Wargaming for Innovation

 

A naval war game in Pringle Hall during the early 1950s. Image courtesy of the Naval War College Museum.

Captain Robert C. "Barney" Rubel USN, Ret recently retired as the Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War College and continues to serve as a member of the CNO Advisory Board.

In a recent department-wide memo announcing the Defense Innovation Initiative, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel calls for accelerating innovation throughout DoD.  Among other elements of the program, “A reinvigorated wargaming effort will develop and test alternative ways of achieving our strategic objectives and help us think more clearly about the future security environment.”1   The Secretary’s use of the word “reinvigorated” implies that some aspects of the current wargaming program, whether in DoD proper or throughout the Services, requires improvement.  Since each of the Services has in place a robust program of wargaming, the Secretary either is calling for additional effort in the joint and OSD arenas or is leery of the objectivity of Service gaming and wants more oversight of the process.  Whatever the Secretary’s true intent, an effort to improve wargaming support to innovation will face any number of pitfalls.  Just throwing money at the problem almost guarantees failure.  If this initiative is to bear fruit, wargames must be conducted under the proper circumstances by the right people using correct techniques. Although not specifically called for by the memo, the implied task for the Secretary and his staff will be to establish a DoD-wide policy and strategy on wargaming. This article will set forth some considerations and principles for doing so.

My Qualifications to Talk About Wargaming

I feel that since I am offering criticism and prescriptions, I should establish my bona fides for doing so.  I have been playing in, designing, directing, analyzing, overseeing and sponsoring professional wargames since 1981.  I served as a professor of planning and decision making at the Naval War College for six years and in that capacity was responsible for executing student end-of-course wargames.  Later, I served as director of the Research and Analysis Division within the Wargaming Department.  In this position, besides analyzing Title X and other games, I served as game director for a major advanced concepts game involving Joint Forces Command and the Navy (Unified Course 04).  Elevated to Chairman of the Wargaming Department, I completely reorganized it and substantially civilianized it, hand-picking the faculty.  In 2006 I was made Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.  I was immediately assigned to design and lead a project to support the development of a new maritime strategy.  As part of that project I conceived of a six-week-long strategy game that produced the central insight upon which the resulting document, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” was based.  As Dean I had seven departments reporting to me.  Three of those departments, Strategic Research, Wargaming and Warfare Analysis, conducted a substantial amount of their work using different types of wargaming, for which I established institutional policy and standards.  Throughout all of this I participated in many Title X games of each of the Services as well as teaching an elective course on wargaming theory and practice at the Naval War College.  I also wrote several articles on wargaming theory.
   
Over the course of the last sixteen years I have observed the Navy and Joint attempts to create innovation centers - the Navy Warfare Development Command and Joint Forces Command J9 - including sitting with LtGen (Ret) Paul VanRiper during Millenium Challenge 02.  I have had a front row seat, as it were, to see how the best institutional intentions, activated by a host of smart, experienced and dedicated people and funded by millions of dollars, failed to generate useful innovation, in part through the misuse of wargames.  In this article I will not provide a detailed critique of what went wrong, but my observations and prescriptions concerning wargaming are based on what I saw fail.
   
The Nature of Wargames

Wargames have been used by militaries for centuries to educate, test plans and to explore future warfare environments.  As distilled simulations of warfare, their attraction stems from the embedded narrative and their ease of use.  Wargames can range from simple table-top, map-based discussions to large, computer-supported events involving hundreds of participants.  However, whether small and simple or large and complex, all true wargames share a common intellectual underpinning.

