The Netherlands Staff College (Instituut Defensie Leergangen or IDL) run an annual Theatre Wargame called Exercise JOINT CHALLENGE. This is a Computer Assisted Exercise (CAX) set at the operational level with one or two Combined Joint Task Force HQs. Component Command (CC) roles are filled either by students or by real CC HQ staff acting as a secondary training audience or as part of Excon. LBS works in conjunction with Newman and Spurr Consultancy Ltd to deliver the Wargame. JOINT CHALLENGE now attracts support from real HQs eager to train their staff is a well designed and executed CAX at the operational level.
Case Studies
The use of Seminar Wargaming techniques by the American, British, Canadian and Australian/New Zealand Armies Program (ABCA) to identify and rank perceived interoperability gaps between the Armies for subsequent examination and the development of mitigation measures.
One of the most common – and unforgivable – errors in the field of wargaming/modelling and simulation is our failure to ensure that we are speaking the same language. Too often experts in one or other of the stovepipes in the field think they are agreeing with something said by someone else when in fact they do not even understand what the other person is saying. This miscommunication is caused by the lack of a common, well defined, language. Different groups will define the same thing in any number of different ways; ask twenty experts what they think a ‘wargame’ is and you will get twenty different answers. Likewise with ‘scenario’, ‘model’ – and many other basic terms. However, achieving a common understanding is not always as easy as it might first appear.
We have laboured the point that there are many and varied types of wargame. This case study illustrates 3 different types of wargame: training, seminar and course of action. A seminar wargame was held to scope a prospective training wargame solution. The mechanics of the seminar wargame were based on course of action wargaming techniques. The case study is intended to quickly illustrate some of the differences between these wargaming applications and show that elements of each type of wargame can be harnessed to deliver powerful benefits – but only when their differences are well understood.