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.

Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

Intelligence And Crowdmapping

I realized today that, while I had written in the past about the idea of crowdmapping, I had never actually used that term in a post before.

That was a mistake.

Don't get me wrong, Group editable maps have been around for some time and are quite successful.  We have used CommunityWalk, for example in a number of projects and it has served its purpose excellently.

CommunityWalk Map - North Caucasus Violence Sep-06 to Nov-06



Likewise, automatically edited maps are also quite helpful.  The comprehensive map at RSOE EDIS, for example, just recently got some new competition with Google Public Alerts.

Crowdmapping, though, is something a bit different.  Here, dozens and sometimes hundreds of people are providing information from a variety of sources (including the web, of course, but also through SMS and Twitter) that are then mapped in real time.

Right now, this space is occupied almost exclusively by Crowdmap.com, an offshoot of the much admired Ushahidi project.  It is not too hard to see a time, however, when other companies and organizations will enter this space with competing offerings.

I, along with a small group of intrepid students, have been experimenting with this system for a few months and, while managing the input has proven to be more challenging than expected, the potential (and the relative sophistication of Crowdmap) is enormous.

The best way to get a sense of the value of a crowdmap, however, is to look at them.  Below are three of my favorites:  Syria Tracker (a map tracking eyewitness accounts of missing, killed or arrested people in Syria in English and Arabic), China Strikes (a map tracking instances of labor unrest in China), and Energy Shortage (a map tracking reports of energy related issues worldwide).  You can see all of these maps below (Syria Tracker is live; the other two maps need to be clicked on to get to the live versions).

This Is How The Daleks Got Their Start... (Drone Swarms!)

Some frighteningly clever people at Penn's GRASP Lab have developed software that allows harmless children's toys to swarm...

Over a million people have already seen the video.  If you aren't one of them, take a look below:



Oh, and if you are unfamiliar with the Dalek reference, you can find them on Wikipedia or here.  Or just watch the vid below:




If you want a more serious look at the potential impacts of this technology, take a look at John Robb's recent post (via @nof)

Mercyhurst College Is Now Mercyhurst University (WOOT!)

For the last several years Mercyhurst has been going through the administrative process of changing our status from a "College" to a "University".  Yesterday, we received notice from the State of Pennsylvania that our application had been approved. 

(Note:  I am going to talk about what I think this means and some of the new things that are likely to emerge as a result but I am also interested in what you have to say. so please leave a comment if you have one!)

This process actually began even before the first piece of paperwork went in.  We changed our Carnegie Classification a number of years ago to better represent the courses, degree programs and research opportunities we offered.

Now that the status issue is resolved, we are all dealing with the inevitable administrative details that result from  such a change, the first of which is our name.  The Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (MCIIS) is likely to change to the overwhelmingly favored Institute for Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst University (IIS-MU) at some point.  The institute's website (mciis.org) will likely get an upgrade at about the same time.

More interesting than the administrative details are some of our longer range initiatives.  The University (going to take me awhile to get used to writing that...) intends to pursue doctorate programs in some of our majors, for example.  Our hope is to be one of the first.  I don't think we want to pursue a PhD type program, however, as there are already a number of PhD programs that would allow a student to focus on the academic aspects of studying intelligence.

Rather, I think we should, like MDs and JDs, offer a professional doctorate (DI? ID? InD?).  The focus of  such a degree, if I had my way, would be on application -- the actual doing of intelligence analysis -- rather than just talking about it.  Specifically, I would like us to provide our doctoral students a chance to become better leaders and managers in addition to gaining increased skills as analysts.

We are obviously some distance from this objective but the conversation about the future direction of the intelligence studies program is starting.  Now is the time to chime in!