Sea Control - Sea Control 166 - Georgetown's Wargaming Program with Sebastian Bae

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Links1. Georgetown Wargaming Society2. Reflections on Teaching Wargame Design by James "Pigeon" Fielder3. Simulating War by Philip Saban

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Sebastian Bay, a defense analyst and wargamer who also serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, where he teaches military tabletop wargaming. Welcome, Sebastian. Thanks for agreeing to come on. Thank you. I'm incredibly excited to be here with you and talk to you about wargaming and our efforts at Georgetown. So before we get into anything else, I did leave out your time in the Marine Corps, but I think you're going to fill us in when I ask you my first question, which is how did you get into wargaming?

That story is a bit long and sort of confusing. But like most wargamers who work in the professional wargaming field, I got into wargaming through commercial games. I learned through games like Risk and Axis and Allies and steadily moved to other more complex commercial board games as a hobbyist, like Advanced Squad Leader and other games like that from MMP and GMT. As you can imagine, there were a lot of nights playing board games in the enlisted barracks. But how I really got into professional board gaming was actually by accident. I didn't even know that board gaming was a profession you can do in the defense community. I was actually working as a freelance writer for Foreign Policy Magazine at the time that I applied to be a wargamer down at Quantico as a contractor. And they hired me to sort of be like a scenario writer, given my writing background.

And then I steadily moved towards the design and analysis. But that's sort of how I got into wargaming professionally. But looking back on it, I realized, especially looking back onto my Marine Corps career, I learned that wargaming was there throughout my time through tactical decision games and sort of fan table exercises and rock drills, where you have little bits of wargaming sprinkled throughout the Corps and the enlisted ranks, which I came to appreciate more and more. And that's sort of where I get my passion for educational gaming, actually, because I remember how much I learned and how much my junior Marines learned when I was a squad leader through tactical decision games. Like just by thinking through a problem against a thinking adversary, they learn so much more than what you can teach them through a simple PowerPoint or just lecturing to them. So could you give an example of some of the tactical decisions, decision games that you're talking about? so you know the Marine Corps has a long history about tactical decision games the Marine Corps Gazette publishes one every now and then and they can be as simple as like

this is a squad ambush how and this is sort of the enemy disposition how do you react right to MAGTAF med levels there were questions of like you have to control for air and logistics and all these other things so the ones that I used as a squad leader were more like simplistic and based on the infantry tactics that we were learning of understanding like hey you are a platoon in a company assault you hear this kind of noise and you suspect there's armor you have these kind of capabilities how do you react given the terrain and your and your mission and your orders and often you see marines terribly fail the first time right mainly because they're overthinking it or they try to be too creative and they forget the doctrine they're learning

But then over time, you learn all the intellectual steps they go through become faster and faster. They're able to cycle through that OODA loop much faster. And that's why I found the real value of TDGs were. So what sort of games were you playing in the squad bay at night? Did you start out with the very simple ones or did you develop sort of a wargaming club within your unit? I wouldn't say anything like a wargaming club. It was more a bunch of us were bored and couldn't get off base. So the games that we first started playing were like Risk and Asses and Allies,

mainly because they're the most accessible. You realize in the squad, like in the classroom, there's a vast spectrum of gaming interests and gaming experience. So we couldn't play overly complex games at the time when we first started getting into gaming. And then we started going up the ladder, right? And we lost people along the way as well, right? Some people were just there to have risk and drink beer, and then as we moved to more complex games that were from the GMT series or MMP series, people were not willing to spend seven to eight hours on a Friday night to play games.

Yeah, I assume there's a certain amount of self-selection as people self-selecting out of the program, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. So it's pretty well documented that we find ourselves in a war game revolution within the Department of Defense. Why is Georgetown showing interest now? First, I think it is the latest wave series of people and professors and classes that have been using Wargaming on campus for a long time. I'm just sort of the latest wave of that sort of movement on campus. Like Madeline Albright runs a very famous and very much in-demand crisis simulation as part of her course. Similarly, Becker Wasser teaches a course on Wargaming and ISIL for undergraduates at the campus for a couple years.