• Wargames are revelatory and indicative, not predictive and prescriptive.  Just as looking at a map provides a better understanding of geography and terrain than does reading about it in text, playing through a scenario provides a better understanding of the dynamics of warfare than does reading history.  Relationships among physical entities like ships or positions, under various military circumstances, are revealed, as are potential incentives to act or not act.  The famous series of games at the Naval War College in the 1920s and 30s revealed that a strategy of sending the Fleet directly to the relief of the Philippines courted disaster.  Based on this insight an alternate strategy of progressive advance through the Mandated Islands was developed.  It is important to note that the games did not, could not, predict what would happen, nor did they prescribe an alternative.  Officers with authority had to decide to accept game results and act on them.  
• Wargames are sensitive and equivocal tools.  It is all-too-easy to design and execute a game that produces dangerous distortions.  If a game is designed to validate a concept that is a favorite of top leadership, it will, whether or not the concept has actual merit.   Organizational politics can influence games, especially when competing equities are involved.  Even well-designed and well-executed games can fail to produce the insights necessary for effective innovation if players, umpires and analysts are unable to hear the “whispers” the game produces.2   Whispers are those counter-intuitive, counter-cultural insights - the weak signals - that are easy to miss.  In Japanese Navy staff wargames prior to the Battle of Midway, a junior officer playing the US Pacific Fleet placed a task force northeast of Midway.  Admiral Yamamoto’s staff ignored this move, believing that Admiral Nimitz would not be so prescient or aggressive.3  Organizations sponsoring games must be ready for the games to tell them things they do not want to hear.
• Wargames require commitment and involvement.  If Secretary Hagel’s use of “reinvigorated” is to have any meaning, it will be because the chain of command commits to getting its “hands dirty” with the wargaming process.  Defense and Service leadership has been busy for the past decade and it has become a frequent practice to “contract out” wargames.  There are plenty of consultants and contractors as well as government organizations that are happy to receive a bundle of money to run a game, and of course hope that the game makes the sponsor happy enough to engage in a series of games.  With little more involvement than providing a topic and a check, the sponsor awaits the wisdom and answers it expects to find neatly bulletized in the game report.  This practice is condemned.  This writer has too often been frustrated in trying to establish a meaningful dialogue on game objectives and design with OPNAV and other sponsors that are too busy to engage. A research wargame is a thinking tool that requires participation by those who must do the thinking and wield decision authority.  Sponsoring leadership must maintain direct involvement from game conception and design through game execution.  Whether acting as players or not, sponsoring leadership must be willing to engage in an in-depth dialogue with game designers.  Participation in the game, beyond showing up on the last day for a hot wash, is salutary.
• Multiple games are better than one.  Individual games, if conducted well and under the right circumstances, can be revelatory, but each game is simply one foray into a limitless forest of possibilities.  Like blind men feeling the elephant, multiple inputs help create a clearer picture.  Moreover, multiple games increase the odds that someone will hear a critical whisper or have a flash of insight that produces a big idea.  Conducting a campaign of gaming also can produce a more effective gaming process, including the creation of adept gaming organizations and a more sophisticated set of game consumers.  However, care must be taken when trying to “connect the dots” between and among games.  The results of games conducted for different reasons, by different organizations and using different methods cannot be easily compared.  The temptation is to gather disparate game data and subject it to statistical analysis in order to squeeze additional meaning out of it.  This is also a practice that is condemned.  For the reasons set forth in the previous bullets, game experiences, not game reports, are the key to learning from them.

Gaming for Innovation
   
Secretary Hagel was right to mention gaming in his memo on innovation.  Games can be powerful tools for generating new ideas, testing them and socializing them with the Services.  However, a gaming policy and strategy should be approached with more caution than enthusiasm in order to maintain intellectual discipline and avoid pitfalls.  Here are some principles and practices that should be followed:

• New ideas cannot be conjured on demand.  Games whose purpose is idea or concept generation must be seen as venture capital investments that may or may not bear fruit.  It is too often the case that up-front expectations of success result in the substitution of euphemisms and slogans for substantive new ideas if these are not produced by the game.  Lip service has often been paid to the idea that we must be prepared for experiments to fail, but when it comes to games, it’s hard to think of any game in recent history that has not been declared a success.  A game can be competently designed and executed and still not produce useful new ideas.  Idea generation games must be a regular diet of any organization hoping to support innovation with them.  Having said all this, exploratory games, such as the first few Navy Global Wargames in the 1980s, can be expected to produce useful insights on the potential nature of future warfare.
• Joint operational level games can easily deteriorate into political correctness in terms of not threatening Service equities.  If Secretary Hagel wants to reinvigorate military wargaming, he must generate an organization capable of designing and executing games in which move adjudications and analyses are conducted without bowing to Service pressure.  This is a very difficult thing to do.  Hiring civilian companies is no guarantee of objectivity as Service pressure can be exerted through other contract vehicles the company may have.  One answer is the creation of an in-house wargaming organization that is mission funded and imbued with an ethos of independent thought (but avoiding the “not invented here” syndrome) and dedication to quality gaming.
• Wargames may have multiple embedded objectives, but should have only one main purpose.  Among the many defects of Millennium Challenge 2002, a large game/experiment/exercise conducted by the former Joint Forces Command, was the multiplicity of purposes loaded upon it.  It was a wargame meant to explore (if not validate) “Rapid Decisive Operations,” but this was superimposed on a set of field training exercises involving thousands of soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors.  Inevitably, the requirements of a large training exercise distorted the play of the game, with resulting controversy that ruined the game’s legitimacy and utility.4  A wargame should never be bigger or more complex than necessary to fulfill its one main purpose.
• Secretary Hagel’s bullet on gaming calls for games to “develop and test alternative ways of achieving our strategic objectives.”  It is one thing to use operational level games to develop and test concepts and plans at that level, but attempting to do so with strategic level games invokes profound intellectual difficulties.  The many degrees of freedom of problems at the strategic level make development and testing of policies and strategies very problematic.  Politics being what it is, there will always be a sufficient number of “unknown unknowns” to confound any attempt to test strategies or policies via gaming.  However, strategic level games can be useful in revealing potential incentive structures in various situations.  In a six-week long game that supported development of the Navy’s 2007 Cooperative Strategy (CS21), the fundamental insight that emerged at the end was that all nations, including such “rogues” as North Korea and Iran, had a stake in the proper operation of the international system of commerce and security.  Key phrases of the ensuing strategy document leveraged this insight and subsequently had a catalytic effect on generating increased global maritime security cooperation.
• Gaming the future.  Since research games deal with scenarios that have yet to take place, all such games deal in futurity.  As sponsoring agencies attempt to use games to probe more far term issues - generally involving procurement and force structure decisions - the likelihood of distortion increases.  Gaming longer term scenarios is certainly necessary, but the design of such games must be approached with caution.  The question most often asked is how would a future Blue force of specified characteristics perform against a future Red force of specified characteristics?  The respective orders of battle are derived from current intelligence on Red development trends and on own force R&D.  To the extent that these lists of capabilities are based on a conservative estimate of how new developments will pan out and how long they take to get fielded, the games are useful.  However, too often, especially in games involving multiple Services, future Blue forces are imbued with too much capability and fanciful concepts are inserted that have no solid basis in research investment.  In a 2003 future concepts game the author designed and directed (Unified Course 04), one in which an attempt to impose discipline on future forces definition was made,  one Service threatened to pull out if certain “advanced” concepts were not included.

