Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: I really don't see wargaming growing, not in the army.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: 20 year old and 30 year olds that are digital natives, they are very comfortable gaming because they do it more frequently than I do. How do I bridge that gap?
[00:00:15] Speaker A: There are no rules for the Red team. The Red Team's going to do whatever they can do to win. And if you don't understand that from the blue side, you're going to lose every time you touch this board.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: You're listening to the Convergence, the Army's mad scientist podcast. I'm Matt Sanispert and before we get to the discussion, I'd like to go over a few changes that have taken place since our last episode. The Training and Doctrine Command and the Army Futures Command no longer exist. They've both ceased operations and have merged into the newly formed Transformation and training command, or t2.com.
So with that out of the way, let's get back to the episode. Today, Rachel and I are talking with Colonel Mike Barnett and Mr. Joe Kreishen from the Sustainment Exercise and Simulation Directorate within the Combined Arms Support Command.
We're talking to Colonel Barnett and Mr. Kreishen about sinews of War, a new game they designed to help teach and train sustainers in the Force, their experience, play, testing it, and what they see as the future of wargaming in the Army. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the army, or the Transformation and Training Command.
Let's get started.
Welcome to the show.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Great, thanks for having us.
[00:01:23] Speaker C: So before we start, why don't you both introduce yourselves, let our audience know who you are, where you come from, and kind of what you're doing here. Colonel Barnett, why don't you start?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Good morning, Matt, Rachel, Colonel Mike Barnett. I am the Director of the Sustainment Exercise and Simulation Directorate at Fort Lee, Virginia. We are the Sustainment simulation capability supporting constructive exercises, command post exercises, if you will.
By background, I'm an armor officer and then I joined the FA57 models and simulations Functional Area.
I've been able to experience constructive simulations at all different echelons through different training events and in some cases live events that started out as constructive. It's been a very rewarding opportunity for me to be able to serve my country. And now having seen war gaming the way we've been doing it at sesd, it's really helped me better appreciate those things within the military decision making process.
When you look at a problem, how you can take guidance and really get into different considerations in Wargaming has become a valuable tool for helping us with sustainment training and planning.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: That's awesome. Great to have you here, sir.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: And Joe, Matt and Rachel, thank you for having me here. I am Joe Christian. I am Colonel Barnett's deputy.
So my career has been a little different than Colonel Barnett's. I started off enlisted as an infantryman, went to college, came back in as an armor officer similar to Colonel Barnett. Then I became a finance officer, then I became a models and simulations officer. Then I retired and Now I'm a CP36, which is a models and simulations civilian. Working with Colonel Barnett and really trying to take wargaming to another level within the sustainment community.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Little known fact, we were actually lieutenants together at Fort Knox at the Armored Basic Course in 1999.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: You found your way back to each other.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Indeed. So it's been a really nice way to start a career and then for me, at least on the, the downward slope, I guess, to be able to work with a fellow warrior like Joe.
[00:03:29] Speaker D: Yeah. So today we're here to talk about the war game that you guys have developed. So can you tell us a little bit more about that game and what it's intended to teach or provide the Army?
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. So the game came about because when we send our teams out to these large constructive exercises, we get a lot of feedback and the feedback is, well, we didn't get to train on this or when they simulated this, it was incorrect.
So we started working smaller games within our own footprint. And some of those games were bringing on access and allies or some other commercial off the shelf games and bringing them into our and just playing around with them.
We had a really good captain that worked with us and she was really into war gaming. And between me and her, we were to determine, well, maybe we can create our own games. And we fiddled. And so we came to this game.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: The other part of that is not only were these games developed internally, but we reached out, especially with Joe and other teammates, to other gamers in the community.
A frequent guest on your show, Sebastian Bay is one of our prime contacts we reach out to, and there's been questions that were posed to us from CASCOM leadership, the combined Armed Support Command that we serve next to at Fort Lee. Hey, we heard about this one game.
We'd like to know more about it. So we've done an assessment on is this the right game for Sustainers? In some cases it's a good game, but it didn't really meet what the CASCOM leadership or Sustainers really wanted. So we didn't discount it saying like, we're not going to use that, it's for a different application. And that's a lot of things about these games.
What is it you want to get out of them? Do you want to learn more about trucking or rail? Or do you really want to get into how are you going to manage commodities of supply?
And the game that Joe developed, Sinews of War, really gets after a greater appreciation for those things in sustainment that as an armor officer, I had to learn about sustainment. While sustainers do this every day and they make maneuver folks get better at what they're doing to understand sustainment.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Going back to the lessons we learned, we identified those as gaps.
And this used to be the Army Futures Command used to be here. And that's one thing that they know very well, is you take gaps and you do gaps analysis. And so with that analysis, we understand from a sustainment standpoint that if we go into lisco, we're probably going to have sustainment that's going to be either dispersed or contested. There's really no game out there for that. So we decided to look at FM4.O.
And if this was Colonel Barnett, he'd be holding up FM4O.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: We'll link to it.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: So, so please link to FM 4.0. And within FM4O, the game goes through the tip fid, which is a time, time phase force deployment of the sustainment or the maneuver forces. And so we, we modeled the game after the tip fid. So the game isn't the normal board game that you'd see. It's not Sebastian Bay's game. The crux of it isn't force on force, it's sustainment versus sustainment. How does one team gets a statement from basically the United States all the way to the person that's firing the bullet on the ground, and that's from both sides, red and blue. And the other part of the game is forcing sustainers to look at a game from a red perspective.
