The Problem of Applying Wargaming to Emergency Management

The premise of this article is: “Wargames cannot provide Emergency Management (EM) with actionable results, knowledge transfer, workforce development, or focused training because of the data practices inherent with practice. The most we can hope for is discussion and public awareness in which ‘serious games’ are a better approach.”

And do this, folks will have the following things to say:

1. “But I really enjoyed the EM Wargames that are coming out!”
2. “They really helped us talk about how an issue!”
3. “I really like those miniatures though!”

First, one of the biggest problems in wargames and the application of wargames is that folks will tie, “did you enjoy it?” to “did this teach you something you’ll be able to apply to the real world later?” and to this, we enter into a perennial problem of wargaming that isn’t really the problem of wargames but the consequence of war games being commercialized and made into an industry which then gave birth to video games, consoles, commerial wargames, serious games, and really almost all current interactive entertainment media. It is a trap, a trap of trying to re-apply a thing developed to teach officers a new way of thinking about troop movements once it has been reshaped and reconfigured to everything from candyland to gettysburg to the settlers of catan to counter insurgency considerations on alien planets.

Second, to these, what I will say is relatively straight and to the point. My time in Emergency Management began in the pandemic and i’ve tried to naïvely observe everything I can while trying to be wrong about nearly everything as I did so. I wanted to be corrected, told I was wrong, and otherwise be forced to sit down and understand the vast complexity of Emergency Management. While some wargames are being designed by EM professionals, they are applying them using the same problemematic mindset that academics of disaster have. As a result, they miss much of the issue in favor of providing entertainment because they do not possess the knowledge necessary to apply it properly.

Finally, I want to note again the end of the point of this article, “The most we can hope for is discussion and public awareness in which ‘serious games’ are a better approach.” Serious games have a different focus than wargaming. While compatible, i’ll make the argument that serious games should be used to educate the public about disaster and emergency management procedures more than it should be used to train EM. Its what those games are meant for! And they’re good. They should not and cannot be used to train others as they are a branch of how we consider Knowing and the Mystique of Logic and Rules. Computing is a different branch, so are wargames, video games. Serious games are games your EOC should be not only playing, but bringing in community members to play. They can help show the public why you need to exist as an agency when Shin Godzilla (2016) doesn’t work.

Before I go any further, I want to define some terms for the purposes of this piece.

Terms Required to be Known

| Term | Definition | |—|—| | Analytics| Act of transforming data to information | | Data Warehousing| Storage of data that can be accessed remotely in a structured way for Analytics | | Fidelity| In wargaming terms, consider this how close to being a boot on the ground in terms of realism. The lower the fidelity, the higher you are in the command structure. | | Knowledge Transfer| Capacity for a wargame to transfer in-game, in-simulation events to actionable, real-life potential| | Serious Games| Games created with a subject matter in mind that are meant to educate about a topic versus train personnel in wargaming | | Situational Awareness| Capacity to understand everything that is happening around you from noticing to anticipating | | Wargames| Primary vehicle of workforce development that started after the Napleonic Campaigns. Currently are used to provide low to high fidelity simulations of a variety of environments |

There are other terms here to worry about but I think this list should cover quite a bit. One final bit that is important is that the central component of this article is that: “At its core, EM has a data problem which masquerades as a “gut check” problem.”

And this problem takes the stage front and center when we get to wargaming.

To this, I want to make 3 summative statements and then attempt to justify how they are relevant to the problem of wargames in EM.

1. Wargaming has a generalization focus while EM focuses on the localness of disaster despite wargames being primarily focused on individual events.
2. Wargaming is based on constantly re-litigating after-action reports and eye-witness testimony within a simulated environment that itself can be re-litigated within the confines of the engine at the center of the wargame.
3. Wargaming is the foundation of Computing whereas EM is the antithesis of Computing.

Generalization

Wargaming, in its current form, was created in the aftermath of Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. He trounced the Prussians so soundly that he ushered in the information age. In an effort to train officers on geo-sptaial concerns and data analytics models that helped Napoleon perform his conquest, the Prussians created some new approaches to teaching officers about how battles worked. While it took some time to really settle in, wargames and their various modifications ushered in a whole new mode of play that connected to business-based roleplaying, the tabletop-roleplaying game industry, and revitalized the video game industry.

The sort of low fidelity spatial nature of wargaming has both allowed it to maintain its dominance but additionally focuses the way that wargames are designed to be consumed. Warfare has become highly routinized in the geospatial context whereas different layers of fidelity can be applied and leaned into to extreme, per soldier detail, to hypothetical levels like CIA Counter-Insurgency operatives in the American Revolution, even fantastic capacity like wars on Mars, against unknowable aliens, and more.

In summary, these games are possible because there’s so much data, so many accounts, so many perspectives, that each game allows us to generalize out to theaters that we can’t even imagine yet. And so we get to the generalization issue in disaster. In order for wargaming in EM to function properly, there needs to be a codified set of rules of engagement that is seen across the profession. To do this, there is a necessary problem of regimented types of specialists with little to no deviation with additional data gathering capacity that, from this moment formward, per disaster, would vastly increase the amount of data available for disaster science more than the sum total of data available currently.

Inversely, there is the problem of generalization. This is from the perspective of wargames rather than EM in that wargames are a problem because of generalization. When we generalize, we outline problem areas that we cannot see or prepare for in our generalizability. Due to the so-called, “Black Swan” approach that EM typically has, this is an issue for 2 reasons.

The Data Problem

Now, to generalize, even with its problems, means to find common ground across, between, and among EOCs, municipalities, and regions. This typically presumes 3 things:

1. That accurate data is gathered and warehoused and is publically available.
2. That ARR are accurate and do not miss any decisions that were troublesome.
3. That these data are kept similarly across all areas.