One way to approach future force structure is to adopt a “challenge-response” methodology either in advance of the game or as part of the game itself.  Each side is given a menu of capabilities under development and a constrained budget that does not permit full or rapid development of all technologies.  One side, say Blue, goes first and makes a set of future investment decisions.  These decisions are divulged to the other side, Red, who then makes its decisions at least in part influenced by Blue’s.  Blue gets Red’s decisions and reacts, and so forth for the number of cycles that would be judged to occur up to the projected gaming point.  Now both sides have feedback-based force structures, which, if not an accurate prediction of the future, at least are not straight-lined and have a form of discipline underpinning them.  Since some long term future developments such as information technology are almost impossible to game, a “futures” game is more about a chain of potential interactions than it is about exploring projected conditions.

• Constrain the roles of retired flag and general officers.  Certain retired senior officers have been highly valuable as mentors and advisors as well as players during games.  However, they should not be used, as has been done on occasion, as interpreters of game results.  Their comments have displaced the actual game results when they constitute panels of “senior concept developers.”  This occurs because of their prestige and it disrupts and distorts the gaming process.  Some senior retired officers are collegial and make fellow players feel able to speak freely.  Others do not.  Senior folks that constantly are in the transmit mode inhibit rather than facilitate the gaming process.
• Games cannot validate concepts.  What games can do very well is uncover potential flaws in concepts and plans.  Thus, when Secretary Hagel calls for using games to test new concepts, everyone involved in the gaming process must be prepared to hear “bad news.”  Of course, finding concept flaws in games is much better than finding them on the battlefield.  However, candidate concepts can become politically charged soon after articulation.  The coining organization and/or its leadership become professionally invested in the concept.  Rapid Decisive Operations, Effects-Based Operations and AirSea Battle are three that come to mind.  When this happens, the chances for objective testing via gaming evaporate.  The real issue in gaming new concepts is not whether flaws will be found - they will - but the nature of those flaws and under what circumstances they emerged.
• Technology insertion cannot substitute for good wargame design.  The “network-centric” Global Wargames held at the Naval War College between 1998 and 2001 were focused on exploring how networks empower command and control.  Massive effort and funding was poured into these huge games.  While there was indeed a significant benefit that emerged from the Global 2000 game (a web-based situational awareness system called KWeb, which was used by RADM Zelibor to command the initial portion of OEF), the infusion of so much new and different technology served to blur the focus of the games and compromise their legitimacy, so much so that the VCNO ordered a halt to the Global series.  My policy to wargamers at NWC was that if they could not design the game as a manual board game, they had no business bringing in technology.  Computer simulation has its place (not a huge one), as do communications networks (a larger role), but the heart and soul of gaming is the intellectual structure that underpins the game.  Technology’s potential role in the game can only be properly understood once that structure is in place.
• Beyond just gaming and considering innovation in general, the following ingredients are necessary (and not easy to acquire):
•  An independent organization, as either a separate command (probably a bad idea) or cell within an existing command or staff.
• This independent organization must be left alone.  This is hard for leadership to do.  The history of the Navy’s Deep Blue is illustrative.  Staffed with top notch officers, after a while the CNO started using them as troubleshooters and quick response generators.  Once that happened, there was no chance of innovation to occur.
• Someone has to ask the right questions.  This is probably top leadership if they would take the time to craft them with some care.  Once these questions are asked, problems can be defined and after that, innovation will take place in the process of problem solving.
• The cell must have some kind of sandbox to play in.  The CNO Strategic Studies Group (SSG), composed of flag-eligible O-6s, does extensive travel and research, but does not “play” in a virtual sandbox.  Serious play is necessary for upping the odds that useful innovation will occur, but this has to be self-directed play with no deadline.