And I think what we've seen in the play testing and then in the subsequent games that we've played is that the ability to understand red helps blue with their planning.
Sustainers don't know maneuver. One of the things we're seeing from the game is a lot of, well, I don't know how to do this because I can't maneuver my forces. By the end of the game, they have a small. They're not experts at it at all. But what they can now do is understand, well, I guess that's why the Maneuver Commander wanted sustainment at this time.
So it's helping them to understand, well, what would a maneuver Commander be thinking at this point? So the sustainers now see what they see. Talking with Ian Sullivan, he actually brought up a great point. Well, why, why is this game not being played down at the Maneuver Center? Because the maneuver guys don't understand. Well, there's a reason why we're not getting Sustainment to you right now. The road's cut off.
The weather is not going to allow it. We're under contact, we have no security. There are many reasons why sustainment's not getting there.
Tying them together and maneuver us with a sustainer and you can see where the game works.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: One of our applications, we actually had the Transportation Warrant officer course. One of their classes came over to SESD and they put transportation warrant officers against each other on each side of the of the game. One side was red, one side was blue in game gameplay or one side was natoa, the blue side and the other side was red was Murata.
And all these transportation warrant officers had to assume different roles on the staff Commander, intel, logistics planners, red teaming each other.
And from that they were able to gain a better appreciation for other people's jobs and to expand out of their unique discipline as a transportation officer and give better informed advice to this to decision makers. So they were able to expand their application of the doctrine that they've been studying for so long. The other thing that we're seeing with wargaming is it's an application. You can apply what you have learned.
All the students will sit in the classes for any number of weeks. They will ingest slides. And that model of just sitting there looking at slides can be overwhelming at times. What we're offering is to get their hands on and apply what they have learned during the discussion. Just to add to the list of things to look up. If you want to do more research on how to work with the Tip Fed, you'd want to look at joint publication 3. 35.
Again, the game was heavily influenced and modeled off of current emerging doctrine.
The things where there's excursions, oh, maybe they come out of news media.
Maybe a QR code from the T2COM G2 said, hey, here's something that's emerging that would. Some of those things have wound up in some of our games.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: The other interesting part about how we developed the game is it started off, we started with Matrix, the Matrix type game as well. How can we teach sustainers at that kind of level and it morphed from a matrix game into a board game because we identified that it's too high level as a matrix game. We need to get down more into the operational.
And it really wasn't meant for education.
It was meant to fill a gap in the compo 2 and 3, the reserves and National Guard units who weren't getting the training prior to getting to these warfighter exercises and the CP Xs.
But what we've seen through the play testing and us playing the game and others playing the game is the educational value is just as important as teaching soldiers how to be sustainers value also, and what we did with the warrant officers turned out to be probably, per their words, better than any test they could have taken the entire time they were in the course.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: And it's getting to. It's evolving to a point where the leadership, in at least the transportation side of things, they are looking at making this part of their actual capstone training event.
So, you know, in some academic settings the students will have to do an oral comprehensive exam.
This is something that the Transportation School is leaning forward on to make this part of a culminating capstone event. And he'll probably be mad at me for mentioning his. But Chief Throm, who is the CW5 for the transportation School, he is also seeing the opportunity to not only take this training tool, Sinews of War, as a board game for education purposes and with the warrant officers, he's also looking at how can he take the non commissioned officers who are doing similar work to help decision makers make decisions and also incorporating it into the captain's career course so that you have this continuum of training and learning with a capstone event that isn't just for the warrants or just for the non commissioned officers or just for the captains, that you bring them all together and you put them into a scenario.
Alluding back to what Joe had said a moment ago about sometimes sustainers don't always get the amount of training they want from a large collective event. Now you've put all three of those different professions into the same environment.
They've seen different educational training models. And now you put them into a common training event on the board game where they now have to apply. And now you've also got where they can assume those different roles, different staff roles, different leadership roles. In the current version of Sinews of War, you're playing roles as a theater commander, corps commanders, division commanders and brigade commanders. Well, not everybody has that knowledge, personal knowledge. Even as a colonel, I don't have that the understanding of how a brigade commander would be thinking, so how can I ask a lieutenant or a captain to do that? So we can, we're looking at how do we take the game and change the echelon with which the headquarters is at. Currently it's at a theater, which would be a four star command. Maybe we can bring it down to a two or one star command, from a higher operational level to maybe to a lower tactical level.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: So the game is sinews of war. We've talked a lot, we've had a lot of podcasts about war gaming and oftentimes we're talking about the theories behind war gaming, the philosophies and things. But you guys actually built one and you executed it in a live setting with participants. So tell us a little bit about how that went. Let's get into the details. Because you actually had. You went through this game with some green suitors. So tell us about that.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: So the warrant officer course came to us and they wanted to pilot. And it's pretty important that we understand the first couple sessions were a pilot. We only had four students come to that first session. They were worried that the game wasn't going to get to the level of what they were trying to teach these warrants throughout the entire course.
