Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Of War Games 20240707 : vimar

CSPAN3 History Of War Games July 7, 2024



whole series was a work that we recently published in the european journal of international relations that talks about the use of war gaming for data collection for looking at data and for thinking about how we and put together policies and then how we use social science to help inspire our war game design and analysis. so we hope you can join us for all three of the the webinars. and this first one we're gonna be focusing on wargaming as a historical tool as an archive and as data and our second series which will be moderated by eric lynn greenberg is going to be looking more at can working design and how social science and approaches or can be used and when it comes to war game design and analysis. and then our final serial final of the series i get to host and it'll be with and some of our great folks have been working on these issues in national security and we'll bridge the gap about how some of the lessons that we've taken from social science might be applied or not applied in how national security practitioners think about using war games. so it's the beginning of a larger project for all of us. and so we're excited that you're here and hope that we're gonna have a really great conversation today. all right over to you read. thanks jackie. we're really excited to be hosting this wargaming series. and so i'm gonna start us off by taking just a few minutes to say a bit more about how we got into this why we're excited as political scientists to have these conversations both within and outside of our field. when we study international relations, it is difficult to study rare phenomena. so in my case, for example, i'm interested in things like nuclear crises and escalation, right? and so you got to get creative think about how to generate data, but this is difficult to do in the real world, right? because we even if we could we might not want to experiment with national security in the real world. and so so we have a great history of scholars turning to creative methods like survey experiments interviews presenting hypothetical scenarios to solicit some responses from research subjects. and this has led to some really great work, but we were noticing that there's a method that can do this better that teaches us about how states governments and we're just strategic actors behave in crises and that's called wargaming. and so we think there's four reasons to be very excited about using war games to study international politics or even in fields beyond the international arena. the first is that war games, we think are immersive tools, right? they are detailed simulations that have done well are engrossing players in their play demanding time and energy right and concentration amongst those players. the second is the war games present players with consequences if they screw up in the game, then they have to live with the choices they made and try to recover and labor later rounds play. and so these consequences should focus the mind. a third reason to look to war games is that they can have highly representative samples. all right, when players with real-world experience and train and training or plausibly similar to those who might be making national security policy in the real world. and that is especially true of some of the historical games. we're going to talk about today. and fourth and finally, we think that war games can simulate group rather than just individual decision making and deliberation, which is much more similar folks will tell you've been in the policy making world to how policies actually made deliberatively so i hope you'll go to the article for more about things like that and why we think are wargaming is is so exciting, but i just want to highlight a reason that tease up the conversation for today why we really think we're on solid ground here and it's a this is not the first time that academics have come to the method of war gaming right wargaming has made the leap from the military and policy community to academia before and i and have this near and dear to my heart because i got into the subject of studying war gaming through the political military war games that are available in the archives now both at mit and in presidential archives that were run by thomas schelling in lincoln bloomfield in the late 50s and early 60s, and they were run partly at mit and then then transferred into the pentagon to run in classified settings, but they were run by academics who took their experience in showings case at it was at the rand corporation and then brought it to the person to the academy to use the perspective of political scientists to ask questions that they are interested in and use social scientific design principles to design a new type of game that was useful for academics. right, and so the finding that i am most intrigued by in the the archives that that i have seen, right? is that even when these games went to the pentagon and were running classified settings now declassified in game reports that it was difficult to get any team to use nuclear weapons in these games, right even though they're simulations, but there were conflicts over west berlin vietnam or other cold war crises, and so even when war plans would have called these nuclear weapons. it's surprising to see in the game folks not want to use nuclear weapons. so i think we can use more games to study important questions about nuclear strategy the nuclear, taboo crisis behavior and escalation in general and all with anonymized transcripts from senior officials making arguments and recommendations right in the room. all of that said we're hoping that that today are our wonderful panelists and at other sessions will critique that right and deliver their own research and and and help us to think about this even better in a cross-disciplinary conversation about war gaming. and so we've got three terrific guests today. we're going to help us do that. we want to highlight their research and and dig into it in our in our discussions. so we're very pleased to welcome dr. john emory who's joined us from the department of international and area studies at the university of oklahoma. and after he speaks we're going to turn to dr. john scott local who is a professor in the wargaming department at the us naval war college. and then dr. elizabeth bartels is joining us from the rand corporation where she is the current co-director of rand's center for gaming. so we're very excited to hear all about your research. i'm going to turn the floor over first to dr. john emory to take us away. thank you so