The list of considerations and principles in this article are challenging to anyone attempting to craft a gaming policy and strategy.  The wrong approach is to simply pick a command or a contractor and direct money at them.  The Secretary and his leadership team must become directly involved and engage in a continuing dialogue and oversight of whatever team is selected or created.  If the OSD Staff does not wish to create its own wargaming organization, it should at least establish some kind of wargaming oversight board that can develop and oversee the Secretary’s policies.

Innovation is a consequence of a corporate culture and ethos of objective inquiry, collegial and open dialogue, and a common understanding of and commitment to institutional goals.  Such an environment must be created or at least facilitated by top leadership through its actions and decisions.  There is plenty of innovation taking place within the Department of Defense, particularly at the technical level, but in many cases, at the operational and strategic levels, despite lip service to innovation, what many leaders really want is revolutionary new ways of maintaining the status quo. In one sense, that is a perfectly proper objective.  The US is a status quo power that seeks to maintain the current international system of commerce and security with itself as the prime guarantor of system security.  Defense efforts at innovation should be aimed at finding ways to maintain this status quo within increasingly severe resource constraints and in the face of rising revisionist powers and new and more challenging technology.  However, below this broad strategic level of regard, everything ought to be on the table for revision.  There will be considerable pushback from vested interests, and nowhere can the pressures be exerted as effectively as through the wargaming process.  I therefore behooves the Secretary and his leadership team to establish a wargaming policy and environment in which the whole wargaming process is “reinvigorated” with discipline and objectivity.


1 Secretary of Defense, Memorandum entitled “The Defense Innovation Initiative,” dated November 15, 2014, OSD 013411-14
2 Robert Rubel, “The Epistemology of Wargaming,” Naval War College Review, Spring, 2006, Vol 59, no 2, pp. 124-126.
3 Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword,(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), p. 62 and 410.
4 Julian Borger, “Wake-up Call,” The Guardian, September 8th, 2002. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq   See also, Fred Kaplan, “War-Gamed,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2003/03/wargamed.html

Looking for Clarification...

I've been thinking about this report for a few days, and finally determined that I simply can't make heads or tails of it. Mainstream media reporting about war games is almost always terrible, because it rarely includes the context of the game, the rules, and so forth. Defense Tech should really endeavor to do better than that:

A recent Pentagon war game that ran the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship through simulated combat in the Gulf didn’t unfold quite as expected, according to participants. The LCS is custom built with the Gulf combat environment in mind: narrow and congested waters, a wide range of low-end threats from sea mines and swarms of fast attack craft to higher-end air-breathing submarines.

The key to the LCS performing as the Swiss Army knife of the battle fleet is the ship’s interchangeable mission modules. While the “plug-and-fight” mission modules sound like a good idea by providing a range of flexibility within a single hull, the simulated Gulf exercises revealed some potential real-world shortcomings with the LCS concept.

The war game featured the trouble-making Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy sending out swarms of fast-attack craft to muck it up with a half dozen LCSs. The LCSs, equipped with the surface warfare mission module which includes the ship’s integral 57mm cannon, a pair of 30mm rapid fire cannons, vertically launched missiles and armed helicopters, were able to beat back the Iranian small boat attack.

Seeing their small boat swarm shot-up, the Iranians dispatched a bunch of small, air-breathing submarines to attack the LCS flotilla. The LCSs were forced to steam down to Diego Garcia to switch out the surface warfare modules with the anti-submarine warfare packages. That scenario repeated itself every time the Iranians changed up their attack and wrong-footed the LCS flotilla.

My first question, and it appears from the comment section that this occurred to many people, is why the entire flotilla would switch between ASW and surface warfare packages. Sending a force capable of meeting both threats would seem to be the only responsible policy. I've got to assume, therefore, that the report isn't giving us some key details about how the simulation was run.