But the real difference between what they're doing with wargaming and what I'm doing with wargaming is really just the ship in focus. Their focus is more on, hey, how do I use serious gaming and wargaming to teach and edify a specific topic? Meanwhile, I focus on how do I use historical military history to teach my students to design wargames? I sort of flipped the equation, and my focus is to produce war game designers, and my focus is to teach them the skills to research, design, and execute war games for education. So were you the driving factor behind the development of this course, or was Georgetown had an idea that they wanted this course, and then they went looking for someone? Actually, that story is sort of interesting. I originally didn't even want to teach the course. I originally just wanted to give the opportunity to students like myself, the opportunity to know that wargaming was a profession they could pursue.

And I wanted to start an extracurricular club on campus, but due to certain campus rules, I couldn't as an alumni. And the program asked me, hey, instead of doing that, would you like to run a couple seminars, like guest seminars? I was happy to do so, so I ran a couple for two semesters. And it attracted a lot of attention and a lot of student interest, so they asked me, hey, would you like to keep doing this as a full course? And I spent an entire summer working on a syllabus and many of my mentors were like Mike Ottenberg and Ed McGrady were incredibly helpful in helping me put the syllabus together and sort of play test my ideas. And then I ran the course for the first time last August, last September for the fall semester.

Okay. So you've actually, you're almost at the beginning of execution here. This is really its first time in run. Is that what I'm hearing? No. So I ran it for the first time last fall. so in 2019 okay so when we talk design i guess where do you begin with the students and are they designing a game as part of the curriculum yeah so my course is a lot of its project based almost

primarily focused on project based so my students are broken into teams of two to three students each and they do this sort of internal fantasy draft of like you have as part of our icebreaker they have to pitch themselves into why they should be on your team and then afterwards the next week they have to provide a research plan or just sort of a schedule of how they sort of see their timeline opening up and then they choose a historical conflict from a list of approved campaigns and conflicts that i give them the reason i have a smaller list instead of choosing letting them choose anything is because i want to avoid duplication like i did not want five world war two war games every semester yeah right and i wanted to specifically force them to choose

conflicts they didn't know or were not familiar with or didn't really get in their normal sort of history lessons so i expand like you can choose the three kingdoms ancient chinese civil war or the second congolese war battle in kashmir instead of afghanistan and coin look at the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka. So I want to expand their both historical and geographic strategic aperture. So I specifically tailor that list for that specific purpose. And throughout the semester, they research their conflict, go through iterative design plans, and then they start putting their pieces together. And by the end of the semester, in the last week, I invite defense professionals and war gamers in the ncr region to come and play my students games and give them

feedback and then they have the first week of finals or to correct any errors or update anything and they hand their finals in and i grade them and they they breathe a huge sigh of relief when that happens so may i ask what becomes of the projects afterwards are they being then marketed or are you trying to push them over to DOD? So with the projects themselves, one of the great things I offer to them is I promise that all the intellectual property of the games belongs to the student designers.

Georgetown does have the right of asking for copies, mainly because the students will often use copyrighted images and we make sure it's educational use only and we don't sell them. But if the students do want to submit their game ideas to commercial publishers, they're more than encouraged to do so. And they have a full package by the end of the term to do so. But for us, like in the last class we had in the fall, we were able to get some funding to produce polished copies off GameCrafter of the students'

games. And we are going to use them in the future as part of Georgetown University's Wargaming Society, as part of our recruiting efforts, as part of our internal events here at Georgetown to show what what students can do and also show what wargaming is to other students so it's sort of uh feeding the cycle so the Air Force Academy has also come out I can't remember where I saw the article published I'll have to go back and look at it and throw it in our show notes the Air Force Academy has also started a wargaming course where their students design it and I forget who their constituents are as well so like they may be uh commanding commands or air force commands or you may be trying to push them commercially.

