Sea Control - Sea Control 584: Wargaming in the Pacific with Chris Denzel and Sebastian Bae

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Links1. Sebastian Bae Twitter.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Ahoy, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your co-host, Brian Kerg, and our best today are Major Chris Denzel of the United States Marine Corps and Mr. Sebastian Bay of the Center for Naval Analysis. We'll be discussing their experience supporting wargaming in the Pacific, specifically in support of bilateral wargames involving the United States and Japan. As a reminder, all views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other organization with which we are affiliated. Gentlemen, welcome aboard. Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your professional backgrounds,

especially your experience in wargaming? Hey, Brian. It's great to be here with you and Sebastian. I'm an intel officer in the Marine Corps by trade, but most of my career I've been doing planning stuff. I went to SAMS, which is the Army's planner school. And then in 2002, as part of my payback tour for that, I went to 3MEF to be the Japan Plans Officer. And that's where I really got into wargaming and met and started working with Sebastian. This past summer, I moved to USFJ, so still working on Japan stuff. up here in mainland Japan doing campaigns and posture planning.

But 3MF was really my first experience with wargaming. We got a little bit of familiarization at SAMS, just a week or so of wargaming, just that we were familiar with the basic concepts. But the first thing I did when I showed up to 3MF was learn that I was responsible for running a 3MF wargame. There really wasn't any sort of plan to fall in on. So I really clung to Sebastian for his expertise

and tried to familiarize myself as much as possible so that I could pull off a war game three months after showing up at 3Meth. Hey, Brian, Sebastian. It's great to be with both of you on this. I'm a senior game designer at the Center for Naval Analysis, also known as CNA,

where I lead our portfolio on Indo-PACOM games, predominantly that focus on the future of warfare emergent tech and allies and partners and operational war fighting so that means i'm often in the indopay computer as i am right now um in japan on this podcast but uh we've been doing this bilateral ground force game with chris before for the last three years and we're about to go into our fourth year very soon but it's been a pretty wild journey as we'll talk about in this episode but uh it's been definitely a learning experience It's about allies and partners, wargaming for commands at the sort of operational and tactical level.

So it's been a wild ride. Awesome. Thanks for that intro. And full disclosure, I did cross paths with both of our guests in my own capacity as a planner, and I can personally attest to the fact that your impact as Japan planners and wargamers has been absolutely impeccable across the force. So the both of you, you've got extensive experience

in both wargame design as well as bilateral military exercises. Recently on State Control, we had an episode with Ben Van Hort and Chuck Bly-Levin, and they specifically discussed a series of bilateral exercises with the U.S. and Japan. Could you contrast war games and command post exercises, especially in the bilateral space? Yeah, absolutely. I'll take the practitioner's answer to this and frame it as a uniform military planner, and then Sebastian can clean it up with all the doctrinally correct answers. but i think we're on the same page here where there are differences between cpxs or command

post exercises and war games um but none of the rules are hard and fast nothing's black and white so there are only tendencies and trends there's a little bit of war gaming and a lot of cpxs and a little bit of cpx and a lot of war gaming but generally what i've appreciated about the difference between the two is cpxs are about training not education or exploration they're about taking what's a known solution or at least believed to be the right solution and rehearsing it to refine it and get people familiar with what their role in that is. That could be as basic as exercising your SOPs as a command center. And so you put into a war situation in an exercise and everybody has their SOPs to get certain information, build certain slides, develop certain plans. And

they're rehearsing that, figuring out who do I need to be talking to? What do I need to be doing? What are the tools that help me? At the theater level, the Indo-PACOM CPXs we do are often based on a war plan of record. So somebody has written out the plan that says, here's the enemy COA, here's the friendly response to it from the Indo-PACOM level to the JTF level, down to the meth and below level. And in that exercise, everybody is rehearsing what is already written down as their plan. Some parts of it are unscripted.

The exact enemy actions might be unpredictable, but you're taking what you know to be your mission and trying to execute it in a somewhat dynamic environment. The other aspect of this is because they're so widespread and so expansive, each individual usually only sees a soda straw of the experience so the mef commander and the mef commander's primary staff may have a decent appreciation of what's going on in the whole theater because they're sitting in indo paycom or jtf battle rhythm events they're seeing

the commander's updates or the uh oh and i briefs they're hearing from the jtf commander what his or her priorities are but everybody else in three mef you know outside of those 20 or so primary staff are only seeing the the three mef battle space so they're vaguely aware of what seven fleet might be doing or what pack f might be doing um but that's mostly invisible to them so while cpx's benefit from being very large and you you exercise a large scale uh each individual has a hard time really piecing all that together and figuring out like what's the story of the entire war here how does my role at 3mef or at the meb or at the mlg how does it fit in with what indo paycom is trying to do by contrast war games are a little more experimental and

