The Craft of Wargaming: A Detailed Planning Guide for Defense Planners and Analysts

by Robert Burks

The Craft of Wargaming is designed to support supervisors, planners, and analysts who use wargames to support their organizations' missions. The authors focus on providing analysts and planners with a clear methodology that allows them to initiate, design, develop, conduct, and analyze wargames. Built around the analytic wargaming construct, organizations or individuals can easily adapt this methodology to construct educational and experiential wargames. The book breaks the wargame creation process into five distinct Initiate, Design, Develop, Conduct, and Analyze. For each phase, the authors identify key tasks a wargaming team must address to have a reasonable chance at designing, developing, conducting, and analyzing a successful wargame. While these five stages are critical to the process of constructing any wargame, it should be understood that the craft of wargaming is learned through active participation, not by reading or watching. This craft must be practiced as part of the learning process, and the included practical exercises provide an opportunity to experience the construction of an analytical wargame. The authors also discuss critical supervisory tasks that are essential to manage the wargaming team's efforts. While the creators are focused on the design and development of the game itself, supervisors must set conditions for the wargame to be a success (best practices) and beware of the pitfalls that may set the wargame up to fail (worst practices). The book demonstrates using the analytical wargaming framework to create relevant and useful planning wargames. It also reinforces using the analytical wargaming framework for seminar wargames that, without rigor, are useless. The book demonstrates the benefits of using the analytical wargaming process to design educational and experiential games.

Genres: Nonfiction

367 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2020

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book, providing a detailed description and how-to guide for practitioners of wargaming. Written as a textbook by two Naval Postgraduate School faculty, this is a well-executed attempt to make the material of their Wargaming Applications course available to a wider audience. The authors introduce their three categories of wargames, analytical, experiential, and educational, as well as providing the many wargaming applications. The book is built around the full cycle of developing, executing, and analyzing an analytical wargame. The importance of building the whole effort around data collection (to answer the game’s question) is repeatedly stressed. Other best practices and considerations are presented in a clear and understandable description of the Wargaming process. After finishing the detailed discussion of analytical wargames the authors provide shorter sections to explain the differences in educational and training wargames. There is a very helpful chapter on the process and scope of analytical wargames during the planning process. I especially liked the detailed explanation of wargames within the larger analytic process. The authors do a great job of explaining the spectrum of analysis, with very realistic breakdowns between computer simulations, wargames, and military exercises. They point out that a single project or event can have multiple analytic methods involved. The book includes a scenario and the necessary guide to step through the wargame process. A great book for anyone involved in or using wargames. Highly recommended for those unfamiliar with wargames as a quick and efficient way to gain basic familiarity.