Simulation and Wargaming. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Техническая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119604808
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no longer limited to military planning. Domain‐specific tabletop games are conducted today in various other domains, from preparing local administration and government for conducting large events, like the Olympics or a sports world championship, or for responding to natural or man‐made disasters, like earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, or terror attacks. Even in business, wargames are conducted to evaluate different options, strategies, and possibilities.

      However, wargames are on the rise again. After years of placing trust into the power of computation, using human creativity and intuition in wargames is becoming increasingly important in the search for new doctrines or concepts of operations. The power of our simulation systems rests on our representation of systems; capturing human ingenuity requires us to look beyond our simulated representations.

      What I want to show within this chapter is that wargaming and computer simulation are not competing methods, but that with the advances in both domains a new approach is possible that will enable deeper insights into the complex domain of modern operations, in which we take full advantage of both technologies. New wargaming centers will have to take more advantage of the computational power of simulation systems, while the creativity of wargamers will guide the activities. The following sections will provide several domains that will benefit from such a symbiosis.

      This introduction presents two viewpoints on the challenges: those of a simulation expert with more than 20 years’ experience in the development and application of simulation systems on many scale and in many domains, and those of a wargaming expert, preparing, conducting, and evaluating wargame events of highest interest in the defense domain.

      This section evaluates the role of simulation in more detail to show that simulation is a powerful tool in support of wargaming in many phases, from early design to the generation of after‐action reviews and reports. However, there are also several modeling challenges that must be addressed to ensure the best use of these powerful methods.

      A simulation implements such a model. Simulations are often understood as the execution of models over time, and in the scope of this chapter, the focus is on those using computers to execute a programmed version of the model to do so. The implementation is characterized by numerical challenges, computational complexity, and use of heuristics. Different programming languages, compilers, and platforms add more challenges. Even the same model can therefore result in various and quite different simulations. Even the change of the hardware can lead to surprising changes in predicted outcomes, in particular in complex, nonlinear systems with a high dependency on the initial conditions. When NATO upgraded their hardware, some of the important analysis results had to be revisited, as some battle outcomes changed significantly using the new hardware. This is not a mistake of any programmer, it is just the nature of highly complex, nonlinear systems that become discretized and solved numerically.

      Despite such obstacles, modeling and simulation is a powerful tool that helps to reproduce well‐known effects, predominantly of physical and kinetic nature, under diverse circumstances and constraints. The next subsection will evaluate where within the process of wargaming simulation can be of help.

      During the execution of the wargame, the focus will be on the human players. They provide the creativity allowing for operational agility in planning and decision‐making. They have the insights to support new ideas, such as multidomain operations planning in the national and international context. They understand how to explore human decision‐making and how to react to unanticipated decisions in the operation. In summary, they are the main players in the wargame, providing creativity and the vision for the big picture. However, the role of simulation is similarly important. It falls to the simulation to compute the mission thread by unbiased execution of decisions in the virtual battle space. This includes computing the mission thread effects as well as the effects of the wargamer’s human decisions. Simulations compute all orders of effects, and some higher order effects in complex, nonlinear environments can be surprising. It is not only possible but highly likely that some of these effects will lead to emergent behavior in the