States of play: evaluating the renaissance in US military wargaming

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the topic of military wargaming into current critical debates in International Relations (IR) on games and gaming, which to date have focused on civilian, recreational forms. Identifying a renaissance which began in the US in 2014, the core argument developed is that wargaming utilizes key elements of critical/postpositivist theory in its interventions into the ‘human training dimension’ with the aim of impacting upon the inner domain of players in promotion of military ends. Drawing on Eyal Weizman’s work, the paper makes two key claims: 1) Wargaming poses a profound methodological and epistemological challenge to the quantitatively-oriented Operations Research (OR) community which has dominated DoD analysis for nearly a century. 2) By decoupling critical/postpositivist traditions from their intended ends, using them instead to impact upon players, wargaming militarizes them. The paper begins by locating the origins of the wargaming renaissance in the Defence Innovation Initiative and associated Third Offset Strategy. It then shows how US military gaming intervenes at the level of the human training dimension by cultivating specific forms of critical thinking, multiple futures planning, and reflexive decision-making using distinctively critical/postpositivist insights. From there it sets out three key challenges posed by wargaming to OR which trouble the latter’s claims to prediction, objectivity, and rationalism, before concluding that a new form of ‘post-quantitative defence analysis’ is emergent which militarizes the tools of critical/postpositivist approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Wargames
• games
• US military
• decision-making
• critical theory/methods
• human training dimension

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the journal editorial team and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the text. She would also like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Leverhulme Trust for this project and the assistance of the US military wargaming community of practice in accessing information and materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ‘human dimension’ here refers to individuals within the US military. Human dimension gaming impacts upon those who are taught or trained, as opposed to an external target population. This is not to be confused with the ‘human domain’, which relates to individuals and groups outside the US military, such as the local population in a conflict zone, which may alternatively, or also, be the target of military wargaming.

2. Important work has been done recently analysing and contesting the notion of militarization, in particular by Alison Howell (2018). While Howell’s points surrounding the limits of militarization in the context of the racial and ableist martial politics of the police and university are well taken, I use the term ‘militarized‘ here not to suggest that critical/postpositivist traditions were ever free of militarisms but rather in the more literal sense of their deployment by military actors.

3. The wargaming CoP referred to in this article encompasses a variety of practitioners in and around DoD. In the later sections, I refer to the prevailing opinions of the CoP in contradistinction to the Operations Research (OR) community. The opinions I describe do not, of course, reflect those of all DoD wargamers; in particular a new generation of defence wargamers is far more convinced by the use of quantitative methods than is the established CoP. I nevertheless use this shorthand to elucidate these general trends.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [RF-2018-573\7].