force historical decisions on the player that were made by their real-life counterparts, but that the player wouldn’t necessarily make. In so doing, perspective is violated for the sake of history, and in turn we’re no longer designing a game, we’re creating an activity.

In most of the games available today, the perspective of the player is not merely obscured, but is altogether non-existent. In many modern wargames, players are asked to deal with everything from digging entrenchments, to maneuvering forces, to managing production of durable goods. In so doing, the player is asked to fill the shoes of sergeant, division commander, political leader, and sanitation clerk. To coin a phrase, that’s no way to run a war, and certainly isn’t any way to design a game.

When a decision is made about player perspective, a game design must remain true to that decision. It has to present the player with choices that are relevant to his position, and not burden him with things that his real-life counterpart would never face. It also should not put powers into the player’s hands that are beyond the scope if his position. As a division commander, the player must put up with the decisions of his superiors, good or bad, and should not be bogged down with where to allot this turn’s spare jeep parts.

A solid adherence to this design criterion will in itself reduce much of the inappropriate complexity of today’s wargames. It also contributes to a more holistic approach to design itself when combined with the other concepts mentioned above about scale. The very nature of game design itself dictates that much of the realism of warfare will be abstracted, but if we adhere to the dictates of perspective and scale, the design will become more elegant in nature, and, more importantly, truer to its subject matter.

Situational Relevancy and the Historical Straightjacket

When we design an historical board wargame, it’s important to have something to say about the subject. Even a mass-produced game like Axis and Allies represents the Second World War from a particular point of view. It’s the point of view that makes a game interesting, and once it’s determined, the design should try to accommodate it.

In a nutshell, what this means is that a designer should know his topic well enough to have an opinion about it, and perhaps some original or at least unique perspectives he wants to bring to the subject. It’s not enough just to have done more research than the other fellow who’s designed a game on the same topic earlier. So what if the OOB is more accurate? So what if the map has the gristmill on the correct side of the river? If that’s all a designer has to offer, all he’s really done is create an addendum.

How many games have been published on the Guadalcanal campaign? I don’t know, and I’m not going to look it up, but off the top of my head I can think of four. I’ve played all four of them too, and unfortunately none has anything more interesting to offer than another. I won’t list the four that I’ve thought of, but the first one published back in the 60’s is the only one I’d bother playing if you asked me. Why? Because none that have been published since then have added anything profoundly more interesting to the topic than the original.

With respect to game design, I think this point may be the most important. When a game designer goes to the trouble of designing a game on a particular subject, we players assume that there is a certain passion for the topic that possessed the designer. As players, we are consumers, and therefore that must be a primary consideration in the decision to design a consumer product such as a game.(!) Any magazine publisher will tell you that the vast majority of their mail comes as a response to an opinion expressed somewhere in the pages of the magazine. As consumers of historical games, we study not just to learn the dry facts of who shot whom, but also to experience new perspectives and entertain new ideas.

So if a would-be designer plans to design a board game on Guadalcanal, he needs to have something more to show than an updated OOB and the latest offering from the Who Moves First Mechanic of the Month Club.

The Myth of Complexity qua Realism

We’ve all most likely gone to the local game store and bought a brand new offering from our favorite publisher, opened the box, and removed a 120 page thesis masquerading as a rule book. Those of us who have had the intestinal fortitude to read these tomes have often discovered that the mechanics of the game itself are often quite simple. So why must we deal with such expansive rulebooks?

Ostensibly, the answer is added realism. In reality, it’s lack of creativity.

To further analyze this problem, we have to apply some definitions. There are really two types of rules to be found in a rulebook; one type is necessary, the other represents a design flaw.

The first type of rule is that which explains to us how the game is played. This is a system rule. The second type is one that explains a specific rule exception, which coincidentally is called an exception rule.

System rules are typically very straight forward, and give us the information we need to play the game. These rules would include such things as the Sequence of Play, definitions of what the numbers or symbols mean on the playing pieces, how movement or combat is conducted, etc. System rules explain to us the game design.

