Sea Control - Sea Control 160 - Exercise Sea Dragon with Von Lambert and Tyler Quinn

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

Links:1. Wargaming Lessons from Exercise Sea Dragon2. Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke (@AnnieDuke)3. Small Boats and Daring Men: Marintime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy, by Benjamin Armstrong (@WWATMD)4. Training and Education Command (TECOM) Warfighting Society5. TECOM Warfighting Club by Dr. Ben Jensen6. Destination Unknown Volume 1  a project of the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity (@TheKrulakCenter) and Ender’s Galley (@endersgalley). 

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're talking with Von Lambert of the Australian Army and Tyler Quinn from the U.S. Marine Corps about the recent War on the Rocks article, Wargaming Lessons from Exercise Sea Dragon. Our usual caveats apply here, so all opinions are personal opinions and do not represent the opinions of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marines, U.S. Department of Defense, Australian Army, or Australian Ministry of Defense. Fellows, did I cover all of our agencies? I think we're good. Absolutely.

All right. So, gentlemen, before we get into the article, Bon, I want to express on our behalf condolences for everything that's going on in your country right now with the wildfires. I know there's a lot going on back in the U.S. We're recording this on the 1st of February. So a height of impeachment hearings here in the U.S., but the Australian wildfires are still getting a lot of media attention, as they should. We're all very concerned. Have you been personally affected? I won't say I've been personally affected, you know, in that it cancelled our holiday because the area where you tend to holiday has been seriously damaged. But certainly right now there's a giant fire about 16 miles south of here.

So there's always smoke blanketing your suburb in which you live and you tend to find yourself checking on the progress of the fire every hour or so. So certainly it does create a real sense of unease, and you always have to have your plan in place in case you need to evacuate, which is something I never really considered until the summer of 2019 into 2020. Is it affecting you at work as well? We see pictures back here of Australian soldiers sitting in a road nursing koalas or doing rescue operations. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary. For the first time in our history, our Governor-General undertook the compulsory call out of the Australian Army Reserve and whilst at the same time, the Australian Defence Force working alongside our state disaster agencies to create this pretty extensive capacity for disaster response. It's really quite heartening that we can achieve this sort of thing in such a short time period. But then everyone tends to get a little cynical on interagency cooperation. But, you know, when it really counts, this is one example where I think it's really making a difference. I think you're right.

We see that ourselves back here whenever we have a natural disaster, though. I would be hard-pressed to name you an American natural disaster that's the equivalent of the state of Virginia being on fire. So I'll divert from the wildfires here, but know that we're thinking about you and your country. I know you're a graduate of Marine Corps University. You went to the School of Advanced Warfighting, which is the Marine Corps' advanced planner course, and you're a planner in the Future Land Warfare branch of the Australian Army Headquarters. Can you tell us a little bit of your operational background? Yes, certainly.

I've served four tours between Iraq and Afghanistan. These are operational experiences of platoon commander, battalion staff. Most recently, I was an operations officer in an 06th Command. Like most people in our generation, it's force protection, advisor, counterinsurgency, sort of as part of the global war on terror. Could you define 06th Command for our listeners? Yeah, certainly. So 06th Command is a regimental task force command,

similar the way the Marines would employ a regimental combat team, or certainly very similar to a U.S. Army BCT brigade combat team. Thanks a lot, Vaughn. Tyler Quinn is a Marine Corps officer. Tyler, you are an American, but you're no less international right now. Can you tell us where you're dialing in from? Yeah, that's right. Well, first, thanks for having me on and appreciate the opportunity working with Vaughn as a classmate back in the command staff.

Right now, I'm stationed in Okinawa, Japan. I'm the executive officer for 3rd Law Enforcement Battalion, part of the MEF information group. And so 3MF, the large marine contingent out here in Japan, is on the cutting edge of a lot of the issues and problem sets as we're pivoting towards the Pacific. And we see a lot of attention being paid by the Commandant and our DOD towards this area. So it's a pretty exciting time. You're the fourth or the fifth Marine officer I've talked to since the Commandant issued his new planning guidance. And it seems like that plan, guys, has sparked a lot of interest in the Marine Corps at all levels, from tactical to the highest strategic level. As far as new initiatives and new ideas, it seems like he's turned you all loose.