Brookings Iran-Israel Wargame

Up to about step 8, the Brookings simulation of an Israeli strike on Iran seems to have run very much like the Patterson simulation. The major difference is in the Brookings sim, the Iranians decide to attack Saudi oil facilities and mine the Strait of Hormuz after playing it cool for several days. I'd be curious to learn why the Iranian team decided to respond after such a delay; their early strategy was very similar to the of the Iran team in the Patterson sim, which was to stay quiet and try to drive a wedge between Israel and the US. This seemed to be working (Israel's only activity after the first strike was to launch an assault against Hezbollah) in the Brookings simulation, and it looks as if the strike on Saudi oil solved a lot of diplomatic problems for both the Americans and the Israelis.

2010 Patterson School Policy Simulation

Beginning on Friday at noon, the Patterson School ran a 22 hour simulation of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Patterson School policy simulations are designed to create situations in which student must make decisions in a limited time frame based on asymmetric and incomplete information. In the past, we have simulated a coup in Belarus, the death of Fidel Castro, and a hostage crisis in Afghanistan, among other events.

Structure:
The teams consisted of 5-6 students, led by either a faculty member or a recent graduate. The students played the foreign and defense policy principals of their respective states, with the leader playing the CoG (Russia and Iran both had two CoGs).

United States
United Nations
Israel
Iran
Iraq
Russia
Saudi Arabia

The simulation was primarily focused on the key political decisions associated with the fallout of the attack, rather than the military details. When necessary, Simulation Control (myself and two recent Patterson graduates) supplied information and made rulings regarding military efforts. The simulation was conducted in real time, although certain events were telescoped for playability and dramatic effect.

As was the case in the last two years, the Patterson School conducted the simulation in cooperation with the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications. Students from the SJT operated websites representing two news networks, Gulf News Service (an Al Jazeera clone) and International News Network (a CNN clone). These networks were managed by faculty from the SJT, and were independent from Simulation Control; on more than one occasion one of the networks declined to run stories from Simulation Control either because of a lack of confirmation or a lack of newsworthiness.

Course of the Simulation:
The simulation began when the last Israeli aircraft left Iranian airspace at 12pm EST. In order to create an incentive for a second strike (and thus tension between the teams), Simulation Control posited an intelligence leak from Israel to Russia, then from Russia to Iran. This leak allowed Iran to organize its air defense network such that the effectiveness of the Israeli strike was reduced. Nevertheless, Iranian forces were badly mauled, losing dozens of interceptors and suffering damage to all key targets in exchange for downing seven Israeli bombers. One surviving pilot was eventually captured in Iran, and another was captured by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.

The Iranians responded with a limited ballistic missile strike against Israel. Most of the missiles were intercepted, about half by the United States and half by Israel. The remaining missiles did no significant damage. Iran also pressured Hezbollah and Hamas to engage Israel. Simulation Control proceeded on the assumption that both Hezbollah and Hamas would be reluctant to commit there full strength to this, and consequently the attacks in both north and south were light. Nevertheless, Israel became involved in a costly series of tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah.

Overall, however, the Iranians played it very cool. They made no effort to destabilize Iraq; in fact, they explicitly pressured affiliates in Iraq to refrain from attacks. Iran also made no attacks on Gulf shipping, or on any other targets. This posture clearly defied the expectations of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iraq, and Simulation Control. The lack of a strong Iranian response left attention squarely on Israel, in particular the violation of Saudi and Iraqi airspace in the course of the attack.

The destruction of above ground facilities at Natanz, and the consequent dispersal of stockpiled LEU, focused the attention of the United Nations and became a growing problem for Israel. Increased radiation levels were discovered in several neighboring countries, increasing pressure for a ceasefire and for the introduction of IAEA inspectors for damage assessment. The United States, the United Nations, and Saudi Arabia all pressed early for a formal ceasefire, while the Saudis and the Russians attempted to take advantage of back channel approaches in order to end the war. The Saudis, however, were involved in a double game; they were attempting to facilitate a second Israeli strike in order to finish off previously damaged targets while they were publicly pursuing the cease fire. For their troubles, Simulation Control blew up a police station in Medina.

The restrained attitudes of both the United States and Iran led to domestic difficulties in both countries. In Iran, Mousavi and the Green movement attacked the Iranian government from the right, accusing the Ahmadinejad regime of failing to respond adequately to the Israeli attacks. State security organizations, however, managed to hold the protests in check. In the United States, the Obama administration came under immediate assault from the right for failing to sufficiently support Israel. However, the mutual policies of restraint helped both the US and Iranian teams keep a lid on the situation; with only limited provocation, it was easier for the teams to ignore domestic critics. Simulation Control attempted to ramp up the domestic tension with a series of twitter feeds, but this didn't work as well as hoped. It's worth noting that the Friday evening/Shabbos timing of the attack probably would have limited the mobilization of domestic opposition within the United States.

