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Wargaming: An interview with ICONS director Devin Hayes Ellis

by Devin Hayes Ellis

April 10, 2018

This interview with Devin Hayes Ellis, the director of The ICONS Project, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for frank news.

Bottom line is, I know nothing about gaming, and I would like to know more.

Works for me. So the ICONS project is 36 years old now. It was founded by my predecessor, as director, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and a couple of academics who thought it would be intriguing to see if they could use the Internet to connect classrooms and teach political science back when that was you know, cool and new, and it worked. In the last decade or so the organization has evolved from being mostly an education mission, which you know, it's had throughout its history, which we still do have, providing classroom simulations for starters, into also having a strong presence providing what is essentially wargaming. Although we often use the phrase simulation or human driven simulation.

Is there a difference between those words and definitions or are they all interchangeable?

They're interchangeable to an extent. I think it depends a little bit on who you're talking to and what the disciplinary background is. In the military context I usually say wargaming because that means something to military folks. And it usually means something pretty close to what I mean, which is,

an exercise that is organized around humans making decisions about a complex problem.

I think we all would consider the pope of war gaming to Peter Perla, who wrote a book called The Art of Wargaming that remains one of the definitive studies of the practice. It's not really a discipline right. You know, people come from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of them in the professional military community who do this are from an operations research analysis background, but that's a very specific set of academic disciplinary things.

How seriously do they take gaming in government and in the military?

It depends a lot on where you're talking about. So the law says, well, Title 10 mandates service level wargames. And so these are gigantic exercises and they take place annually. They are these gigantic efforts, where often people in the planning staffs of major commands and services whole time in that part of the planning staff, will be spent designing and executing Title 10 games. They also have these sort of cute permanent names. So for example, the Special Operations Command Title 10 game is called, Shadow Warrior, and that's what it's called every year. So it'll be you know, “what is Shadow Warrior 2018 gonna be about?, oh X, Y, or Z". And that's sort of how they handle that at the highest level. But those games tend to be very driven by a sort of a combination of three major factors. The long term institutional priorities of the commander of the service. So, you do not want a game that's going to undermine what you're telling Congress you should get money appropriated for. Right? The specific intent of whoever the commander there is. So if it's a service game then you know the service chief is going to have significant input on what the priorities are. What he, or hopefully a future she as well, wants exercised in that annual game. And then the third thing of course is, what are the national security priorities that are being set by the president's national security strategy, and then, the secretary's national defense strategy.

Games happen all over the place at various levels. I was recently in Europe for a small-ish tabletop exercise that involved about 60 folks from our particular command and we were very focused on one very, very specific problem and that took a couple of days and —

What problem was it?

I can’t really talk about that. But let me say this. There are only so many problems that the military’s worried about in Europe. And some of them I think we thought were from the past, and now they are back in fashion again.

On a military level, when there's time, is gaming something that usually contributes to the decision making?

Not always no. In fact you know, wargaming has sort of had peaks and valleys of fashionable-ness, I guess. You know, we talk about sort of high points in the history of war gaming within the U.S. military establishment. I think most people who study the issue would point to wargaming that the Navy did prior to World War II. Which is often talked about as an excellent example of a service really spending a lot of time and effort thinking through what could be a plausible strategic problem for them. And then gaming it on various different levels, to the extent that you know, I can’t remember if it was Halsey or Cane, but one of them said after the war, that they had worked the Pacific theater so many times prior to World War II, that the only thing with the Japanese that actually surprised them was kamikazes. That was the only thing they hadn't thought of.

Wow. And today, how is gaming used in comparison?

So I would say they are on the rise right now. For a couple of reasons. First of all I think in the last 15 years or so the community of war game professionals has really sort of coalesced in a away that didn't exist before, thanks to maybe about, a half a dozen individual people honestly, who have been crusading on this their whole careers. And you know, we now have an interdisciplinary community of interest conferences that are even international. I go to one annually in London. There's one in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, and here in the U.S. And you know, it's really I think…that the strengthening of that community of practice and the popularity, the rising popularity, of the methodology with some parts of the U.S. defense establishment especially, has been able to promote its utility, and has seen a sort of a resurgence in wargaming. And then a couple of years ago the deputy secretary of defense at the time got involved in the work. He was a big fan. He actually put out a memo ordering the reinvigoration of wargaming in the Department of Defense.

Has that enthusiasm continued from the previous administration to our current administration?