much reed so i came to war gaming in a pretty roundabout way. i was working on contemporary issues of technology ethics of war things like drones algorithms ai all the hot topics of the day and i kept coming into a bit of a dilemma when we're thinking about this kind of unknown future of war, right? worth trying to project a future that may not never occur. and so how do you think through that and of course i turn to history in the historical record to try and understand that. and so where else would i go then the rand corporation archives in santa monica, california? the place of cold war knowledge production the origins of deterrence theory rational choice and early systems analysis. and i ended up finding something interesting in the mid 1950s the origins of political military gaming that ultimately led into read polly's political military games at mit. and seeing how these games played out there and trying to understand the dilemmas that were present in the cold war right the invention of nuclear weapons nuclear. brinksmanship something that thankfully we have no empirical record for right? you still have to think through what may happen in a possible future of war and so it ran they did this in something known as the cold war game where they sought to integrate politics and economics into traditional wargaming. they wanted to really truly understand the deep dilemmas of political decision making under the uncertainty of nucle of the nuclear era and mutually assured destruction. and so i went in i'll admit with a bit of a character view of the rand corporation, right? i thought i was going to go in and see a bunch of old white guys talking about killing millions of people without inequalms and casually discussing incinerating tens of millions, but what i found wasn't groupthink, but on the other hand just a huge contestation, especially between the mathematical analytics division and the social science division at random in the mid 1950s. and this played out in two competing cold war games that they each made to try and understand the world. so the mathematical analytics division sought to integrate politics and economics in order to test us strategies in the cold war to ultimately be able to predict the future and give policy guidance for the best us strategies. the social science division on the other hand thought that the mathematicians were getting a little bit too far on their turf talking about politics and social science and they decided to make a spike game also called the cold war game. where they wanted to really look at the insights of judgment of group dynamics of the psychology and really truly understand the unique culture and character of the soviet union of the european allies of the united states and the united states itself in order to better understand and exercise judgment in the face of the horrors of nuclear war. and so what i found in my paper that was published in texas national security review on this. was that the mathematical analytics division was very quick to use nuclear weapons multiple times. right, whereas the social science division on the other hand very much. had a lot of nuclear restraint. right. they were very hesitant to press the buttons. so something that read found in his games as well were also there in the original political military games at the rand corporation. and so thinking through all of the dilemmas that they were faced with and an unknown future of war. i think it's useful to think about five key insights that i gained from the archives there. and so the first one in the core of my argument in that paper, is that the level of abstraction you have in war games matters, right? that's not going to be that's not going to be a surprise to anyone here who's been involved in wargaming right? sometimes abstraction is very useful, but what i found in the social science game, is that realism leads to an emotional engagement with the players right now. i argued that an engages their ethical intuitions in a way that kind of more abstract games may not do right, i found in that game a lot of players even that advocated bold policies and their writings and things like that. we're very hesitant to cross that nuclear threshold even within a game simulated environment. and i think the second lesson i learned from this which may be controversial is that wargames are a tool for understanding human judgment rather than prediction. right, i think war games as prediction really just comes down to the game design the rules that you set and the assumptions that you make and that can drive outcomes. whichever way the war game designer wants to drive them right so it may not be the best tool for predicting the future of the social world or for predicting few recommendations for policy makers, but it can tell you a lot about human judgment and group dynamics. the third lesson i take away is taking seriously conditions of uncertainty. especially when we're looking back historically we tend to kind of read history backwards. we know the outcomes right? and so we tend to view inevitability where there's contingency. so one of the most profound impacts i had in the archives was how how the social scientists grappled with these conditions of uncertainty so i'm just going to pull a couple quotes one from joseph goldson. he says no government is absolutely free to impose its will upon the world all operate under some constraints. all must operate with incomplete information about the present and the future and all must expect the unexpected to interfere with the best laid plans. world political history is replete with examples of pyrrhic victories and conversely with situations thought to be defeats at the time which turned out to be blessings in disguise. how to allow for such considerations and evaluating real or game simulated political developments is a formidable problem indeed right the conditions of uncertainty the contingency of history and the endless possibilities of the social world really were await that these social scientists at rand. we're trying to grapple with in the mid 1950s. another social scientist at the time noted quote. there are gaps in our knowledge of enemy equipment and tactics. there are wide variations in observed results with our own forces. they're fluctuating factors, like weather involved and the situations under study that have no real peacetime president. in the end because of this we think it's wrong to go into great detail on one factor only to multiply it by another that is so vague that philosophers debate whether it could be rightly called a probability. in fact, we're coming to the opinion that too much emphasis is placed on the