And just the ideas are flowing, whether it's via War on the Rocks or Marine Corps Gazette, all the publications that everybody's writing right now. It's really exciting to watch if you are a Marine Corps watcher. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things. I don't know if you have the saying in the Navy, but, you know, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission sometimes. And I think that we definitely have that saying. Yeah. So so the commonized planning guidance, like you said, it it let us loose. A lot of these ideas and water cooler talks and discussions have been kicked around for the past few years has given people the permission to sort of, hey,

Let's start getting it out there and really thinking creatively and pushing the boundary on what we think is right and really trying not to fight the last war better. But, you know, how do we prepare ourselves for the future? That's great, y'all. Great response, man. So if you read War on the Rocks regularly, as well as various more Marine-specific publications, this is not the first mention of Sea Dragon. Krulak Center and Marine Corps University pump the exercise very regularly on Twitter. Vaughn, I think you want to talk a little bit about what war games are and frame that conversation before we get into Sea Dragons specifically. Yeah, thanks, Jared.

I think it's important just to reinforce what Tyler said, that that transition period is something I observed firsthand just in the schoolhouse between the 37th and 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps. you know that that energy and reinvigoration of that kind of thinking isn't to take away from the previous comment at all but certainly to reinforce great work and and re-energize a lot of the thinking with the marines and i experienced that firsthand so part of that manifested as a emphasis on war gaming and i think really it's a case of not inventing something new but going back to the roots of what wargaming is in a exploratory a testing and evaluation approach that uses you know certain scenarios and certain capabilities as a vehicle to do it in that sense it kind of bounces off the european continental experience uh certainly monk of the elder or even earlier

with scharnhorst and klauswitz with that idea of taking kragspiel and exploring scenarios and exploring what they would call the science of war to then, one, make themselves better at execution, but two, really explore the range of possibilities to then help future-proof their ideas. So that being said, let's talk a little bit then about what Sea Dragon is, and if you can talk about how it began, if you could address some of that. Yeah, certainly. You know, I've always been interested in wargaming, and whilst at Staff College, the Marines took that opportunity to pursue the interest further. Sea Dragon was in its second iteration, I think, when I came to it, and certainly when Tyler came to it as well.

Ben Jensen was a strong advocate for it in the schoolhouse. And I think he did it under the banner of the Training Education Command approach to wargaming. And it's essentially a free play or free cry of spiel using a commercial off-the-shelf game, and in this case it was Flashpoint Campaigns, as part of voluntary extracurricular activities. The program itself, driven by MCU faculty,

and it just became a case of people who wanted to explore this medium for testing yourself as part of a university-wide knockout competition yeah and if i could uh throw in two cents on that absolutely the the the really neat thing about sea dragon are really two things one is the commercial off the shelf so it's it's taking a game that you know anybody who who likes to play computerized games can can just get it themselves but we kind of modified it the the T-Com and Dr. Ben Jensen, as Vaughn mentioned, modified it. And so instead of having to go through this huge procurement process and come up with something very specific to the military or even the Marine Corps, we're able to take something that already existed and modify it slightly.

And then the second part, as Vaughn mentioned, was that knockout, the competition. And so you get a whole different style of play when there's skin in the game, when there's something on the line. And even if it's just reputation or having the pride of, you know, holding the trophy over your head and being able to claim that for the next year, even though the Marine Corps and the military has done war gaming a lot, a lot of it is tied around exercises or, you know, proofing concepts and things like that. But this had a whole new feel with the competitive vibe to it and the commercial off-the-shelf gaming, which allowed for a lot more creativity, I think. Yeah, we used a game called War at Sea that was developed at the Naval War College

when I was teaching over in Hamburg, Germany, and it was the competition that really made the game hum. You could not walk into that room and not feel the energy just radiating off of the students because there was a lot on the line, and there would be trash talk when they would meet at the battle table, and it was great. My German students, though, I'm going to hear it from them on Twitter if I don't just correct pronunciation of Kriegsspiel.

