Sea Control - Sea Control 347 - Wargaming at CNA with Dr. Chris Ma

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Links:1. Rolling the Iron Dice: From Analytical Wargaming to the Cycle of Research, by Peter Perla, Web Ewell, Christopher Ma, Justin Peachey, Jeremy Sepinsky & Basil Tripsas, War on the Rocks, October 21, 2019. 2. Revitalizing Wargaming is Necessary to be Prepared for Future Wars, by Robert Work & Gen. Paul Selva, War on the Rocks, Dec. 8, 2015. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. I'm joined today by Dr. Chris Ma. Chris is the Wargaming Research Program Director at CNA, and we're going to be talking about some of CNA's efforts in the wargaming field. This episode was edited and produced by Dr. Ed Salo. We are still looking for additional audio editors. We're happy to provide you some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment, so if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec and add to your resume and personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to ccontrol at simsec.org.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is the Wargaming Research Program Director at the Center for Naval Analyses, Dr. Chris Ma. So, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Can you start by giving the listeners a little bit more of your background?

Sure. So, yeah, I'm Christopher Ma. I went to school in a small little liberal arts college called Coe College in Iowa, where I majored in physics and in philosophy. And then after being there in Iowa for four years, I wanted to live in a big city. So I went to Georgia Tech, where I got my Ph.D. in materials science and engineering. And then at 27, I got my first real job. And I had the privilege of working at DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's kind of like the R&D department of the DOD. They're credited with making things like the Internet, GPS, all cool, like blue sky ideas,

a very innovative technology. After being there for about seven years, I decided I wanted to have more immediate impact in terms of what I was doing. So rather than working on things that were 15, 20 years down the line, I thought I'd do something that's a little closer. And through serendipity, I found CNA, where I joined in 2012. They sort of plucked me out and said hey we need some analysts to be part of the wargaming team a new team that was sort of forming within cna i had never done wargaming before so i was like am i gonna be playing risk all day i didn't i didn't quite understand what was going on but um i said sure if you want to pay pay me to play games i'm i'm more than happy to to do that uh i learned that it's a lot more complicated

a lot more scientific with a lot of art industry as well involved in that. I've been there since for almost 10 years now. And a couple of years ago, I took over as the director. And so I'm helping lead the team to hopefully do continue to do great things to help help the Department of Navy as well as the DOD. So that's me. Well, thanks. I started smiling as soon as you brought up Koch College, because that is roughly the area of the country that I'm from. So, you know, we can follow up on that offline and talk about what there is to do in some of the rural Midwest. And as a reminder to our listeners, all opinions express our own, not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated.

So on that note, Chris, what is the Center for Naval Analyses and what does CNA do? yeah so cna is a federally funded research and development center uh ffr dc that is in particular serves the department of navy so it's non-profit and you know at the heart of it what we do is we kind of solve squishy ill-defined complex issues um by applying scientific rigor and analysis And hopefully at the end of the day, that rigor and that analysis creates actionable solutions for the problems that are of national importance to the Department of Navy and the DOD at large. So I'm going to add one more caveat to this, too. We are recording this March 12th. I'm not sure what date it's going to air, but typically we're airing about a month after we record. Obviously, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is going on.

So if there's anything that comes up that our listeners think may have been pertinent in between March 12th and whenever this goes to air, that's why we're not asking the question. But Chris, what types of organizations are typically commissioning games with you? Is it just the Navy or do you work for the COCOMs as well? What else do you guys do? Yeah. So, you know, as the Department of Navy's FFRDC, we, a large number of our sponsors are, you know, part of the Navy and the Marine Corps. So within them, we have organizations like OPNAV N4, N2N6, NAVFAC, PACFLEET, MARSOC, the MEFs. And that makes up probably around 30% to 50% of the sponsors that we have. It fluctuates year to year. Outside of that, though, we also work with the joint staff. The last year, two years, we've worked closely with J4, J7, J8.

