Article on Command in the Wall Street Journal

October 27, 2024 · Posted in Command, Command PE

Original link (paywall): https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/a-million-people-play-this-video-wargame-so-does-the-pentagon-e6388f50

Text reproduced below.

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.

Warfare is changing at a pace unseen in almost a century, as fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East shows. For military commanders, tackling that upheaval demands fast and constant adaptation.

Increasingly, that entails playing games.

Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.

Proponents of wargames include Tim Barrick, a retired Marine colonel who is now wargaming director at Marine Corps University. He drills students using board games and computers. In one online exercise, he pushed eight Marine majors repeatedly through the same Pacific military engagement, using a program called Command: Professional Edition.

This software is unusual because it didn’t originate with a defense contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit.

Over the two months that Barrick’s Marine majors played Command PE, as it’s known, their creativity grew.

“These are not simple problems,” said Barrick, who previously ran the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab’s wargaming division. “It’s not like we’re asking them to play checkers.”

The game has become a surprise hit, for users of all stripes. The Air Force recently approved Command PE to run on its secure networks. Britain’s Strategic Command just signed up to use it in training, education and analysis, calling it a tool “to test ideas.” And Taiwanese defense analysts tap Command PE to analyze responses to hostility from mainland China.

Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.

When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank.

“Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.

Former Air Force Air Mobility Command analyst Pete Szabo started using Command around 2017 to model military planes’ fuel consumption in battle scenarios.

“It’s been a very powerful tool for us,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Convincing his superiors to employ commercial, off-the-shelf gaming software, though, took some work, he recalled. “At first it was like, ‘Nooooo.’ ”

Some officers have long derided wargames as entertainment, navel-gazing or “bogsats,” short for “bunch of guys standing around talking.” But the simulations—especially digital ones—can hone decision-making, spatial awareness and maneuvering abilities, say advocates.

“There’s no doubt that skills in a game matter on the battlefield,” said Arnel David, a U.S. Army colonel who advises the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top general and helps lead an informal organization to promote wargaming of all sorts, called Fight Club International.

Wargaming, which first took its modern form in Prussia about 200 years ago, got a boost in the U.S. in 2015 when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work warned that the Pentagon’s wargaming skills had “atrophied.” The military services scrambled to up their game.

Traditionally conducted using maps, grids and dice—essentially sophisticated cousins of familiar board games like Risk and Stratego—some wargames entail tabletop models that resemble electric-train sets or require an entire room.

Computer wargames still generally resemble complex maps more than first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty. But their speed and processing power allow operators to run and rerun scenarios at a tempo never before possible, and to generate scads of data for analysis.

In a project called Gamebreak for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2020, scientists at military contractor Northrop Grumman developed AI models to essentially play Command PE, processing more than 200 quadrillion options—or 2 followed by 17 zeros.

AI is increasingly helping users create scenarios, run games and sift through results for trends and surprises. French wargame maker MASA Group boasts that AI allows its Sword program to be run more easily than rivals’ systems.

Whether AI and advanced software actually improve wargaming and preparations for war is a question sparking battles of its own. Warfare is so complex—buffeted by factors ranging from equipment and strategy to politics, weather and corruption—that modeling all the inputs entails parsing an almost infinite number of variables. Quantifying unquantifiables such as military morale requires arbitrary decisions.

“If all your data for a simulation is garbage, it’s garbage out too,” said Anna Knack, who leads research on AI and security at Britain’s Alan Turing Institute, a government-funded research center.

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.© Kevin Ray J. Salvador/U.S. Marine Corps

Skeptics say digital wargaming, in an unintended twist, may actually reduce understanding of scenarios because software’s underlying algorithms aren’t accessible to users.

“It takes some of the human decision-making element away,” said Becca Wasser, who leads the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington.

Advocates say computerization expands enormously both the usefulness of wargames and their range of potential users, often complementing manual games.

“It’s a tool in a toolkit,” said David, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not all wargames involve combat. NATO, which in 2021 adopted warfighting guidelines that call for “audacious wargaming,” also runs crisis-management simulations. U.S. Transportation Command runs wargames involving shipments and logistics, its area of responsibility.

Wargames that focus on a specific field, such as logistics, are relatively straightforward to design, while modeling big conflicts is vexing.

To simulate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in a tabletop game played between teams of specialists in 2022, modelers hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington spent more than a year designing and preparing the project. Each of 22 iterations took a full day, between which the designers adapted the game to address new issues from each running.

It was a simple battle simulation that Navy Lt. Larry Bond wanted to create in 1980, after using the service’s complex training game, Navtag, onboard his destroyer.

Bond created Harpoon, published as a paper-and-dice game that drew a big following thanks to its extensive technical data on military systems. One fan was insurance-agent-turned-author Tom Clancy.

Clancy tapped Harpoon as a source for his first novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” and used it so extensively in writing his 1986 follow-up, “Red Storm Rising,” that he called himself and Bond “co-authors.”

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.© Elizabeth Frantz for WSJ

A home-computer version of Harpoon flourished and then faded early this century. Frustrated fan Dimitris Dranidis sought to replace it. The result, Command: Modern Operations, released in 2013, took off as users—many in the military—added and corrected its open-source database.

The database now includes tens of thousands of items, from bullets to bombers, covering almost every front-line piece of equipment used by all the world’s militaries since 1946. Users keep parameters like fuel capacity and operating range accurate.

After Work’s 2015 Pentagon memo sent the services scurrying to rediscover wargaming, an Air Force official stumbled on Harpoon and contacted Slitherine, which held the publishing rights. The McNeils introduced him to Command, which they were also publishing as a consumer game.

“It never even occurred to me that we’d work with militaries,” said Chief Executive Iain McNeil, whose father, J.D., had previously owned a scaffolding business.

The Air Force sent two retired generals to assess the company, seeking to better understand its operations and Command’s database. They invited the McNeils and Dranidis for meetings at the Pentagon, where the newbies shot selfies standing behind the briefing-room lectern.

Slitherine created a version of Command for military and intelligence-agency needs, Professional Edition, addressing their security requirements and allowing them to upload classified data without giving access to programmers or other users, Iain McNeil said.

In the military world, most acquisitions undergo more rigorous testing than consumer products for battle-readiness, but Command flips that paradigm thanks to its evolution. With roughly one million commercial users, Command “gets beat up by the community to a degree that the defense industry just can’t do,” said Barrick, the Marines instructor.

Command focuses on battles and engagements, not campaigns or wars. “It’s really useful if you want a very close look—almost through a soda straw,” said Wasser at CNAS, who sees it as an excellent tool for training and education.

Education was one of the top uses cited at a conference of Command military users in Rome hosted by the Italian Air Force last year, attended by civilian and uniformed defense professionals from the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan and beyond.

German Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Silier explained how Command offered a way to teach mission planning that mixed classroom theory and real-world experience.

In his seminars, a group of around 20 pilots would face an emergency, like defending a target from an incoming attack. They planned mission timelines and assessed factors such as flying time with a given fuel load. Their proposals were fed into Command, and the simulation played out on a big screen in the classroom.

“It’s a stadium-like atmosphere,” with students cheering when missiles hit the enemy, said Silier. “One student told me it’s more exciting than a Champions League football match.”

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Juanje Gómez at juanje.gomez@wsj.com