Israel was hampered by an increasingly troubled relationship with the US, and by the lack of sufficient "bunker buster" ordnance. Eventually, at around 7:15 am on Saturday, they ordered a second strike, in spite of US refusals of in-flight refueling, replacement ordnance, and access to Iraqi airspace. This led to a dramatic confrontation with the United States over Iraq, with US SAMs eventually targeting and shooting down an Israeli F-16. Shortly after this took place, we called the simulation.

Evaluation:
This was the most intricate simulation that Patterson has run in several years, and it came off relatively well. As the purpose of the Patterson simulation is to place decision-making responsibility in the hands of tired, tense, ill-informed students, we made a decision long ago to sacrifice realism for drama. Obviously, a US shoot-down of an Israeli warplane is exceedingly unlikely to happen in the real world. Then again, the turn of events was very surprising to Simulation Control. To the extent that the simulation revealed anything of policy relevance, it suggested that a policy of restraint on the part of Iran could cause some serious strategic problems for Israel. Iran suffered substantial damage to its nuclear facilities and Air Force, but was generally perceived to have won a major diplomatic victory (although for reasons that were unclear to Simulation Control, relations with Russia soured). The United States also did relatively well; the US position in Iraq was not threatened, and there was no evident danger to the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Israel managed to cause some damage, but at the expense of serious tension with its major sponsor and a general perception of ineffectiveness.

For a more general take, see this article in the Kentucky Kernel.

Expeditionary Warrior - Conclusion

Expeditionary Warrior: Concluding Thoughts

Assembling a seabase was a good solution to a finite campaign when lots of forces and material need to be brought ashore. After the initial movement, the seabase can be reduced to those platforms you need to support operations ashore with logistics, command and control, medical, hot chow, PX, aircraft maintenance, etc. There are conditions of security situations ashore, or a desire for a limited footprint ashore that naturally leads you to conduct operations from a seabase.

We are currently building what is lately called MPF-Transitional. It will have:

1. Selective off-load capability of cargo and vehicles, pull out the right pallet in a matter of minutes, at sea.
2. Ability to use lots of different kinds of connector boats. LCAC’s, LCU’s, riverine boats, international navies’ boats.
3. Additional Berthing. The Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) has 1,100 racks.
4. Vehicle Transfer: The VTS will allow us to transfer vehicles skin to skin at sea.

Concerns:
1. The hospital ships are going away soon, with no programmed replacements.
2. Connectors, connectors, connectors: will we have enough LCU’s, LCAC’s, raider craft, riverine craft, etc. Will they work together?
3. Incorporating other nations. Lots of other nations are building amphibs with great capabilities. We will need to be able to work with them.

Thanks a lot for reading this week. Sorry if the posts were too long; if I had more time, they would have been shorter.

Move 3 - Non-Combatant Evacuation

Move 3: Non-combatant Evacuation Operation
From the wargame: Expeditionary Warrior 2010

The situation ashore has deteriorated. The assassination of the opposing political party’s leader has thrown the host nation into an armed conflict between the government and the opposing party. The embassy has requested military assistance to evacuate non-combatants.

The combatant commander has assembled a seabase composed of Joint High Speed Vessels, a Mobile Landing Platform, MPF ships (T-AKE and LMSR’s), and a MEU on a 3-ship ARG. Once we decided who’s in charge, we conducted the NEO. In the game, we decided that command and control functions would remain on ship. Amphibious big decks have great communications capabilities and flag staff spaces, so they were very useful for this move.

The majority of American and allied nation citizens that are to be evacuated live near the coast, so evacuating by sea, as slow as ships may go, was seen as a good option. This also reduced crowding in the few airfields that are still serviceable after a few seasons of flood.

A couple ships we will have in 2023, the Joint High Speed Vessel, and the Mobile Landing Platform were invaluable in conducting the NEO. The JHSV was used to ferry evacuees to a nearby port with a working airport. The MLP was used in much the same manner. The JHSV can carry a few hundred (in seats and troop berthing) for a matter of hours. The MLP can carry upwards of 1,100 for a matter of days (troop berthing) if it didn’t already come full of Soldiers or Marines.

During the NEO, we didn’t see as much a need to play nice with others as we did in the previous HA move, we saw the NEO as a clear mission that U.S. forces would conduct, and we would be in charge of the evacuation of U.S. citizens.