So we gave them the introduction, gave them the rules, gave them everything they need to know about the game beforehand.
And when they got to the game, we didn't really go over the rules. It was just, okay, we're going straight into the game. We're going to start playing the game. By the next session, it had come to eight. They had eight warrant officers for the session two third session. Every warrant officer in the course for that particular course was playing the game. We had so many students playing the game at this time. We had theater commander, the Corps Commanders, SPOs. For each one. We have cards in the game. The cards are more of your mdl. They can. They have the ability to gas an opponent. They've got the ability to build bridges because they provided that theater level asset that's not inherent in the game.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: If you were looking at a constructive exercise where you have the scenario, the road to war, the cards that Joe's talking about, those that almost serve as like an inject.
So something that wasn't part of the original script, but the teams have those cards to facilitate what they wanted to do.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Well, it sounds like from, from the way you're describing how, how the number of people started to escalate, that the learning curve is probably pretty easy to get to know the rules of the game and actually play it.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: So in my notes I wrote learning curve. At first glance, look really hard. I mean, it's a, it's a game book.
But a lot of the game book involves sustainment and you can turn off and on certain elements of the game based off of your learning demands. And so we didn't use a couple elements of the sustainment, which made learning much easier. And the game progressed a lot faster by doing some of the things in the game that weren't there. So there were about half of the students by the third week knew the instructions or the manual as well as I do. And they were running the game by themselves.
By the fourth session, they were running it. I was just in the back.
They liked it when I would adjudicate their actual combat, which isn't a lot in the game, but they liked that because it was seen as a mediator.
And other than that, they played that game by themselves.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: They did. And even, even to the point where they were self policing on the time they would allow for decisions to be made, Almost like a, like a shot clock, they were holding each other accountable. Because sometimes I think we. When we came out here a couple months ago, when we played it with the TRADOC G2 team, there was no shot clock. And sometimes you could see where the timing of making decisions could creep a little bit longer than you really wanted. They held they had someone assigned to the clock. And when that clock clock wound down, you heard them, three, two, one, decision, make, go. And they were very, very adamant about that because they saw that the discipline in the process needed to be enforced. Otherwise you get very amorphous. And planners owe this to the leaders.
Just because you get a directed course of action doesn't mean you don't do the mission analysis. You still owe the boss those considerations. And I'm paraphrasing, I just heard something from the. The LISCO conference down at Fort Polk. And one of the leaders down there said that, that even if you get a directed course of action, do this thing, the leader said, do this, you still owe them the mission analysis.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: The instructors were very hands off.
And I think that if you're going to build a game and you really want the instructors to be part of the game, their role, this is Joe Christian's opinion, is to watch the students, to grade the students for what they're trying to do. Did they make decisions in the two minutes that they allotted for every action?
Were they thinking critically when they were loading up their tip fid? Did they put the right elements of sustainment in the right priorities of sustainment within the tip?
Did they ensure that the scope of their sustainment didn't go further than what the maneuver forces were required?
That's what the instructors were doing during the game and they were really picking that up toward the end. So that when we got to the after action review at the end of the game, which in itself was an event, we ran a simulated round for the chief of transportation and they ran it through for about an hour.
We did an AAR at the end of that and it was self run by the students, not the instructors. So the instructors were able to sit back, take their notes. And it was a really good critical AR in which they talked about things that they learned during the game. Not about the game itself, wasn't about the mechanics, it was about what did you learn about the tip fid, what did you learn about ensuring that you had a priority of effort, that you weren't trying to sustain everything, you were trying to sustain a priority of effort. And those were things that came out during and that's what the instructors allowed them to do.
So as we move forward and they want to add this to the POI is ensuring the instructors understand the game, but they understand their role in the game. It's the students run the game, they watch the students and they provide feedback when they're going in.
[00:18:42] Speaker C: Well, I think that issue and, and what you said about the shot clock shows that, that the players are invested in it. And you know, the, the instructors aren't pushing them to do things. They're self motivated to get it done. I think that's what you're looking for, you're hoping for out of a game.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: And, and it was because the students were the very involved and not worrying about waiting to hear from instructor what to do. Their critical thinking skills were elevated. They were more active in the learning and the application than in the passive receiving of watching slides, you know, progress through during the course. And I think that was one of the main reasons why the transportation school came to us for you know, the initial discussion about what could we do to help them modify their poi. Since that engagement in like August, I believe we've already had inquiries from quartermaster ordinance, we've had requests from other reserve component commands, other sustainment commands. If because they saw this game during sustainment week last year, can we come out out to their unit, to their training assemblies and help them with their instructions, MDMP with their mission analysis because they were preparing for a real live Deployment. And they saw, as Joe mentioned, they saw gaps in their own training. And if they were able to use a board game to help bridge that and train those, in this case a seniors of war, those sustainment skills, now you've got another way to get that after that training value. In the reserve component, they have roughly 39 days a year to train and that includes their two week annual training period.
Not a whole lot of time. And unless they get into a mobilization scenario where they now have that dedicated time to do a train up before deployment, they're always finding, looking for those opportunities to train. As a former guardsman myself, we couldn't always get our tank units down to a mission training center at an active duty post to train on tank simulations.