Exception rules are much more insidious. From time to time an exception rule is actually called out with a bold Exception printed at the beginning of a paragraph. However, these are usually only the minority of exception rules you will find in the 120-page document mentioned earlier. Any rule that must explain behavior of an individual unit, card, or playing piece that is in itself an exception to all like units, cards, or playing pieces is also and exception rule. Aha! These are insidious design exceptions. More correctly stated, they are design flaws.

This topic gets us back to the notion that these are games. Therefore, a successful game designer gets his point across in the context of a game; the designer’s point being the key issue under examination. Thus, the system is where the design sweat must go, because it is the system that needs to show us what the designer wants to get across. Remember the historical straightjacket? If the point is in the details and not in the game, everyone’s time (and money) is wasted.

Using Warfare Theory as Design Guideline

Some years ago when I was fully immersed in the daily machinations of publishing a magazine with a game in it, a customer called me and asked what advice I could give to help him become a war game designer. My first thought was to tell him to light all his money on fire and get it over with, but I succumbed to the earnestness of the request.

I asked him if he had ever read Sun Tzu. He said that he hadn’t, so I told him that the best advice I could give him was to get himself a copy of the Art of War, and to read it as many times as it took to understand all the points therein. I said that if he can do that, he’d understand the considerations involved with the management of conflict, and therefore have great insight into the sorts of things a good game about warfare should model.

I have no idea if he followed my advice, and I don’t think I ever heard from the fellow again. It’s possible he took my answer as a brush-off, and, given my experience with the sensitivity of some wargamers, now harbors some sort of deep-seated hatred for me. Nevertheless, if he called me again today and asked me the same question, I’d give the same answer.

Those of us that have ever actually taken the time to study warfare theory recognize that the sorts of things that concern battlefield commanders have little to do with comparative statistical analysis of armor piercing munitions and ablative armor. Warfare is largely a psychological affair in which understanding your enemy and her relative capabilities and motives are as great a factor as firepower.

Also, ask yourself this question: Would you rather have better relative technology or better doctrine? If you answered technology, I’d say you have some reading to do. If you said doctrine, then it’s likely that you, like me, are disappointed by today’s wargames.

To my mind, Sun Tzu’s Art of War is probably the best wargame design primer around. Wargame designers would do well to spend some time with this classic. It’ll teach you everything you need to know.

The Next Steps

Trying to chart a path that gives us some new directions in game design is probably something akin to walking backwards in a minefield wearing a blindfold. I can already hear someone out there saying, “Okay Compton, if you’re so damn smart, you design it!”

Part of the process that went in to writing this article was not just a dissatisfaction with current wargames, but also a dissatisfaction in my own designs as well. Giving thought to my own design shortcomings had much to do with the synthesis of generating these criticisms and methods.

Although I would like to claim credit for originating all of this thinking, the truth is, much of the above has already been described in the writing’s of Peter Perla and others. That their work has either been forgotten or ignored is unfortunate. But anyone considering wargame design today would do well to revisit those texts.

The art of wargame design is a craft. And like any craft, in order for it to have real longevity, it must be infused from time to time with new ideas and must occasionally strike out in completely new directions.

Let us hope that designers realize that vision, and that publishers take the chance on making that vision reality. The future of wargaming depends upon it.

Next: Groping for the New Paradigm, Part Three: Process of Design, in which the synthesis of a new design for modeling modern warfare at the strategic/political level is examined.

Recommended Reading:

The Art of Wargaming by Peter Perla
The Complete Wargames Handbook by James F. Dunnigan
Wargame Design, SPI Staff Study No. 2
The Art of War by Sun Tsu
How to Make War by James F. Dunnigan
Chance and Chaos by David Ruelle (This is not a wargame text, but rather a discussion of the concept of chance and its relationship to chaos theory and classical determinism.)
Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell (Also not a wargame text, but anyone that wants to design (or frankly understand) a strategic level conflict had better understand economics.)