Perfect. sorry just say you know he's australian right yeah yeah i was just saying no actually that's fine yeah so what scenario are the students presented with i would imagine it changes from year to year but you know there's some basics that they start with yeah for us um they do vary each year in the two years i played the best part about the the way they present the scenario was a fighting with the force you have so you know a force in being and then a objective force beyond 2025 and so had the opportunity to play with essentially fight to night, fight with what you have

and then in that case it is an educational war game but then the great part was that it was then blended with educational experimental war gaming so you had the ability to then test yourself through the medium of future

forces. The scenario itself was a NATO in the Baltics situation, so flashpoint conventional standoff scenario and of course we would play as the Marines. It was inside a ucom owned or ucom established joint task force against it really was continental forces of the russian army okay uh in this sense it was a short notice this is what you have you're already in execution to an extent so you've your lodgements been achieved by and large and you're essentially

racing to set the start condition for following forces tyler was your experience the same i think you guys said you were at school at the same time that's right so i was in the same conference group as von you know we sat 10 feet away from each other so i i was actually able to play on a couple of teams when he was there the smaller team we didn't make it through the first round but you know that's okay we learned a lot of lessons focusing on like how we could use information ops and then which sometimes is very difficult in these types of games but then i was able to actually play with von as well and and yeah the the neat thing was that that force and being what we had fighting with that but then once you get into some of the deeper rounds allowing

for these capabilities that aren't actually online yet it allowed for thinking into the future how would you how would you fight in a similar scenario if you had different forces or different technology fires being one that was extremely important throughout all these games so when you talk about the future capabilities i mean i'm assuming everything associated with this game because it's commercial off the shelf is unclassified what sort of correct future capabilities were you talking about absolutely yeah totally classified sorry i don't want to step on you there tyler uh no perfectly but it was a combination of incoming projects for the marines and then blending man-on-man teaming emerging fire and forget technology uh pike

and spike as one example uh different kinds of drones and then some dialed up lethality inside you know current missile technology really it's just essentially taking things you know are out there and then just playing with some of the parameters by which they're employed what planning are students required to do and what sort of time constraints are you working under i'll certainly i can offer my experiences and then i think tyler would have some different ones yeah the great part about it yeah the great part about it allows for as much as little planning as the participants want to do i saw some guys go there and essentially say you know what we're doing it live um or that ben jensen he recommended about four hours preparation prior to a two to

three hour game i found that to be enough you had your products already built but we probably spent perhaps eight hours once you problem frame do a thorough enemy analysis examine your mapping build a couple of course of action analyze and war game yourself before you enter the the tournament and understand your own force weaknesses so for me i think i'll somewhere around eight hours per round not to mention just the huge number of discussions you'd have with your own teammates you know in the corridor over coffee beforehand but certainly for us it was products that we know to be true and good you know synchronization matrices high value target matrices, attack guidance matrices, and core graphic and narrative stuff, we would have to

submit a couple of products and then a placement of forces sort of placemat to aid the game start state. So like I said before, you could get away with it if you just sort of told Dr. Jensen what you were going to use, where it was on the map, and then just pretended your way through it, or you could go in there with all your stuff dialed up and, you know, a set of products that with savant hr how about you tyler what was your experience like yeah that was uh fairly similar like i said the the first team i was on we kept it pretty simple code graphic narrative and using some relative combat power analysis you know turning the map around and and trying to figure out what what were maybe a couple of the enemy codes what they might do and then really looking

at yeah about four or five hours i guess of prep coming up with branch and sequel plans on that synchronization matrix you know you you want to you definitely don't want to fall in love with your plan you want to have some flexibility in it and so that was that was i think one of the key things and once you're in the game it's it's fairly quick and and you're playing turn turn based play against another live team uh versus just a you know an ai computerized enemy yeah that was going to be my next question who is actually playing red on that side is that other students or is there a faculty team who's working against you as students and i'll let vaughn because he's got two two games under his belt and two championships um so he can he can speak to that

a little bit more but but yeah like we talked about at the beginning the competition of it it's not just competition in the sense of like who did better and who had a better you know co-graphic or whatever against a computerized enemy yeah although you could play it that way It was against a live thinking team. And so it was student on student. And we actually played across the Marine Corps University. So you have command and staff college teams. You have teams from Expeditionary Warfare School, which is our career level school with captains and company grade officers from across the joint force. There were also teams from Marine Corps War College, Lieutenant Colonels, and School of Advanced Warfighting, where Vaughn was. So it blends a whole bunch of different varied experiences, different MOSs. We have joint teams and coalition teams. And that was the really great part of it, is that you're playing against another group of students and the creativity there.

