Here is an interesting, and unsettling, article regarding the still-classified results of a wargame recently conducted by the US military involving everyone’s favourite lunatic nation, North Korea.
Although the outcome of the simulation was more than troubling, that is not what I’m posting about. No, what I am interested in is understanding the wargame process itself. In particular, how is it remotely possible (even in theory) to accurately predict and then mimic the likely actions and reactions of a nation like North Korea? I mean, it’s become a truism that the country (or, I suppose, more accurately, its leaders) is (are) totally bonkers.
Bottom line, for a wargame to be instructive, I assume it is essential to be able to play the role of one’s adversary beyond sheer guesswork; you use his past behaviour to predict what he’ll do in various circumstances, under various conditions. Yet, by definition, one cannot predict what irrational people will do. How can you ‘wargame’ that?
What people totally don’t understand about war games is that there are many different types of war games, and they aren’t all like a game of Dungeons and Dragons where players lose if they don’t choose correctly; nor are they all like playing John Madden 2k13 by loading up the Ravens and the 49ers in order to predict who will win the game.
Although I know nothing about this war game, I looked up the website. It reads, in part:
This description screams to me that this war game is one in which a pre-plotted series of events are scripted before the game to force participants to make tough choices. Those choices are later examined to shine a light on the decision making process, challenge assumptions, and flesh out the issues that participants should have thought about.
Let me illustrate:
Scene 1: The “North Brownland” News Agency acknowledges the existence of a famine and appeals for international aid. If aid is provided, N.B. will allow limited inspections of its WMD facilities. What should the US do?
[Participants confer and decide]
Scene 2: A week later, the Fearless Leader of N.B. has escaped to Chongaland after food riots extend to military units. The US has no idea who is now in charge of the country. What should the US do?
[Particpants confer]
Scene 3: Days later, a civil war breaks out and Chonaland sends in troops to stabilize the situation on the western border. A rogue N.B. general claims to have control over all WMD stockpiles and threatened to attack the US if it does not demand the withdrawal of Chongaland troops. What does the US do? etc.
Note that the progression of scenarios has nothing to do with what the participants choose to do. If, after scene 2, the US opts to invade, that doesn’t alter the problem in scenario 3. The game is also not making predictions that scene 3 will come about.
Instead, after the war game there is a hotwash where participants explain why they decided to do what they did, why they disagreed with their colleagues, and what they would have done differently had they known more. It also gives participants to say, “Gee, I had no idea that we couldn’t order “x” to happen and that it would take days for it to occur. If I had known that, I would have done something different/we need to figure out how to make that happen quicker.”
Again, I don’t know any details of this particular war game, but I would bet anything that this war game should be considered more of an intellectual/psychological exercise rather than a prediction of what will happen in the future. The thing is, that either journalists don’t understand what’s going on, or they hype these things to make them look like predictions to scare people and sell newspapers. Or get people to click-through, or whatever makes money these days.
It’s also worth nothing that while it’s popular to say that North Korea is just completely bonkers, it’s not actually true.
The North Korean leadership has found a model that works quite well, given the constraints they are working with. There is no way they could stay in power if they liberalized, so that option is right out. So out of the options they have left, they found one that let them stay in power for generations, where your average tin pot dictator these days has a lifespan of years. They somehow even managed to survive the fall of the USSR and the economic changes in China, which is no mean feat. Their mix of belligerence and humanitarian disaster has been quite effective at getting aid without too many strings. It’s a working system for those making the decisions.
It’s also worth noting that North Korea is not just one guy. There is a leadership structure, and they do have a fair amount of sway.
It’s rarely useful to characterize other people as crazy. Usually, there is quite a bit of underlying reason behind what is happening.
Yea, the OP’s question seems kinda weird. The article says explicitly that the wargame in question posited a collapse of the N. Korean gov’t. In which case said gov’t probably wouldn’t be making any decisions, rational or otherwise.
Certainly true if they liberalized N. Korea politically. But I’d think China and Vietnam shows its possible to liberalize economically and maintain an authoritarian, more or less hereditary political system. I never really understood why N. Korea didn’t follow these examples, seems like being leader of a (relatively) wealthy, growing economy would be a lot more fun and a lot more stable then ruling it over a bunch of impoverished peasants.
I acknowledge that if it’s assumed the government has collapsed then, yes, it’s reasonable to assume that it would wield less influence but not zero. Indeed, it is often the case that deposed or overthrown or collapsing regimes do not go out quietly. For example, consider Libya, maybe Iraq, and possibly Syria in the not-too-distant future if the insurgent forces suddenly sweep out the al-Assad regime. They continued to influence the scene for quite some time.
Likewise, in the case of North Korea, if the government went down, I don’t think it would instantly vanish. I might expect some acts of desperation (punctuated by explosions and flames) while it’s on the way out.
even sven: I think what you said about Kim Un may well be true (“crazy like a fox”). I admit I was being somewhat hyperbolic. Still, I think predicting his moves would be near impossible.
Didn’t I read somewhere that they did a wargame using Iran, but the US lost. So, they had to put in new rules, like limiting missile launches, so the US could win.
That would be a good thing actually. Why spend all that money on the war games so you can trounce a fictional Iran, pat each other on the back and talk about how awesome we are. It might be fun, but you don’t really learn anything.
Far better to be surprised in the simulation and learn from it, than be surprised in an actual war I would think.
