Sea Control - Sea Control 506 - What Wargames Reveal with Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Links1. "What Wargames Really Reveal: Outcomes Matter Less Than Who Pays and Who Plays," by Jacquelyn Schneider, Foreign Affairs, December 26, 2023.  2. Stanford University Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Ed Salo returns as host today. He's brought back Dr. Jackie Schneider. Jackie wrote an article for Foreign Affairs back in December on what war games can reveal based on who's playing and who's paying. This episode was edited and produced by Johan Porisch. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out simsec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. Welcome to Sea Control. Tonight, we have the pleasure of

speaking with Jackie Grace Schneider on her recent article, What War Games Really Reveal, that was published in Foreign Affairs Magazine. Welcome to Sea Control. Thank you. So I want to start out with, I could have read your bio, but I wanted to let you tell our listeners a little about your career, your background, what you're currently doing. Sure, sure. Well, you know, I started in the Air Force. I did six years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force. After that, I went and got a PhD from George Washington University in political science. And this whole time I stayed in the Air Force Reserves. After I got my PhD at George Washington, I went to the Naval War College, where I worked in the Strategic and Operational Research Department.

And that was my first time to really get to see a big Department of Defense wargaming. So I had the privilege of working on quite a few of some of the Premier Navy and DoD wargames that we ran at the Naval War College. And then I got the opportunity to take my new position, which is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University. And while here, I have built my own wargaming initiative. So it's the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at the Hoover Institution. And we run wargames, but we also collect wargames. So one of the big pillars of the Hoover Institution is our library and archives. We have a pretty extraordinary collection of historical materials. So it was kind of only

logical that this institution, which has such a long history of preserving, curating important pieces of historical information, for us to have a war gaming collection. So we are in the process right now of building out that war gaming collection with both historical and contemporary war games. Let's hop right in. So you recently had an article in Foreign Affairs where you were discussing a recent congressional led war game regarding different approaches to China. Can you tell our listeners a little about that game? Sure. So it's a pretty interesting game. It's an interesting game, partly because of where it was held and the players that were playing in it. This is a war game that was actually designed by the Center for New American Security. They have

an extraordinary war gaming team there. And their team ran the war game, but it was a war game that was done for one of the, a new commission on the Chinese Communist Party. And it's a bipartisan commission. I'm going to talk a lot about Gallagher because Gallagher, Congressman Gallagher, who's the Republican that heads the committee, was heavily involved in the public release of the statement afterwards but he basically spearheaded him and his democratic counterpart spearheaded a game where congressional representatives played this war game and it's a u.s china war game over a taiwan scenario and what is remarkable about remarkable about it is that you got that many congressional members to sit in a room together, not during work hours, and they're

not debating pieces of legislation. They're not lobbying for different initiatives. They are playing a game together. This becomes like an extremely immersive, extremely evocative kind of experience. And then coming out of that, you have a wide variety of different press releases and press coverage of the event, both kind of the players' experiences as well as the congressmen who ran it, what they took from it. So it becomes way bigger than the game itself because it has this large role in shaping both public and congressional perceptions of U.S.-China relationship vis-a-vis Taiwan. So how did this differ from the mini games that, you know, It almost seems like every couple of weeks you hear about, you know, this think tank had a game or, you know, all through 21, 22, all these different war games were done by the different think tanks.

You know, how would you say this game was different? Yeah. And, you know, they're all connected in some way, right? Like the fact that we're seeing so many Taiwan war games that are played in unclassified settings, that says something about the interest within the foreign policy community and where the direction is going for U.S.-China relations. this particular game um is a game that seen as actually i think had been running before and i believe it was either similar or a take on a game that they had shown in meet the press either a few months or a year prior and that game which was televised also included congressman gallagher as well as michelle flournoy who a name that's been kind of punted around for a potential future Secretary of Defense, as well as the former commander of Air Combat Command. So these are

important people in U.S. foreign policy that are playing these games publicly, right? They are on the record. At the same time, you have a game that's being played at CSIS. And CSIS's game, which is once again, a U.S.-China game, looking at Taiwan, also gets a lot of coverage. You know, it's in Wall Street Journal, it's in Bloomberg, it's in the New York Times. So it's, you know, the game that happened in Congress was different because these are congressional players. And because the game was sponsored, or at least the idea for the game came from Congress, not from a think tank. But in many ways, all these different games that are occurring at think tanks in Congress are related to each other because they represent that U.S. decision makers

believe that this is something that needs to be understood you know can in the article you kind of give us a short history of war games you know how they developed and not just playing risk you know i did all through high school very nights where then you looked up and you're like wow it's 5 a.m and we're still playing something to uh actually do something but what is sort of the short history of war games as you kind of see it and i i thought it was really cool i didn't realize that you all had that big collection of war games out there? There's so many war games that have been impactful in American history and actually kind of world history.