I don't remember. But are you linked in any way with what they're doing there? Do you interact with that course developer just to share ideas? Oh, absolutely. So who you're talking about is James Pigeon Fields. It's called Simon's Pigeon. I always call him Pigeon. So his name is James Fields.

He was in the Air Force and taught board gaming design at the Air Force Academy. But he recently retired and is now teaching at, I believe, Colorado State. But there are other institutions like James and courses like his. Like, for instance, James Starrett and Mike Dunn teaching down at the Command General Staff College down at the Army University at Leavenworth. They teach several courses on design for the Army officers who are training simulations focused. Then, of course, you have King's College and other institutions. And, yes, I interact with most of them. Mike Dunn and James Therod and James Fields have been great mentors and great colleagues in mind

as we tried to help each other of like what are you doing for your course what works for you what didn't work for you what games have you been using and there's also a little bit of variance between our audiences so my course is designed for civilians and military officers so I have to sort of split the difference Mike Dunn and James Therod and their wonderful courses down there at Leavenworth they only get military officers of certain grades and they also get them for different periods of time so there's like these variances in our teaching styles and teaching courses and our syllabuses for those reasons but i think it's it's you're in a dozen flowers are blooming across both the the military pme system and and the uh and the civilian universities

and this segues almost perfectly to my next question which was who are the students that are contributing both to your society and then enrolled in your class because i'd imagine you get a much broader spectrum of folks georgetown is kind of known as a feeder for department of state but i know there's dod people who are there as well and then presumably from all across people who will go on to work all across the u.s government go to georgetown university so what is your student body like so uh for the course the student body are all master students in the center of security studies because it's one of the courses within that graduate school in the school of foreign service so my students in terms of background can be a mix so you have

some military officers you have some vets who have some kind of military background but then you also have students who are in the five-year program and they're just out of undergrad and they're finishing up their masters to the school of foreign service and then you have other people who come from all sorts of backgrounds who work at state department who work at other sort of defense agencies and think tanks and they come from all sorts of backgrounds and different gaming experiences so i had people who interned at you know i mean institutions that do some kind of war gaming so they were much more familiar with the names and concepts and then i had people who never did any war gaming at all and they're like this sounds like a cool class let's take it

and i think they didn't know what they were walking into yeah how does teaching the civilians differ for you you obviously have some experience working with military people but how has that experience been different from you and then what have you learned from your students i think the real difference between teaching a mix of class of civilians and military officers is that you have to you know you can't speak the military language as any as anyone who's been in the military been around the dod you learn that everyone the military has its own sort of slang and shorthand and for instance like if i say udaloo like you instantly know what i'm talking about right if i say that in front of my students they look like they look at me as if i just grew a unicorn horn

right so there's that there's that aspect right so for instance when i run tactical decision games with my students which i love to do and my students originally hate it but they end up loving it by the end of the course i have to explain a lot of things that are inside the tgg scenario beforehand So I was like, this is what a BTR is, this is what a MAGTAF is, this is X, and this is Y. And I learned that. And then I walked them through the TDG, and usually in the first iteration, I literally see my civilian students, like, having a panic attack. Because I put them under stress.

I'm like, you only have five minutes to read and write a scenario, like, give me an answer, and you're all going to present, right? And if you tell a bunch of A-type achievers that, like, you have this super time crunch, and you're going to present in front of your colleagues on a topic you haven't seen or prepared for, it creates a lot of stress. And, you know, admittedly, I make it worse by, like, trying to talk to them and playing music at the same time to increase the stress a little. But over the weeks, they get really, really good at them because they start understanding,

