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Recent DoD level interest has highlighted the importance and value of wargaming as a vital and neglected element in the comprehensive understanding of operational environments, force design, and operating concepts. There is both clarity and confusion in this interest. Clarity in that it recognizes a problem and gives momentum to a solution; confusion in that it has not distinguished between the natures of computational analysis and wargaming. It has even suggested that “reinvigorating” wargaming is merely a matter of incorporating analytical techniques (methods, models, and tools – MMT) into wargame designs. However, the effort to optimize this relationship entails more than the simple incorporation of MMT into wargame design. This incorporation is not new. The struggle is to synchronize the process of sophisticated analytical methodologies with the action of the human intellect such that the potential of both are integrated and optimized by using the computational result as a substrate for human decision.

Analysis is based upon mathematical process; wargaming is based upon human judgement. Both are powerful and are compatible. But, they are not different expressions of the same thing. Computational analysis relies for its manipulation of data and its precision of results upon a methodology involving the quantification of variables and the specification of their interactions. In analysis, exact conclusions emerge from the connection of method to a specific problem. However, analysis is limited by the very tenants of its science to what is measurable. It cannot go beyond statements of trends and precision (accuracy is another matter) because it cannot substantiate what it cannot measure. Further, a particular resulting measurement does not necessarily imply a universal pattern.

Wargaming rests upon what cannot be measured. This stands in contrast to but not in opposition to the computational analytical approach. A wargame does this by embracing, assembling, and organizing many variables without an attempt to assign values or calculate interactions. These variables, which reside in the situation, the individual, and emerge in the dynamic friction of play, are impossible to measure separately or in assembly. The action of the wargame generates interactions and relationships that could not have been anticipated and relies upon the emergence of results not subject to prediction. All of this is synthesized and organized in the human imagination and no science is capable of quantifying the path, dynamic, or chance that transforms this complexity into a comprehensible and coherent whole. And yet this is what both drives a game and defines its results.

Thus, wargames explore the interlocking coherence of the whole while computational analysis produces precision in isolation. The question is: How to associate the two to mutual benefit? The problem is one of relating processed facts and human imagination. The analyst and the wargame designer must combine the two realms without losing the essential strength of either in the midst of the constant dynamic and change in game play. The answer to this dilemma involves the recognition of the distinct natures of the two approaches and the effort to forge complimentary methods. Wargaming permits judgment to be influenced in a dynamic context by emerging evidence as a precursor to decision. Analysis can aid this process by injecting “points of precision” into play, which then merge with and act as an informing substrate for decision … the universal requirement in any wargame. In other words, analytical methods can inform imagination with a precision designed to influence but not direct decision in game play.

The benefit of a wargame supported by analytical methods that provide points of departure and situational precision as the basis for decision is the production of informed and defensible insights that can shape and direct subsequent efforts in a concept or combat development sequence. There is no analytical methodology by which the outcomes of the inherently human activity of play can be transitioned into a rigid accuracy. But then war is an inherently human activity that only rarely adheres to the requirements of scientific law and rigidity in war rarely produces brilliance or success. The key to understanding the benefit of the incorporation of analytical methods into wargaming is that, while sharper and more focused insight can be expected as outcomes, one learns that knowledge does not have to be quantifiable in order to be defensible. This informed combination of the analytic science of the necessary with the wargaming art of the possible promises to provide a foundation for the objective substantiation and justification for the resources and programs required for future military success.