I mean, you had people bringing in trifolds to block their planning so you can't even see or hear them. Oh, yeah. Because we try to use that, right? like oh i can hear what they're saying so i know what they're going to do the next round yeah so you had to be very careful with that um it just allows for a more organic environment where luck and surprise are fully present yeah i found that the real richness of that marinkle university experience it blends all those courses plus the joint interagency international aspect uh i think my first team tim my first year tyler if you remember we we turned up and had

a couple of infantry officers artillery you know for marines and then it was i think we had u.s air force electronic warfare guy an indian army as well and then my team i led at school advanced war fighting had u.s air force b2 then there was you know u.s marine corps intelligence officer with an infantry background and then i had a u.s armor u.s army cavalry officer as well so it was such a such a broad church and really that was probably the best part about it is the to combine those things we talk about coalition ally thinking that really pretty significant grassroots level yeah did you find yourself psychoanalyzing your opponents based on their backgrounds uh quite a bit particularly as you went with the the final absolutely you you would

and i think in the second year i managed to get it right a couple of times everyone's got their biases you know you get there with a ground guy and all he wants to do is go straight up the middle with heaps of smoke um an armored guy might packet some of his some of his tanks as a pretty pretty heavy reserve and then bring around the outside but there was certainly no point i would say you know i make those comments but there's certainly no point where the human opponent gave you exactly what you expected that is just not that's just not warfare you're always fighting a thinking person who adapts on the fly and always surprises you tyler yeah absolutely yeah sorry go ahead yeah absolutely no just to echo uh what von was saying yeah surprise chance luck all played

into it and yeah definitely you get a whole different kind of enemy analysis most likely most dangerous courses of action when you know that person on the other side or you you have an idea of their background and where they came from or how they think a little bit and so you you get to really get a good fingertip feel for how that would play out in real life versus when you do exercises or map games you're you're running off of a fictitious enemy or even possibly a real one you know when you're working on classified side but even then there's only so much that you can know right and uh so when you're playing against classmates or other people that you're right there with it it gives a whole nother feel to it and like in war in this game it's knockout there's

no second place in war and so these these games provided options to run like really high risk scenarios in a low risk environment to improve decision making so i would say every team that played no matter how far into the rounds you made it took away a significant amount of lessons learned just in decision making and real-time gameplay in a in a high risk scenario but in a very low risk environment you mentioned decision making one of my own realizations is we used war games over at the Furings Academy was we often learned as much about students' personalities as we did about their comprehension of operational art. So you could see, okay, someone's a very good analyst, but freezes when they have to make snap decisions. You can identify the student who

is a good teammate, even when he or she isn't in charge. Did you find that to be the case for yourself as you work through with your different teams? It was like, was either of you a team leader or I don't know how your teams were actually organized so maybe we should start there is like is there a leader for the team or is it sort of a consensus to go forward as you play through the game I put myself in as the team leader but certainly you know because it's voluntary in extracurricular time there's there's it's really that coalition of like-minded people that want to win together so certainly having a strong personality leading it but valuing those guys as a part of it because for me picking those unique skills in the teams i did that really

deliberately gave you a perspective you didn't own so you had to rely and trust that your teammates to do it so really it was teams of usually between four and i think i saw as many as eight in a team um i kept it between four to six with different mos's or different trades and skills that and specializations that people brought to the table but i certainly found that you could see where the people came from but then also their desire to to better themselves as a part of this this process so you know guys that like to talk talk loudly but kind of not really produce anything behind that or you had the really quiet guy who as soon as you started asking questions you realized just how much he brought to the table it was really quite a diverse group of people and then

that in itself was one of the strengths i think the the team i was on was a little bit more collaborative a little bit more organic not with a single strong leader at certain points in the game one person would would kind of jump in and their area of expertise and we supported each other through that but I think obviously Vaughn's model is kind of a a model for success you know when you have an OPT leader you know I mean really but you have an OPT leader you pick out certain people's strengths and one thing I would just say kind of like you know General McChrystal's book the team of teams and a couple of books out there that i've read recently culture code and legacy just leadership type books about human dimension of teamwork no matter what it is war or a sport