Also, don’t think of it like they changed the rules because they were sore losers. If they’ve budgeted for 2 weeks of war games, and they lose in 5 days; then of course they would say “Ok, that was very educational. Well we have 9 days left, lets run it again but this time lets see what happens if Iran chooses to do X instead of Y.”
I’ve read in numerous histories that the Japanese Imperial Navy wargamed the attack on Midway in early 1942, and lost badly because their carriers were mostly sunk. So Yamamoto made them change the rules, and they then won. So they went ahead and attacked Midway, and most of their carriers were sunk.
You’re talking about the Millennium Challenge 2002. It’s true that the ‘blue’ forces lost the first time around. (There wasn’t a specific opponent, just “a middle east nation”.)
The logic behind restarting was as Willcross said, they’d budgeted for 14 days of exercises, so if the game ended on the first it’d be a waste to not start over.
Some of the other problems were General Van Riper used some ‘novel’ tactics that were pretty far outside of reality. Things like “well, the US can read my radio transmissions, so I’ll just use motorcycle couriers” except that the simulation didn’t account for the time delay of a motorcycle, so he got instant communications that the US couldn’t stop or descramble. Or using suicide dhows to sink aircraft carriers. Sounds clever, if you can get enough suicide crews and assume the US would not warn off ‘civilian ships’. Unlike the USS Cole, if there was an active shooting war going on I’m pretty sure the destroyers would not let ship sidle up to the side of their aircraft carriers.
I’m programmed some wargame simulations for the DoD. Let’s just say the results of wargames (at least computer based ones) bear only a superficial relation to reality. Good for thinking maybe, but with a rather large grain of salt.
Yes, it does sound like war gamers can always “win” their war games by changing the rules as needed, doesn’t it. . .
According to theory of testing, this is actually a perfectly cromulent technique. It may seem like they are continually and arbitrarily moving the goal posts as needed. The immediate popular view will obviously be “Well, duuuuhhhh!”
The idea is, you “move the goal posts” as needed to “win” your game. THEN, take note of how you had to move those goal posts, and this will give you the valuable information you wanted.
Lemme give an analogy, from intelligence testing. (By “intelligence”, I mean people’s IQ measures, not “military intelligence”.) IQ is defined, by definition such that the population average will always be 100. Intelligence tests are always being modified to make sure this is true. So, as society gets “smarter” (e.g., by new scientific knowledge that then finds its way into school curricula), students’ scores go up. So the tests are modified to account for this, so that IQ test scores will always average to 100. “Well, duuuuhhhh!”
BUT! If you want to study how students’ have gotten smarter over the years, just take note of how you had to adjust the tests to get the results you wanted! This will tell you what you are looking for.
Similarly for “war games”, where (depending on the rules of the specific “game”) they might adjust the rules as needed to “win”, and then note what adjustments they needed to do. By taking note of this, they can learn valuable information about how to plan or conduct future “wars”, whether fictional or IRL.
And in a related technioque, you can make the scenario deliberately unfair, to give the “enemy” implausible advantages, and see if you can still win and/or expose where your weak points are. I’m unaware if anyone officially uses this aspect, but I’ve heard rumors that it was used in some cases.
I also know the Japanese pre-WW2 had an issue along these lines,but they reversed it as a sort of team-building excercise. They took several recently-returned (from the States) non-military diplomatic personnel and gave them control of U.S. forces. Presumably, the theory was that they would be more in tune with how the U.S. would act. America was drastically weakened for this game, but the non-military people absolutely won. Unfortunately, the war was already running at that point, so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to use said knowledge.
Can you provide a cite for this? I’ve read a lot about really bad Japanese war gaming all the way through the end of the war, but haven’t read about this particular incident. The Japanese military wasn’t even the slightest bit interested in learning how they were weak, and this story doesn’t seem to match with how the war played out.
As is mentioned above, the side playing the Americans in the war game before the Battle of Midway evaded the Japanese submarines with his carriers, allowing them to close in and sink the Japanese. They ruled against that, and the Japanese team won. In the actual battle, the Japanese subs were slow getting to the area where they were supposed look for the US fleet, and the US carriers had already gone past, allowing them to close on Japanese carriers and sink them.
In his autobiography, Colin Powell writes about a simulation which is was being graded on in a command school, and he said that during the exercise, he knew that they were looking for the candidates to be bolder, but he felt the circumstances required being more cautious. I wonder how much the games are “gamed” this way, using them to confirm what you already believe.
There are no enemies or friends in this world between nations beyond what we socially construct. These are merely labels we place onto collections of people in this world in order to satisfy our deeply-seated psychological urges of identity. Most of all, they are the result of decisions that our leaders have made, and such labels can be perpetuated only as we continue our identification with those decisions. The only way war will be averted is when people of respective nations refuse to consider fellow citizens of other nations as enemies because of what the leadership has declared. We should all stand up in unison, citizens of the US and of North Korea, and speak directly to each other as human beings and citizens, as opposed through representatives in their respective governments who try to impose their desired frame of reference upon us. Representative diplomacy is the problem, and direct diplomacy is the solution.
If a North Korean looks an American in the eye and vice versa, directly and face to face, he will see a fellow human being with the same fears, aspirations, and needs. Our consciousness is inculcated to us by our leaders in government. To play along with that charade is to let the worst aspect of human nature take control. To rise above that is to embrace the best aspect of our nature.