educational they're designed to put players in situations where you know there is not a known solution. You might have a theory, you might have a hypothesis of we think this is the best way to solve this problem, but you're designing wargames specifically around unknown solutions. We know this is a hard problem. We know we don't know how to solve it. Let's put players in a situation where they are forced to make decisions, prioritize this over that, sequence this in front of that, and figure out what we learn uh is it something we can lock in a solution to or is it something that we need to further study or we don't even know what the exact questions we are there so i look at war games more about uh discovering what the question is or testing a hypothesis

to that question you have um and then from a scale perspective war games are almost always much smaller than exercises even the largest war game is far smaller than uh some meth level cpxs so the benefit of that is you're literally and figuratively all in the same room so in our war game everybody comes together in the morning and gets the brief of here's what happened yesterday all the red cell players all the blue cell players they're in the same room seeing here's what happened here's the whole map and players from their individual seats get to see what what is the wider war here what's the wider problem set and how do i sit in also because of that and i know we'll get to this later war games are also a really great venue for outside observers to come

in so whether it's national security personnel folks from the embassy state department uh civilian leadership or even uniform leadership at osd we're trying to come in and see what is three mess role in the wider o plan if they come in a cpx they're only going to see a sliver of things. And most of what they'll see is people doing their jobs, which is not so interesting at the strategy or policy level. At a war game, it's much more condensed in terms of what are the big muscle movements? What are the big issues? And then, of course, because you're all in the same room, there's a lot of back and forth of conversations that happen that wouldn't happen if you had somebody in a command post in Hawaii, somebody else in a command post in Okinawa,

and somebody else in a command post in Yokota. So literally and figuratively all being in the same room has a lot of benefits as well both to educating people uh and and solving problems and now i'll turn it over to sebastian from to tell tell you guys that everything that i said that was wrong so no i will largely agree with chris on this um the best way i describe it between exercises and games is that they're venn diagrams and cpx is often sit in that weird overlap between games and exercises. And the best way to distinguish games and exercises is that exercises tend to focus on skills and execution, just like what Chris mentioned is, can I do this thing in real life? What are the processes and how do I walk through this process? This is often what

exercises are about. On the other hand, games are often larger abstractions and simplifications of the real world but they focus on decisions consequences right so because exercises tend to focus on real world execution on real world coordination real world sort of skills right whether that's you know being able to acquire something with a radar use a drone or do a staff process uh they tend to be real real time right while more games you can get much deeper into a problem weeks days months depending on the abstraction but really focus on decisions you don't really care about the the tactical level in the sense of like can i require this radar it's really a question it's like what decisions am i making and what implications and consequences

against that thinking adversary on the other end which is a huge difference between exercises that board games feature so you know having designed both components of exercises and cpxs and games exercises tend to be more on the rails right because they tend to have a script a certain schedule ranges and things and so forth that have specific limitations so those are all really focused on the training portion like training a skill or execution and then on games they tend to have more open-ended questions of like what about this process or how do we go about solving this problem set against this adversary and the adversary adapts you know i mean um as designers we always say hey we have we have control of what goes into turn one and then afterwards it's all

really the players that write the story and narrative of how a game unfolds because it's their decisions and we're practically just the judges of seeing hey that's a strike that's in and so forth but how the the decisions unfold over the course of the game's turns are really up to the players which is a huge major difference between exercises and games and then in that rear fuzzy zone between cpxs is that depending on the type of cpx it can be focused on decisions that can make it sort of trend towards a game or it can be more like hey that we're going to practice a process we're going to practice um you know i mean these kind of products and see if this works to brain and now trend more towards the skills execution portion of exercises so it's not binary

but we do have a bad habit in dod with large of calling games and war games and exercises interchangeably both in the press and in our own vocabulary so i would say the major difference is decisions and consequences for games skills and execution for exercises thanks for that guys that was a really good breakdown of some of the compare and contrast of war games and exercises and clarification of the definitions and really what stands out between one or the other and i think it set us up to uh really flip the question around a little bit and explore the space in a little bit different way can you discuss how war games complement exercises yeah so sort of riffing off that previous question if war games are to

try to come up with solutions to unknown problem or problems that we don't know how to solve then what i've seen especially with the the war game we've run with cna over the last few years is unaddressed problems in CPXs in the first year that were explored in our war game the first year became standard con ops that we would execute in a CPX the following year. So we're looking at questions like, how do we do contested sustainment down to some relatively remote islands? And we're coming up with theories about how we might do that

in conjunction with larger combat power pulses, how we might use bilateral modes of sustainment, et cetera. So we're experimenting with that really unbounded in the first year. And then by the time we get to a major CPX like Resolute Dragon or Keen Edge the following year, I'm seeing those con ops, sometimes with the very same names, just being pulled out on day two of the exercise and saying, well, let's run one of these. let's run a Sea Snake or let's run a Sakashima Express.

