After eight years of effort, and spending over $300 million, the U.S. Army
has officially received its new wargame (WARSIM) for training battalion,
brigade, division, and as big as you want to get, commanders, and their staffs.
Now even the most elaborate commercial wargame would not get $300 million for
development, and eight years to create the system. But wargames for professional
soldiers have different requirements, and a troublesome Department of Defense
bureaucracy to deal with. First, the requirements. Commercial wargames shield
the player from all the boring stuff (support functions, especially logistics.)
But professional wargames must deal with these support activities, because in a
real war, these are the things commanders spend most of their time tending too.
Sad, but true, and it’s why you have the ancient military quip, “amateurs study
tactics, professionals study logistics.” Professionals also study personnel
issues. A division commander will also know his half dozen combat and support
brigade commanders very well, and the 15 or so battalion commanders well enough
to know who is ready for a promotion to brigade commander, and who has to be
supervised a little more carefully. Actually deciding where the combat units go,
and when they attack or defend, takes up little of a commanders time, especially
for higher level commands (divisions and larger.)
WARSIM covers a lot of
complex activities that a commander must deal with to achieve battlefield
success. Besides logistics, there’s intelligence. Trying to figure out what the
enemy is up to is, next to logistics, the commanders most time consuming chore.
Then there is maintenance (keeping equipment running, and getting it fixed),
transportation (especially helicopters) and personnel (particularly finding
people capable of replacing leaders lost to combat, disease or
accidents.)
Another unique aspect of WARSIM is data capture. Every
action by the players is recorded, so that after the game, it is possible to
identify which decisions were responsible for success, or
failure.
Dealing with all these elements is a major reason why WARSIM
cost so much. And it wasn’t just that there was a lot of “stuff” to measure and
get working in software. No, the major problem was dealing with the
representatives of each of these “communities.” The logistics, intelligence,
maintenance and transportation experts not only had specific (and welcome) ideas
about how their work should be simulated, but they often had ideas (generally
not welcome) about how all the other folks should work with them. This leads to
bureaucratic battles that gum things up, generate a lot of wasted effort and
drag out the entire process. People in the Department of Defense don’t like to
talk about this aspect of wargame development (except to each other, behind
closed doors, preferably in a soundproof room, so all the yelling and screaming
cannot be heard.) Another reason for the high cost of WARSIM was the original
plan to make it part of JSIMS, a joint wargame system that would allow all four
services to wargame together. JSIMS failed, as the services had too many
differences. Much money was wasted in trying to resolve all the technical, and
tactical, differences. JSIMS came to be called a “billion dollar boondoggle,”
for the total cost of all the wargames involved (one for each service, and JSIMS
which tied them all together.) JSIMIS was quietly put to death in 2003.
But each of the services were able, with varying degrees of success, to make
their own wargame useful, at least for their service. But this wasted several
years. Work on JSIMS began in 1996, and WARSIM (originally called WARSIM 2000)
in 1997. The original target date of 2000 was missed, and, well, you can see
what happened. WARSIM didn’t get delivered until 2005.
One advantage of
such a large wargame like WARSIM is that some of the component parts can be used
alone for training. The portions of WARSIM that deal with intelligence work are
used that way. Other components are equally beefy enough for standalone
training.
WARSIM still has a lot of the bad habits that have dogged
professional wargames for decades. For example, the military still uses a lot of
people to control subordinate units. This could be done via software, but there
is still a lot of resistance to this. So games like WARSIM require dozens of
“pucksters” (as the subordinate players are called) to make decisions and
transmit it to the officers who are actually being trained. The military still
has trouble “validating” the data used to drive their games. Commercial wargame
developers use lots of historical data, and this has worked quite well for
decades. Indeed, this was one of the features of commercial wargames that first
drew the military back to using wargames i