Connections 2002

Lecture: Wargaming at SAMS

by Russ Lockwood


School of Advanced Military Studies
presented by Dr. William J. Gregor

The typical thought process in military planning goes something like this: concept to plan to execution. The trick is to figure out where war simulations fit into this cycle.

Ideally, the steps should go something like this:

    mission analysis
    planning
    development of a course of action
    wargame based on that course of action
    refine the course of action
    development of a plan

When you insert the wargame, you have to balance modelling a contemporary situation using contemporary tools (for example, extracting appropriate data from a database) versus a historical situation that may not necessariy match up with a contemporary situation, but you have verifiable data (orders of battle, maps, etc).

Finally, the wargame must be multiuser with an easy to use interface--time spent in mechanics must be kept to a minimum when you only have a certain amount of time to learn.

In the next to last step, refining the course of action to select objectives, you must allow for the students to organize a theater of operations, assign forces, establish a command, including assigning and commanding subordinates to recreate base planning and unit readiness, make sure logistics are in place, and then execute the mission andmonitor the progress of the exercise.

The major problem in creating an operational level war simulation concerns time and space scales--it is difficult to simulate long periods of time and the various actions performed by subordinates.

For example, Gregor uses a WWII simluation to teach various strategic concepts by making the students take the position of the Japanese Command structure in January 1942. Pearl Harbor has been bombed, the Japanese fleet is back at readiness, and students have a free hand at dictating war strategy and seeing how it plays out. It's a particularly difficult position to be in, and yet, it brings all the various educational concepts together.

Bio

Dr. William J. Gregor - LTC, USA Ret., Educator, Strategist, Planner, Wargamer Dr. Gregor is Professor of Social Sciences, Information Management Officer and Webmaster for the School of Advanced Military Studies. Dr. Gregor teaches national security policy and joint military planning and in that role uses simulations to support student joint operational planning exercises. In the mid-1980's he served as a strategic planner in the J5 of the Joint Staff. In that position he was the joint staff working group representative for the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the national strategy review, and was the author of the first national military strategy directed by that reform. He served 23 years as an armor officer and was a technical advisor for Microprose's M1 Tank Platoon and Imagic's M1A2 Tank Platoon. He has been on the faculty of the School of Advanced Military Studies since 1993.

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