It's like, oh, hey, these are literally names we came up with last year at the war game for specific challenges or problems. And you see the evolution of a problem from contested sustainment, how are we going to do that, to more discrete executable options. So whereas two or three years ago, we were just talking about how do you get logistics to the islands? Now we're talking about, well, there are different methods we could use for surface sustainment or for air sustainment um and those have branched out to different

concepts of operations that will pull off the shelf in an exercise so as the war games sort of start to you know i hesitate to use the word solve these problems because you're not really coming up with a solution but you're coming up with a solution you think works or at least can be adapted um these become things that you can pull out of your toolkit in an exercise and then And of course, if crisis and conflict ever happen, you have rehearsed those to the point where you can pull them off and hopefully do them. And then the final point I'll make here is that experimentation gives people a common set of experiences. So they know what the terms are, they know what the concepts and the challenges are. So when you start referring to those concepts later, they're not just the name of an option, but they're a corporate experience that the command has.

so as much as i hate to admit it with chris on the line is um like the bilateral ground force game that we did for 3mef and for chris for a long time um was one of my is still one of my favorite games because we went through what we call the cycle research for it right we're able to run the game as cna for the math to look at all those problem sets and then we also attended and supported uh keen edge resolute dragon all all these other exercises where we're able to observe like these outputs that chris mentioned right and see like hey did you can you really do the things you said on paper on these slides uh in our move sheets um and then that was fed back into our analysis into our reports into our memos that we gave to the math uh when we went back and did our

homework which often again fed the next year right so the great benefit of these sort of campaign of learning campaign of analysis where we do series of games that feed into each other which was amazing to do for the mef but so like our games fed into the exercise the exercises fed into the analysis and analysis fed into the whole cycle back again right so we have years of reports and memos and things and concepts that were like hey yes we worked on this hey yes we had this conversation and we build on those so we're not always stepping back and starting from the same you know your sort of step zero again over and over right so you know that was really powerful and one of the things i would say is that we got great feedback from the exercises of like hey like

we thought this worked on paper like this and this you know i mean this wiregram looked like connecting this organization to this organization but in practice it doesn't work that way right we're all been there where the doctrine or the doctor documents that says you should do this But in reality, it goes some other way for whatever reason. And trying to understand those portions really informed the game design and the game concepts and the game questions that we asked the next following year to continue to refine those. And it was really important to build our own knowledge on the gaming side, supporting the myth of what concepts they were thinking, because they're moving so fast month to month as part of like sort of the joke cycle of understanding from one event to another. It was rapid change. And I was always be asking Chris, like, hey, what's the news documents? What can you send me? When do I go out?

And I we ended up spending so much time in Japan supporting these events from the planning conferences, the TTDs, the exercise reports to the executions of the game that I joke with Denzel that I should start paying Japanese taxes. um so i think that was really important to be intimately connected and supportive and stay on that same rhythm as the as the math as it approached the problem that was a really good explanation and you mentioned a couple times uh your organization the center for naval analysis so at the risk of turning this episode into an advertisement an advertisement for cna could you discuss how organizations like it enrich and enhance war games like the bilateral ground forces war game and others yeah so i won't try to make it too much into a commercial

for cna uh so cna is one of the ffr ffr dcs or the federally funded research development centers this includes places like ran where i used to work which is the army and air forces ffr dc and vr the ffr dc for the navy and the marine corps and then there are others like mitre and ida that also do war gaming work but i would say ran and probably cna are the top tier of those of those organizations that do war gaming uh in support of the command commands to the operational fleet uh and the units and so forth but i would say the biggest advantage like places like cna is that we bring a corpus of knowledge about gaming right just like all of you have mos's as tomos or intel officers or anything else like our job predominantly like my job is 365 days a

year to design games for commands for organizations and tackle problems right so i've been designing games for over 13 years right uh for the dod uh and that's i mean not something you can replace with like you're telling what some poor major like denzel would be like hey in three months you're doing a 400 person bilateral game right um and we're really happy to help and support his effort at the MEF. The other thing I would say is that that we're going through right now is that as action officers and plans officers switch over in commands, right, and the series of games continue, CNA and other organizations are able to hold that institutional knowledge over from one, you know what I mean, sort of PCS season to the next. This is more important in other places