You mentioned earlier the combatant commands. They are definitely a part of our portfolio, as well as AFRL, OSD policy. so we're really sort of all over the place in terms of the types of organizations that we are we get to work with we get to you know help try to understand whatever issues they're looking at and what's nice is that having that large uh swath of of people that we get to work with we get to bring all that information all that knowledge to help inform all the other types of games right so you know maybe we're working for the joint staff right but that's going to eventually trickle down to the Navy. So all of our Navy and all of our Marine Corps sponsors get to

have that knowledge of what's coming down the pipe for them because we have that exposure. How have you seen demand signals shift over your 10 years with the organization? And as you answer this, feel free to answer it. You can answer by warfighting function, by region, by event. For example, I know there's been a much larger push into wargaming since So vice chairman, so General Silva was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, famously wrote a War on the Rocks article about reinvigorating wargaming. Yeah, so I will say like both Silva and Work are kind of our patron saints of wargaming within the DOD. we saw a large uptick and I know quite honestly are still riding that wave for the emphasis that was placed or replaced maybe on wargaming. And so as a wargame director, I'm very happy to come out

and sort of address that. But in terms of like actual other types of places that I've seen it grow. You know, clearly with the pivot to the Pacific, we've seen a larger uptick in problems in that region, examining different facets of some of the policy, war fighting, allies and partners, all those kinds of things have been, you know, within the last five, six, seven years uh been uh and having priest um i think cyber right i think the cyber as because it becomes more and more mature as being folded further into the uh into the the war game community i'm sorry into the not the war gaming community as it's been folded into the uh domains for war fighting we've gotten a little bit more interest in sort of seeing and understanding that uh

Logistics. Logistics has been a large uptick, mainly I've seen because that was the portfolio that I managed before I took over as the director. The importance of logistics and having that in place in order to fight effectively has another been a large uptick. I would say in the recent years, we've seen more about simultaneity, right? How do we fight two fights at the same time? How do we keep our enemies at bay with people not trying to take advantage of our opportunity? And so I would say those are the main things that I've seen over the last couple of years. Is there a level of war if such a thing can be said to exist that you're typically examining or is that really dependent on what the sponsor has asked for? So I will say it definitely depends on what the sponsor is looking for. At CNA, we don't necessarily have a hammer and everything's in the up.

We want to look at our individual sponsors and their needs and the questions they're looking for. But I would say that generally, in terms of the trends that we've seen, operational, high operational to operational type of games are where we found ourselves executing. I think maybe part of that is because wargaming is really good at being able to examine concepts. And so if you have a concept that hasn't been fully fleshed out, right, you don't have the data or the information or the detail in order to do that tactical level. And if you have a concept, you've probably already been given sort of that strategic guidance. So that's a consequence. A lot of people have come to us to understand like new kinds of concepts to employ or help with O plans, planning operations and things of that nature. So that's really where we've seen generally a bulk of our war games sort of sit. So we were introduced by your colleague, Sebastian Bain, and my discussions with him, he brought up your vision for CNA's gaming portfolio, going so far as to describe it as ambitious and necessary.

what was the state of the gaming portfolio that you inherited and then what is your vision for that portfolio sure um so i definitely inherited a very healthy portfolio or a healthy gaming team but and looking at it i have right there's a within the gaming community there's sort of this uh back and forth of is war gaming more art or more science right um and depending on where you rely on the field uh there's a spectrum of different answers but i sort of tend towards a little bit more towards the artistic and some of the our war game designers are a little bit more on the artistic side right it's it's creative uh understanding of how to balance abstraction versus reality right in order to get the most out of a war game to get the data that

we need in order to create um uh the analysis to answer a question so because i have a bunch of creatives on my, on my team that are looking to, to not just rehash the same thing over and over again. They want to do something new. I sort of looked at the portfolio and I said, okay, we're doing a lot of force on force types of games, you know, answering some questions that are iterative, right. Or slight, you know, slight changes. And I wanted to sort of expand that. And so what my vision was, was to take war gaming. And when people think of war gaming, they generally to think of a large map that has you know either pucks or cubes or little um little figures that are representing ships or tanks or aircraft right and they're and they're fighting right that's the

force on force but wargaming can be so much more than that wargaming can be expanded to address problems uh like how best to create or stand up or modify a new organization we can look at wargaming to look at um cyber right which is not about you know not about pucks on a on a map and and fighting in sort of force and force so i really wanted to expand that to look at you know interactions with with partners and allies so really take wargaming and really apply it to a host of different problems uh both inside and outside the dod um i think that we're seeing with real world events, right? The importance of the different levers

that the government has in terms of dime, right? The diplomacy, right? I mean, we focus on the DOD on that end part, the military, but partners and allies are going to be important. Economics is going to be important.