Groping for the New Paradigm, Part I: The Indictment

2003-04-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

Almost fifty years ago a fellow named Charles Roberts began designing and publishing games. They were revolutionary in concept: board games representing warfare in a fashion much more specific and tangible than anything in the past. Unlike Chess, these games offered very specific historical events to choose from, offering the player the opportunity to rewrite history. In fact, they laid the foundation for an entire industry, from which sprang almost all the other game genres that are popular today.

The first efforts quickly evolved. Square movement grids became hexagonal, Zones of Control were invented, as well as the Combat Results Table, Terrain Effects Chart, et al.

Then, right about there, creative thinking pretty much stopped.

Since then we've seen expansion and refinement of those designs, but no real, or perhaps a better word would be successful, departures. Today, an innovative game is one where someone has come up with a new way to determine in what order the pieces will move. Wargame designers have become complacent in their acceptance of the hex/ZOC/CRT model, and apply the same principles to monkeys with sticks as giant robots with nuclear tipped missiles. There is no real creativity happening.

It is startling to realize that almost every era, every scale, and every conceivable style of combat has been represented using the same mechanisms. Hexes, combat factors and movement factors, zones of control, and odds ratios have been applied to almost every conceivable form of combat.

This method has become dogma; a doctrine of design that assumes a one-size-fits-all form of evaluation and application. The Wargame industry has straightjacketed itself with a purely derivative model from which it refuses to evolve or deviate.

It is little wonder that a once thriving and lively industry has shrunken to print-runs of under 5000, and a static customer base that howls for severed heads whenever a wargame company reaches for a new audience by delving into other genres.

Conventions offer some eye-opening grounds for observation. Who has not attended a recent gaming convention and witnessed the paucity of board-wargames being played? Or witnessed the eye rolling and grimacing of other gamers when witness to the hex and counter ecclesiastics?

What do they know that wargame designers and players do not?

Take role-playing games (RPGs) for example. RPG’s have been around almost as long as wargames. In fact, they sprang from the loins of the wargame industry. Why have they managed to maintain popularity, as well as penetration into mainstream sales outlets? There are many answers, but the one that concerns us is that RPG designers have routinely thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to their game systems. RPGs are about the story, or the world they take place in. The system isn’t really a part of the equation when it comes to the player’s enjoyment of the game, other than to facilitate the realities of the environment or story. Therefore, RPG designers create role-play systems that are appropriate to the environment that they are designed to support. Key word here is support.

Meanwhile, the belief in the traditional wargame design model has attained canonization. And the swine are laughing at the pearls. In a nutshell, most games are designed as concept in search of an appropriate system, while military based board wargames are a system ever in search of events from which to extract new names to paste upon the components.

Game Vs. Simulation?

I recently posed a question to a close friend of mine, Vince Blackburn (those of you that have read Competitive Edge magazine will be familiar with his column A Word in Edgewise), for whose opinion I’ve always had great respect. In all the years I’ve known Vince, he has always been ready to play a hex and counter game with me, and frequently had a sound understanding of the historical situation. In spite of that, he never instigated the play of, nor owned any traditional wargame titles. I asked him why, and here is part of his response:

“The key factor, though, is that it is all fantasy to me one way or the other. No game is an ideal simulation of reality, because men will never behave like pewter models, nor will they ever be as predictable as even the most complex morale chart. Even if you could design a mathematically perfect board game, you would still be sitting around a table with friends rather than wiping your radio operator's brains off of the latest communiqué to learn whether your column will be relieved or whether your widows will collect your medals. I don't think I would make decisions the same way in the two different circumstances.

“I regard historical games the same way I regard historical fiction or the ‘alternate history’ genre. You never really re-fight the Battle of Hastings, you fight it as it would have happened with a different set of personalities in command of the armies-of armies that are only approximations of the original anyway. Once we have an approximate simulation like that, I like to tweak the variables. What if King Harold had cavalry? Swap some figures around and you see a different battle emerge. What if William had more advanced armor when he crossed the Channel—or what if half his ships had sunk? For that matter, what if ancient Merlin came out of his crystal cave to lend a little of his powers to his Anglic brethren? What if William's forces were actually Orcs, and referred to Normandy as Mordor? I think the line between ‘historical’ and ‘fantasy’ games is an artificial one, and I find that fictional settings allow me to create something new. I enjoy creating, so that is the way I tend to design scenarios.