like USFK where that PCS season is a little bit more rapid. But even here right now, as Denzel went off to usfj and we're working with um his his predecessor or his successor uh at the math we're working through those things of like hey yes we did this yes we have these products this is where we can go and build on these things so i think that'll be really important in the coming months as we go to our first bilateral ground force game without chris and i think that's a big portion of it the other thing is that we also provide sort of outside their perspective right we We have no dog in the fight in many of the sort of questions that the Marine Corps or the Navy is asking itself about, whether it be force design or concepts or old plans or

its roles and missions. And we're able to give that sort of unbiased third party perspective of like, yes, this is what we do. Lastly, I would say is that when it comes to just war game execution is that we're able to bring the adjudication knowledge that are required to adjudicate everything from air subs to naval to logistics uh and build a sort of custom team for the meth right on whatever it needs for that year for that game and for those set of questions um but yeah it's been a real pleasure to being supporting three math and sort of the command on this problem set yeah what what

i'll add to that is you know as i alluded to before i i showed up and i and you had a spell war game um it's two words right uh but i i was thrown straight in you know a week or so after i showed up i had to i'd run my first planning conference for a war game that honestly at the time i didn't even realize was a three mech war game i thought it was usfj's war game um and i could speak marine corps and i could speak operational challenges uh and the more time i spend at three meph i could articulate what the commands challenges were but i didn't know how to turn that into a event that would force players to confront certain problems or i didn't know how to facilitate the conflict that players might have whether it's trying to fight the scenario or

trying to fight the starting conditions or trying to fight the assumptions um so sebastian and his team at cna are super useful because they're professional war gamers the staff officers that are helping to plan and execute this are professional military personnel and you really need the dialogue back and forth between the two to say here's here's the problem i have in operational or doctrinal terms and then sebastian in a collaborative discussion saying here's how we can design an environment to force the players to trade off between these assumptions or maybe it's three assumptions right so i'll i'll come to sebastian and say i think my problem is i don't know if it's a or b special say well have you considered if it's maybe a b or c um because

he's seen similar challenges right at the endo pecan problem set up at the theater level he's seen totally different challenges in nato he's seen non-military war games so he's he runs the full gamut of war games and bring a lot of different tools and skills to help me and uh the command i'm with with a specific challenge um so it's you know we joke that it's a marriage but it's really these two diverse skill sets that really have to be in dialogue across the full exercise life cycle to design and execute a game that's really of value yeah one more observation i'll rip on based off of the the comments you just both offered is that criticality of the cna as the corporate knowledge holder sebastian you mentioned this but chris and i

have both been in positions where the key personnel doing key jobs might rotate after one two or three years and that turnover oftentimes that can uh that swiss cheese effect can occur where many many of the key people turn over at once and so much of that corporate knowledge is lost within the headquarters itself so in some commands they're big enough and if resources permit gs employees and contractors often fill that gap of corporate knowledge and allow it to exist as the military individuals move each year, each summer. But as we get more and more fiscally constrained, the ability to do that diminishes such that organizations like CNA become even more critical because that will be the only place where the corporate knowledge resides and will remain over

time. I'm going to pivot slightly. So here's a curveball for you guys. I think this is the most important question the listeners need to know the answer to. Is the Hawaiian shirt the official uniform of the center for naval analysis or is that a sebastian bay policy i'll take this that's a that's a misnomer it's not actually hawaiian shirt it's an okinawan shirt it's a place called what what's it what's it called sebastian mango mango house mango house yeah um actually one of sebastian's uh project uh project leads on the latest war game um we joke that she's uh she's becoming the next Sebastian as a going away president for the last war game I ran with them I I made sure to get her a mango house shirt so that you know

Sebastian never got hit by a truck she could toss that on and nobody would know the difference yeah um so yeah that's a funny story uh so one uh yeah I do love a good mango house shirt if you're ever on Okinawa go grab one um the other thing I will say I do have lots of Hawaiian shirts and, I mean, Okinawan shirts as well. I would say that's a predominantly Sebastian thing. Some of my team members do the Aloha Friday thing or when they're out at Indo-Pekoma, Hawaii, but I'm probably the only one that consistently wears them

all day round, all seasons round. But I would say it is just a personal choice, but it has definitely become like an association brand with me in the sense that I was walking around Tokyo one day and one of the Meff guys was there and we met on the street and he's like oh i found you he's like i could see you with the hawaiian shirt like a few blocks away and he like ran up to come catch me and i was like that's wild um so stuff like that it's just you know i mean it's good um i mainly wear them because they're

largely comfortable right and i'm not a very much a suit person um to the point that my director has to like tell me uh to be like hey like wear a suit for this meeting and i was like ah uh because otherwise he'll he knows i'm going to show up in like khakis and jeans and a Hawaiian shirt um otherwise but yeah that's definitely a Sebastian thing that's the kind of deep cut you're only going to find here on sea control and no place else so uh thank you very much for that that side quest there so let's get back to business uh gents could you talk about the in-person nature of war game design and how you pull this off in in the gel for the joint exercise life cycle yeah so i would say the in-person nature especially for games that have allies

and partners is like the most critical thing uh the one things i tell my young designers and my teammates at cna is that if we're doing it as a partner's game like plan for travel plan to be there in person because being in the room is there's no substitute for presence um it's like my little AR note after BGF the first year is that if we didn't attend the meetings in person, if we didn't go to Ichigaya, if we didn't go to the MEF and have these conversations in person, I don't think we would have been half as successful as we were over the years because there is a certain level of like frankness and communication that only happens in person. And I was recently reading a book about communication.