How does a whole of government respond to it? And I want to basically, and my far off plan as I'm certainly working towards that is to be able to incorporate all those things and a host of different types

of issues and problems for our team to tackle. And I, like I said, hopefully help the DOD at large answer some of those squishy, complex, difficult problems. And I'm wondering if you've seen any impact already from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, because that D and that E lever, they're getting a workout right now. They are. So I think because we're right in the midst of it, we haven't seen that directly. But I think it's going to come, right? I think that, again, that whole of government, uh the other levers will be super important and what that means is right the dod it's got a huge budget right so they can afford to war game um a lot of different things state department right

treasury all that because they don't um and so hopefully somehow uh with this emphasis or the hopefully what will be the success of that d and that e uh well for future conflicts or maybe even you know, this particular conflict, we can start wargaming different COAs, different avenues of approach in order to solve some of these kind of issues in the real world. And I guess I shouldn't have really left out the information pillar either. It's obviously we're watching the Ukrainians do yeoman's work in the information domain, sharing their story and telling their people's story. So opinion type question here, what should DoD be incorporating into its game that we aren't doing effectively now that's a great question um i would say for for me what i think is my number

one priority and this is you know christopher maul talking um i would love to see more comms degraded uh comms denied type of uh of effort into war gaming right it's a really hard problem right um i think that we know that if we're going to fight a near peer competitor that comms denial, comms degraded environment is going to be something that we're going to have to deal with. And so being able to abstract that so that we can have our military leaders be able to make choices, understand risk, you know, be able to simulate the fog of war and how they're going to react to that, I think it'd be super important as we move forward. Additionally to that, I would say sort of um cyber right cyber is is one of the newer domains or if not the newest domain

um and and and the war fight and i find uh cyber sort of kind of currently in war games kind of being like that snl skit with uh christopher walken of cowbells give me more cowbell right that's you know what just i gotta have more cowbell but not really understanding how to incorporate cyber in that multi multi-domain layering how to plan for it how to properly execute it. And so being able to have more cyber so that our operators, our planners can have a better understanding of what it takes to do cyber, how effective cyber can be used, I think will be important, again, for, in my opinion, for the future warfight. And you and I spoke about this prior, you and I spoke prior to this about trends you've noticed

over the last few years, and you immediately thought of logistics, which again, is a massive theme of the Russian Ukraine conflict, but when did the interest in logistics start to pick up and what types of logistics problems are you looking at, particularly as you look at Department of the Navy? Yeah. So I would say for me, probably around 2014, 2015 is where I saw the, I don't want to say explosion, right, but a larger number of sponsors coming to us to look at logistics uh in terms of types of issues right uh fuel right as the navy right the navy uh is a fuel carrier uh because it's heavy right you're gonna be able to fly bags of fuel and airplanes um so we've been looking at fuel for you know essentially since 2014 2015 um how we're

going to move it around and um particularly given the um the pivot to the pacific and that theater which we have long transit times. I would say within the last two or three years, to include in logistics, I would say that infrastructure has been another emphasis. You know, where can we make investments to get the most bang for our buck? And so we've looked at a lot of different organizations within the Navy and the DOD in terms of how can we do logistics, wartime logistics, and particularly investments for infrastructure. Where do you find your players, Are your clients providing decision makers to help you sort of play test the concepts that they're giving you? Are you sourcing everything in-house?

So one of those things is, again, it sort of depends. In an ideal world, what we would do is we would do a lot of role-playing games. And so we really want the people that have the expertise, that know what it's like to sit in that job, or at least maybe it's their boss's job, but have enough experience to sort of sit and play the games. Because award gaming is about being in an immersive experience. And so understanding what the left and right lateral limits are of a decision maker, of a play, of a role is important. And so we try to get our sponsors to be able to reach out to get the actual people in those seats or in that command to play. Now, is that always the case? You know, the DOD is very, very busy. The Navy is very, very busy. The Marine Corps is very busy. So CNA can and has augmented in the past. We have regional experts to play, you know, different partners and allies.

We have red experts in order that know our red adversaries, both the policy, their leadership, as well as their techniques of how to fight. so we can incorporate them as cna is full of a bunch of analysts and so we have lots of different types of subject matter experts when it comes to different technologies different uh operations different commands and so as needed we do augment but an idea where we'd have players um being pulled from the actual commands that were that we uh that we're representing in our games that was a follow-up question there uh how do you choose your who's going to play red for you i know you mentioned you have some people in-house you have a sort of analysts who have some understanding in that region by the way what are you looking for as far as a background as a red player because

you may have two analysts who have very different views of the way a country acts or how their you know decision making functions within their particular form of government yeah so i would say there are i can give two answers to that so uh one we choose our red players based off of what the need what the decision right so war games are about decisions when it comes down to it right it's about human interactions and so the person will that will play in terms of their initial let's call it role so to speak will be based off who do we need do We need someone who knows who needs to know about what the leadership is going to be at sort of a national level. Or we need someone that's going to be know how to like know what the missile firing distance is for a particular platform.