like, what is the information I need to absorb quickly? What is the most important bits? What are the important decisions I need to make? What are things I already know I should be doing and don't have to think about, right? so there's that so it can be incredibly exciting to teach a mixed class because i feel like the mixture of experiences and perspectives really enrich the course from people who have state department who come and look at a conflict much differently than someone from dod does or for someone who's just been a student so far i think that kind of dynamic interaction is the

best part of those sort of design teams and i really try to encourage dynamic diverse teams and experiences in terms of what i've learned from my students i've learned a lot a part of it is i've learned a lot of what it means to be an educator and to be a professor because this past fall was my first time teaching this course so there was a lot of learning on the go like i learned don't assign too much reading because they'll never do it and they'll hate you for it another part of is that you have to learn to cater to all the different learning styles in the classroom and there's another aspect of it was I was incredibly surprised and excited about the level of game designs the students produce like I was blown away some of these games were

intricately designed and presented they had really nice cards they had really interesting dynamics and they thought through why they did it certain ways so that was one thing I was really impressed impressed by and every time I talk with my students about design I feel like I learned something as well by teaching them something so have you been able to identify the characteristics of a successful designer now that you've gone through a couple iterations of this no not at all because i feel like designers are like it's like saying what makes a good artist right it depends on the style and what you want out of the the art or the game that you're asking them to produce and there's also a lot of times the war game is a is this compromised collaboration

right so you can't you can see the fingerprints of certain students and their certain styles and certain interests right and then you can see the other students interests and fingerprints on the other parts so you can't say like that one student was you know i mean the only good part of this game the whole point of this game or the design process was produced this collaborative process for instance one of my students last semester did a game on ancient china on three kingdoms The team was comprised of two undergrads and one military officer from the army. And one of the great things about that game is that they decided to focus on the operational strategic intersection point of the Three Kingdoms Civil War. Because the officer was interested in the operational campaigning aspect, terrain, types of units, how does combat work out, right?

How do you move forces around in this era, right? What are the key elements of warfare at this time? And the two civilian students were more focused on that strategic level of like, how do you create political alliances? Are there peasant rebellions? How do you do the economy? And they blended them beautifully between those two elements of having enough operational stuff but enough political stuff to make it a really dynamic and rich game. So that's an example of how there are different experiences and perspectives that led to a really interesting game. I imagine part of the curriculum is you're playing some games in class, is that correct?

Yes. So what are you playing and with what objective? So the objective for a lot of the games that we play is one, a little bit of convert the unbelievers, is that some of my students come in skeptical about wargaming and its purposes. So a part of it is like for me to teach them, hey, wargaming can be really fun, really interactive and really useful in learning and interacting with the topic. So there's a bit of that. Another part of it is to expose them to different games and game mechanics. So I'm teaching them to be game designers. So the first thing you need to do is to learn all the different type of mechanics that are already out there. So I use a combination of this fantastic book called The Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, which is just an encyclopedia of game mechanics and commercial games that I use to teach them, hey, this is how you can do combat adjudication or this is what a combat result table looks like.

This is how you can do deception and imperfect knowledge in games. For instance, I use Frederick, which is a game by Rio Grand Games, which I absolutely love using with my students. The game is about Frederick the Great fighting in 1756 against the Swedes, the Russians, the Austrians, the Holy Roman Empire, and the French. And he has to fight against all of them, and they're in a coalition. The game is so simple, really, in its rule set. We can be really dynamic and really complex in terms of winning. So I love showing them that game. another great crowd pleaser that i use with my students is actually game of thrones risk

the engine of that game is just risk but the the designers layer on all these sort of extra layers to make it more like game of thrones and have changed sort of the game mechanic where you don't have these attila the hun muscle movements where they just come and sweep through with the army of 100 and becomes a war of attrition the game is focused on objectives and strategy and it's more defensive oriented and the one oh yeah sorry does it incorporate some of the political aspects of game of thrones as well yes so there's you can have political marriages there's a economy there a little bit of naval movement and you're sort of a secret effect cards that you can buy so there's like this element that you can have imperfect knowledge and sort of tip the military balance