We're just trying to collect a portion of that. There's discussion about games that goes back to ancient China. But most of these early games in ancient China, in India, in Egypt, in Rome, are really strategic, abstract games. go, for example, right? So they're used by elites in these communities to train strategic thinking, but they don't directly correspond to a campaign or to military capabilities or even to a geographic area. Now that starts evolving with chess or the king's game, right? So you start seeing

a little bit more kind of concrete representation of things that kind of look like military and state elements of foreign policy, but it's still strategic games, right? You don't see it actually becoming a part of campaign planning until Prussia and the advent of Kriegsville. So Kriegsville is a game that comes out of Prussian society, actually, interestingly enough, out of Prussian civil society. So it was like a parlor game. People were playing these board games, kind of like you were talking about risk they were playing games like risk an entrepreneurial person who really loved the games realized this would be even better if we worked with my pal here who's in the prussian military and we made it more realistic so they developed this really extensive rule set that

for once finally looked at kind of how tactics and campaigns actually came together and tried to represent them in the game so you have the development of a rule set a professional rule set At the same time, for the first time, you're seeing real maps. You're seeing the use of materials to symbolize the movement of different kind of troops and weapon systems. So all of a sudden, it's going from abstract logics to far more concrete logics of campaign. And there's this great story that this, you know, the inventor of Kriegsspiel is kind of pitching this to the generals and the princes and all the top, you know, Prussian elite, you know, Prussian general says, oh, this is not a game. This is war, you know, they're really taken to it, right? And it shows how important kind of this evocative nature of gaming is, even from the beginning with Kriegsspiel. But what was amazing about Kriegsspiel was that it allowed the officers within the Prussian army to use this kind of gaming apparatus to debate about tactics and operations and campaigns. And here's the first time that you're able to innovate and experiment without having to actually move forces on a battlefield, which is really expensive and difficult, right?

People often credit Kriegsball with a lot of the kind of the Prussian military successes, and it's probably less that you can see like, oh, yes, this is the moment where, you know, they've developed this new tactic as much as it is the ability to generate new ideas and to really create a codified system for young officers to experiment, innovate from the bottom up. Now, Kriegsball comes over to the U.S. and, you know, the army kind of plays with it. But the really big wargaming innovations in the United States are actually in the naval domain. And so this actually represents a closer relationship with what was happening in Britain.

And in Britain, once again, you know, Britain is in a naval empire. The British really focus on the naval aspects of wargaming. And so you see the influence of Fred Jane, who, you know, for those of us who love military stuff, that becomes like the Jane's defense. but Fred Jane was a guy who was interested in war games and he actually brings over ideas about war games to the World's Fair in the United States and so this becomes the beginning of how the Navy starts thinking about war gaming and so as any good thing that happens in the Navy it's not something that originates in you know Navy command instead it's McCarty Little playing with these war games in Newport in, you know, rooms that nobody in big Navy really knows what's going on. And he

experiments enough of that, he starts seeing some sort of patterns that ended up being really influential to the development of kind of the first modern US Navy. Now, that really is the genesis of war gaming as an important part of how the US military thinks about buying weapon systems. And so the Navy tends to lead this. The Navy is extremely influential in the interwar period between World War I and World War II, where they are doing extensive war games with students as they come through the Naval War College and really like war gaming every different aspect or opportunity or different, you know, variation of a Pacific campaign. so they don't figure out like how to win it or what's going to happen but they're prepared for almost everything that ends up happening in that campaign because they've seen it all and it becomes an extremely important experiential and learning device so there's this great letter from nimitz where he writes to the naval war college later saying that because of the games that were done

so extensively with so many players in so many different ways the navy really was ready for everything that came at them in the Pacific campaign, except kamikazes. He said, we didn't anticipate kamikazes. And so then moving into World War II, you actually see a shift. So campaign games become, are still being run, but you see that now they're using games to understand nuclear politics. And this is the rise of what we call political military strategic games. The Thomas Schelling's, the Albert Wohlstetter's, you have this group of people at Rand out in Santa Monica that are using war games as a way to understand nuclear politics. And they're building not campaign games, these immersive games where they're, you know, taking guys, it's always guys,

for five days to Camp David and having them just like sit in a scenario and imagine the worst of nuclear war. And these experiences are extremely vivid, and extremely evocative. You have these great quotes from people like Schelling saying, you know, we were so immersed that it was like coming out of a dream when we came out of those events. And so then these this generation of strategic thinkers ends up influencing US defense politics for the next two, three decades, right. And a lot of these games are cited as they go into, for example, the Berlin crisis that while Kennedy's making these traces or the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's trying to figure out, like, what are the possibilities of nuclear war? And a lot of people sitting in that cabinet have actually participated in some of these political military games. And they go a little bit out of vogue with McNamara.

