Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare

Summary

Over the past few years, the Wargaming Department (WGD) at the Naval War College (NWC) has observed a trend: its game sponsors have been turning away from traditional force-on-force gaming, toward increased emphasis on exploring issues related to novel command-and-control structures, information operations, irregular warfare, maritime security, and inter-agency coordination. All of these new interests reflect, in one way or another, the emergence of what is termed “Fourth-Generation Warfare” (4GW), a networked, highly informationalized process in which enemies attempt to evade or neutralize the overwhelming conventional military superiority of the United States and its allies through irregular and asymmetric methods.

The NWC asked CNA to work with its staff to develop gaming techniques to address these warfare issues more effectively. We approached this problem along several avenues of research.

Our research into the concepts embodied by the term Fourth Generation Warfare showed how important it is to distinguish what is new from what only seems new, and to understand the necessity of merging the two. In game design, the key elements with which the designer must work have always included time, space, forces (or resources), effects, information, and command. Implicit in these elements, which are primarily the “nouns” of the game designer’s lexicon, is the underlying context of the game and the relationship of those nouns to the fundamental “verbs” of game design—the actions the players may take to change the state of the synthetic universe constructed in and by the game.

None of the key characteristics of 4GW allow designers to dispense with these basic game-design concepts. Instead, our analysis of 4GW concepts highlights the need for designers to address more effectively the potential asymmetries inherent in how the different sides of any conflict think about the elements of the real world. Designers of 4GW wargames must think in new ways, but use both new and old tools to capture these asymmetries in game terms and to exploit those game elements to achieve their goals.

These asymmetries lie first of all in an asymmetry of worldview and an asymmetry of purpose, which lead in turn to asymmetries of action and asymmetries of means. Only by understanding all these flavors of asymmetry, and by designing a game system that looks at the game universe from the perspectives of all the major players, can a 4GW wargame hope to provide useful insights into the kinds of questions the NWC and its sponsors wish to explore in wargames.

Based on our research into 4GW theory, and on our development, exploration, and analysis of prototype game systems, we conclude that the central design problems for 4GW wargames are to:

• Evoke the competing asymmetric worldviews in the minds of the players
• Instantiate the resulting asymmetric purposes, actions, and means to create a game “universe” that reflects current and potential future realities
• Structure a framework for player actions and Control assessments that enables players to propose new ideas and new effects while keeping those ideas and effects within flexible boundaries that prevent them from “breaking” the game.

As a first cut at a fundamental structure on which to base the design of 4GW games, we identified the currently popular concepts of DIME and PMESII. (DIME represents the elements of national power defined in terms of diplomatic, information, military, and economic instruments, whose actions affect the political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure (PMESII) dimensions of a nation or region—or even an organization such as al-Qaeda).

This same structure allows us to provide a framework for the players themselves to introduce new ideas into the game without allowing flights of fancy—whether by those players themselves or by Game Control—that may take the game into unproductive directions.

In addition to the structural foundation, a 4GW game needs a procedural superstructure to facilitate game play. As a first step toward designing 4GW game engines and mechanics, we propose adopting some concepts and techniques derived from commercial board wargames of a type called card-driven games (CDGs). CDGs embody many of the resources and options available to players in a set of cards built on a structure tailored to the gaming environment. These cards help define and drive player actions during the game.

Through mechanics for acquiring, storing, and sequencing cards, CDGs combine the creation of hidden options for player actions with a concomitant need for the players to plan their actions and combine resources and capabilities in creative ways to achieve the greatest effects possible. This combination is an extremely attractive design tool for building 4GW wargames.

To illustrate our ideas, we present a rough and incomplete conceptual design of an operational-strategic game of 4GW. This conceptual design—something between a thought experiment and a working prototype—is both an example of some of the thought processes involved in designing such a game, as well as a possible stepping stone for future game designs. The basis for our approach derives from the CDG genre, using DIME and PMESII as its structural foundation.

By describing both the process and its output, we illustrate how we could go about producing a workable game of the type we envision. Our work makes us confident that solutions to most (or hopefully all) of the basic problems of wargaming 4GW do exist. We have seen them in available commercial games as well as in recent Naval War College games.

Furthermore, though cast primarily in terms of the design of a manual wargame—in contrast to a computer game—the solutions and ideas we have developed during this project are readily adapted to electronic play—whether asynchronously, using email, or in realtime, using an active internet server. The appendix discusses these concepts in more detail. Further development of the ideas we present here is a promising line of attack for the Naval War College Wargaming Department to pursue in its future research and development efforts.

*Originally published in September 2006, this paper was reprinted in December 2024.