CNA continuously invests in innovative, independent research projects that explore new tools and approaches for addressing emerging national safety and security challenges. These projects are showcased in the CNA Innovation Incubator (CNAi2). From analyzing machine learning for public safety to developing a Navy Force Design Lab, CNA's most creative thinkers are continuously working on new approaches to help government solve the nation’s toughest problems. In our Meet the Innovator series, we interview the analysts behind CNAi2 projects about their work and their innovation process.
Q: You’ve created a series of successful training games that began as a CNA funded project. What’s innovative about the Hunt series?
Noble: I think this is best embodied by the latest game in the series, CLF Hunt™. Say you’re a brand new officer who’s going to be steering a Combat Logistics Force ship around in the Western Pacific. What do you need to know about how to help your ship evade detection and targeting, and how are you going to learn it?
CNA has written excellent studies on this topic, hundreds of pages of them. Are they going to read them? Will they grasp the importance of the recommendations? What makes CLF Hunt™ innovative is that it takes recommendations from some of those reports and turns it into a physical thing that actually gets used and understood. Instead of handing you a report, I'm going to give you a game. It's going to take two hours to play, and when you've played one round of the game, you've gotten your feet wet in information warfare and learned some basic information.
It's not everything you need to know, but once you’ve played the game, you realize yourself that staying undetected is a problem for you, and that you need to get better educated on information warfare.
Officers are taught about different levels of TACSIT, which is a unit’s own assessment of how well it is evading detection by an adversary. The TACSIT level indicates that you are either not located by the adversary, located, or located and targeted. But there’s not much fidelity in that system. It doesn’t tell an officer how they were located and targeted. So in the Hunt games, we have an innovative way to depict TACSIT levels. You are playing inside of concentric rings that indicate whether you are detectable—the outer ring—locatable, or targetable. The circle is made of up of wedges showing the different elements of the information environment that the enemy could use to locate and target you. For example, the red wedge, “Signals,” indicates whether your radar or other signals are detectable. So the player sees, “Okay, we're targetable because of signals, so I need to do something that counters those signals, right?” You instantly know what the problem is, in a way that is lost if you’re just reading a briefing slide that says “TACSIT 1.” And that's a much fuller conversation. The commander who sees that is, like, “How do I fix this in the game?” And then hopefully that opens up the thought process of, “How do we fix this in the real world?”
I remember running the first Hunt game that CNA funded, EAB Hunt™, down at Marine Base Quantico. During a break, a first lieutenant blurted out, “We’re surrounded by the information environment.” And I thought, “Yes, you’ve got it!” I’m sure he had read doctrine to that point; in theory, he's aware of it. But it wasn't real yet until he was playing the game inside those rings. It’s just a completely different way to interact with information that connects with them on an emotional or personal level. It's something that they’ve discovered themselves, as opposed to being told by us.
Q: How would you describe your personal approach to innovation?
Noble: I don't think I've ever gotten up and thought, “I'm going to be innovative today.” But I’m intensely focused on solving problems. I’m not satisfied with the status quo. And I have a good awareness of a broad range of tools. Put those three together, and you’ll get innovation.
I didn’t set out to make innovative games; I saw a problem that I cared about. We were producing important reports on the information environment, and they weren’t having enough of an impact. It’s as if someone was saying to me, “Don't send me a report, even if I ask you for one; just help me figure it out.” As someone who had worked on professional wargames at CNA and was a hobby gamer, I was aware of tools that I thought might be able to solve this problem. It became a sort of passion, this small way I could help out a lot of people and hopefully do good for them.
Q: You’ve been at CNA for a decade, as a field representative to the Naval Information Warfighting Development Center, deployed with Carrier Strike Group One, in CNA’s Special Activities and Intelligence Program, and now on the wargaming team. What have your learned about CNA’s approach to innovation?
Noble: CNA’s approach to innovation is broadly to hire smart, creative people and give them space to do smart, creative things. And part of that space is CNA-funded research. No one in the military really wants to pay for you to create a brand new game that comes in a box. But once it exists, they want it. Once I had created EAB Hunt™ for the Marine Corps, we also ran it for Expeditionary Warfare Training Group, Atlantic. They saw the need for their officers to learn the same concepts for their Amphibious Ready Groups, or ARGs. So they sponsored us to develop ARG Hunt™. Then the Navy’s Logistics Group Western Pacific wanted its own Hunt game customized for the Combat Logistics Force, so we made CLF Hunt™. I don't think any of this work would have been possible without CNA first kicking things off with its own funds.
A lot of analysts come to CNA fresh out of their PhD programs, where the one resource they had in abundance was their own time to think. CNA’s own funds help unlock that space again, where you can take the afternoon and go think about whatever random thought you have. CNA-funded research is the closest thing that we have to the garages in Silicon Valley. Right here, we are the garage.
Q: What inspires you to approach these challenges in new and innovative ways?
Noble: For this work, there are two motivations: The one is really wanting to help people who are facing no-kidding, real-world dangers. They’re people I can help make aware of some things that, if you know them, might make your life better—or last longer. And the other side of it is that designing games, playing with the pieces, solving the problem of how to take a boring set of slides and turn them into an interactive experience that will help people learn is cool. This is fun. Every day working on a game is better than a day not working on a game.