Secretary Mattis has not actively reversed that directive in any way. So I mean, I would say it doesn't have quite the momentum it had at the moment, when Secretary Work said make it happen. But it's not you know, I wouldn't say it's been shunted aside either, because the life cycle of reinvigorating something in the Defense Department, if people actually take it seriously and put resources behind it, we could be in the next presidential administration before they've even done the things that they said they wanted to do four years ago. So I think there's a lot of good wargaming taking place in a lot of places in the defense establishment. To be perfectly honest there's also a lot of very bad wargaming taking place all over the place, mostly because when something like that happens and everybody says, “get me a wargame”, you know part of it is box checking.

Obviously I'm a proponent of this as an analytic tool, as a decision support tool, as a training tool, because it's what I do.

But I also am very much against seeing every problem as a nail because what I do is hammer.

A lot of us think the professional conscience of wargaming is a gentleman named Steven Downes Martin, who was on the faculty at the Naval War College for many, many years, and is a professional game designer. He likes to joke that the three questions he always asks his sponsor are, what is it that you need to know that you don't have right now? Why do you think a wargame the right tool to get that? And, when do you rotate?

What are the other options in terms of analysis and running through scenarios? Gaming seems like the obvious choice if you’re looking at complex levels of decision making.

Right. I would say that if what you have is a decision making problem, then gaming is a great tool. If what you have is not a decision making problem, then it might not be the best tool for you. If what you have is a big data empirical analysis problem, wargaming is not going to help you. I try very hard not to sell this as a one stop solution for all decision issues for leaders and organizations. I also know we try to call out things, if you have a chance, when they’re not really living up to what this technique is valuable for. Because then it reduces people's interest in the technique. Right? You go to a couple of wargames that you feel were a total waste of time, and you're not going to go back to a wargame for your problem. Half the time that's because it was either a problem that should have been addressed in a different light, or it was a really badly designed game.

But I should say there is also a slightly more insidious potential problem, where maybe you have a really nicely executed game about an interesting topic, but it turns out what you got out of it, the relevance, or the utility, or how much did you really learn from that, is less than maybe you would have wanted.

Right.

Okay, so the sort of a pinnacle of the wargaming system is an outfit in the Joint Staff, in the J8 directorate, which you know, sort of studies and special plans at the Pentagon, as opposed to the J5 who are the people who actually write war plans. The J8 has a unit called SAGD which stands for…oh look it up.

[Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Division]

But that unit is charged with doing very high level, what we call Pol-Mil games, which is short for political military gaming. It’s potentially about inter-agency decision making. So it's not just a military or a defense problem, it's something that would involve state, the intelligence community, Treasury, Homeland Security, whomever else has an equity in that problem. And so that's why we call it political military because you're bringing in political leaders and other interagency leaders, in addition to defense establishment leaders. And the Pol-Mil gaming that they do in the J8 at the Pentagon is usually at the very highest level. So at the national command authority level, even where the players who are there representing their departments activities, are playing the members of the national security units. Tom Allen, who is now retired, ran that organization for many years and is in that Pantheon of wargaming greats in my opinion.

He, you know, at one time said to me, “I’ve never seen a bunch of people walk away from a weeklong TTX junket, where they all got to leave their jobs behind and band together, and pretend to be fighting the Russians, and say, oh that sucked. I didn't get anything out of that. Everybody always says it was so cool, that was important.

What is the most essential thing to understand about gaming as it applies to our military and our national security right now?

Right. So I mean, I know it said it a trillion times, but I'll say it again,

I think the most fundamental thing to understand about wargaming is that its utility is pretty squarely in trying to come up with solutions to problems where there is a high degree of complexity or uncertainty. And where the critical factor that's going to take you in one trajectory or another, is in human decision making, rather than physics are unquantifiable error.

Do you work with Special Operations frequently? Do they involve you?

So, special operations, I think the special operations, the SOF community, has been called on in the last 15-20 years to do a tremendous number of very varied missions in support of U.S. national security policy. They’ve had to tackle a lot of issues and problems that are not…that are like, way divergent from what the original SF mission was back in the 70s. That's fine. So the answer to your question is yes. Because the leadership in that community has been conscientious about trying to apply whatever techniques they can to understand the dimensions of the thornier parts of their mission better.

As a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defense establishment, and we’re speaking about defense with a big D, spent a massive amount of energy and resources trying to tame the problem of complex operating environments, especially around insurgency, counterinsurgency, dealing with human populations, and all the attendant problems, trying to jam that problem set into an engineering framework. If only we can build a better, faster, stronger systems dynamics model, it will eventually spit out an algorithm where all the commander has to do is say, here's the details of my population, and the details of my mission, and it will tell you what to do to be successful.

I think that that was an enormously flawed, costly, and wasteful effort.