or business this really brought out those how are you a good lead how do you leverage somebody else's skill set you know to contribute to the betterment of the team and the goal that the team is trying to improve so that was another big lesson i took away not just in like personal decision making but in team dynamics and working with people and using strengths and being able to use those towards a common goal so is there a mentoring or self-reflection time for the students afterwards to think about their leadership within this game so do you have anybody sort of stand there taking notes on what's going on within your team and then providing feedback to you we would do a quick after action review quite informal a hot wash and it came down to you know if you lost

you'd kind of feel awkward and point the finger each other a couple of times but you're all friends already and so and also it is just a game and it's still exploratory which is part of it though you want to win it certainly you realize what assumptions you had were completely fallible how the limitations on your own approach to operational art your thorough misunderstanding of certain capabilities um so for us it was a case of you just put your heads together then huddle describe what you found to be successful from your perspective in your job plus before that we'd also go into the room with an idea of how we would run it and then toward the end of that second year you know i stepped back and gave other guys a chance to go and lead it because you

know i felt that they had other strengths that deserved to be put out there and i'll certainly use the example of one of the fight i think the second to last game i played u.s armor cavalry officer you know i said it's over to you man we've come all this way so may as well take a punt and and he did a great job and really it was just demonstrated that our self-reflection at the end of these games as informal as it was you could see that was slowly developing our approach so you wouldn't really cover the same thing twice tyler i don't say this but like you were less successful than von was so i'd imagine like perhaps your debriefs went differently you talk yeah how has it evolved for you it did um like i said i i think we we had a collaborative effort

and when we came out of it we we debriefed a little bit but knowing that we weren't going on we just sort of turned our attention to other other things so it wasn't that we we forgot and didn't internalize the lessons but i think it was less detailed than it would have been for hey we're going on to the next round what do we need to tweak what the school environment does provide though in in that you know it's in a school is that there's tons of time for reflection and self-reflection and so I continue to do that throughout the course of the school year because this happened in the winter of the first semester so you know about halfway through so the rest of the time I was there I was still picking up things through the classes and the exercises that we were

running and trying to implement the things I learned in C-DRAG and so that's a good thing about doing this in a school setting is that you do have time you don't you're not responsible for a unit or a bunch of other people you're really responsible for yourself and you know the further education of of yourself and so you're allowed that time to make those connections with other things yeah this is going to be one of my uh questions further on is like one of the real arguments for the use of war games in the classroom is that people tend to retain more when the learning is experiential so i was going to ask is like did you go back through the rest of the course and even now to things that you learned in executing this war game and von i'll

ask you first because i know we just heard from tyler but i'd like to hear from both of you on that subject specifically certainly i would offer straight away that that kind of experiential learning from my point of view in executing this for two years i never made the same mistake twice and we did that because we were reflective in our approach to it you know three key things that we did that could probably be thematically dragged into everything we do you often pay if you have to produce some certain tools you use you know matrices of certain kinds in a short amount of time you often use it you often have it in front of you then discard it and i remember having that easy attack guidance matrix as an example a great one put together by

an artillery officer in my team who then we became fixated on the screen discarded the piece of paper we're not not deliberately but didn't have it in front of them and we'd start chasing targets around the map and as a result became inherently fixated on super tactical things at the expense of operational objectives we still won but only barely in the following games i'd always defer to is that in our attack guidance matrix and therefore is it linked to operational objectives and using that kind of discipline using your tools discipline approach to them and then as things speed up keep those tools there to guide your decisions as opposed to just you're now doing it live so discard everything you've prepared beforehand in that kind of haste

the second one was the approach to developing enemy course of action in my first year it was essentially most dangerous and most likely in the second year you know leveraging the skills of a marine corps intelligence officer on my team we started to come up with multiple most likely most dangerous components that we would then confirm or deny and we also added some well considered wild cards you know if you had this time and this resource would you do a certain thing or how would you go for broke if you had to and by having that more collaborative approach and check and test of enemy course of action we're able to explore you know that sharn horse approach of exploration more thoroughly in in dealing with the enemy so i think uh tyler uh

