| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Commonly used war-game adjudication methods break down and create unreliable results when addressing novel operational or strategic problems for which we have little experience or data (for example, information warfare or a regional nuclear conflict) and when we wish to explore situations rather than educate officers about well-understood situations. The primary causes of this breakdown are, first, the incorrect assumption that adjudicators are impartial controllers instead of dominant players and, second, the design choice to make the players' decisions the game's primary output. Among the many reasons for war gaming (such as research and analysis, training, education, and discovery), this article focuses on "discovery" war games, where the objective is to find out something previously unknown about a novel operational or strategic problem, something that cannot be better discovered by other methods, such as seminars, work groups, modeling and simulation, or operations research.
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