And the reason that these kind of evocative games go out of vogue with McNamara is they're not very scientific. you can't measure stuff by numbers really in those i mean they're irrational and they're emotional and this whole idea that like you're sending these men off to camp david and they're getting immersed this is ridiculous right and so you know there's a series of games that occur in the johnson administration at the end of the kennedy administration these sigma games they're looking at things like vietnam and actually turn out to be extremely prescient right and McNamara doesn't believe it. And I think, you know, historians are still trying to understand, did Johnson ever even see these Sigma series games about Vietnam? Or did they get buried

by McNamara or LeMay? LeMay participates in these games and can't stand the fact that one of the big findings from the games is that strategic air power will not defeat the Viet Cong. So LeMay actually starts an influence campaign in the halls of the Defense Department telling everyone how messed up these games are and how bad the control was and the adjudication and the rules and its bias. So there's a bunch of factors, right, that are contributing to the fact these Sigma games don't end up mattering. And so you see in the Johnson administration and with McNamara a focus on more rationalistic modeling. And war games in the next kind of 10 years, to us and I modernize, I think they look a little bit more just like computer models and sometimes I download things

that I'm like well it's a war game and I'm like this is a computer model but that's that was kind of where things were at the time were they war games or were they computer models and there's a great piece by John Emery where he goes back into the Rand archives and looks at a debate between the Rand kind of more humanistic liberal arts thinkers versus the Rand math people and they're looking at kind of the role of irrationality and computer models in war gaming and he actually finds that the computer models go nuclear quite a lot so you know you've got a period there where you have a bit of a fight about what is war games are the computers are they people and then eventually as with all things dod it you know war games have a resurgence and by the time you get

Reagan, you're seeing those big, evocative, experiential, vivid games occurring again at the highest levels. And so Thomas Schelling kind of comes back in the mix. This is the same time period you have Proud Prophet, which is related to the whole kind of Abel Archer fiasco. There's a series of kind of nuclear command put exercises that also look like war games. Reagan's very intrigued by these you also at this time period have war games televised there's a scheme that a crisis war game that gets televised that ted koppel narrates for that yeah it's it's a really i mean it's a it's like an amazing james schlesinger's in it i mean it's just like extraordinary crisis game and i think les gelb and maybe graham allison wrote it but it becomes

influential again not just you know in the dod but also in the public forum right like this is happening at the same time that the movie the day after comes out and so like it's part of a public conversation these war games are and then that brings us into the post-cold war we get a little confused we're like oh wait what are we doing war games for what are we doing as the U.S. and I think the way I would characterize war games from you know the 90s up until about work about Bob work in the 2010s and they're important they're still happening they're happening within the Air Force the Navy, the Army, they're happening, right? And they're actually kind of more codified as part of the process by which we budget and acquire and plan campaigns. But they start

representing the different bureaucratic politics and bureaucratic kind of stovepipes in which they're generated. So they start representing the kind of organizational politics that's really cemented within the Department of Defense. And that brings us to kind of Bob Work, who was the deputy secretary of defense and he sees like we need a war gaming revitalization and he invests a lot in innovative approaches to war gaming in building a database of war gaming archives so you can look across war games and and we'll have to ask you know bob what he thinks but a lot of those initiatives were extremely ambitious and i'm not uh i'm not sure all of were realized. And I guess that kind of brings us today and war games are once again in the public

eye. They are playing a huge role in how we make decisions about Ukraine, about Taiwan, about the future of our military. And so I, you know, as somebody who's now looked at kind of this history of things, you know, you kind of realize that what the war games are very much influenced by the context in which they are run and that yeah i was going to say that leads me to two things i was i'm going to kind of combine these questions i had is talking about use quote that war games are not crystal balls but they are powerful tools of influence and then also mentioning that a lot of times with the game it's who is playing how the game is played and distributed and ultimately why it's played that offer the real insights rather than you know who wins or loses

kind of thing so would you like to elaborate a little on that yeah you know a lot of games that get it right don't end up influencing politics right the sigma games are a great example they get it right and there's also an example of a game a seminar style game called desert crossing which general zinni ran in like the late 90s in the clinton administration and what he finds is that it's going to be extremely hard to occupy iraq over the long term that the politic the domestic politics of rebuilding that nation are going to take us you know decades and billions of dollars no evidence that this war game ever influences policy in fact zinni has spoken in many occasions about how disappointed he is that this game ended up not seemingly influencing

