Yes, but these are not “grand strategic” in scope. They are more situations like “if Iran decides to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, what happens when we try to reopen it given our equipment and current doctrine versus theirs.”
We have operations plans for a North Korean invasion scenario. We occasionally wargame with the South Koreans, but there are not “players.” Instead, there are people following existing doctrine and tactics. There is no central room where “players” are giving orders. People are following a script to see how actual troops perform when following said script. There are commanders of each side who get some leeway within the script, but they are not allowed to be all that creative. In the famous war game where blue “lost” to Iran due to a swarm of fishing boats sinking our Navy, the red commander repeatedly broke the rules and essentially was told to stop. He then got pissy and leaked to the public that we “lost” the war game. But war games are heavily scripted and he wasn’t following the script or the parameters so the result was never considered valid at all.
There is nothing like what you’re talking about.
Again, anything more than specific theater-type engagements involving specific tactics and strategies for a limited portion of that engagement are discussed in operations plans, but they are not “gamed.”
War games are limited in scope. For larger strategic plans, an operations plan is developed. The operations plan has parameters that are set by individuals higher up the chain of command than the individual creating the plan. The OPLAN to deal with a full nuclear exchange had parameters set by the SecDef and the plan was drawn up by lower level persons.
There’s no one playing such roles. War games are smaller scale tactical and you go with the parameters you start with. There is no “request more troops” or “request to use nukes.” You can do what you can do, there’s no requesting stuff outside of that. If you don’t follow the script you get in trouble. For high level strategy, there is no war gaming, instead there is an op plan. But individual draw that plan up in large collaborative groups, there is no “playing” of sides.
You seem to be talking about a scenario where we war game a huge scale strategic conflict, like simulating a full scale war with the USSR not only specific theaters and such but geopolitical simulation and etc. The military doesn’t do that.
The war games we actually do are exactly this, testing doctrine/tactics/training/equipment. There is no problem with finding weaknesses or failures with “blue”, in fact that’s considered a good thing as it is a learning experience.
But the OP in his other thread has repeatedly said he’s not talking about traditional military exercises/war games in the field using field troops. Instead he’s talking about a scenario where you have generals huddling together and basically doing a grand strategic simulation, where they can not only make grand strategic decisions but also political ones. Like requesting authority to use nukes, or levying more troops, or opening a new theater of war etc. The military war games more specific scenarios, it doesn’t war game what he’s talking about.
There are plans, in which speculation is definitely engaged in, where planners draw up grand strategic plans. But there aren’t grand strategic war games. You might game individual parts of the plan, like a single theater (say, Europe in a USSR invasion over land), but you don’t have a grand strategic game where someone plays the President, someone plays the overall commander of all military forces from the West etc.
I think this thread can serve the discussion just as well if you want to modify the question. Rather than have two very similar threads, I have merged the second with the original.
But a serious contribution though - The OP might want to check out RSAC - The Rand Strategy Assessment Center. it seems to be the closest approximation of what you are envisioning:
Sure, those games happen. But they are not common because they are so complex, and like you say, it is much more likely to wargame more specific scenarios or aspects of a conflict.
To give some idea of various wargames, there is a biennial wargame examining what happens to satellites in a major theater war. Participation is broad, as “The wargame included participants from nine NATO nations and Australia, six NATO groups, nine US organizations, as well as Commercial Space Industry.” This sort of game has people playing roles of both civilian and military decision-makers. Basically, both sides are presented with a scenario, they make some decisions, the opponents get to make decisions, and the next day both sides are presented with an updated scenario. In this sort of wargame, both sides typically have significant latitude to make decisions, and the “referees” of the wargame must plot out the significance of those decisions in order to generate the next day’s scenario. That analysis may be done by humans or it may be done by computer modeling assistance, depending on the sophistication of the game.
There are other wargames that are more scripted and offer less latitude to decision makers, like this. These types of wargames are more intended to draw out leadership level issues, such as how decisions are made and the needs of policymakers during a crisis, rather than to model specific operational capabilities.
It is worth noting that wargames that involve groups of people sitting around a table and debating scenarios happen all the time. The National Defense University has a department focused on those exercises and improving the capabilities of wargames.
There was a big war gamethe other day, to test the reliability of the electric power grid. Civilians were involved, in that the electric utilities participated down to the lineman level. But they weren’t playing soldier, but participating in their real-life jobs.
One of my old coworkers had worked on some wargaming software. All of the data loaded into it was unclassified and/or gibberish, and the math mattered, but it didn’t. The wargames he describes are similar to what the OP’s looking for – a bunch of high-ranking people in a massive conference room making strategic decisions. The important takeaway is that the point of these specific wargames, and the lessons they were trying to learn, had very little to do with the efficacy of specific units and strategy (hence the garbage data), and more to do with the mechanics of unit deployment. Intel needs to go up the chain, orders need to go down, and that’s an activity that needs to be practiced like anything else. So “We’ve got 3 dragoons of munchkins approaching from the left,” is just as useful a bit of intel to respond to than something that’s more realistic. Can the commander get the information, accurately, in a timely manner, and form a cogent response that makes it back down the chain? That’s much more important than whether or not sending a squadron of A-10s at the dragoons was the proper choice.
Please. They have experts draw up a comparison of the technologies involved and assess the probability of one defeating the other in a specific, given scenario. Then, should that scenario come into play over the course of a wargame, they use state-of-the-art random number generation to determine the outcome of the stated probability to the third significant digit.
