Spot Report From The Future: War Between Pakistan And India Has 70% Chance Of Going Nuclear

Each year, in my strategic intelligence class, I use an old-school war game as the capstone of the game-based learning portion of the course.  Last year, we looked at a potential conflict on the Korean Peninsula but this year we were able to examine a hypothetical, near future, force-on-force conflict between India and Pakistan using Decision Games' Showdown.

The premise of the game is that "something" happens such that India feels compelled to invade Pakistan.  To win, the Indians have to take four of the five major Pakistani cities while not allowing the Pakistanis to take even one Indian town.  The Pakistanis win by preventing an Indian victory or by taking two Indian towns.  A draw is possible if the Indian player takes four cities but the Pakistani player has one Indian town.  Showdown is a 2 person game so we actually had 28 games being played more or less simultaneously.

The results?  In the 28 games, Pakistan won outright in 11 of them (39%) and India won outright in 7 (25%).  In addition, there were 3 draws (11%) with the remaining seven still too close to call when we ran out of time (4 hours).  It was a pretty even battle for the most part (You can see the number of cities taken plotted against the number of games in the chart below).

X axis = No. of Cities taken; Y axis = No. of games

Oh...yeah.  And in 70% of the games, the conflict went nuclear before it was over.

It is not preordained that this conflict will go nuclear when the game begins.  The Pakistani player must use nukes first and must be losing before the nukes are released (this is simulated by a rule that increases the odds that nukes are released with each Pakistani city taken). 

Showdown only simulates tactical nukes but it does so in a fairly sophisticated way.  Each side gets a fixed number of nukes to begin the game with a random plus-up to simulate the unknowns inherent in the size of the two nuclear arsenals.  Likewise, nukes can be duds (fail to explode upon contact) or get shot down by either sides' air defense systems.  Neither dud nor shootdown is highly likely but it helps create a sense of the fog of war. 



The photostream above is of the final dispositions of forces for both sides at the end of 15 of the games.  The darker pieces are the Pakistani units and the lighter pieces are the Indian units.   The cell phones used to take most of these pictures don't give much detail, so I have provided a clearer image of some the counters below.

 

This year, I asked students to make estimates about their opponent's strategy, devise their own strategy  and then execute that strategy.  In the after-action review, we went back and tried to determine why someone won or lost.  In many cases, students were able to determine that it was a poor or good estimate, strategy or execution that led to their defeat or victory.  In some cases, however, luck played a major role and occasionally (particularly in the games that were still up in the air when time ran out) it was impossible to say.

While I am a fan of games in the classroom in general, I particularly like using these old school war games with intel students.  It forces them to not only make estimates but to come to grips with the consequences of those estimates while simultaneously giving students a sense of the complexities inherent in modern warfare.

Spot Report From The Future: North Korea Has 10% Chance To Take, Hold Seoul

An example of starting positions for DMZ.

Last week was Battle Week in my Strategic Intelligence class.  Using DMZ, Decision Games recently released tabletop wargame that simulates an invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces sometime in the near future, my 20 students duked it out over the Taebaeck Mountains and Cheorwon River Valley for nearly four hours. 

The results?  The rules give a "win" to the North Koreans if they can take and hold Seoul.  Those same rules call it a draw if North Korean forces can take Seoul but not hold it.  In the 10 games we played, the North Koreans were only able to take and hold Seoul once while they managed 2 draws.

Obviously, the purpose of this exercise was not to predict the future.  I wanted to get my students to think about strategy and the impact of intelligence on strategy.    In order to encourage this kind of thinking, I had them outline what they thought their opponent's strategy would be and then detail their own strategy before they began the game  

At the end of the game, I also asked them to consider how well they had been able to estimate their opponent's strategy and how well they had executed their own strategy.  

While I am still crunching all this data, one of the most interesting results came out of my students' predictions about the outcome.  I wanted to know which side the students' thought would win.  I also wanted to check for bias so I asked this question two different ways.

First, I asked who would win, "me" (the student filling out the survey) or "my opponent" (the student they were playing against)?  Only three of the 10 North Korean players predicted victory while none of the South Korean players predicted a North Korean victory.

Next, I asked, out of the 10 games to be played, how many times would the North Koreans win?  While the range was from 1 to 4, the average was 2.25 games.

While the level of understanding of the game and the rules varied among the players, if I give a half point to a draw (which I am inclined to do...), both the individual predicted average and the collective average indicates a high degree of calibration on the part of these student analysts -- an encouraging result, for me, at least. 

I will post more as I develop it but leave a comment if you have a specific question.