The issue here is that ARRs are politically derived more than realistically created. Additional issues around where, when, and how certain assets are distributed, how much they cost, what fund allowed their purchase, and who benefitted from the purchase?

ARRs are filled with folks covering their collective and agency-based butts. They are riddled with creative interpretations, missing activity and on-the-ground discussion, missing time-based reporting and essential, sometimes ugly, detail. They are like this because while we want to know the truth, the truth is that the disaster happened years, sometimes decades ago, and was simply waiting for the proper catalyst.

At the last moment, that last moment where we as a species within a culture can see the unvarnished truth of the weaknesses of ourselves, we balk and resort to covering our butts. It is a consistent failure that is both unsurprising and itself a reflection of the very thing that causes disasters to happen.

This provides a real impetus to never actually collect data so that ARRs cannot be disagreed with, even when a FOIA request forces them to be readable, the lack of data to perform analytics on, the lack of a data warehouse, manifests the full failure of why disasters continually catch us unawares despite knowing that water exists, fire exists, and that under the ground is liquidy ground. We set up information systems to survive humanity’s capacity to blow things up but after decades, they can barely survive falling out of my hand when I watch people restore old toys on youtube to fall asleep peacefully.

Without that truth, without the data that could allow us to glimpse that truth, no wargame can truly encapsulate the training needed to not only respond to disaster but also provide the necessary mental model to consider the world before the hazard manifests the weaknesses that are disaster.

EM and the Technology Problem

Wargames form the origination of applied computing in that the age of information was ushered in by Napoleon Bonaparte and across multiple wars computing was developed at a breakneck speed to enhance and ensure proper calculations of probability of victory. This has formed the basis of how we consider wargames, computing in culture, video games, and just play in general. As a result, the types of decisions that the military makes are compatible with technology regardless of what is happening on the ground as this can be triaged, worked around.

By default, EM’s theaters will always be unknowable, not fully plannable, and worse, contain unknown levels of infrastructure. The result here is that we are stuck trying to plan for the unplannable and given the data problem as well as the issue of generalizability, we find a potentially unsurmountable obstacle.

I posted this on something Todd De Voe was talking about today but Emergency Management tends to think about black swan events; however, within Emergency Managmeent, the black swan is the white swan and given the aspect of AARs, we are stuck with a white swan that soceity itself sees as a black one whereas this event was more of a reflection of ineffective planning or unrestrained development rather than anything else.

So, the basis of what makes wargames work in the military is itself inversed inside of emergency managment. Add to this the AAR issue, the lack of EM being devoted to dealing with our weaknesses as a species, and the political need to maintain one’s job and we reach complete incompatibility.

On Fun

I stated this in the beginning but I wanted to highlight it a bit more here.

One of the issues in wargaming is that their metrics and outcomes are often unknowable. We cannot know about knowledge transfer, we cannot know if they are effective, and we cannot know much. But this is not because we can’t do it, but because we ask questions of the players like, “Did you have fun?” or, “Was this enjoyable?” or, “Was this satisfying?”

It is difficult because by default, the definition we assign play is the Aristotlean one, “Capacity of children and animals to leap.” We do not see play as a serious thing, as an adult thing, and yet the play element of culture, more than fun, is a formative aspect of the societies we live in. Rules, rulekeepers, and unwritten laws like norms form the basis, the glue of the social contract. These are essential elements of play.

From that starting point, we then lose a huge amount of potential for evaluating outcomes for groups. Instead, we might simply say, “well, they generated good discussion.” And yet, this is a problem for other reasons. Discussion of what? Because of what? Why? Did that discussion carry across the exercise? Did it inform others? How? What did it do? We don’t keep track of metrics because of the data issue.

And this is where fidelity comes in. Play in all its forms mixed with computing in all of its forms afford us an interesting possibility. Originally, wargames were meant to afford officers the capacity to understand the abstract nature of the type of war Napoleon brought about. Here, we moved from checkers and chess where we’re essentially on the ground, and start to move up toward abstract concepts.

Fidelity is needed when we want to be able to show and help folks feel the required mental models at different levels of abstraction. A wargame, in its set level of fidelity, is altogether different from those other games, even for the same event. Imagine playing as a private, PFC, Corporal, Sergent, on up. What we have to consider within each is the level of abstraction the world now contains.

In EM, this is similar as we move from victim to volunteer on up to EOC chief. We need data, we need to be able to do analytics, to be able to create models that we can base wargaming on. Again, we have the issue of data, of ARRs, needing to provide a level of fidelity we can base games on. This points to a fundamental problem of EM existing as antithesis to computing, to military information chains of communication. As a result, we cannot perform what is required to develop a wargame that does little more than make people talk who need to.

Conclusion

At the start if this article, I highlighted 3 specific issues that are keeping wargaming from being useful to EM.

1. Wargaming has a generalization focus while EM focuses on the localness of disaster despite wargames being primarily focused on individual events.
2. Wargaming is based on constantly re-litigating after-action reports and eye-witness testimony within a simulated environment that itself can be re-litigated within the confines of the engine at the center of the wargame.
3. Wargaming is the foundation of Computing whereas EM is the antithesis of Computing.

Across this article, I tried to highlight what stymies the usefulness of the wargame. At its core, we can point to the warehousing and collection of data as a sole point of failure that cascades across multiple other dimensions, those of creating models to base games on, affording for fidelity, and really promoting the idea of disaster as something that a hazard manifests, not causes.

I have mentioned serious games as a possible alternative. Many of the wargames being developed now are closer to this space than wargames. Designers of serious games will tend to balk at the idea of designing wargames because the word “war” exists in it. This tends to be the last issue of wargames: war itself. And that’s a topic for another, much longer, paper, post, career, or entire body of work across millenia.