In part because a lot of the complex environmental modeling techniques that come out of engineering and hard sciences could be an amazing analytic tool to deal with problems in those domains, when you try to apply them to social science settings, to human terrain settings, they rely for their validity and their strength in their original homes, on having a really high degree of certainty about the causal relationships between different variables.

That was a very long way of saying, I think much more quickly than the big D establishment over all,

the SOF community noticed that they weren't getting results from that kind of approach, and they were noticing it in real time, on the ground in a lot of places. So they pivoted back to addressing some of these things with wargaming much more quickly than the rest of the defense establishment did.

You talk about SOCOM, well you know a four star commander, whose mission is to prepare and equip all of the SOF community, has a very different level of concerns about these things than a two star commanding general of a theater of Special Operations Command, who's sending guys out to do very specific missions. And so you just, you know, you want to make sure that the way you're calibrating your game addresses the level of the question. That's really, really important.

You know I always say, any game, just like any other model of reality is a tradeoff between fidelity to realism, and playability.

Right. Thank you. I think that answers most of my questions. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?

You know, not to be unpatriotic, but I think the best short introduction to how, or why to wargame, and how to do it, is the very brief manuals that the UK Ministry of Defense of wargaming has written very recently. I will send that to you because that's just a great resource for anybody who's like, while that sounds good, I want to be able to go and read about it.

Thank you! That’d be great. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you very much. Have a good day.

A Note From the Editors

by franknews

October 1, 2021

A note from the editors,

Two years ago, we spent a month looking at our grid system – we came away realizing that while we are deeply dependent on quick, readily accessible energy, very few people had an encompassing understanding of the system, the grid, that provided our energy.

That sense of disconnect is the same with much of the infrastructure that shapes our modern world. We take the ease that roads, damns, and powerlines provide for granted until they are strained or broken.

It’s painfully obvious that climate change is here, that society, as we know it, has changed, and that the infrastructure that maintains our society must change in response.

September looks at the intersection of climate and infrastructure.

-frank

EDITORSLETTER

We Normalized the Abnormal

by Peter Norton

September 22, 2021

This interview with Peter Norton, professor in the department of engineering and society at the University of Virginia, was conducted and condensed by franknews.

Peter | I study the social side of engineering, including its history and its future. I am specifically interested in mobility in cities, sustainability, and inclusivity in mobility.

You write about something called a “treadmill of car dependency”. Would you tell us a little bit about what that is and what that means?

When you start to accommodate automobiles, you inadvertently start to require them. For example, when you build a society where there are lots of good roads for cars, pretty soon, all the destinations become located far apart, such that now you have to drive. Another way in which this effect kicks in is that if you are used to taking the bus or walking or riding your bike, and you have policies that accommodate drivers, pretty soon, it gets harder to take the bus, or harder to bike, or harder to walk so that, although it may seem like the policies are just giving people the choice to drive, inevitably, they tend to give people the obligation to drive.

When they accommodate car dependency, they're perpetuating car dependency.

Why did we start to accommodate car dependency? If we could go back to between 1915 and 1930, what was our thinking? And what were the interests involved in that decision?

Good question. The usual answer to that question is that this was a market decision, this was a democratic decision. America preferred cars, and in a free society, you have to go along with what most people want to do. However, the more I looked into this, the less the story stood up.

What I found instead was that actually, when automobiles started to appear in large numbers on city streets, around 1915, they were treated as intruders who had to be on their best behavior as the newcomers. The way of looking at who belongs in the streets and who's responsible for safety was hostile to car domination. But by the early twenties, people who wanted to sell cars organized to change those norms. And none of this was a market outcome, and it was certainly not an outcome determined by a majority either. A relatively small, relatively wealthy minority of people was all it took to win car domination in city streets. Interest groups organized to make that happen. They changed engineering standards to favor cars. They changed notions about safety: suddenly fast driving was okay and expected and normal.

Crazy what small tweaks to policy can do to society.

Yeah, it was profound. Maybe even more surprising is that a lot of the experts, a lot of the insiders, actually fought these trends. One of the reasons why we don't remember that is that the automobile interest groups were very smart about giving a megaphone to the engineers who were saying, “yes, we have to rebuild cities for cars.” Those engineers got a huge audience. Again, it was very much of a deliberate effort by the people who wanted to sell us cars.

There's an analogy with the people who wanted to sell their cigarettes. It's not a perfect one, but, if you want to make money from cigarettes, it's a good thing that cigarettes are addictive. Your customer will keep buying. Cars were kind of like that. Once they rebuilt society to accommodate cars, they could count on that treadmill effect.

In terms of equity, what are the ramifications of this transformation?