Rumsfeld or that administration when they're making these Iraq decisions. So it doesn't really matter whether a game is right or wrong. In fact, it appears that we've gotten most of the Ukraine games wrong. There's some, you know, Washington Post reporting suggesting that American Ukrainian games have consistently underestimated or been incorrect about potential success of Ukrainian offensives. And we also, there's a great Rand report that just came out that suggested that Rand also got Russia wrong at the beginning of the war. They estimated that Russia would be much better than they were. So war games get things wrong all the time. Does that mean they're not useful? No, because the act of war gaming, the kind of the actual kind of theater of it, is what

actually influences policy. So there's a really interesting vignette in a Bob Woodward book talking about Afghanistan. And I want to say it was, you know, when Dempsey was in charge and they were running these series of war games to figure out how many people that they needed for the search. This is like a big debate that's happening. The White House thinks number X, the DOD thinks number Y. And there's a quote from one of the assistants for on the national security staff, who I think was a former general. And he says, I'm not going over to the Pentagon to drink bad coffee, to play a war game that they already know what the outcome is going to be.

And he says, and further, if State Department and the National Security Council play in these, it's going to make it look like we support these findings. So we shouldn't send people. So they know sometimes having certain people in games makes games look like they are validated, right? Sometimes people pick people for games that they think will lead to certain outcomes right and you know when you're looking at a game

and you realize oh look who they got to play that person that really reveals something about kind of what the sponsor whoever's putting on the game wants to get the outcome and then sometimes there was a game that was played at stratcom a few years ago where secretary esper in the public release they say that this the sitting secretary of defense sat in the game this is like unheard of right almost never you actually have the secretary of defense play the secretary of defense for a variety of reasons like doesn't happen but it absolutely never gets publicized absolutely not so the fact that they you know release that that was really interesting okay so what is this you know this this is signaling something about bureaucratic politics right these traces about

who is playing and the rules that they're given, they all give us information about the bureaucratic politics, the organizational politics, the game around the game, the outer game reveals sometimes more about what's happening in the U.S. kind of foreign policy apparatus than the game outcomes themselves what should the public and the press do to better understand the games because stories are out there they we hear these things of if you listen to one game china's going would easily win others say no they wouldn't and you know again like you were saying these are the publicized ones the declassified ones you know how what can we do so that we're not falling into the prey of i hate to say manipulation but i'll say it yeah you know i

mean look i run war games so even though i'm coming at you and i spent the last i don't know how long giving you a cynical outlook on kind of war games i still think they're very useful analytic tools i just don't think that they can predict the probabilities of the future they can give us an idea about what the potential futures are but the reality about war games and really this is kind of a social science rule is that you need a large number and and you need some level of control in order to say in any any sort of way here's kind of where i think the most likely possibilities are. I think the first thing to realize is that a game might be right, but unless you see many games saying something very similar, you should take everything with

a grain of salt. The other thing that I think is important for especially the press is to have the organization show their work. The CSIS game is a really good example of an organization that showed their work they published the entire report they published their rules they published if they had you know they openly showed this is how we ran the game and i i can go into that and i can say i don't agree with this or i don't agree with that but i know where they made those choices right and i think that that is really really helpful in understanding um the limits of gaming and so i think also kind of understanding where there are patterns if you're seeing many many many games that are all saying very similar things that lends some level of validity to

some of the findings so the fact that all these taiwan games suggest that oh the u.s needs more munitions and this is going to be a bloody fight other types of analysis say that too yeah like that seems right you know that's probably going to happen yeah exactly so like for me when i run my games. So I ran a game that had 580 players. We ran over three years. This is a big iteration, right? So that's giving us a little bit more power to say, hey, here are kind of generalizable patterns of different types of populations. But even in that, I always be careful when I tell people the results of the game. I say, here's what the majority of people do. But then I say, well, let me tell you what my outliers did too. Because the reality is that Putin does not fit

in the majority of my population. But the characteristics that someone like Putin has may actually fit with some of my outliers. So I think that's another important thing to look at in war games is to look at not only kind of the pattern of how often things occur, but when you get something that is really arbitrary or strange or the outlier, to look at that and say well what are the characteristics of that what made that an outlier and do those characteristics have any resemblance to the world in which we live question i didn't send to you but thought about it when you were talking about it what is your favorite game what do you like to play oh this doesn't have to be the big complicated like do you like risk do you like