It says like, I think 60% of communication is nonverbal, right? It's from all the cues that you see from their body language. And that's particularly important when you're working through a translator and so forth to understand like, hey, what are they feeling? How are they responding to your words and understanding if they actually say yes and mean it, or are they just saying yes to move on, right? And those are all really important things. I don't say our junk cycle for, you know, as Chris will probably mention is like, was insane. Like we did what, four or five planning conferences a year that were often at least a week long, often held in Japan, that also required like pre-meetings and pre-SVTCs to coordinate all the details from admin to content and so forth.

and our games themselves are two weeks long right so it was a tremendous amount of like of effort and like the tempo was quite fast and rapid and uh there was no end to bgf right like typically for cna projects there's like a there's a culmination you're like okay we're done we're good like on to the next but bgf as part of a series was really just like as soon as we finished the last one uh my counterpart doug jackson or leah janzer who is now uh the project director with me would start writing the report and i'll be start already with chris like planning the cdc the first planning event for like all right now what do we do for the next game how do we think about um the next joke right uh and it was very much like living uh getting a glimpse into the

life that you guys were all lived at the g5 so which i did not envy um but it's definitely stressful but it was incredibly important to be in person to work with our ads and partners to work with our counterparts in person i don't think there's a replacement for that yeah what what i'll add to to all that is you know especially with all the different stakeholders we had in this game being in the room and seeing the rabbit holes you get sucked down and planning conferences really prepares you to design a game that avoids those rabbit holes or really know what the issues are so that as a facilitator you can bring the players out of that rabbit hole so you can you can keep the game moving forward and not get hung up um those rabbit holes are also useful

because maybe those are the rabbit holes you want to go down maybe and maybe it's not this year maybe it's next year um so there were a number of times over the three years where uh you know we derail an entire afternoon of a planning conference trying to solve a problem realize that it's not solvable at our level and that would arm sebastian and his team to adjudicate that when it came up during gameplay but it would also allow the conversation to continue so that next year we could say what if we design a game around trying to solve that problem because that that keeps coming up so let's address it awesome great um so moving on from the jelk a couple times you mentioned the role of observers uh and i think it's worth highlighting so jens could you highlight

the role of observers the ratio of observers versus players and the benefits of having both observers and players under the same roof so this is actually probably one of the places that chris and i disagree so as a designer i always want less observers because they're just more people that you need to sort of uh care and take care of and i'll make sure they're not doing they're not being destructive they're not they're getting out of the way largely or if they're being beneficial that they're beneficial in the right way right so observers from a designer's perspective are just like extra like factors that you're thrown into your ready complicated machine that is your game and you don't know what they are going to do they're just variables that you have

to account for in stride i would say that uh that most designers probably to have like a really high player count and really low observer count in terms of ratio uh but i will say that you know i will admit to chris's point that it's really important at times and it's hugely beneficial for the wider campaign of learning and the wider campaign of coordination um from an organization's point of view of why you have observers right to have to build stakeholders build a community of interest and a community of action that will do something around this problem set and that you want everyone sort of connected in because there is a challenge in our field where games in one service or one plan or one perspective are not always connected to the next one and we can talk

a little bit about that later with other games like nw pack and so forth but one of the one of the benefits of having observers that you're able to build those sort of institutional tendrils to other organizations and other perspectives that you're able to sort of like weave together over time but in a pure execution way as a designer i remember our first conversation i think it was a second year where denzel wanted all these observers and i was like please no like we already have 400 players and you want to bring like 100 observers um so i remember that stress but we were able to do it in the end but uh it's just always a challenge yeah i love observers uh i've every time somebody has asked if they could bring somebody i've literally said the more the

marrier um but you know sebastian has a point and if you if you go to any war gaming course or read any war gaming book they you know they will explicitly call out that like observers will kill your war game and you should have as few as possible and you should lock them in a room far far away from the players uh i didn't like that but also we didn't have that choice um you know The U.S. is globally engaged. Its players and its leaders come from all over the world, and they have all these experiences. Japan has only one ally, and it is such a huge part of their defense. So the Japanese will bring, you know, you'll bring one or two general officers to the outbrief, maybe a one star, maybe a two star, and the Japanese will bring 23 and four stars to their outbrief. And of course, if those general officers are coming to the outbrief, then their colonels and their action officers are going to want to be there observing so that they can staff those generals. So working with allies and partners, if you're working with somebody who the U.S. is their one big ally or this is their one big war game a year, you're going to have a lot of attention on their side.