Just scheduling what it was.
What I found was a game called Steel Beasts, which is a tank simulation game where you could actually replicate tank, tank or Bradley Gunnery, you could build your own scenarios. So now at a drill weekend we were using a sim that I bought at Walmart for $40 back in 2000.
That game has now evolved significantly in the, in the gaming community and the Sims community as a viable training tool.
Board gaming is the same type of thing. And what, what I'm looking at as a senior Colonel, United States army is how do I take my experiences as a planner, as a critical thinker and now link them up with what the, the younger soldiers are doing? The 20 year old and 30 year olds that are digital natives, they are very comfortable gaming because they do it more frequently than I do. How do I bridge that gap and gain the advantages from those skills in gaming, marry them up with the skills that senior leaders have and now we have something to apply it to and that's with gaming and specifically through Seniors of war, we have that opportunity to continue to further that ideal and that training in a lower cost, lower overhead environment.
[00:21:56] Speaker D: So contested logistics is and will be a key condition of any future conflict, especially in the Indo Pacific.
So, so taking what you've learned in using participants for this game and with the transportation warrant officers, what have you learned from your game that may inform logistics execution in a potential conflict? With our pacing threat. So expanding the scenario out a little bit.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Okay, so my biggest one, and I know the Colonel has seen some, is it's obviously protection and I'm going to give an example and it's not in any way to embarrass the Colonel or maybe it is.
So in one of our first play tests in which he was very new to the game, you can put a Jlots we actually have jlots in the game. And so he had to put a.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Jlots in which is joint logistics over the shore. Basically you're building your own port on the beach.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: He put it in a good spot on the beach but he didn't put any protection.
And so on my first move is I was playing the red team. I was Marata was to jump in some airborne and take out his.
And the next time he played he didn't do the same thing was almost similar and I took something else out. But as you played the game he started understanding the protection. But in my opinion as I watched the game and what I tried to tell the students because at the end of each round I would give them my thoughts on what they did right and what they did not do correctly. And it was usually, well, you forgot to defend this sustainment hub. And if you lose this, you now have broken your supply chain and you're not going to get your sustainment to this unit. So I would say protection during LISCO is gonna be very hard. And this game really shows that sustainment past come needs to take it seriously.
[00:23:49] Speaker C: But I think that's a great example of the power of learning in the game. Yes, it, it, it was okay that what happened to you, your J Lots got, got blown up on the first move or whatever. It wouldn't have been okay if that happened the second and third and fourth time. But the fact that you were able to go in and correct it, you're seeing something and you're correcting it. And that's, that's the power of learning through these games.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: And it's, it's iterative. So the first time I played it, yeah, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna put my J Lots in. This is great. I and I thought I was doing really good. Not. And I forgot about the other war fighting functions. Well, Joe was the game author.
He knew all these nuances and I'm.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Trying to figure it all out.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: But I learned from the first play, okay, don't do that again. And then we talked about it. Next time we went and played I did something different. So that's that the power of being able to do things iteratively in a safe to fail environment.
You're reluctant to do that say in a, in a war fighter exercise that has been planned over the course of a year has thousands of man hours built into it. A board game allows you to do these things in those safe to fail environments and then learn iteratively.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: So this doesn't Always go, well, we had a group and I'm not going to identify them, but they played the game and they did the same thing that the Colonel did. They put the jailots out there undefended. And I was not Red Team. I was the facilitator at this time. And I told the Red Team, hey, there's probably something you could do here.
And they decided they were going to take out the JLODs. And the blue Team was adamant that that was not fair. I knew the rules and I tried to explain to them, there are no rules for the Red Team. The Red Team's going to do whatever they can do to win. And if you don't understand that from the blue side, you're going to lose every time you touch this board.
We ended up going back and letting him keep his J lots.
But I think if we have that in our head, that one, there's cheating in a board game.
You got to get that out of here. Rides are going to cheat every time they can. And blue needs to understand that. And you need to, you need a Red Team, the Red Team, and we don't really do that well. And two, you need to know where the Red's going to try to get to you. And it's going to be the JLODs, the S pods, the A pods, all those critical infrastructure. It's infrastructure I'm talking about. If you don't protect the infrastructure, you're not going to get sustainment where it needs to be.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: So can I ask you on that? Because you've talked a lot about the Red Team and it got me thinking, how do you, how do you design your Red teams for these games? Are you using folks from, from G2S anywhere or like, what goes into a Red Team for this game?
[00:26:19] Speaker A: So when I did my Red Team, I kind of modeled it off of what I thought Russia would be. Red versus Blue was, which was the original title, because I'm not very original, was us coming in as NATOA to defend another country, sort of like NATO and the Red Team coming through to try and capture this country, sort of like Russia.
So I tried to model them, the Red Team after Russia. But what I did differently, as opposed to giving them any different perimeters or, or anything, is I made both armies the same. The militaries are exactly the same, with the only differences being the Blue team has more sustainment assets than the Red Team. The Red Team has more forces. So each, whichever side you're playing, you have a different challenge. If I have more sustainment, but Less forces, How do I achieve my objectives? But if I don't have enough sustainment to achieve my objectives, where's my common. Where am I going to culminate? They're not really a Russia us. It's basically two similar forces trying to do the same thing with small differences.