you know pull a little war hammer out or i mean uh well i have two young uh relatively younger children and they just discovered monopoly which is not particularly a game of strategy until you get to the end and uh you know so we play a lot of monopoly at home i know that's not as fun kind of where we are in our our gaming trajectory my kids sometimes beat me and that's a little embarrassing so i'm pulling away from that during covid well i have a 20 year old son but during covid i found the game pan am which is a really fun game of you know buying routes and all this stuff and my son just like figured it out and all this kind of stuff and like all the business aspects

of it and he's not a history major he is a business major and i'm like i'm happy for you you found what you're but yes and and i grew up the uh playing risk and um access and allies on the weekends and all weekend and changing rules so that we could you know not do the same basic thing and now as a historian i look back i'm like oh we were just in big arms races where nobody wanted to actually do anything well it's pretty remarkable it's pretty remarkable how risk um and to some extent x's and l's has that has stood the test of time these were core strategy games right the logic of strategy but that makes them so universally appealing but it's also why games like go have been appealing for so long right because at their core they're about the strategic

choices that we as humans make and sometimes we're also working on comparing human behavior to computer behavior in these games and i'm interested in like other type things where recently they were big fan of science fiction and the robotech cartoon series had a game out and read an article about how the whole thing is basically on counterinsurgency and i'm like yes it is and so because yeah they're trying to put down a rebellion and all this kind of stuff and i was like wow that is actually really cool but i think the the other thing about games is how great they are for teaching right so how many i'm a political scientist you're a historian and sometimes these concepts can be hard to touch right when we just make our

students read about them, but the application of concepts and ideas in games can be an extraordinary pedagogical tool. And so, I mean, you definitely see that in like the professional military education, you know, war games have been used as a training and a teaching device for a while, but I think also in civilian courses, we're seeing more and more of the use of games to help understand otherwise abstract concepts. Right. So what are some of your projects you're working on now and where can our listeners follow you on social media or other avenues yeah well the social media thing i feel like that's gotten harder these days yeah i am still on this thing that i think is twitter or x i don't i don't i don't know i still call it twitter i'm but i i get mad every time i

look at it too because of yeah well it's been a little bit it's a little bit less of the the kind of networking um that it was before a few years ago um so i'm on there as jackie g schneid but we have a website for our initiative, the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. We are currently working on our collection. So the collection is not live. We are working with a vendor to build out the technology, but we have a bunch that we have in,

that's waiting to be uploaded. We're hoping in May to have it all uploaded. So if there are games that people are interested in, or if there's a topic that you're interested in, I wonder if they have a game about that. and please email us or if you know of a game you say this is a game that was super influential for us or influential for me let us know because one of the things that we like to do I have an extraordinary team of historians and undergrads and archivists and we're just pulling at loose

threads I mean we found already some exercises and war games that our team and most of my colleagues had never heard of and yet we found like this one I can't figure out if it's an exercise or work games called Exercise High Heel. And we can't find the actual exercise, but it's a nuclear command post exercise. We found letters from the head of intelligence agencies to Secretary Laird and Kissinger saying, please turn this off. We think this is going to make the Soviets think that we're going to war. Turn this off. And then we have found actually communications to the Soviets saying, this is just a fake, not real. Don't worry about it. So we know that Like whatever this was, was really important.

So now you just kind of kind of find all the other stuff. So we've got a bunch of that that's sitting in the collection that's waiting to go live. And we're going to have a few series this spring and in the fall that will highlight some of the collections that we've put together. So we've acquired almost every component of the Sigma series. We have also, we're working to acquire or we're trying to acquire a bunch of these Taiwan war games. And we'll have webinars and public events around these different kind of groupings of games so we can talk about, you know, their influence on history and their importance and hopefully kind of introduce these war games to a new generation of historians and scholars for them to look at.

And we're also running a bunch of games. We've got games on space and AI and network characteristics that are all in some level of execution. So good stuff happening all the time. That sounds exciting. And I'm looking forward to seeing that and some of the stuff that you have posted, because one of my goals for this year is to start a wargaming club on campus here in Arkansas State to kind of, well, they're always looking for things to make people more connected. and i was like that would be pretty fun and we have a war a war gaming store here in town so i was like well i'll go talk to them and you know i've got a few of the free ones uh you know just little tiny things to try to get people so that's that's a goal hopefully knock on wood that it happens but well thank you so much um i really enjoyed this and when you come up with some more things. We would love to have you back to talk more, and thank you for your time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021