Simulation and Wargaming

5Wargaming, Automation, and Military Experimentation to Quantitatively and Qualitatively Inform Decision‐Making

Jan Hodicky¹ and Alejandro S. Hernandez²

¹ NATO HQ SACT, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

² Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA

Introduction

The tug‐of‐war between military credibility and mathematical rigor to inform decision‐making is continuous. A complex world, made even more complex in multidimensional operations, diversity of forces, idiosyncrasies of leadership personalities, considerations for global policies, and ubiquity of information, reinvigorates the tremendous need to reduce Clausewitzian friction (Watts 1996). A means for mitigating this friction is by increasing quantitative analysis to support decisions. Today’s commanders demand traceable, credible, quantifiable information.

The number of tools that are available for collecting information steadily grows throughout the military and commercial domains. However, leaders are unsatisfied with just more information; they seek new knowledge. Commanders require the ability to examine and re‐examine problems to obtain a grand innovation that results in a decisive comparative advantage over an adversary (Worley 1999). Such innovation comes from discovered knowledge (Box, Hunter, and Hunter 2005). A need to balance the objectives of acquiring information and developing insights is not new. Gaining information is critical to decision‐makers (Kaplow and Shavell 2004; Raiffa 1970), but the need to learn ...