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.

(Most recent update: 10 May 2013)

Millennium Wars: Korea, One Small Step (2003)

Boardgame designed by Joe Miranda.

• Game description at BoardGameGeek

North Korea: The War Game (2005)

“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.

• “North Korea: The War Game,” The Atlantic, 1 July 2005.

Crisis in North Korea Simulation, ICONS Project

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.

• Available from the ICONS Project.

DMZ: The Next Korean War, Decision Games (2010)

Boardgame designed by Eric Harvey.

• Game description at BoardGameGeek.

CENEX 2011, University of Denver (2011)

A crisis negotiation exercise “covering simultaneous crises in the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula.”

• Scenario information and moves via CENEX website

Next War: Korea, GMT Games (2012)

GMT Games’ wargame of a future conflict in the Korean war, designed by Gene Billingsley.

• Description and session reports via BoardGameGeek.
• See also Crisis: Korea 1995

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.

• “Preparation for Instability in North Korea: a Korean Peninsula Crisis Simulation,” CSIS, November 2012

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.”

• Robert Farley, “2011 Patterson Spring Crisis Simulation,” Information Dissemination blog, 8 March 2011.
• scenario details (via simulation blog)

Unified Quest 2013, US Army War College

US troops intervene to secure the nuclear arsenal of the dictatorial republic of North Brownland. It proves to be a hard slog.

• “The Army’s Navy: Fast Boats, Long-Range Rockets Play In Classified Wargame,” Breaking Defense, 15 February 2013.
• “U.S. Army Learns Lessons in N. Korea-like War Game,” Defence News, 26 March 2013.
• “U.S. Wargames North Korean Regime Collapse, Invasion to Secure Nukes,” ABC News, 29 March 2013.
• “North Korea War: U.S. War Games Reveal Faults With Nuclear Recovery Strategy,” PolicyMic, April 2013.
• “The U.S. vs. North Korea: Inside a Pentagon war game,” CNN, 10 April 2013.

Dartmouth College Korea simulation (2013)

Simulation with student participants at Dartmouth College.

• “Dartmouth Students Get a Taste of Foreign Relations Through Crisis Simulation,” Dartmouth Now, 25 January 2013.

Drive on Pyongyang, Modern War magazine (2013)

Boardgame designed by Ty Bomba.

• Game description via BoardGameGeek.
• Michael Peck, “Woe to the Imperialists! How I briefly defended North Korea from American aggression,” Foreign Policy magazine, 8 April 2013.

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.

• Tom Marshall and Michael Gonchar, “Decision Point: Understanding the U.S.’s Dilemma Over North Korea,” New York Times, 19 March 2013.

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.

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.

The conference venue this year is the Tec^Edge Innovation and Collaboration Center (ICC) facility.  A part of the Wright Brothers Institute, the Tec^Edge ICC is located at 5000 Springfield St. in Dayton, OH.

For more information, see the conference website, here.  The conference continues to take shape, so check back for updates!

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!

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?

As a brief distraction from a backlog of email tonight, I decided to run an n-gram on how often the terms “kriegspiel,” “kriegsspiel,” “war game,” and “wargame” appear. As you can see from the graph above (which represents a moving three-year average), there is substantial growth in use of these terms in the late 19th century, a spike upwards during WWI, and then a slow decline until the 1950s. Thereafter the terms then appear more and more often, albeit with a sharp and temporary decline in the 1990s (corresponding, perhaps, to a low point in the miniature wargaming and boardgaming hobbies).

Now back to the email…

This is just a reminder that I am continuing to update the Israel vs Iran wargame compendium.  The most recent additions: details of a crisis simulation at the Brookings Institution, as well as a couple of scenario exercises/op eds from the Washington Post.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to report that GameLab has already given birth to an educational card game that is now being used, specifically in a World Bank course on strategic coordination in crisis response. Designed by Gary Milante (also known as “GameLab Group Facilitator Alpha”), the game uses some of the ideas and themes raised in the GameLab session, but adapts them to a simple and fast-play card game mechanism.

You will find further details—and links to the files necessary to play test your own version—over at PAXsims. The initial design is likely to undergo further revision, so comments are welcomed.