Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Military exercises where the commanders and staff are real but the troops are simulated are called command post exercises.[1] The US military's approach seems to be less like gaming and more like doing it for real. Five day 24-hour training exercises, using the same people and gear the real command post uses, with 1:1 real time. Somewhere in the back are umpires using computers to track what's happening. The objective is not so much to learn tactics as to see who and what breaks. Screwing up can set back real-world careers.

There are people pushing for more paper war-gaming, but they're in the minority.[2] "Train like you fight" is an Army mantra. But the U.S. Army War College is trying.[3] There's a lot of heavy thinking going on around how to defend Taiwan.

[1] https://www.army.mil/article/192566/increasing_proficiency_w...

[2] https://www.lineofdeparture.army.mil/Journals/Protection/Pro...

[3] https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/back-to-the-basi...

I think the biggest problem to simulate is the fog of war and ambiguity of what's going on.

When you're staring at a paper map with a bunch units scattered about, with tangible values assigned to thing, its "easy" to get a solid grasp of the, essentially, static situation and mull on it.

The "Real World" is not so clear.

If you ever wanted to bump your heart rate, try playing one of the old time Air Traffic Control games where you have to juggle the planes flying in your air space in real time. They can get busy, and things can start falling apart. And this was where you had perfect information, and perfect command.

However, one of the most interesting aspects that one game did was that when you sent a command to a plane, they had a chance to a) ignore the command, or b) do it wrong. When that happens, the cognitive load just spikes.

Similarly with these exercises. You have real people, interpreting (perhaps wrongly) real commands, in real time, in a fuzzy information environment, against others who may not necessarily be playing by the rules. Stories of counter forces swapping uniforms and insignia to cause confusion. Perhaps much like the Germans did during the Battle of the Bulge.

Very hard to replicate those conditions on paper (or in a computer).

> Very hard to replicate those conditions on paper (or in a computer).

I wonder if it is hard to replicate on computer, or in what ways it is hard.

I expect that modern military commanders, at least those in command posts, interface with the rest of the military mostly via computer. Theoretically the computer could be made to output the same things it would in reality. In a way, it makes simulation easier than pre-computer.

I lack expertise on the nature of the errors - the kind, magnitude, etc. - that commanders see, those that constitute the 'fog', though I could imagine that is well-studied. Could those be simulated automatically? Or, if not automatically, could they be scripted efficiently enough to be practical?

Someone showed me an old text-based computer wargame (for entertainment, not for militaries). I forget the name, but managing a map was up to you and the only information you got was a flood of one-line intelligence reports; you couldn't slow them down and often they were vague, conflicting, or inaccurate. For example, it might just say 'armor seen on X road, civilians fleeing south' - going which direction? how many of what kind? whose armor?

I think both ways of simulating have their place.

The real-world training exercises will discover weaknesses that the paper ones won't detect (also, they are more fun - and soldiers probably need some sort of activity from time to time), but you can have a lot of paper exercises for the cost of one real-world exercise.

It's like unit tests and integration tests!

A large scale exercise like that nearly started WWIII back in 1983. The Soviets had become extremely worried about an American first strike and were watching for any signs that one might be imminent. Then a bunch of high-level NATO people did exactly what they would have done if nuclear war were breaking out. Thankfully the exercises ended before the Soviets decided they needed to carry out a preemptive strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

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