same same question to you as far as like the experiential learning and what you've been able to use since i know you spoke a little bit about before but i would agree and reinforce the the things that that Vaughn said using those tools as as guidelines to keep you on track so it's a the learning that I that I took from that game was very much how to marry up the kind of Goldilocks middle ground of strict adherence to your plan and chasing around tactical things like the you know hey look squirrel right you don't want to get down that that rabbit hole but you also don't want to stay too strict to your plan. So it's a very much happy medium of using those well-thought out tools to keep you in line with your operational goals and avoid getting too tactically dragged

down. The biggest thing that I could think of was later on in the year, Vaughn and I were also on a team later during an exercise to develop our own, like made up our own war game. And so taking from sea dragon we we were able to kind of take some lessons from that of gameplay chance and those wild card things that was a big one that i took away from from this game was that even with the thinking enemy that you may know a little bit about there are chance things that are probabilities there's nothing is an absolute except that statement i just said there right like there is a there is a probability um and i and i gotta give credit where credit's due i just got done reading Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Great book. Highly recommend it to anybody that's in decision-making

stuff. But there's always probability involved. And when you can frame your decisions in terms of probability, it gives you a little bit more flexibility in how you make those decisions. So those are a couple of things that I took away from it. And just like I said about before, the schoolhouse environment, it gives you that time where you're kind of in an incubation environment to allow those ideas and thoughts to grow to bounce them off other students to get up on a whiteboard and have a beer after class after you just got done discussing all this and really just throw out the craziest ideas that you have and get people to punch holes in them and and really kind of wrestle with some of the some of the concepts right and certainly for us like at

the start of it um at the start of the war on the rocks article we use that opening malk of the elder quote you know no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter the enemy's main strength really this idea of exploration hypothesizing what you think the enemy is going to do racking and stacking that in terms of probability and then validating those assumptions for us then doing it multiple times against someone who is a free-thinking enemy there's always a different group of people from very diverse backgrounds that would then completely throw what you've thought about them back in your face and surprised you and turn your assumptions on their head, this to us was that real way to exercise judgment.

Yeah, you mentioned specifically in the article over-reliance on air power, which is likely a function of everything the U.S. has done since 1991, and students were required to use other fires assets. So were there fires assets that were commonly forgotten, or did you find, as Von, you were successful twice here did you find a way to leverage that in your time it's like what like why did you realize that there was this over reliance on air power is that something instructors told you afterwards uh certainly it was probably just when we got done with that first probably two rounds in the first year the simple answer was to give it a hellfire and when you

realize that that just isn't as successful as you want it to be every time you start to say well how do i one make that more successful or two do something so that the enemy doesn't just expect another hellfire to come their way because anyone listening to this would probably be as familiar with that idea that we're able to do almost as much as we want to do at any time with the assets we have and that freedom doesn't exist with people with enemies that have capabilities that are almost at par or certainly even better and maybe it's just a decade of counterinsurgency in an environment where you have overwhelming air supremacy but for us every time you lost that pair of helicopters or your sortie rate coming from the marine air wing or the carrier

strike group just wasn't what you expect then you really force your alarm one what you have at hand or two use deception superimposition and other things to really be more efficient about how you employ your fires and probably the biggest thing was learning the mechanics of suppression of enemy air defense so sead or seed in depends which service you're in i learned that from a from a for a u.s air force buddy in the first team and you know he was a real real master of explaining that to us in really simple terms how to beat you know a modern integrated air defense system and working through the mechanics of creating that package or that window to then prosecute the targets you're trying to prosecute.

So learning from each other, really shaking off those biases and those already validated ideas that you're walking in with. Like, I can just bomb that. I can just shoot at that. You have to fight for every opportunity you get and fight to be able to preserve the assets you get too because you may not get them back. What it really kind of showed was the full mutual support from combined arms and how it's not always just air is supporting maneuver sometimes that maneuver from the ground

is able to support the air and by right so it kind of goes back and forth because when you have that enemy that has capabilities and and we say in the indo paycom ao those pacing threats yeah they really do have those capabilities and i know that's a huge thing uh weapon engagement zones that everyone's kind of thinking through but it also showed how you have to have a good succession of command and really distribute your assets so that way when the company headquarters get schwacked that platoon can take over and they have the ability to call in the fires or or the air maneuver in a similar way to achieve success did this game really represent the first time either you were working against what we would call a near peer or peer level enemy absolutely i mean yes