with things in your hand which i really like and i found that the game is it's like catnip to a lot of the students because they get really competitive and they get really into it and they're like okay what's the next game how do we can we play that again and i i found that that is usually a good way to get them interested yeah does it ever get too competitive in there have you had any flip tables no flip tables yet but you know i mean i think a lot of times when you get competitive you are learning from each other and the next time around you're you are not pushing that envelope and you're thinking both of your adversary and your peers to the next level inch by inch so are the students sticking primarily to military tabletop gaming are you seeing some

of them try to solve other problems in whatever their career field may be so the because of the course's focus the focus is usually on military tabletop war gaming but i do allow some flexibility If you want to introduce a heavier political element or economic element. Also, like if you're doing something like coin or sort of proxy warfare, there's a more focus on that political sphere where the military and the political sort of blend. But a lot of times the students have two choices of essentially choosing something in their field that they're interested in or choosing something totally completely out of left field and learn something completely new. And I found that both choices have different benefits. Well, we're recording this on March 8th, so the topic of the day is coronavirus, COVID-19. Is that a subject that's come up in your course as far as students wanting to model response, or are they just really excited to play Pandemic now? So I'm not teaching this spring semester yet. I will be teaching the next course in the fall. But when I'm running the Wargaming Society on campus, we replayed Pandemic and we have discussed the whole coronavirus and the pandemic.

And I actually was like, you know, if you really think about it, pandemic is actually a very poor game when it comes to modeling pandemic responses. And the reason I say this is because pandemic assumes a cooperative nature among all the, you know what I mean, all the players and all the parties. But if you really think about it, right, like one of the reasons that pandemic is really hard or real life pandemics are really hard is because nation states and governments have, one, a myriad of incentives and prerogatives not to do really robust uh responses two they have all their own sort of self-interest right so you know as a thought experiment uh my students and i in this in the war gaming society we're talking all right so what would we need to do in terms of game mechanics to model a more reflective game in terms of pandemic responses then i would say hey like okay then china has certain types of specialties and abilities but they have different prerogatives

and game objectives than the u.s labs and the u.s scientists versus the eu-based scientists and such right and then you have to also not only worry about the spread of disease but economy people the political consequences because those all sort of mish and mash into how you respond to pandemics meanwhile in the commercial game pandemic which is a great game great example of cooperative gaming it doesn't have any of that you don't have to worry about people being afraid to go to work or being afraid or people panicking in terms of the political sphere but in terms of real pandemics those are real concerns so imagine if you had to play a pandemic game where you have to worry about unemployment levels and patent and the stock market and also like the chinese

are not cooperating with you because they don't want they don't like you for whatever reason right yes uh so you know i mean i think that would be really interesting and prior to like an eight-hour game, right, instead of Pandemic, which is designed to be more accessible to more people. Yeah, I think, you know, not to downplay the seriousness of this, but I think it's going to provide a very interesting case study for some of your students in the fall if they're interested in modeling something like that. Oh, absolutely. Have you modeled your course in society after anything in particular? Because the first institution that comes to mind is one we've mentioned already king's college in london so my course is inspired by so many people to sort

of paraphrase isaac noon like i stand on the shoulders of giants and king's college and phil saban and his book simulating war is one of the textbooks on my course and i love his book because i think it's incredibly accessible for even complete novice to approach war gaming and its history and sort of how to do educational gaming in the classroom and of course i pull from and some pull wisdom and inspiration from other colleagues of mine like mike dunn and james there who we mentioned but also ed mcgrady and mike arnberger who run the moore's certificate course they've been incredibly helpful so i i blend a lot of elements of of other wargaming courses but like i said like each of the courses have different focuses and different purposes

that provide a little bit of variance but king's college is definitely one of the inspiration importance i know you recently did your first game night for your wargaming society how was the attendance and what did you play honestly i was a little worried about attendance early on mainly because we're setting up and we're there a couple hours so early for our own internal meetings and i was like oh man what if no one shows this is our first event and you're always a little bit nervous and then i was overwhelmed by the response of students who did come right We played, I think, seven or eight different games at once at one point for everything from Access to Analyze and Pandemic to Frederick to Memoir 44 and Citadels. So we were playing a whole mishmash of games that were designed to be accessible.

