ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES FOR EDUCATIONAL WARGAMES

Purposeful integration of assessment within educational wargame design is increasingly essential as military education expands those activities within its curriculum. This multimethod case study examines key challenges and strategies for assessment within educational wargaming practice. Drawing insights from faculty interviews, academic documents, and faculty meeting observations, the study identifies six key assessment challenges: gamesmanship, lack of control, multiple faculty roles, receptiveness to feedback, evaluation of individuals in teams, and fairness of evaluation. It then discusses how experienced faculty mitigate these challenges throughout the assessment design process from identifying outcomes to ensuring the quality of evaluation.

Wargaming and the Military: "Napoleon at Waterloo": The Events of June 1815 Analyzed via Historical Simulation

The Battle of Waterloo is one of the most memorable actions in world history and has in consequence given rise to both an enormous historiography and many other forms of commemoration. “Napoleon at Waterloo” examines one such form of commemoration, namely the traditional board wargame, and it examines how this activity can be employed to further understand how the battle was fought and won.

HEDGEMONY: A Wargame to Evaluate Senior Joint Professional Military Education Learning Objectives

The Officer Professional Military Education Policy directs Joint professional military education institutions to develop officers who demonstrate critical and creative thinking skills. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ’s intent is to develop strategically minded officers who will “creatively apply military power to inform national strategy, conduct globally integrated operations, and fight under conditions of disruptive change.”1 The wargame Hedgemony is unlike most other wargames. Its focus is on teaching defense professionals how strategies are a complex interaction between force development, force posture, and force employment. Hedgemony also provides a way in which the Marine Corps War College measures its program outcomes.

EDUCATIONAL WARGAMING: Design and Implementation into Professional Military Education

In light of the Commandant’s Planning Guidance, there is a renewed emphasis on educational wargaming in professional military education (PME). While wargaming has a long history in PME, there is currently a gap in the academic literature regarding wargaming as an adult educational tool. Scientific study has focused on adult education theory and models generally, highlighting the identification of four different learning experiences, each tied to a learning style: concrete experience, which suits those with a diverging earning style; abstract conceptualization, which suits those with the converging learning style; reflective observation, for those with an assimilating learning style; and active experimentation, which works well for those with an accommodating learning style. By effectively engaging each of these four experiences, educational wargaming can have utility for a diverse array of learning styles.

PROMISE UNFULFILLED: A Brief History of Educational Wargaming in the Marine Corps

This article offers a comprehensive historical overview of educational wargaming in the U.S. Marine Corps and how it can evolve in the future. The tradition of leveraging wargames for educational and training purposes is deeply rooted in the Marine Corps. From humble beginnings at the Naval War College to Service-wide wargaming initiatives like TACWAR, the Marine Corps has always sought to develop the intellectual edge of its Marines through wargames. Yet, in successive decades, the Marine Corps has consistently struggled to maintain its wargaming efforts. This article concludes with recommendations on how to develop, expand, and evolve educational wargaming in the Marine Corps.

DEVELOPING SELF–CONFIDENCE IN MILITARY DECISION MAKIN: An Imperative for Wargaming

In his Commandant’s Planning Guidance, the 38th Commandant charges the Marine Corps with doing more to employ wargaming in education and training. It is not often clear why the Marine Corps needs to use this technique to practice decision making, given other kinds of decisions games, such as tactical decision games (TDGs) and decision forcing cases (DFC). While these other decision-making educational tools have their advantages in honing the communication of estimates, orders, and corresponding rationales, the primary virtue of wargaming lies in the far larger number of decisions players must make in a continuously unfolding situation.

WARGAMING IN PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION: Challenges and Solutions

Given the emphasis to employ wargaming in professional military education, how can instructors in the schoolhouses, operating forces, and supporting establishment—particularly those who are not experienced wargamers themselves—go about it? This article explains the necessity of crafting desired learning outcomes to selected, modified, or in-house designed serious wargames with the assistance of accomplished experts. Summarizing relevant recent scholarship, it provides foundational terminology and concepts that facilitate collaborative conversations, as well as offers advice regarding common but avoidable pitfalls of this dynamic and immersive teaching method.

WARGAMING DEVELOPMENT SERIES: Developing Impactful Wargame Narratives through Storytelling

Nothing connects people more powerfully than well-told stories. Humans have been telling each other stories since long before they could write them down. Sharing stories is a critical part of building trust with others, and that trust is essential to creating meaningful connections with people. Great stories have structure and purpose; they appeal to our deepest emotions and are most compelling when they challenge or change our perceptions of reality. There are rules to the methods and techniques that create great stories. This article explores the benefits and challenges of applying successful storytelling techniques to designing wargame narratives that balance creative ambitions with achievable timelines. Wargames that incorporate such techniques will surface new trends and better inform future conflict planning.

Russian Cyber Information Warfare: International Distribution and Domestic Control

Cyber information warfare (IW) is a double-edged sword. States use IW to shape the hearts and minds of foreign societies and policy makers. However, states are also prone to foreign influence through IW. This assumption applies mainly to liberal democratic societies. The question examined in this article is how Russia uses IW on other countries but protects itself from the same activities. The authors’ main argument is that while Russia executes influence operations and IW in cyberspace, it strives for uncompromising control over its domestic cyberspace, thus restricting undesirable informational influence over its population.

Consistency of Civil-Military Relations in the Israel Defense Forces: The Defensive Mode in Cyber

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has four battle threats, where cyber is equitable to conventional (state), subconventional (nonstate), and nonconventional. An escalation in one could lead to an overall escalation in all. In the political areas and, by extension, in civil-military relations (CMR), the IDF has a defensive mode as routine, while an offensive mode is manifest rarely in emergencies and war. The IDF is engaged in a total war in a defensive mode yet a limited war in the offensive mode as Israel’s adversaries do not share the same policies with regular cyber and terror attacks against civilian, government, and military targets. There is consistency in all four threats. Fencing, active defense, and preventive and preemptive strikes dominate.