The collapse of the strategic and the tactical in this AO specifically also means that a lot of the tactical problems that we're running into require strategic policy solutions. So we've had cases where Ministry of Defense observers took a question we had back and did a quick legal review and came back during gameplay and said, actually, I think you could do that. And that turned something we thought we couldn't do as an alliance into something that was theoretically possible. So the other value of observers is you bring in people outside the player base, and if managed correctly, they can enrich what the players are doing. But there's always that issue, you know, and when we've done war games with other agencies, you know, we've had players or planners kicked out of a room because that's going to be used for debriefing.

So there's always the fight of, like, the players and the war game is the thing, and the DVs can come in and the observers can come in on a not-to-interfere basis. So that requires its own art and science of managing that. um but i would say that at a most of our war games have have had more than 50 percent of the human beings in the room not be players whether they're facilitators adjudicators or observers um this is a war game that definitely breaks the mold much to sebastian's anxiety what i found really fascinating about the discussion you guys just had is how much of this is a question of is this

really a function of wargaming or is this a function of just managing human beings that is applicable to so many other circumstances we all share similar scar tissue regarding name the planning conference name the operational planning team or opt effort where you've got the the rogues gallery of the different human personas and how they do or do not contribute to the effort or the cause and uh just manage managing that and the risk you assume uh by inviting more or less uh is just um something you have to work through and figure out i don't think there's a single right answer and it's going to vary from situation to situation but i really appreciated that a deep dive on that so speaking of people let's move on to uh stakeholders so every war game

will have multiple equities and stakeholders you've got the game sponsor you've got the players You've got the selves that might be represented, but that might not actually be present with their people and many, many others. Can you talk to the challenge of balancing all those stakeholders? Yeah. So from a game design perspective, it is very similar to what you just you just mentioned. Right. Is that when you have lots of stakeholders, you have a lot more institutional weight in some ways. Right. Also means you have so many other personalities and equities to also manage. right in the sense of like this organization wants this and they want this question and uh i remember our first year like the biggest struggle was getting our questions down right

i was like hey as a game you want maybe three objectives like that's it right three things we want to look inside of this game right i think the first draft um i think chris can correct me if i was wrong like we had like 12 like 12 questions i was like guys that this is not possible we cannot throw every ornament on this christmas tree that we're calling this bylaw ground force game we need to have some discipline about what we all like concurrently want right as stakeholders and that was a challenge it was um there's definitely some stark tissue both from the u.s and the japanese side uh in that process and we've gotten better over it right in terms of like hey let's focus on these are as our priorities these are nice to have but these are our focus

right and that's always a challenge and that's a lot of what the first planning conferences at the like the cdc and the ipc are largely about is like building who who are the major stakeholders what are their equities what objectives and for in cna terms we call them outcomes and objectives or oh no's of saying hey by the ipc we're gonna have oh no's that are settled that we agree on so we can start doing the real work of design you mean research and all these things to prepare for the game cannot shift like significantly from that sort of like azimuth and that's always a challenge right to get everyone to agree on these because words matter and what their definition is and so forth um so i would say that's the big thing of like the outcome is like hey what does

this whole process from the report to the game give the organization whether that's japanese or the MAF or the US side. And then the objectives are like, what are the specific decisions and dilemmas and choices and processes and things that we're going to laser focus on in terms of what the scenario is going to really explore and push at and focus on, and also determines what expertise we need in the room to make sure we can answer those questions in stride and make those decisions through an informed way and manage the consequences when the adversary or the scenario itself goes against what your expectations are so i would say stakeholders are always a challenge and we're going through that right now again right as this is sort of the curse of games that are

successful is that as you become more successful more people want their hands and fingerprints on your game which means that you have more maps to feed in that process but it is both good because we're able to influence things beyond the math right uh through this game but also challenging because um that means that your sponsor is no longer a sort of a marriage as denzel mentioned as like it's just you and the sponsor focus on a problem it is you your sponsor your counterparts and all their friends uh trying to like put this plane together on an annual basis which is always a challenge but uh it's definitely a balance when you act yeah and and our war game specifically is challenged because there's there's no charter to it there's no tasking you know so if you look at