And the student executive committee were running the games to sort of recruit new members. I was really excited and proud of all the efforts that sort of come to fruition after all of our planning that first game night. How often are you going to be hosting those? So we're hoping to do them more frequently in the future semesters. We were sort of slow to get kick-started this semester because we had to go through all the paperwork of being able to book venues and stuff. But we're not only doing game sessions this semester, but we're hoping also to do guest lectures.

We just had our first inaugural speaker, Mike Arnberger of Moore's Wargaming Community of Practice. He gave our first lecture at the last week of February. And our next speaker is Volko Rohunke, who is the famous designer behind the GMT coin series. So he will be giving a workshop slash guest lecture in late March. And then we have the Naval War College coming down to run their international crisis game in April. In the same month, we have John Gordon from RAN running a Naval War game on campus using miniatures. So we have a lot of different types of events that we're trying to expose our students to

because we don't want it just to be about commercial games. We want you to expose to professional games and other types of designers, both commercial and analytical. And the idea is to have the students engage the war gaming community along a whole wide spectrum of things. Yeah, I would say you're ideally situated just with Georgetown's location there because you're at the nexus. You have National Defense University is right there. TECOM is just down the road in Quantico. That's the Training and Education Command for the Marines. you're not far away from Carlisle Barracks and the Army War College and then all the other DC

think tank institutions which run all their own games whether that's RANS CSIS all the acronyms seem to be right there and accessible to you and you have you know a valuable commodity you have players like players who will be the future of the U.S. government DOD wherever they're going to go how the partnerships align for you thus far actually you sort of hit it on the head there our location here in the sort of ncr the national capital reason has been so amazingly advantageous so this past january we partnered with the kulak center for innovation down at the uh down at marine corps university in quantico and i had my students come and run their games for their staff and their faculty and their students for active duty marine corps officers and my students ran

their games and everyone benefited the students got to practice running their games for a more professional cohort thus the marine corps officers got a chance to play these various games and sort of get your free exposure to the types of educational gaming that is out there and that partnership has been incredibly fruitful and they've been amazing in their support to us we're also trying to do other partnerships down at quantico like just this past week i went to the basic school down at Quantico to see how they can improve their sand table exercises they do for their lieutenants as part of the TBS course. And they've agreed generously to have Georgetown students come down there and go through their sand table, tabletop exercises, which are called

their STEXs, which will be great cross-pollination intellectually and sort of experientially. And we are partnering with our other civilian universities like Johns Hopkins SAIS, which is trying to start its own wargaming course and george washington university's simulation group that runs a simulation every semester so we're trying to cross-pollinate with as much as many institutions as possible we're trying to interact with the u.s naval academy up in annapolis and bringing naval wargaming there as well so yeah we're trying to partner with as many people and institutions as possible and i'll be bringing my students down to connections this august to run their games as well.

Oh, very cool. Sebastian, I don't have any other questions, so I'd like to thank my guest, Sebastian Bay. Where can we find you online, and what's next for you? You can find me online on Twitter at Sebastian Bay. I wasn't very clever when I did that one. In terms of what's next, this term has really focused on kick-starting the Georgetown University Wargaming Society,

and I encourage everyone to go and Google us and sign up for our mailing list. And if you're interested in collaborating with my course or with the society that I help run, please reach out to me. You can find my contacts online and on Twitter. We're always looking for ways to interact with the defense community and the wargaming community writ large. Thank you so much. And for our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week.

Thank you, Jared. See you next time. Oh, help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. Why am I bullying the alley? Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. Put it on the shimbo now.