[00:27:27] Speaker D: What I think is really interesting is when.
So when you played with the transportation warrant officers, I'm assuming it was just both red and blue were the transportation warrant officers. So there was no intel officers were playing red. So you're forcing Blue to think like red, which is really interesting and different from a lot of the bigger war games where you bring in twos to. To come play red.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Basically forced them out of their comfort area.
[00:27:53] Speaker D: Right?
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Exactly. There were 11 warrant officers from the Transportation Corps. That's their job. I am a transportation warrant chief. Thrum had wanted to help them become a little more broad, give them a little more idea, a little, expand their focus, if you will. So they had to on their own developers. Who's the G2? Who's the 4? Who's the SPO, the support officer? Who. Who's. Who's your chief of operations? Who's the commander?
And they did that internally. They saw that they had to come up with these, these duty positions internally. We didn't tell them.
And because that they were able to pick up on that need, they saw that gap.
They had to do that.
[00:28:37] Speaker C: So talking about what you guys learned, Colonel Barnett, you mentioned previously about how as the games evolve, they, they cater to, you know, the next generation of folks coming through and technologies are added in. You mentioned the digital natives. And there's another group, you know, beyond just the millennials now that are into the force.
What have you seen that you learned from youthful leaders who have played this game? Something that maybe you weren't seeing. It was a different perspective, but this next generation sees things differently.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: What I've seen is they are very quick to adopt the gaming piece of the game, whereas an older officer like myself is going to be. I'm going to have my doctrine in my hand going, all right, how am I going to do this from a doctoral perspective? They're going to game it much faster. That's why their adoption of the game. And we've had several pretty well informed discussions about, hey, if we digitized the game, so many things about gameplay that are built into the analog rulebook could be much readily available in a digital application.
How much supply can I carry? How much, how far can I go? If I extend my sustainment unit out too Far do I lose.
Do I lose that connectivity to my other units into my maneuver forces? A digital version of that.
They'll actually be able to see that because actually the color on the board will change which will show that range of that unit and almost like a trans transparent layer will show up. So their, their adoption of or application thereof of the technology piece has been very enthusiastic. Some of the instructors from Army Sustainment University that have come over just as an excursion, hey, can we play the game just as a leader development program over lunch.
Their suggestions again, the difference in age, and it's not in a disparaging comment, but they're seeing things much differently from, from their fighting positions than I have seen. And that marriage of that of those skills is, is critical in help bringing war gaming to a much more significant portion in planning and a bigger tool than the toolkit of commanders.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: I would say they've got a greater idea of what MDO looks like.
So I've got my MDO cards.
They come up with better suggestions than what I created and I should implement them. But I forget my notes.
Their idea of what you can and cannot do in the modern battlefield is different than what I see. I would never gas.
I've been trained never use gas. It's not one of our first steps. I would say nine out of 10 times when we see it. They're gassing almost as a requirement now because they understand what it can do.
I wouldn't do it. It just, it's not in my training to use it as a first, first step.
We played a special round in one games with the warrant officers and we gave them nuclear weapons and they used them. And it wasn't because we told them to. We gave them, if you use it, there are repercussions. So each team had repercussions for using them, but they were okay with it because it was going to get them to their objective.
I don't think either one of us would have used them based off of what we understand.
So it's their use of things in MDO that are different than the way we think that makes them better gamers. Because it makes me want to give blank cards and say you write down what you want for an MDO card and if the group agrees to it, it stays in the game because these are the things and I know that the mad scientists want stuff like this. What kind of innovations can we have in MDO that are going to help the U.S. army? And I think it comes from just giving blank cards in a game and saying if you can come up with a good argument, use the card, you can use it.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: The other side of that is you can take using some type of abhorrent weapon on the battlefield as a first use application and expand on that in a different discussion on US Policy.
Do we need to review US Policy? So now you go from a tactical game getting after a theater problem and you can pull it out and now make it an element of national policy.
How do we talk about this differently? Should we be, should we review that policy on first use weapons?
Because if our junior leaders are thinking about it and we give them the autonomy to act a little more freely on the battlefield, what does that say for us if they actually go ahead and did that? So again, by playing it out in a safe to fail environment, seeing how their minds are thinking now, we can inform senior leaders in a different war game type of environment.
Maybe we need to actually go back and relook at our policy because if our soldier, our junior leaders are thinking a certain way, maybe we need to relook at how are we training them.
[00:33:28] Speaker D: So I think we've really touched on this next question a lot and we've touched on these aspects of this throughout this whole conversation. So I'm going to give you guys a chance to reiterate some things. But why do you think it's critical that the army takes advantage of games like yours to inform training and readiness?
[00:33:47] Speaker B: The ability to think critically is very important because now, now that also helps to build trust. And if leaders have trust in the ability of their junior leaders to carry out something where they haven't had to be told all the time, that's very important.
The by putting gaming into the academic setting and changing that model from where you look at slides, you write an order, you do an oral presentation, the green pen comes out and you got you, you know, you get your go, you get your no go, then the suit, then the student goes out to the unit, they really haven't, have they really applied what they've learned?