some of the other uh well-known war games out there like the global series of games that is tasked that is sponsored by the chief of naval operations there is a uh naval uh i forget what acronym is but but a master analytic plan that says there shall be a global series war games and it shall address the following things um the war game sebastian and i ran sad no founding document it was it was kind of a handshake agreement that we need a war game and it sort of evolved organically so there was nobody officially in charge that could say we will do this we will do that um 3mef kind of had the lion's share of that because we we paid the contract for cna but at the same time we we needed to um we needed to play nice with others and and that that can be

a real big challenge so a lot of that's just managing humans as you said and being smart enough to know what problems are self-resolving right say yeah sure we'll we'll we'll handle that and then by the time you get through the planning final planning conference uh they've talked themselves out of wanting to do it some of its deception uh so my counterpart would occasionally come to me and say you know my boss wants to talk about how to how to put more air defense stuff into this war game because he's an air defense guy and he'd say can you help me have an information operation against him and we'd say yeah yeah well we'll put that in a working group on the side you know so you have a couple people over on a whiteboard drawing something out but it doesn't

really impact gameplay so that's really the art and and staying focused on the objectives is how can you make people feel heard and get people involved in a way that does not interfere and a lot of goodness comes out of that you'll you know the last point i'll make here is a lot of the working groups that we sort of shunted off on the side to just occupy the troublemakers you know they produce really good planning products that would get into the out brief as hey we did not play this but here is something that we've worked on on the side that could inform future planning whether it's for this game war game or the real you know contingency plans um so again it's it's just the art and the science of managing human beings uh especially when you have no authoritative

piece of paper to beat them over the head with what i really appreciated about that last point is uh so for those others who have been raised in planner schools when you're trained on how to deal with um troublesome folks or folks who really really want their idea to be heard and they may not understand that that is at odds with the intent of the game or the opt uh we we get told terms of like the good idea garage like hey we're going to put that over here and maybe come back to it um but what you just described chris is you found a way to actually get something of great value out of the folks that you you're forced to sideline and uh to emphasize it's not to be derogative toward the people that you are quote-unquote sidelining but it's just understanding

you have a responsibility as one of the war game leads to keep the game going in the intended direction um but what i appreciate about it is again you described a way to still get meaningful output out of those individuals in a way that did in fact matter to them and did make them feel heard so i mean using war game to uh master emotional intelligence and organizational emotional intelligence is uh is really cracking chris you got one more thing yeah one thing i wanted sebastian to to talk on a little more on that is coming up with a branch plan right identifying what the landmines are and then figuring out how how you're going to resolve a problem if it comes up and and your solution didn't work or how you're going to um prioritize

things so sebastian can you talk a little bit about you know whether it's uh time skipping or or the accordion of time that i've tried to have you do every single year um or other ways where we have committed to something we weren't confident was going to work but had a branch plan for how to deal with it if it went sideways yeah so chris is an amazing sponsor i love our relationship i love working with him uh many ways because our personalities match and our skill sets also complement each other uh but chris also uh will ask absurd things of a game design um so one year i think it was like what the second or third year where he was like hey we're gonna do a two-week game and we're gonna do two turns per day for a bilateral group that's like 300 humans right

i was like and i looked at him i was like no that's not possible like you can maybe do that if you have maybe 60 players and they're all like one single language uh and they're all highly informed and highly productive right like you're even then you're pushing your luck but he's like no we're gonna do a turn in the morning adjudicate in the afternoon at lunch because i was like okay i guess i'm not eating uh and then we're gonna uh do another turn and then adjudicate in the evening so the players can do that again i was like one there's no way the players can do this right i like we normally gave them probably eight hours to do a single turn right to do this bilateral coordination as both of you know having been part of the meth and you're in bilateral opts and all

these things like it just takes time to work through translation and so forth like we had a rule of thumb like chris and i had it that says anything that takes place in english that takes 15 minutes will take two or three times that length of time right to do it bilaterally right so i was like i don't know what you think you're gonna do and then out and he's like and i remember walking back from this planning conference uh back to my team at cna i was like hey the sponsor wants us to do two turns a day i think it's a terrible idea i could not convince them off this terrible idea so we're gonna do is that we're gonna prepare to do this as if we're gonna do our best but also at the same time prepare for this thing to go awry as we undoubtedly know

it will and we're like we're gonna have this xyz thing and we're gonna prepare to like shift gears and have the scenario we're all we're all gonna have this in our back pocket right and um you know unsurprisingly the game executes and like chris walks up on the first day we're doing our double turn he's like or like before even we do our double turn he's like i don't think that's possible i was like yeah i know i agree and i was like is there a way we can sort of shift gears i was like yep we can and then i was like i was like and i went to my team i was like hey bring out all the things we're gonna shift gears in terms of scenarios stuff um but yeah that's definitely some score to shoot from that game but i mean i think it's also one thing i will say is

also good to try new things right to always be willing to push the envelope of what is possible because even as game designers we are not omniscient right about what is good and what is bad all the time for games we only have our own experiences

to rely on and the experiences that we have seen in others but this is one of those few times I was like oh I've seen this I've done double turns before for bilateral groups and it never turns out well and so forth but yeah I'll pass over to Chris if he has any last-minute comments on that.