Another invaluable tool for the NEO was the ability to connect the shore to the ship, and not have to rely on a serviceable port. We are operating from a multi-billion dollar seabase with state-of-the-art aircraft and communications, and the most useful tool was the 65 year old LCU! It’s tough to carry people on an LCAC, and it’s tough to carry thousands of people on helos. LCU’s to the rescue!

In general, the seabase was very useful in the NEO, but it was a stepping stone in the evacuation process. You can’t just impress the evacuees to be a new crew of the ship, we’ve eventually got to get them home, and the evacuees will probably want to go faster than 15 knots across the ocean. So using the seabase’s ships as ferries and a base of operations was valuable, but it didn’t complete the whole mission by itself, we’ll need to get the evacuees to an airport.

Stay tuned, tomorrow we will conduct stability operations from a seabase.

Move 2: Humanitarian Assistance

Move 2: Humanitarian Assistance

For background information on Expeditionary Warrior 2010, go to: https://www.mcwl.quantico.usmc.mil/ew.cfm. Sorry, only accessible for CAC users, we’re working on it!

Move 2: Humanitarian Assistance, 2022. After a couple years recovering from the 2020 severe flooding, the host country is hit again with an even more severe rainy season, requiring the international community’s help.

To answer a comment about the Marine Corps in 2022: The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab is currently experimenting with something called Enhanced Marine Air-Ground Task Force Operations. Basically, in EMO, the lowest level independently operating Marine Corps unit will shift from a reinforced battalion, as we see in a Marine Expeditionary Unit, to a reinforced company. MCWL is experimenting with the additional comms, fire-support and transportation that will be needed to support platoons operating 40 miles from a ship, and 10 miles from each other. A Company Landing Team (COLT) is pretty cool, because it creates a small amphibious operations capability that could fit on one ship, potentially increasing the reach of U.S. forces around the world.

Another answer to a comment: There will be partners, and there will be other countries with competing interests. We have discussed the difficulty in relief operations if someone like an Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela brings a cargo ship or frigate and says, “We’re here to help.” The basic answer from the ambassadors, admirals and generals helping the game is: “It depends.”

The wargame is looking into the advantages and disadvantages of using a seabase in various scenarios, Move 2 requires a humanitarian assistance operation.

First of all: it’s all about relationships and agreements. The Embassy is key in starting an HA operation, the first thing the seabase commander needs to do is check in with the embassy. The HA operation needs to be run as truly a supporting operation to the host nation, and not a “we’re in charge” kind of operation.

Environment, to run HA, we need a benign environment, with no threat other than a few criminals and looters. HA won’t be effective if we need to attack the village before we bring in water. This is applicable from a seabase or not, but it was an interesting nugget from the gray hairs in the room.

Advantages of the seabase in HA: A HA operation will require a lot of heavy equipment. Water purification, power, road building, other engineering equipment is all heavy. Ships are great for transporting heavy stuff, and LCU’s, and LCAC’s to some extent are great for taking that heavy stuff ashore, where a port facility might be damaged. (Like Haiti in 2010)

Basing your HA operation from a seabase reduces your footprint ashore, which is good to reduce the support required ashore, and helps your security situation as well. (During tsunami relief in Thailand, the US forces kept only a couple dozen on shore at night.)

But there are disadvantages to a seabase too: A seabase is slow to respond, in comparison to human suffering. A seabase will not be there in time to be a first responder and tend to the dying or bleeding. In fact, a seabase may not even be there to prevent suffering or death from a lack of water or food in the first 72 hours. During the wargame, we looked at a week to ten days as a reasonable window in which we could respond to a disaster with a seabase. So, the seabaase won’t be there first.

Another disadvantage to a seabase is a reduced effectiveness if the ship-to-ship connectors cannot mate up to all ships in the base. Currently, the Army and the Navy both have ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore connectors, as well as our own service MPF ships. The connectors need to work together. Maybe only buy one LCU for the whole DoD, or one LCAC; commonality, incredible concept.

In 2022, we assumed MPF ships have a ramp (Vehicle Transfer System) that they can roll vehicles to another ship or floating dock. We also assumed a ship called a Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) exists. An MLP will be able to accept the rolling vehicle from the VTS/MPF ship, and will have a lot of deck space for docking LCAC’s and LCU’s. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/mlp.htm

This link might answer some ship and connector questions:
http://www.quantico.usmc.mil/seabasing/

Move 3 coming this afternoon. We are ramping up across the range of military operations, so all you gunfighters can stay tuned.

Move 1: Steady State Assistance

For background material on Expeditionary Warrior 2010, refer to https://www.mcwl.quantico.usmc.mil/ew.cfm.