Right. Those are very, very different reds players. So it's going to be really dependent on on that, on what the question is that we're looking at or what decision we need that player to make. So that's first of all, in terms of like you're right, different players may have different within the Intel community. Right. There may be different assessments within the within the same organization of what a red will will or won't do. But this kind of gets at the heart of what what a war game is. Right. A war game is in the simulation. Right. I can get the same group of players to play the same game several times and the outcome will be different each time because someone will come in. Maybe they had a bad day. Right. Maybe they're not super focused. Maybe they're risk averse. Whereas another player wouldn't have have risk aversion. And so the fact that we're going to have that delta,

we're going to have some variation in the way someone perceives a decision in a moment of time is completely fine. Because a war game isn't repeatable. It isn't a simulation where I hit the button and I get the same answer over again. And that's okay, because a war game gives us trends. It gives us the ability to try things in a safe environment so that we can learn. And if I get a result from a war game, as an analyst, what do I do? And what does my team and cna do we take that result and we say okay let's pull the thread about that is that something is that a war game ism is that a real problem okay it's a real problem how big is that problem is that an outlier right or is it an issue that we can use uh exercises or real world data

to cooperate to say yeah no we've seen this over and over again so let's let's do further investigation in it let's do some some hard analysis into that um and so that's why when it comes to slight different variations in a way a player is going to play uh or a view that someone have for the most part it's going to be okay because again um the the a war game doesn't predict the future it gives you one of a million types of potential futures and then from that piece of data we can then look and extrapolate out to better understand the problem and use other techniques like analysis like exercising like uh iterative war gaming to really address it and then a follow-up question to that it's and i realize that the answer to this is partly a

function of just funding and time but how many times are you running each of your games to sort of for lack of a better term you know quote-unquote control for personality if you will we're trying to see the results that you get yeah you're going to have all these iterations of what the person the decision the individual makes in these given situations but eventually you'll see some patterns emerge. So how many times are you typically running those to identify some of those patterns? I would say probably 80% of the games that we run are probably one-offs. And again, it's that issue of time and money. The sponsor needs, doesn't have infinite funds, or they need an answer soon in order to inform other analysis or help inform a little bit of a decision.

that other 10 to 20 percent we do have games that are iterative in the sense of we'll play one game once we'll wait a couple weeks maybe maybe a couple months to play it again or sometimes what we actually do is we'll have games that will be run concurrently so we'll have four versions of the same game running all at once now that requires a lot of people to play that game right and so getting all those kind of people on this certain day to play can be difficult So I would say it's a majority, a vast majority of the games that we are that we run are sort of one offs. I'm going to go back and ask another logistics question. I just thought of it as you were answering there. Has the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the way that we have seen it unfold, which seems to have come as quite a surprise, the way that it's unfolding here,

has it forced you all to look in-house at any of the assumptions that you built in sort of your own logistics games or like hey these are aspects of this that we've observed to date that we haven't effectively built into our games we need to look at some of these going forward um so what i'll say two things right so the first is i there are definitely some times where i looked at things that i saw on the news and i was like oh russian did not war game logistics right Right. I think I've done better about that. Right. So that one thing. But honestly, right. At CNA, what we sort of believe in is what we refer to as the cycle of research, which is a phrase coined by Peter Perla. And so in the cycle of research, you have three components. You have analysis, you have wargaming and you have exercising.

