Evan D'Alessandro

For reference I was thinking about a Long Range Desert Group Call of Cthulhu campaign (which would work extremely well), but reading this back a Toyota War Delta Green game would be equally cool...

It probably is that wargames can be "predictive" like other tools can be, but it requires a lot of very hard work, a very good model for the game, and more wargaming epistemology to know how to best do that then we currently have (though it's being worked on slowly).

Thus that data can form part of a larger argument about what will happen, but I think there is an over reliance upon output and not causal mechanisms to produce the final theory of the experiment, which is falling into the error of treating wargames as predictive.

This also then muddies our own wargame reporting too. For example people will state both outcomes, decisions, and causal mechanisms without much distinction, and reporting often becomes quasi-predictive. I think that's fine to a certain degree that wargames can be experiments that produced data.

I'm still split on that going that route is useful/easier for the general public to understand (possibly true), but it does muddle the point for insiders too. I've seen some professionals make the mistake of taking a wargame as predictive.

Minor pet peeve of mine as a professional wargamer is that despite the fact that professional wargamers know better than to say that wargames are predictive (as they are in fact indicative) the examples we point to (USN War College Interwar, WATU, maybe Gulf Strike, other examples), are predictive.

Having both Truth Social and the normal press website was a good addition for this one, with some degree of policy by tweet occuring, and the game overall was a good time for the players. I'll start uploading the updated files as I am able to over the next month.

The Chinese got a couple of kilometers inland before being stoped, and PLA air assault forces ended up surrendering in the face of Taiwanese counterattacks (though PLAAF air interdiction was nasty).

The Chinese then conducted a Joint Island Landing Campaign, which went less well as the US managed to be able to surge air over Taiwan, the Taiwanese had laid mines very very early in the game, and Chinese minesweeping was rather limited for time to sweep.

Photos from the KCL Crisis Sim. With a Chinese blockade in place, President Trump started the war with a massive strike on Chinese SCS bases. A good Joint Firepower Strike plus shocking effective cyber on INDOPACOM's logistics system put the air war solidly in favor the Chinese.

The 20K is in Navy hulls (the 075/076 LHDs and 071 LPDs, also all the LSTs/etc), civ shipping probably plausibly bumps that upwards of ~75K total, but the civ shipping is gnarly because even the RoRos designed for at sea ops don't support disembarkation of AAVs as quickly as grey hulls w/a well deck

They could try to force more by shrinking spacing between battalion channels but that would of course lead to its own problems. People treat this like they can line up brigade after brigade to land them in the north, and it's just not the case.

Based on known Chinese doctrinal amphibious battalion attack frontages (a pinch of salt with the number, but I think they are probably correct), Linkou beach can take 30% of a brigade's full attack frontage at a time, and Haihu beach 70% (caveats apply, and I'm being favorable to the Chinese).

After the game I'll get around to updating the game files on the website as I've done tweaks and touch ups to a lot of the game over the past several months.

Almost finished up with prep for tomorrow's game. Printer has now run out of yellow ink and won't print, but the last few things to be printed were non-essentials anyway.

WARGAMING JOB ALERT 🔔

MANTECH is seeking an Assistant Wargame Director for an on-site, customer facing position for a major program in Quantico, VA 🔍

Warfare as God Intended (U.S. woodland M1 helmet covers)

February 15th GUWS General Game Day Join the Georgetown University Wargaming Society on Sunday, February 15th from 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM in the Healey Family Student Center (HFSC) Herman Meeting Room for a general game day! We will provid...

Join us at Georgetown University Wargaming Society for our social game session on Feb 15th!!!! All levels of gamers are welcomed. Bring your own game or learn a new one. Register below. 👇 🎲 💥 🗺️
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The quote of the night was "moving all these bloody people is hard isn't it?"

Tonights wargame was planning a NEO and embassy evacuation from Taiwan. They had to draw up a Emergency Action Plan for the American Institute in Taiwan and then red-team it. Both team's plans took some different approaches, but each time I run it I get something interesting!

That skeet reads like it was written by a lunatic, but unfortunately I am insane enough to understand it.

Rapid Deployment Light Tank (a.k.a. Twilight 2000's LAV-75)

Project Iceworm

VZ-8 Airgeep

Slightly less serious wargaming tonight as people pitched failed Cold War projects from the reasonable to the utterly insane in Shark Tank/Dragon's Den game. As designer I got to sneak in my favorites of the Bell Rocket Belt, RDL Light Tank (a.k.a. T2000's LAV-75), and the VZ-8 Airgeep.

It's still kind of insane to me that doing this sort of stuff is both my job, my hobby, and the thing I get to study on a day to day basis. Wargaming is really cool (though I will prefer modern Taiwan over Midway, I'll happily do either)!

I'm going to be making some of that stuff now that I've seen it!

For a long time the discussion around autonomous weapons was giving them the ability to pull the trigger. I do wonder what the conversation around a autonomous commander giving the order to pull the trigger will be. I should probably talk to those people who think about this in my department more...

Those are perhaps more on the rigid than non-rigid wargame side though. Inversely for non-rigid side hallucinating capabilities could maybe be a bigger issue (though I'm not looking into it), and I haven't really probed into how LLM's deal with non-rigid resourcing constraints.

One of the thing's I think is fascinating (having heard it come up at another point in discussion on LLM's) is the inability of LLM's to manage resources in wargames. Kind of minor but that it can't do a very basic thing any human could do (even poorly) probably has some interesting implications.

I would really like a copy of these slides too!

A powerpoint slide with a title Wargaming and Game Theory, date, university affiliation, ISM university logo and author's name.

Wargame design can benefit a lot from learning from other social science modelling approaches, especially from game theory. Today, I had a pleasure to talk about wargaming and game theory at wargaming course at Alti Studi Difesa.

Do you need a physical copy, or would scans of the rules/maps/componenets work?