We would argue that they really hadn't. Whereas with tabletop gaming, now they have to apply and it's part of the curriculum. So again, as the instructors are in the periphery watching and facilitating, the students are figuring out on their own. And that's kind of at the end of the day, you want to have your junior leaders thinking about these. You force them to coordinate and collaborate. Sometimes we go into staff meetings and nobody's talked beforehand and the first time they're collaborating is in the meeting. They should have done it before.
So the gaming helps them to do that. We saw that awareness grow and you can see it in their faces. In this case the Warrens who played this back in August, you can see that appreciation that they have learned not just what they were taught from the slides, but the application of it. And in some cases, oh, I shouldn't have gone down that route. That KOA really was the bad koa, the course of action analysis. Now we can go back and look at, oh, let's, let's go to the north instead of the south, let's not bomb the city, let's hold our resources because we can apply them somewhere else and maybe deter in the west and then affect a movement to the east.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: It's putting sustainers in positions they're not familiar with and it's really putting them in the positions that they now understand their consumer. So if we say we provide a service as sustainers, well there's a consumer of that service.
We now understand from their standpoint what they're looking for. The other is money. I was a former finance officer and I completely understand what money means. And there's things called money on the battlefield. There's money is everywhere.
Games are expensive. A large game that we run with our war fighter exercises cost millions of dollars, millions of dollars. And our sustainers get very little from these games. Well, for the cost of a fifty dollar game, because really that's what it would cost to develop the game and put it in a really fine board game or a digital copy of the game, about $50.
For that $50, I can train hundreds of National Guard reserves in their armory without them having to leave.
So from a money standpoint, it just makes more sense. It not only do I have the game and it's there, but I can continue to play it. I can replay it, I can stop that game at any point because we're going the wrong way.
You can't. You do that with a large war fighter exercise. You just lost millions of dollars.
So it's the replayability, it's affordability and it's just the ability to impact at the specific place with explicit learning demands or training objectives for that particular unit.
Like when we go to the war fight exercises, sustainment objectives aren't there. And if they are, they're not, they're not really followed. No one really cares about them.
This game allows you to tailor it to your training demands and get you ready for a warfare exercise.
[00:37:23] Speaker C: So you talked about potentially digitizing parts of the game.
So I can see that this game will Evolve as it goes on.
What do you guys see as the future for not just sinews of war, but you can talk about that, but war gaming in general in the military, as, as the future I'm gonna unfold.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Wargaming in the military is definitely a skill and an application that in our opinion definitely needs to be expanded upon. You know, the current models that take, you know, several months to apply and then bring units together, very costly.
As simulations officers, we are, you know, very invested in the development of next generation constructive simulation and next gen constructive command and control.
These new capabilities are being developed right now to reduce that overhead. Chief of Staff of the army is very emphatic about reducing the overhead on collective training events.
The way we're looking at tabletop gaming to support that effort. Again, most of sustainment is in the reserve component, whether it's in the, in the Guard or in the actual army reserves that doesn't get to have the same amount of training days. Again I mentioned earlier, 39 days a year, which includes their two week annual training board. Gaming gives them another opportunity to do these training activities.
Whether it's during the drill assembly formally or it's done informally in the evening after, after retreat, you give them the opportunity to, to do these activities at a much lower cost.
The we're seeing that digitization is going to continue to expand.
Ten years ago, if I saw a soldier walking around with a phone in his hand, I'd have been pretty upset, like what are you doing?
Well now you can get every doctrinal manual, technical manuals, watch videos on how to do maintenance, and it's all in the palm of your hand on your, on your mobile device.
So the change in the mindset of seeing a soldier with a mobile device in their hand from you know, not working to now that they, that is their work that has, that also needs to evolve. And being able to put a powerful game into a mobile device or on a tabletop that can be quickly set up and self run or self paced is tremendous. Now if you bring in a senior leader to facilitate or moderate to be that corps or theater or division commander, now they can apply their military judgment and help the development of those junior leaders to bridge that gap. From the very technical gaming piece where their thumbs are getting a really good workout, to now they have to put the device down for a minute, think about the scenario, apply those critical thinking skills that you get from the application of doctrine to get after the commander's training objectives. So that's definitely see it as a.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Huge win so I'm going to be a little bit more pessimistic. Colonel and I, we talked about this specific question when we're driving up here.
And the words I wrote was I don't, I really don't see war gaming growing, not in the army. In 2014, I worked for the Army War College. We ran a large conference on how to get war gaming into the Army. Large. We brought in experts from everywhere.
We had Peter Perla, God rest his soul, Jim, James Lacey, Doc Starrett, Mike Dunn, all the, all these army or Marine, all these, all these war game experts came to this and they said, okay, here's what we need to do. We need to start the lowest level privates going into basic training. Let's get them into war gaming. Cadets going through rltc, get them into war gaming. And then every course that they attend going up through their career, there should be war gaming.
This was in 2014.
None of that is happening. What I told the colonel is it's 0 or 100.
He's a really big advocate for war gaming. He's 100.
He may not be the best war gamer, but he is one of the biggest advocates out there for it.
The next 06 that comes in could be a zero.
And that means I'm back to ground zero, which means we don't do war gaming or we don't try to give war gaming to the same community for at least another two years.
That's what's going on in the Army. That's not what's going on in the Marines.