the scenario had the ability for the opposition to use non-strategic nuclear weapons so you know as an australian in this place it was certainly well beyond peer and tyler i definitely heard a yes i you but it's like what was that realization like the first time you sat down and you're doing the sort of analysis of relative combat power yeah it was uh it definitely made us pause whereas before both von and i have operational experience in iraq and afghanistan and your analysis of the enemy situation is completely different and sometimes maybe even dismissive when you're talking when you're thinking in those terms right of air power and and fires so what would this did is it definitely causes to slow down on that area and think through that in a lot more detail and

and to come up with i guess redundancies and like it like i said distribution so you don't have necessarily a single main effort during a certain time or you have a really good succession of command that can transfer and allows it to be more organic i think tyler's also getting to some of the our article we talk about the the second lesson was learning to fight disconnected and outnumbered the ability to employ air power as a way to offset your relative superiority or your qualitative advantages when you're employing a headquarters that is removed from your order of battle in the opening rounds and then your decisions are slowed so far that you're now forced to make choices and trade-offs certainly the ability to accept that as a start point was

one of the biggest learning ideas like what do you mean i now no longer can pull the levers at will to generate those effects that was certainly a big a big teaching point for us in our opening round and something we took into even in my second year i was still surprised as i'm getting jammed off the map that my well synchronized plan was now just a set of yes no decisions of which i've probably only got a third of them to make and i have to make a choice between moving or shooting because the capacity to get through that jamming is so limited yeah that actually links really nicely i think to the commandant's playing guidance and a lot of the theories that are floating around now about what we may have to do if you if we find ourselves in a situation where

we need to move across the pacific again whether that's dispersing our forces using stand-in forces or we're going to have to use a lot more mission command than we probably become used to where we have basically a free flow of communications while we're operating in iraq or afghanistan absolutely you know and i think we can these war games taught a real healthy respect for similarly equipped opponents and then the concept of properly equipped small distributed teams creating a position of asymmetric advantage outstripping a mathematical advantage is a

real novel idea that we just have to keep pursuing so clear mission type orders prioritise the discipline and tact guidance matrices that I've alluded to before and then that mental agility to understand when the mechanism for execution is no longer effective

certainly that learning for me came in the second year because maybe I just lost sight of it a little bit, a bit of skill fade perhaps, but there was certainly a real time when that kind of electronic attack and not having an appropriate response

to losing that command and control function really forced me to examine in the future that mission type orders and prioritizing what you're going to do. Yeah, I think that's a problem set that definitely is at the forefront of our minds uh here in in three meph as a stand-in force that's been mentioned many times uh contact layer and you know fighting across the pacific what vaughn just mentioned uh that that clear

intent uh i want to kind of build on that a little bit so there's another book i i got to plug uh small boats and daring men um that i finished a few months ago it's been mentioned many times on this podcast already it's phenomenal yeah it's it should be in my opinion it's got to be the number one common knots reading list like i it's just got to get pushed out there but those are three big things that i kind of took away from that uh that are applicable and can't get pulled forward is just what vaughn mentioned about that simple intent you know really clear but simple um so it allows the the junior commanders uh flexibility um and and that flexibility and thought is getting the right people in the right place to achieve that mental

agility so you know the army's moving towards that with their uh their new commander's combine i can't remember the exact their commander's uh screening process they've they've revamped it to be much more rigorous and i think that's moving towards getting the right people in the right place at the right time yeah i think they're conducting uh conducting interviews with juniors junior officers before they promote them up that's right yeah especially for their command slate so when they're in a position to command a battalion or brigade they're bringing them in to do a battery of cognitive tests written exams physical fitness tests blind interviews so it's it's pretty comprehensive but it just speaks towards that effort of getting really getting that part right

of the personnel because at the end of the day the one thing that hasn't changed about wars that's a human endeavor and there's people involved and then the other thing with the small boats was that that resourcing and training you know resourcing those small teams to achieve that intent you can't give somebody a mission and then not give them the resources to accomplish that mission which in the marine corps we pride ourselves for years on doing more with less but i think maybe a better way of saying that we need to do do more with with less but we still need to do them with the right things right and so the common house planning guidance has spoken towards that of how do we need to shift away from maybe some older technologies older capabilities