This has huge ramifications. I'll try to keep them simplified, but they're fairly complex. In the mid 20th century, especially the forties, fifties, and sixties, when car dependency was really proliferating and suburbanization was taking off as well, most of the suburbs were explicitly whites-only through segregation and racial covenants, It was still legal until 1968 to write in your real estate covenant that this house cannot be sold to anybody except somebody of European ancestry. So white people could leave the city and people of color stayed in the city. At this point, the highways are coming along so they clear real estate to put the highways in to serve the suburbs.

So these highways went through majority black and brown neighborhoods with almost no compensation.

They were being expelled to make room for drivers who didn't even live there, to drive through where the local residents had lived before. And the destruction is breathtaking. It's shocking to see. I mean, I think people are acquainted with this now better than they used to be, but it's still just jaw-dropping to see what was done to these cities. I think it's an extremely close analogy with colonialism. In other words, you have the colonial power, in this case, the suburbs, exploiting places under the claim that this is progress, this is what we have to do to have a transportation system that works. Which of course is absurd because what we got instead was a transportation system that actually doesn't even work very well, leaving aside all of these matters of equity. Even many of the motorists are themselves, drivers, by compulsion rather than by choice. People pay a huge part of their paycheck to car payments, insurance, fuel, vehicle maintenance, and so on. In effect, even many of the drivers are part of this system of inequality, but not to their advantage.

So the idea was that this is how the transportation system, as you said, needs to be so that it can work. And it turns out that it didn't work. What are the metrics involved in working on the idea of efficiency? Would you say that we don't have efficiency in the system now?

It's a great question because what you use to measure this has obviously profound effects on your analysis.

For example, if you measure how many people are served, you get a very different answer than if you ask how many vehicles are served per hour. And yet the metric many agencies use is cars. Ultimately we care about the people getting where they're going. So that's a strange measure right there.

Another perverse measure is a delay. “Delay” is what traffic engineers say when they mean that you can't go the speed limit. Delay becomes almost like a magic justification for spending public money to reduce delay on the vehicle. The formula they use is they say, well, your time as a person is worth something, like whatever you get paid per hour, and therefore the delay is costing you this amount of money. And therefore we should spend at least that amount of money to remove the delay. That is absurd in a lot of respects. One of the absurdities is that the person causing the delay is the person driving – the drivers cause each other delay. Another thing is if you want to eliminate delay for vehicles instead of delay for people, then you basically have to pave over most of the city. In fact, a lot of American cities are mostly paved over.

In line with what you're saying, but the solutions to overcrowding and traffic seem to be, build more, add more lanes. I mean the freeways in LA are monsters. Would you suggest a different way to think about the current challenges that we're living with?

Well, we need a total transformation. There are some indications that big change is already underway, but not yet 1% of what has to change. We have to have cities so that you do not have to drive. I'm a historian and to me, it's a little surprising how much resistance that idea gets. As a historian, I'm used to looking at cities that are from an era when no one drove and it actually worked quite well. It was certainly not perfect, not even close to perfection, but there were a lot of things going for it that make it attractive.

A lot of Americans who can afford to take a vacation in other countries will go to countries where a city is a city where you have a hotel room and you can walk to the grocery, you can walk to a restaurant, you could walk to your job if you have one there. In an American city, that's usually illegal. By that, I mean maybe about half of Americans live in areas that are zoned for single-family residences only. And if you live in such an area, no one can open up a grocery store that you can walk to because that would violate the zoning ordinance.

And so – strangely in a time when we have to be doing everything we can to make our transportation less energy-intensive – some of our biggest obstacles aren't that we don't have the technology or the money, it's that we actually made it illegal to do it better.

And that's really crazy. We need to change that.

There are so many other things we need to do. We need to just reverse the priorities. We've reversed them before. One hundred years ago, pedestrians were priority number one. We need to put them back to priority number one. Given what we know is sustainable, inclusive, healthful, affordable, equitable, then it's very clear that number one should be pedestrians. Number two should be cyclists. Number three should be other kinds of micro-mobility, like electric bikes and scooters. Number four should be mass transit — buses, electric streetcars, passenger rail, commuter, rail. Automobiles should be last. If we can reverse those priorities, the amazing thing is not only is that more sustainable, it's also cheaper.

What is holding us back from making that transition?

We have normalized the abnormal. So it's abnormal to think that if you want to go somewhere, even to get a cup of coffee or to get a pain reliever, that you have to get in your car to do it. We've gotten so used to it that we think it's normal. If you look at it from a historical perspective, it's really, really weird. It's really weird that if you want a sandwich, that probably means going through a drive-through.

We have to renormalize what we made abnormal.