and it's a cycle, right? It goes, oh, it's iterative process going back and forth in any particular direction. You can enter at any particular point. So the idea is like with a war game, you do a real war game and then you can do an exercise

or you can do an analysis afterwards. So that's a long way to answer to say that part of our job in order to make war gaming better is to take as much real world data as possible to help inform, like you said, the assumptions, the analysis of our war games and we do that and so without a doubt when there's a reconstruction

a more detailed reconstruction of the events that have unfolded with russian ukraine uh and every and everything peripheral to that we will look at that and say okay how can we incorporate now we have real data to better serve uh our customers our sponsors to make sure that we can not reinvent into the wheel and learn from uh from from others and from uh from real world events so if the navy just gave you a bunch of funding to design whatever game that you wanted that would help the navy and marine corps what game would you want to design oh what game would i want you're asking me like to pick a child um let me let me let me defer let me give you two answers you can you can thank sebastian for this question this is the sebastian i will i will i will duck his pay

as soon as i get back um okay so i'm i am gonna be a war gamer and say it depends so i'll give you two answers and i'll make them quick so that i i don't i don't i don't take up too much of your time so as i before as i said earlier about you know what things are we not incorporating well right i would say i would personally i'm on a personal quest to have comms degraded right games to incorporate that to understand what really what mission control mission command is right to be able to understand how we're going to address the fog of war so incorporating that into our war fighting games i think uh is something that i would love to do do i know how to do that right now the answer is no i have no clue of exactly how we're going to do that uh but i have a bunch like i said i

have some creatives that that if i put on this problem they will come up with a elegant solution in order to address this right um and that's the beauty about the team that i have is they want to be working on the bleeding edge of the dod problems and not that there's not that comms degrading isn't degraded environment isn't bleeding edge but it's something that we haven't had to do because no one is sort of asked us to look at it so that was the first one um the second one now again is cyber right um cyber is one of the new parts of the multi-domain um war fights and we at cna have created this very sort of i think is sort of elegant game design for a product a cyber game called merlin but that that sort of if if we have a pie right merlin addresses a very small

slice of that pie right uh it's good for understanding you know what it takes you know the the what it takes in order to get a cyber effect but i would like to slowly expand that you know with other types of issues to look at merlin looks at a very specific issue other types type of cyber issues so that again war planners uh operators um they can better fold cyber into their multi-domain war fighting and right now i think it's just too novel and they don't have enough experience and being able to fast forward that or to accelerate that as much as possible i think would be a hugely beneficial to how i think the how i think the war fight will go right it's going to be it's going to be done with ones and zeros right uh then rather than you

know um as much boots in the ground that we used to have for the way we used to fight and then final question uh do you game in your free time and if so what are you playing and why uh yeah so i i do um i actually have uh recently i when i recently i have three tweens in my household and so i'm trying to get them uh more into gaming and my condolences on the three tweens man good luck uh you know i'll tell you what it's harder than i thought it was going to be but uh yeah so i'm trying to get them to to be better into gaming um and so a game that we've sort of gravitated towards uh is secret hitler which is this hidden identity game um i like it because it helps i think it helps them teach about strategy and how to read people um although i will

say like i feel a little worried that they're going to take those skills that they've learned from secret hitler and they're going to secretly ban to ban together to overthrow me in a vicious coup um but but outside of outside of my my family life i would say a game that i really enjoy and it's again it's one of those very simple mechanics but very elegant is diplomacy um we've played diplomatically at cna several years ago uh for the first time we got together and uh it is just it is just a it's it's i love the game because it's about it's about interpersonal skills like I said the mechanic is really simple but the application of it is so diverse and so I know this sounds weird but like almost beautiful right and I so I love playing the game although I had a band

we had a band playing the game at CNA for a couple years because people kind of gotten gotten some some hurt feelings and I mean mistrust I've never played diplomacy but everything I've ever heard about is like you will never be friends with the people that you play with diplomacy after you've played diplomacy it is that is definitely an issue but luckily at the wargaming team right we we all play enough games that we are able to suspend belief and be like all right this is a safe environment where the decisions we're making are only because that's what is being incentivized by the game and you know but even like i said even that there were still some people on the team were like i can't work with that person anymore because i can't trust them like no wait

that was well i was austria and they took took over like yeah so anyways um but yeah so so diplomacy is a game that i love but again yes i have to be careful who i play with um and and make sure that we i don't lose friends and or co-workers all right well that's unfortunately all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest dr chris fermat chris where can we find you online and what's your next project if you can talk about it yeah so um you can find me at linkedin or you can find me at cna.org uh we have a war gaming page there that's got information about both myself and some of the other team, as well as some of the unclassified work that we've done. In terms of next projects, well, we look to be

pretty busy for this spring and summer, hopefully sort of supporting some of those squishy issues that are, you know, are prescient to the different organizations that we are working with. And hopefully we get some good results that can help the DOD. So that's what we're doing in the short term, at least in the level that I can speak to here. Well, thanks again for coming on. To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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