To answer a question from an earlier blog about “What is a seabase?” and “How does this work with MPF?”

A seabase is a collection of ships and capabilities at sea. It basically provides an airfield, a port and a logistics base through the collection of ships and other tools. So in real terms, you put some MPF ships together with a carrier and LHA/LHD, add some well deck capability with LPD/LSD’s and there you have a seabase. Now anyone who has been a part of a Navy surface combatant group knows that at times it is easier to swim to another ship than it is to get a ride there, or have a phone call with someone on another ship. So you can see quickly, that a key element of a successful seabase is ship to ship, and ship to shore connectors. In addition to that, you will need to surgically extract the cargo you want from the densely packed MPF ship. So when the MPF ship goes to support a humanitarian assistance operation, you will want to leave the armored vehicles, but take out all the tents, generators and water purification units. It is projected that in 2020, the time for Move 1 of the wargame, the U.S. will have a selective cargo offload capability, as well as improved connector capabiities.

So in Move 1 of the wargame, the U.S. and its coalition partners are supporting a nation like many in the world. There is little to no infrastructure, the national government has little or no ability to improve the lives of its people or provide basic services, and laws mean very little. The reason the seabase was deployed to the area was to support the government to rebuild infrastructure and prevent disease following an unusually severe rainy season.

A seabase is good for humanitarian assistance because it reduces the footprint ashore and the amount of support you need to bring ashore for yourself. That’s great, and it was proven in the aid provided to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

For the seabase capabilities we envision for 2020, we are planning on the ability to pull the bulldozer and generator out of the hold on the MPF ship, and deliver them with an LCU or LCAC. We don’t have that capability yet, but we’re working on it. Currently, when you unload the MPF ship, you need to unload it all until you see the equipment you want, then you need to put all the stuff back in the same order.

The seabase is not a great answer to everything however. In Move 1, we want to provide a persistent presence ashore to assist rebuilding and disease prevention. A seabase is not really great for that, you can’t really build situational awareness or relationships while you are 40 miles or more off shore. A seabase was seen as being a good platform to deliver heavy equipment, and some logistics capabilities not provided in the host nation, like refined fuels, medical supplies, etc.

Move 2 and 3 tomorrow, keep sending your questions.

Seabasing nuggets.

Expeditionary Warrior 2010 is a joint, multinational wargame designed to test the concepts of seabasing. Refer to: https://www.mcwl.quantico.usmc.mil/ew.cfm

Sitting through the obligatory classes prior to the seabasing wargame. To save you the few hours and the line to the head during breaks, here are a few nuggets:

-Seabasing is a national capability. The Corps gets is feathers ruffled when we hear this, but the fact is the Army has significant equipment already pre-positioned and they are buying some Joint High Speed vehicles, to connect MPF ships and ports.

-The current 30-yr shipbuilding plan just released with the QDR will realize an amphibious fleet of 29 - 33 ships as the years go by. Both the Navy and Marine Corps agree that it takes 38 ships to lift 2.0 Marine Expeditionary Brigades (MEB). To further complicate matters, current USMC units have more vehicles than the tables of organizations of 10-years ago; it won't all fit on the ships, even if we did have 38.

-USMC (and Army) equipment has gotten much heavier and larger in the past 10 years, and will continue to do so. This will make amphibious ships too heavy, and with the larger vehicles needing to be in the upper vehicle stowage areas just to fit, the ships are too top-heavy. As a telling illustration:

Old Vehicle: M151 Jeep: 3,000 lbs.
Currents ships designed around: M998 Soft-door HMMWV: 5,000 lbs
Currently used on the ground: Up-Armored HMMWV: 7,600 lbs
Future vehicle, Joint Light? Tactical Vehicle: 22,000 lbs

Current Helo ships are designed around: CH-46: 13,000 lbs
Future Helo: MV-22: 47,000 lbs

Current V/STOL attack aircraft: AV-8b: 25,000 lbs
Future V/STOL attack aircraft: JSF (F-35): 46,000 lbs

This is a huge problem that we haven't really been faced with in combat operations yet. How to fit current Marine forces on a ship? There are a few smart guys crunching the numbers to examine the Gear Left On the Pier (GLOP).

The first move of the game comes this afternoon, we'll see how this seabasing thing works.


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Expeditionary Warrior 2010

Follow me this week as I participate in the wargame Expeditionary Warrior 2010. A multi-national, joint wargame sponsored by the Marine Corps to test the tools and tactics of seabasing. The game is set in 2025, with the Navy and Marine Corps team we expect to have then.

The game will go from Feb 21st to the 25th. I'll post to keep you updated to game moves, there will be about two moves a day.