that aren't as relevant and if we don't jump off of those and get the the newer things that we need right now or in the future we're going to be too late yeah just just want to drive that point home that simple intent getting the right people in the right place and then making sure those people are resourced and trained to accomplish the mission von are you uh bringing the game back with you to australia have you recommended it to your colleagues this is something that you should take up there i know i'm trying to remember who's your major general who is all over twitter now at war in the future running your oh look yeah certainly i could advertise on behalf of major general uh mick ryan yeah but certainly his twitter feed and activity speaks for itself

absolutely what i'd offer really is you know as tyler talked about before doing more with less the simulator the digital fight club that we describe in our article offers dedicated creative space to war game and you can do it with any commander any staff create a high stress environment and then do it so many times that the general resilience of that staff can handle all these different scenarios thrown at them and then dial up some of the different types of technology that take away your ability to do what you think you can do and then learn from it and for us that educational war game and then the combination of educational

and exploratory war game really taught us a whole lot of things about ourselves, about our ability to integrate in teams and just those themes are what I'm going to take back here and I'd give a plug for Australian Army's war fighting laboratory led by a good friend of mine

he's all over war gaming and certainly that exploratory experimental stuff but really what it offers for the broader of community is take your small teams in those schoolhouses and build up and build it into our dna build it into our collective psyche that yeah hey i know how to ball game i know how to take a constructive environment form a small team and then employ those approaches to planning and execution as opposed to kind of doing them on a powerpoint and then just paying lip service to

it at the end of the day thanks tyler is this uh something that you're trying to implement with your teams out on okinawa it's definitely something i'm involved in and trying to get out here so the marine corps training and education command has a nascent organization called the t-com war fighting society there's actually a couple of articles in the marine corps gazette called the fight club i think it was a winter of 2018 november december time frame uh that it was written and it talks about bringing these games out of the classroom and education setting and into operational units so the crew lack center you mentioned them as well and so i'm working with they're they're doing a visit here in march and just trying to get some of those ideas out so you can build that

resilience in the in the classroom setting and individuals and small teams but then we all go our separate ways and so that's i think kind of the next step is working with some of these higher level staffs and maybe even creating competition you know you could if you're in division you could have regimental staff fight another regimental staff and i think we've seen that a little bit to a degree in our 29 palms where we're doing force on force live exercises but you can even get a lot more out of it through these through these games so that's that's what i'm working on with the t-com war fighting society in the crew act center to try to kickstart some of this with the grassroots yeah i really like the idea of the staffs fighting one another just because of

The cost is so low in comparison to doing it live, force on force. Yeah, absolutely. I'm afraid we're out of time here, so I do want to thank my guests, Von Lambert, Tyler Quinn. The article is Wargaming Lessons from Exercise Seed Dragon. You can find it on the War on the Rocks website. It will also be linked in our show notes, as well as we're going to provide links to all the books that Tyler mentioned as well. So, gentlemen, do you have any other projects you're working on? I'll start with Tyler first.

Yeah, thanks. No, just that thing I just mentioned, working with the Krulak Center. I also am an editor on The Destination Unknown, Volume 2, which is a Krulak Center initiative. It's a graphic novel that's thinking about the future fight in 50, 60 years. So that's going to be coming out soon this spring. Keep your eye out on the Krulak Center. And that's kind of the next big thing for me. And then I'm moving to the MIG this summer, the Meth Information Group, taking over a civil affairs bill.

but something that I haven't really ever done, so excited to look into something new and kind of just get new perspective on some things in the information environment. That's excellent. Vaughn, anything coming up for you? Yes, certainly. I'd like to advertise the Land Power Forum as part of the Australian Army Research Centre and the Future Land Warfare blog.

It's available for people to post 1,500, 2,000 words and really get that discussion and honest contest of ideas going as we move forward. you know employing new capabilities and probably more importantly employing new thinking and then the other thing i'd like to say is certainly in the future i'm looking at how the impact of quantum adversary fighting with quantum technology really changes how we approach warfare in a classical class which is in uh idea so stand by for that uh gem coming your way sometime soon thank you very much gentlemen and for the listeners thank you for tuning in talk to you next week © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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