The Connections 2013 conference will be held 22-25 July in Dayton Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Connections is the only national event dedicated specifically to professional military wargaming. Organized and chaired since its beginning in 1993 by (now retired) Air Force COL Matt Caffrey, the annual Connections conference has worked to advance the art, science and application of serious wargaming by bringing together all elements of the field (military, commercial and academic) so participants can exchange information on achievements, best practices and needs.
The theme for 2013 is: “Enhancing Wargaming Support to Budget Decisions.” Given the current and future uncertainty over US Department of Defense budgets, this is a timely theme indeed.
Another valuable element of Connections is the chance to meet leaders from across the spectrum of wargaming. Past attendees and speakers have included Larry Bond, James F. Dunnigan, Joe Miranda, Al Nofi, Peter Perla, John Prados and many more.
Keynote speakers for this year are:
COL Chris Froehlich, Chief Strategic Planning Division, Air Force Material Command
Dr. Peter Perla, author of The Art of Wargaming, Lead, Wargaming, Centre for Naval Analysis
Dr. Thomas Allen, Deputy Director for Studies and Analysis, Joint Staff
Connections is open to all contributors to the field of professional wargaming: military, government, defense contractor, academic, and recreational. It is an unclassified event. Many of the attendees are recreational wargamers in their spare time, but the emphasis of the conference is on discussion of activity and issues in professional wargaming, from the military, commercial and academic perspectives.
The Emergency Capacity Building Project—a coalition of some of the world’s largest NGOs involved in disaster response—has a major ongoing project on the use of simulations for enhancing training and preparedness. You’ll find an overview of their work at PAXsims, their latest report here, and links to all of their simulations-related materials here on the ECB website.
Given the success of the previous (and ongoing) Israel vs Iran wargame compendium, I thought it might be a good time to start a similar listing of wargames dealing with a potential future conflict in the Korean peninsula. The listing includes commercial/hobby games where these address serious analytical issues of strategy and military operations. Some student simulations have included, although model UN-type crisis committees haven’t.
“Dealing with North Korea could make Iraq look like child’s play—and the longer we wait, the harder it will get. That’s the message of a Pentagon-style war game involving some of this country’s most prominent foreign-policy strategists.”—an account of a crisis simulation convened by The Atlantic.
Explore the complexities of negotiating an end to a crisis in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and mistrust. This simulation places students in the roles of key global leaders as they attempt to determine the cause of a recent explosion in North Korea and de-escalate tensions between parties. In the wake of Kim Jong-Il’s death, the international community’s concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program are heightened and events in the simulation have precipitated a crisis that threatens to ignite a regional conflict.
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Korean Peninsula Crisis Simulation (2012)
In November 2012, CSIS held a two-day crisis simulation exercise in collaboration with the International Communications and Negotiation Simulation (ICONS) Project of the University of Maryland. Three teams were formed for the exercise: a China team, a U.S. team, and a control team which played the roles of North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Participants included senior members of the U.S. foreign policy and security expert community, many of whom were former U.S. senior officials.
The simulation was designed to test and enhance U.S.-China crisis management capabilities in general, and to underscore the benefit of advance discussion between the U.S. and China to respond to potential contingencies on the Korean Peninsula.
Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky, Korea simulation (2011)
Graduate student simulation, involving ”a disaster and succession crisis in North Korea, and included teams representing North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States.”
Lesson plan for Korea simulation, New York Times “Learning Network” (2013)
Should the United States rely on diplomacy and incentives or military confrontation to deal with a nuclear-armed North Korea? In this lesson, students will play the role of White House advisers, exploring policy options and recommending the best strategy for preventing war in East Asia.
The first Connections UK conference—an offshoot of the original, US-based Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference—will be held at King’s College London on 3-4 September 2013. Additional details can be found at the Connections UK website.
The 2013 session of the Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference will be held in Dayton, OH, July 22-25. In keeping with the challenges of operating in an era of limited resources, this year’s theme is “Enhancing Wargaming Support to Budget Decisions.”
As with previous Connections conferences, the first day (Monday, July 22) will be devoted to optional tutorials, starting at noon, followed by an evening ice breaker. The heart of the conference, with panel discussions, demonstrations, working groups, and more, will be July 23 and 24. An optional outbrief session will be held the morning of July 25. The current draft agenda is available here.
Here is a web survey Matt Caffrey putt together to get some demographic info and preferences to aid in planning this years connections conference. The plan is to hold it at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton Ohio. It will be hosted by the Headquarters Air Force Mobility Command, Strategic Planning Division with a theme related to how wargaming can support decision making associated with the anticipated austere budget environment. The exact wording of the theme is still being drafted. Connections was held there in 2010 for those that remember and Matt intends to secure the same venue (the Tech^Edge facility).
Thanks to Kirk Stork for setting up the survey and Chris Weuve for coordination of the effort! and as always Matt, for the tons of hard work he puts into organizing Connections each year!
I’ve had some interesting discussions with Matt Caffrey at AFRL about the roles and uses of wargaming for S&T investment purposes. This has a lot of potential to be informed by business wargaming, but suffers from the typical desire for an extended time horizon (typically at least 10 to as long as 30+ years). Given our typical decade+ prourement timeline, that is effectively looking at what the next generation and ‘generation after next’ technologies should be. Matt brings up the historical cases of the USS monitor and the F-8 as examples of technology that we happened to procure “just in time”, that easily could have not been avaialble when needed. He asks “Can wargaming help us do at least as well in the future?
The navy used to do a series of long term technology “fight the war of the future” games, but found that after the Cold War, there were just too many variables looking out even 10or 15 years to have any real basis for analytic decision-making based on executing a single warfighting scenario. The Navy has nibbled at the edges of the problem, but not gotten much beyond the “BOGSAT” based “vote on your favorite pet rocks” (a disgracefully bad substitute for real operations reseach…).
The still harder part of the problem, is when to bring cost into the analysis? Can you even do effective cost estimating of lifecycle costs for future systems? What is the time horizon for when that occurs? What other factors shold be invovled? The typical focus on Technology Readiness Levels is grossly inadequate. (Evertt Rodgers seminal “Diffusion of Innovation gets to why…) There are several other aspects of an invnnetion that are far more important to it being adopted as an innovation!
So who is doing what types of S&T realted gmaing out there, and what are the key variables the games are trying to inform? Or is the future just too fuzzy these days and do we need more classic operations research work before we get to the point we can gain information through gaming?