And that's not easy, but I think there's some good news: we did it before. We can do it again.

It does seem however that so much of what drove the shift were business incentives. Do you think it's possible to invite change not through business and through communities?

That is one of the biggest obstacles. When there's money to be made, there's going to be groups that are very powerful, making sure they make that money. This is a big problem because right now people are telling us, well, we can have carbon-neutral mobility, but it's going to take amazingly high-tech stuff. You're going to need incredible tech. You're going to need all this lithium, all this nickel, all this cobalt. You're going to need all these sensors. You're going to need all these integrated circuits and processors.

All of those things may be wonderfully helpful, but the problem is that they are only telling us about the things they can make some money on. And they're not telling us about all the things we can do that won't make anybody rich. I'm talking about just making environments where you can bike to work, or you can walk to work.

It's going to be very hard to overcome that business interest model to prioritize what's good for the planet and the people who live on it. But there are some good examples of how even against those kinds of odds, we can do some impressive things. One of my personal sources of inspiration is Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962. At that time, chemical companies were making lots of money selling herbicides, insecticides, and so on. And they still are, but there were some practices that were going on that were profoundly destructive and they had been normalized.

She wrote a very eloquent book explaining exactly why this had to change. And amazingly, within eight years of the publication of her book, the number one pesticide that she was pointing at was abolished in the US — and that was a very profitable pesticide. How did she do that? She took millions of isolated people and united them in a common cause. We can unite millions of people as well.

The people who sold us car dependency were very smart about it. They learned that you have to give people a beautiful vision of an attractive future. Even if that attractive future isn't even achievable, if you make it credible, people will sacrifice to get to it. We can make beautiful visions of livable cities.

You touched on electric vehicles but how do you think it fits into the picture?

We do need electric vehicles. Electrification is essential. There's no question about it. The fact that I'm critical of electric vehicles doesn't change that fact.

What I'm critical of isn't electric vehicles. What I'm critical of is the notion that car dependency will work if we just electrify the vehicles.

There's a very big difference. We need a world where you have an option of affordable housing from which you can walk to work or take transit or ride a bike. In that world, electric vehicles might be useful. In this world, electric vehicles solve nothing.

The quantity of metals necessary for the batteries is incredibly problematic in its human and environmental costs. And then it's not even clear we could ever get all the metals necessary to do it. The resulting vehicle is inevitably quite expensive – more expensive even than a combustion-engine vehicle. We simply can't afford that kind of resource-intensive transportation system, not to mention the fact that even right now about three-quarters of our grid is powered by unsustainable fossil fuels. We need to get that up toward a hundred percent, but it won't get there if we have a huge new electric demand. The more new demand we put on the grid, the harder it is to get a grid that's from renewable fuels or sustainable energy sources. Electric vehicles are necessary, but they are not the solution.

Are you hopeful?

The new infrastructure bill does not excite me because it's still primarily based on the assumption that driving everywhere is normal. That can't be normal. I am heartened by some elements in it, including some money for freeway removal, which is unprecedented in federal policy. That's huge and encouraging, but, in general, policy does not make me optimistic. The people who are demanding the policy change give me some optimism. I don't think change is going to come from policymakers of their own accord. It is going to come when people unite and demand change.

E. F. Schumacher was the author of a book called Small is Beautiful back in 1973. One thing he said that stuck with me is when we talk about being optimistic or pessimistic, the trouble with saying you're optimistic is that it leads you to be complacent, and the trouble with saying you're pessimistic means it leads you toward resignation and not trying. We just need to do the best we can.

I can't say I'm optimistic, but I don't dare be pessimistic either.

I'd like us to just go about doing what we need to do to make transportation and energy sustainable.

I think that’s probably right and the only way really to think about our climate crisis without getting either overwhelmed or dejected. It is also trite to say but my favorite thing about New York is the sort of interaction that creates community. When I go back to LA, I'm like, this is lonely...

Yeah. Have you noticed that the sustainable path is often framed as we have to sacrifice? I think a lot of the sustainable way forward is actually very attractive for reasons you just articulated. If we can frame it that way, that may help us overcome some of the resistance to it as well.

We're not just trying to survive. There's also a better world that can be built with the decisions we make now.

Back to the smoking analogy. When the experts were saying “you've got to stop smoking,” the tobacco companies framed that as an unbearable sacrifice. And they said, "Well, you don't have to quit if you use this amazing filter on your cigarette." And what people gradually figured out actually is that quitting is hard, but once you've quit, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anymore. It feels like liberation. And I think there's something very much like that in store for us. If we can get this right and get it right in time, in not being so prodigious in our energy use and in our driving, it can actually be very liberating.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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