The Air Force is doing a fairly good job with the army itself. Can't get past. You want me to roll dice. That's what I hear all the time. How is that going to make me a better leader by rolling dice? But I'll tell you, every time I gave a pair of dice, be it a matrix game or this game, to a general officer, they don't want to let go of the dice.
But does it make them a proponent of war game? No, it stops right there.
So my pessimistic view is I don't see war gaming, at least in the near term, getting any better for the Army. And so what I really believe is it's got to start at the academics.
It's got to start with the universities.
I work with William and Mary. Right now we're getting ready for a war game that's going to take place in March. And I work with them every week and I talk with them and it's a great community.
More colleges are now Doing this. They're creating their own war game and labs and I think having them reach out and work with a T2 comm and I know William and Mary does, that's where it's going to grow. It's going to grow from the relationships with these universities or ROTC units, having a relationship with army units. Because these organizations, the academic units, they don't want these large digital exercises they can't afford for them. They need board games. They need either a seminar type board game, a matrix war game or a board game. But they also need the expertise that comes from Army.
[00:43:01] Speaker C: That's pretty dire. But I think, I think if I can find, you know, sort of a glimmer of hope out of that, it's that you did mention, you know, the Air Force is doing it, the Marines are doing it, so it can be done.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: A lot of war gaming that already goes on during mdmp, you'll see in the five shop of whatever echelon you want to talk about.
And you'll usually have maybe an ORSA or a research analyst that is leading that.
And some of the challenges is getting those outputs from that mission analysis into the rest of MDMP to provide the commanders with those best courses of action, those recommendations.
Again, sometimes commanders have a very directed course of action, but as subordinates, as staff, you still owe the boss the mission analysis. You don't just, we can't just take that coa and say, okay, boss said, well, yeah, but you still, you still need to do the analysis. Because there may be something that wasn't considered. There may be something that, because of biases, was left out of the thinking process.
And we've all studied the power of biases in, in many different areas and sometimes that could cloud judgment. So you need somebody to be that naysayer. You need somebody to say, hey boss. Yep, Roger. We're going to go do this. We're going to go, you know, north.
However, this lateral route or this other aspect of the battlefield was not mentioned. And we think this is going to detrimentally affect us. I've challenged everyone that I've worked with. Do not just take the fact that I'm a colonel, United States army, is that I know everything.
I expect you to challenge, respectfully, any decision I throw out there.
[00:44:42] Speaker C: Let's say people want to know more about sinews of war, want to get involved with it. How do they go about that? Do you guys have a roadshow with what, what's going on there?
[00:44:48] Speaker B: That would be really fun. I think I. So the, the best way would be to contact Joe or myself via email would probably be the, the fastest. We don't, we don't have our own separate website.
And then it's just a matter of we'll look at our calendars and see what, what's in the realm of the possible. 4 Either A We always want to start off with a virtual discussion. How can we help you? What are your training requirements? And then you know, can you come to Fort Lee or are we able to go to you and definitely have an open conversation? We, we've learned as simulations officers one of the first things we're taught is never say no. Always try to get to yes. Always think of yourself as a utility infielder, not a left handed relief pitcher. So if a commander is coming to us says hey, we're getting ready to do a major exercise and we need a little bit more help, what can you do for us?
Then you know, we'll have that conversation. We welcome those engagements because we know having seen in previous environments where sustainers don't always get the same level of training that they like, we have some tools where we can help. And then just a matter of looking at the calendar.
[00:45:51] Speaker C: Well, before we let you go, we want to get to these rapid fire questions because these are the most fun after we have a meaningful and in depth conversation about things that are actually related to the work we do. Now we want to know a little bit about you guys and the way you think.
So as always, these are asked to every guest and they're always the same. And we'll start with Joe and then we'll go to you, Colonel Barnett. So what technology or trend keeps you up at night? And it doesn't have to be wargaming related. It can be but doesn't have to.
[00:46:13] Speaker A: Be AI is the biggest one because I can't open up my Facebook and understand that everything on there is correct. I can't watch a video and not think that it's been not been doctored. So I can't trust at least 50% of what I'm reading. And that is a stat. I read just yesterday about what how many bots are out there and they predict it's 50% of all social media out there bots and it's all AI driven. That's what keeps me up at night.
[00:46:39] Speaker C: Colonel Barnett.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: So it's going to start off analog would be the loss of actual books because everything is so digitized and then the reliance that that digital source is a representation of that original analog source.
When you're writing a paper, you. You're required to pull as many original sources and you have to cite them. So you had to go to a library virtually or live and touch that resource digitization allows because I grew up on Napster and the amount of recycling or changing of things, content can get changed and if it's not cited properly, you could inadvertently make the wrong conclusions based off of somebody else's work and it wasn't the original source. So that would be the integrity of the data that we're getting at, which feeds into what Joe said about the, you know, half of what we find out there is bots.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:36] Speaker C: That makes me think of as we were talking about earlier, that they're re releasing the original version, the theatrical version of Star wars in 2027 because there have been so many changes to it. Who knows how many people have seen the. The actual original that that aired in 1977?
[00:47:49] Speaker B: I did.
[00:47:51] Speaker C: So our next question. What's something about you that most people might not know that you're willing to share to all of our podcast listeners?