Everything Sebastian said is true, but I do want to register that in our first VTC ever, he and his team were the ones who recommended the two turns a day, and I was the one that said no. That is also true, yeah. So we both learned. That was an excellent vignette in flexibility and adaptive and reactive learning.

So thank you very much for sharing that tale with the listeners. Gents, we're coming up on time here, but before we wrap up, are there any other key points that we didn't discuss that you want to hit on? The only thing I wanted to hit on just generally, and it's not really specific to wargaming, but I think wargaming is a great way to explore the issues. Out here in the Indo-Pacific, this pacing challenge, the strategic to the tactical are really collapsed on each other.

um you know for japan it's the strategic and the policy questions of you know how does do u.s forces get access uh to their fighting positions and when in the timeline you know does japan become a co-belligerent in a war um that we were involved in or do they not or on what timeline right those are all strategic policy questions but they have tactical implications of like can three meth fight is it responsive enough can it support the joint force um is it able to support the the japanese self-defense force or the japanese self-defense force is able to support us all these issues are inherently intertwined um so i think that's that's something that our doctrine doesn't really speak to that's worth appreciating uh this doesn't really have anything

to do with war games except back to the point about everybody being in the same room it's a great venue to explore those linkages and not scope a game completely to this is an tactical war game well it is but if it implicates strategic and policy issues uh we've discovered you know you need to be a little flexible and have space to have that discussion without it sidelining things so to build on what chris said so i would say in the early years of bgf uh we tried to do all those echelons concurrently in the same two weeks uh and over time we sort of broke them off into separate pieces that all were part of the same effort um but happened with different audiences and different focuses that fed into each other sort of i mean like games that fed into other

games and exercises so like uh chris's before he left we did the sort of a strategic level game sort of at the MOFA, MOD, OSD level that fed into like, you know what I mean, our more operational tactical game for 3MF and its counterparts. So I would say that, you know what I mean, sort of building even an ecosystem of games over time that, you know what I mean,

so one game doesn't do it all, but you try to take bites of the apple and the problem set from different angles and different audiences that are institutionally connected, either through a sponsor, through a funding stream, or through just relationships that you build between the teams that are executing

and responsible for them is really important. So as a game designer, I will give this advice to all other game designers who are trying to do like longstanding sort of bilateral games or even multilateral games. Haven't done several of them over the past couple of years is there's no replacement for presence, like I mentioned before,

but fundamentally it boils down to relationships, right? So anyone who has not been at 3MF or have not done like bilateral things on a regular basis really don't really tend to underestimate how important that is is to know your counterparts to have dinner with them to engage with them as just people and then then as planners and build those relationships even for me as a designer observing the MEF I can see the people in the MEF who are able to connect and really work together and collaborate with their counterparts and that's hugely different because they're the ones who go out to karaoke with each other and have dinners and have conversations with

them long past the working day right and i think that's really important to build those kind of relationships both with your counterparts and both with your sponsor and so forth because that has allowed us to build our institutional knowledge that we mentioned before and also our institutional pathways of relationships that we can leverage over concurrent years over concurrent games and that's been really important um and one thing i would say is that the one japanese phrase that i've learned in this whole process was like karoshi which is like death by overwork because both chris and i and the mech staff and our teams have worked really hard on these days like what our average hours on some of these days were like 16 18 hours uh working through the

slog of uh of a game so it was definitely not easy uh but definitely something that i think was meaningful and impactful on the on the on the backside to your very point sebastian i did in fact die from overwork when i was out there in my previous position and i am a ghost and i will forever haunt the uh the sea control airway airwaves it seems so uh gentlemen finally where can listeners find you online if anywhere and what else are you working on i'm on i'm on linkedin uh i sort of took a pause over the last three years at mef because it was so busy for from too much public writing so i'm trying to figure out how and where i'm going to get back into that now that i've i've moved on but i haven't figured that one out yet so everybody can can find me on

linkedin or shoot me a message there um that's me um you can find me on linkedin blue sky and twitter those are usually my predominant social media platforms i engage with and i was on on clever when i wrote uh so like both my usernames for both blue sky and twitter are just my name uh sebastian bay so you can find me pretty easily um but yeah all right well hey gentlemen thanks again for joining us uh good luck at your current assignments fair winds and following seas to listeners bravo zulu for tuning in and we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.