Vince’s reply reveals some important points, but chief among them to my mind is the lack of understanding in historical wargame designers of just what it is a we’re about. The point he makes about historical vs. fantasy is well made. Is it really just history that we’re trying to portray? If it is, how does the notion of game integrate into the historical construct? If it really is impossible to recreate a battle (and it is), does that render the idea of realism academic? In actuality, wargame designers stopped asking those questions some time ago.

Many industry “insiders” like to call these games simulations, but the term simulation has never really applied because what is being simulated has never been adequately defined.

For example, the most common advertising gimmick used in the industry has been some variant of now you are in command. So is command what is being simulated? If so, then why do players know the exact disposition of their enemy's forces? Why are players mucking about with the local skirmishes through manipulation of ZOCs in a game that is supposed to be strategic in scale? Why are any of the challenges of command we’ve been taught to expect from war theorists such as von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu absent from any actual game decisions?

Is it the actual mechanics of battle that designers are after?

Is it just the feel of panzers rumbling across the ground?

Taking an objective look at wargames will fail to yield an answer. Ultimately, wargame designers have been designing games, and nothing but games. And sadly, it’s been the same basic design over and over.

Worse yet, war games have become complex, unwieldy, unpopular, and in many respects, a cliché relative to other venues of game design such as card games or RPGs, or especially computer games where some real innovation has actually occurred, which in turn has kept those industries somewhat fresh.

If a person were to pick up a wargame 30 years ago, then time warp to the present and compare it to a wargame of today he could legitimately ask, “what has changed?” The creativity of the 1950s and 60s has turned into the dogma of the present, which has transformed the industry that started it all into a redheaded stepchild.

A rejuvenated military wargame industry requires a complete rethinking of how we design games. A designer must stop using the hex and counter model as a starting point, and begin with the topic and its unique realities. Then the designer must carefully consider just what it is he wishes the game to represent and what perspective does he want to present to the player, i.e. in what representational position does he wish to put the player in. That position must be consistent and well defined before any thinking can be done on design mechanics. Then, chose or invent mechanics that support that player position, and discard irrelevancies.

The wargame industry cannot hope to grow or, in the long run, even survive if this sort of methodology does not soon creep into the thinking of designers, and consequently into the pipelines of publishers.

Understanding the Player and the Ramifications of “Gray Matter” Marketing

A well-known wargame designer recently asked for my thoughts on expanding the wargame market. My response was simple: it cannot be expanded. It must be reinvented.

Attempting to reclaim the audience that TSR destroyed is folly [for more information on this, see A Farewell to Hexes by Greg Costikyan]. They're gone. Attempting to compete with the gaming offshoots of computers, etc. is similarly impossible. A paper wargame will never be able to compete with the visceral affect of seeing the target explode on the computer screen. We must seek our audience elsewhere.

Jim Dunnigan has often described his audience in the old SPI days as "over-educated." A more objective evaluation may show that the audience was actually something else. In fact, the statement was probably as much a marketing ploy as anything else. In fact, Avalon Hill used to employ an identical marketing tactic. Inserted into all of their games was a "do your friend a favor" reply-card where they asked for the name and address of a friend with sufficient "gray matter" to play their games to which they could send their catalogues. Although they were talking about intelligence rather than education, the intent was the same. Thus was born the idea of wargaming as an intellectual pursuit, and the perceived notion that wargamers were more educated, more intelligent, more insightful, etc. than other forms of gamer.

Thanks to such marketing, many wargame customers were taught to think that they were smarter or better educated, which is clearly specious. And in truth this marketing had a lot to do with the decline of the industry. Who wants to hang around with someone that thinks they're smarter than you are, or insists on wearing their doctoral robe every time they sit down at the gaming table?

