The Global Games have been running annually since 1979, usually averaging 650-700 participants per game, examining US policy and trying to test and refine various strategies. The 2000 exercise included 15 flag officers.

History and Objectives

1979-83: Focus on logistics and sea lanes, with exploration of political, economic, and nuclear threshholds.
1984-88: Focus on joint operations of NATO vs. Warsaw Pact, with exploration of the effects NATO strategies has on USSR decision making.
1989-93: Focus shifts to worldwide warfighting, with exploration of checmical/biological warfare angles.
1994-98: Focus on operational scenarios in specific regions, with exploration of cooperationg with coalition partners.

The latest exercises focuses on the interlock between the sensor grid and the shooter grid--in other words, pulling in cyberspace superiority to influence events in the "battlefield" such as enemy morale, procedures, and strategies. The shooter part refers to testing new fleet battle concepts, experiments, and strategies--especially at Naval War College. The wargaming department of the NWC conducts about 80 events a year (including international coordination), and is currently exploring new concepts in Tactical Land Combat by building a network in cyberspace to coordinate the event.

For the future, more emphasis will occur on web-games games, integrated operations, shore-based results (i.e. firing a Tomahawk cruise missile at targets), and response to dynamic threats. Ths will include wide-area distribution, such as linking other service colleges, land-based commanders, and units of the fleet at sea. The core concepts of game objectives, decision-triggered events, and support tools (data models, etc) will remain the same in the simulations, but will be spread over cyberspace.

More Connections 2000:

Introduction
Lecture: Opening Remarks
Lecture: History of Wargaming
Lecture: Aerospace Power 101
Lecture: Games the Navy Plays: Naval Wargaming Past and Future
Lecture: Sliding Timescales in Published Wargames
Lecture: Wargaming: The End of the Millenium
Lecture: Effects-Based Modelling
Lecture: Global Defense and Wargaming
Lecture: Army Transformation 2000
Lecture: Global Wargame
Lecture: Global Engagement
Lecture: Commercial Wargaming 1999
Lecture: The Human Factor: Modeling Inputs
Lecture: The Modeling of Intangibles
National Security Decision Making Game Recap