[00:47:57] Speaker A: I'm not a true war gamer.
[00:47:59] Speaker C: Ah, that is surprising.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: I don't play a lot of board games in my free time.
I enjoyed building Sinners of War. I enjoyed building a matrix game called First Contact.
But on my spare time, I'm more into video games. Nice slow ones now because I don't have the reflexes anymore. But things like Civilization 6, which is now Civ 7, those are my type of games now. And the other thing I'll share is I'm writing a book. Oh, cool.
[00:48:28] Speaker C: Is it about anything related to this or is it.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: It's about Dungeons and Dragons.
It's fantasy.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:48:35] Speaker C: Very cool. You know, speaking of playing slower games now, a buddy of mine sent me a video of him playing Battlefield 6.
And I watched it and I had to ask him, I said, is that like real speed? And he said, yeah. And I said, that is way too fast for me. It was unbelievable.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: Can't play those anymore. Yeah.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Colonel Barnett.
[00:48:53] Speaker B: So completely way off the reservation. I wrote this down as we were driving, having had to move quite a few times throughout my career. One of the things we always did at our new residence was plant a vegetable garden or flowers. So one of the things that I gravitated towards was actually planting roses.
So I will, wherever I can, whenever I can. I'll have a small stand of hybrid tea roses. So that's my. That's my go to.
[00:49:19] Speaker C: So you're set up every Valentine's Day. Just about good to go. That's awesome.
[00:49:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:49:23] Speaker C: I got to. I got to write that down.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And the hybrid teas are the ones that usually have the best aromas. They. They do both. They look good and they smell good.
[00:49:31] Speaker C: All right, and last question. And we. We hinted at some movies before this, but what's your favorite movie?
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Probably one that he's probably only heard of, and it's called Taps, I think.
[00:49:42] Speaker C: I've heard of that was Tom Cruise.
[00:49:44] Speaker A: Tom Cruise.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Sean Penn.
[00:49:47] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: George C. Scott.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Okay. It resonated with me at that age because it was about a group of young kids who are at a military academy, and that military academy was being closed, and so they took it upon themselves to seize this military academy and hold it by all means, until the protagonist of the movie understood that holding something by all means probably isn't the best idea. And so it resonated with me.
[00:50:14] Speaker C: Excellent, sir.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: Jaws, wonderful. It's the struggle of, you know, human struggle against nature. And, you know, in the army, we are. It's a people. This is a people business. And there are struggles every day, whether they're internal struggles, external struggles, but we're always having some type of a conflict. Some are positive conflicts, some are. Are not. But Jaws, for me, has been one of those movies that I could watch it anytime it pops up on the TV or throw the dvd.
[00:50:44] Speaker C: And that's a movie I grew up on. I saw it in theaters for the 40th anniversary. I think this year is the 50th, because it's 75, but I didn't catch it in theaters again. But, yeah, that movie means a lot to me too. Very good. Have you seen either of those?
[00:50:57] Speaker D: I was gonna say I haven't seen either of those. A lot of the times I have not seen the movies that are.
That people say on this podcast, so.
[00:51:06] Speaker C: But we're trying to help.
[00:51:07] Speaker D: Really need to branch out.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Well, I was gonna say frozen.
[00:51:12] Speaker B: 70, 1975 was a good year for movies. So if you. If you want to go back into the wayback Machine, you can find a. An extensive list because they'll all be doing their 50th anniversary.
[00:51:22] Speaker C: That's true.
[00:51:23] Speaker D: Jaws is on the list, though, because I know Matt loves that movie. So it is.
[00:51:27] Speaker C: She has started to see more classic movies. The more and more she's. She's been working with.
[00:51:32] Speaker B: The Rocky Horror Picture show is also in that same category.
[00:51:35] Speaker D: I have seen that movie, too.
[00:51:38] Speaker C: Did you see it, like a midnight showing in Richmond or something? So she's been to the real one.
[00:51:42] Speaker D: I've been to like the actual one.
[00:51:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:44] Speaker D: Where people are. There's.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: How many times have you seen written out?
[00:51:47] Speaker D: Just a couple. Like maybe like two or three. So not too many. There's actually a board game of Rocky Horror Picture show that I own too.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Really?
[00:51:55] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Did not know that.
[00:51:56] Speaker C: All right, well, hey, this has been fantastic. We really appreciate you guys coming down here because we're doing this in person. We normally record virtually, but we always love it when people are around that we can come in and sit. Sit around the table and talk to you. And we've been following Joe for a while now because Joe was at our Georgetown wargaming conference and presented for us. But we're always trying to keep our head into what. What the war gaming community is doing and how we can help propel that and let people know about it. So we appreciate you coming down here. Sinews of War is the game.
Reach out to us or reach out to the gentleman here if you want to get in touch with them and maybe they can bring it to you and you guys can play it. So. Colonel Barnett, Joe Crescent, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: Been our pleasure.
[00:52:34] Speaker C: Thanks for listening to the Convergence. I'd like to thank our guests, Colonel Mike Barnett and Mr. Joe Cretian.
You can connect with us on social media, me, madsci, and don't forget to visit and subscribe to the blog the Mad Scientist Laboratory.
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