More to the point, the audience was not over-educated, nor any smarter (if wargame sales and proclivity toward market reduction is taken into account), and one could even go so far as to say that their interest in history may have been superficial at best. Generally speaking, there's lots of Dr. So-and-so PhDs (the names of whom can actually be seen in the design credits of many modern wargames; whatever their doctorate may have been in, it certainly wasn’t English usage (see usage of honorifics in any reputable manual of style; Dr. Joe Gamedesigner, PhD is not a proper title usage, and in fact, use of Dr. or PhD is only appropriate to demonstrate authority on a topic to which the doctorate specifically relates, while use of both Dr. and PhD together is never appropriate and considered arrogant)) who may argue that point, but to do so would ultimately be self-serving, counter productive, and finally self-defeating (by actually demonstrating the point).

So what are wargame players really seeking if not self-aggrandized historical enlightenment?

A hint exists in the marketing banner of many early wargames: Now You are in Command. It is this opportunity, more than anything else, that attracted the early fans of wargaming. It is the feel of being in command, the opportunity to see if one can out-do the generals of history.

Unfortunately, anyone that is genuinely interested in the challenges of command cannot help but be ultimately disappointed by the wargames being published today or even at any time in the past.

The first wargames offered a tantalizing glimpse, a promise of a future of gaming experiences where the feel and the problems and the challenges of command would become systematized and granulated into playable games that would be representational of a given historical or potential event.

Somewhere along the way that vision was lost. The system became the element of interest rather than the event itself. So instead of a vast library of games uniquely representative of their topic, we have a single game system of questionable merit troweled across the entire spectrum of the art of warfare. And so the industry reaped the harvest of a single idea trampled into paste through endless repetition and derivation into ever more complex designs of no more relevancy than their progenitors published in the 1960s.

And in the course of transforming the craft of wargame design into the art of bricklaying, the core of players has been reduced to the most inertial element, frequently penning letters of complaint over the printing of SS Panzer units in some other color besides black. (A more recent example of this sort of behavior occurred to the folks at Strategy & Tactics magazine. They had the remarkable audacity to move the FYI portion of the magazine from the front to the middle. This seemingly trivial adjustment to the layout generated multiple complaint letters.) That such trivial matters should generate complaints at all, let alone a significant volume of them leads one to truly ask: over educated?

Something to Think About

Wargaming doesn’t need expansion. It needs a complete redefinition. All of the assumptions that have been made about the audience, the market, and the method of design need to be completely reevaluated and reinvented. Publishers must make room for creativity once again, and overcome their fear of losing what little audience they have left (because it is that very audience’s desire for endless immutable repetition that prevents the industry’s much sought after growth). Designers must discard their marriage to the hex and counter model, and begin thinking holistically about their topic and what it is they want to represent. And finally, players must begin demanding new ideas and original thinking from what few viable publishers remain.

There are still people out there receptive to the challenge of out-doing historical figures, of testing their decision-making abilities against others in an historical context. In fact, playing at war is as popular as it ever was.

What is lacking is an interesting paradigm to do it in. Hexes, ZOCs, CRTs, et al are clichés now. They never really worked properly to begin with, but they have taken on the air of dogma, tablets of wargame design law handed down from Mount Avalon by the prophet Roberts. In the eyes of the faithful it is intellectual elevation; in the eyes of others it is the stuff of ridicule.

The industry needs to shake loose misconceptions and think about how it could change, or rather, transform itself into something new. Where designers start taking radical departures from previous design doctrine. Where the industry magazines no longer run articles about how John Doe started gaming at age 13 with PanzerBlitz and collected every piece of drivel published thereafter, only to have an epiphany at age 45 in which he discovers that he wishes he were a child again; but instead have articles on real creative thinking, new ideas, and genuine criticisms and discussions.

That is what the hobby once meant to many and is where they departed it when it could no longer fulfill that need.

To reinvent itself, wargaming must fulfill that need for a new generation of intellectuals. And when I say intellectual, I firmly subscribe to the definition provided by Aldous Huxley: "An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."