numerical outputs of broad system studies measures like total bomber shot down cities destroyed total bombs on target and so on and quote right? so you see they're already grappling with what we didn't come to terms with in the vietnam war with the vietnam body count problem, right if you get too much quantitative driven numbers, it may tell you that you should have won the war three years ago as it still kind of going on and on. so taking conditions of uncertainty seriously the fourth is that we need to look back to the future. right and so one way we do that is looking back to the past in the historical record and understand what assumptions they made about the future. right, then we can test those assumptions against the empirical record. and what the social scientists then found to kind of push back against the mathematics division is that the mathematicians were kind of mere imaging the soviet union, right? they were assuming the soviet union either act like an evil caricature or like the us would act in a lot of ways right. so there's a real importance of having area studies experts to play or red team if you will, so that's one of the big takeaways that i think all of us can try and apply as much as possible is bring in historians bring an area studies experts into our war games as much as possible. and the fifth one is really focus on the silences of the archives as much as what is there. right, so both and reads work and my work. there's no direct discussion of ethics or these kind of ethical dilemmas, right? we don't get that in the early cold war period it's just kind of the fear and anxiety of an all-out nuclear war. right. and so these there's some good evidence that these were kind of relegated to private thoughts. and what we find across both of our games at random mit. is that they take a huge emotional toll on the players? right having that high level of realism leads to a real engagement and lincoln bloomfield famously stated that out from the game. is often like waking up from a particularly vivid dream, right? it takes days for the for the feeling of the game to wear off. and i think that has an important impact when we're thinking about understanding human decision making and group dynamics that it's not just reason and emotion as a dichotomy, right? this isn't the idealized cartesian world, but reason and emotion are always already intersecting and overlapping so understanding the kind of logical sequence along with the emotion that goes into the weight of decision making is essential. and so finally that leads me to a few limitations of the archival method. alright so often we're working with incomplete information right when i first went into the rand archives. i didn't know that there were two different cold war games one original one and a spike game because they all called it the cold war game thankfully historian daniel bessner kind of helped me tease that out and we really laid out kind of clearly which game is a social science game, which game is a mathematical game. so that's one risk that you run. the second limitation is while it tells you a lot about that particular moment in time. it may not be universally applicable or relevant to today, right? so understand it through the lens of what was going on at that moment as much as possible. there's always a danger and that we're reading in what we want to see we need to understand our own positionality as researchers and use the best historical and interpretivist methods that we can in order to avoid that. and finally getting back to my fifth key insight the silences of the archives, right? i think there's an important to have a judicious and interpretive hand to draw out the complexities of the silences in the archives. to understand as much about what is present and what is absent. and that tells us something about what the dominant discourses were in that snapshot moment of time. right, and so the immense challenge then is to preserve the kind of indeterminate and mysterious character of the war game that you're getting into in the archives. well simultaneously to step around their paradoxes while creatively revealing what is present in absence. so thinking through as much about what is missing from the archives. as what is there, so go ahead and leave it there. absolutely. fantastic. thank you like a commend everybody to check out dr. john emory's article in texas national security review. let's go now to dr. john scott logo, and i believe he's going to share. yes, i am sure supplies i see if i can make this work here. okay, and assume everyone can see that hello everyone josh got logo from the war gaming department in newport. um, i have to give the obligatory disclaimer the views here are mine alone and not did not reflect official policy or position of the war college the navy or the department of defense. i want to thank jackie and read for inviting me today briefly. what i want to do is discuss how we understand war games and how i understand them within the context of the work i do and then i'll look at two historical case studies that i've i'm looking at personally to in my work to help understand the work we do for for the navy looking at what a war game is. the definition that we've generated and thinking about we go back to mccarty little in 1887 where he just simply called it artificial war, right? so it's simulated. it's a joint pub one tells us that it involves two or more opposing forces that have rules data procedures that depict an actual or assumed real life situation and of course when i got to the department 12 years ago, they handed me peter perla and this was a definition that i started with a warfare model of simulation does not involve the operations of actual forces. um, but more importantly those events are affected or could be affected by decisions by players on opposing sides. so we're that leads us and what we use now is what frank mccue came up with in his 1966 book fundamentals of wargaming make you worked over four decades in the war gaming department and he puts a war game is a simulation of selected aspects of a conflict situation. in accordance with predetermined rules data and procedures. that provide decision-making experiences. and provide decision-making information. and most importantly that is applicable to real-world situations. they're not usually exclusive the decision making experience or the decision making information left side being the experiential side of the war game the right side being the analytic side. we i think and we think they're interrelated if you go to the canavan framework for decision making we're or

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