Testing Their Mettle

Marine Corps war gamers are exploring new concepts for fighting the global war on terrorism.

In a tidy, red-brick building on the well-manicured grounds of the Marine Corps Base at Quantico about 30 miles south of the Pentagon, Frank E. Jordan III gets paid to spend his days doing what any red-blooded teenage boy could only dream of doing: He plays war games.

Of course, if the average teenager understood the months of intensive planning required for organizing, executing and then analyzing one of the Marine Corps' war games, it might not seem like so much fun.

In fact, it is deadly serious work. Jordan, director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's war-gaming division, is exploring how new operating concepts, organizational designs and equipment might be put to effective use in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where Marines are battling insurgents and attempting to build goodwill with the local population.

"War-gaming provides an exploratory process and mechanism for looking at a broad range of issues and operational problems," says Jordan. While every version is unique, Marine Corps war games typically involve 150 to 250 people, most of whom are playing for what is dubbed the blue team, which represents U.S. forces, the red team, representing enemy forces, or the green team, other players who could potentially affect the outcome of military conflict-other U.S. agencies, such as the State Department, the CIA or the Agency for International Development; members of the media; representatives of foreign governments; and others. "We try to cast the net as widely as we can," he says.

Players are briefed extensively in advance about their roles, capabilities and the circumstances under which they will play. The game itself usually lasts several days, after which designers and observers spend weeks dissecting it.

Military war games, unlike military exercises, don't usually involve actual combat troops and equipment. "In relative terms, it's fairly inexpensive," says Jordan. "It replicates decision-making conditions without using troops and full-up staff and equipment you would have in a real-world operation."

Thus, war-gaming is "very useful for assessing alternatives-whether they be policy alternatives, operational courses of action or capabilities," Jordan says.

George Akst, senior analyst at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, which is the Warfighting Lab's parent organization, and the science and technology adviser to commanding general Lt. Gen. James M. Mattis, says war-gaming, when done well, is a useful tool. "From my perspective, war-gaming provides the ability to explore current and future concepts, equipment, etc., in a way that provides insight into how they might play out in a given scenario," Akst says. "You need to ensure that it's appropriately designed so you're not gaming it or trying to force some particular outcome. But I think when done properly you can gain some useful insight into some of the issues you're trying to investigate."

Expeditionary Warrior

One of the primary war games the Marine Corps conducts annually is Expeditionary Warrior, required under Title X, which dictates the services' responsibilities for organizing, training and equipping forces. Expeditionary Warrior is a classified game, not because the war-fighting concepts themselves are Top Secret, but the scenarios executed in the game are based on real-world problems the military is engaged in or expects could happen. Expeditionary Warrior 05, conducted last December, for example, involved U.S. intervention in a nuclear-capable "failed state." The gamers explored a new operational concept the Marine Corps is developing, called distributed operations.

"The impetus to classify doesn't come from a specific thing we're talking about in the game generally, as much as the scenario, where you're looking at a specific country or a specific set of capabilities that sometimes could [affect] the classification of the game," says Shelly Amundson, the war-gaming division's information management officer. "It's usually not the thing that we're talking about that's classified, it's the situation or perspective that we're using to examine it that is the thing that makes it classified."

In April, the Marine Corps published "A Concept for Distributed Operations," an eight-page paper outlining the proposed model for future combat operations. Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Marine Corps commandant, explains in an introduction to the paper, "As we meet the irregular challenges of small wars, 'A Concept for Distributed Operations' is intended to promote discussion and to generate ideas for specific combat development initiatives . . . [the paper] describes an operating approach that requires new ways to educate and train our Marines and that guides us in the use of emerging technologies."

The concept involves enhancing the combat capabilities of small units, whose actions are to be coordinated throughout the battle space by a robust command and control network. It sounds simple, but is in fact enormously complex. Decision-making authority in combat would be distributed across a wide number of junior leaders. According to the paper: "Maneuver units will operate in disaggregated fashion with companies, platoons and even squads dispersed beyond the normal range of mutually supporting organic direct fires but linked through a command and control network. . . . Units will possess the capability to rapidly re-aggregate in order to exploit fleeting opportunities and to reinforce or support another unit in need."

The implications for the Marine Corps training and education system are enormous. The concept requires that infantry squad leaders will have "a broad understanding of command and control systems, the intelligence cycle, fire support coordination, logistics and other disciplines, in which extensive knowledge has been principally the domain of Marines far more senior. Further, we will provide junior leaders additional technical skills that will enable them to perform combat tasks normally accomplished at higher levels of command. Marines at the infantry squad level, for example, will be trained to direct all forms of supporting arms, provide terminal guidance for rotary wing and tilt-rotor aircraft, perform casualty evacuation, maintain access to high-level communications networks, and other function, without the aid of the specialists typically found at higher levels of command."

Expeditionary Warrior 05 explored the use of distributed operations in the failed-state scenario across four areas central to the global war on terrorism- counterproliferation, conventional combat operations, counterterrorism and stability, and support operations-ensuring civil order and that the population has water and electricity and the like.

"To date, Expeditionary Warrior has addressed issues of relatively near-term significance," says Jordan. "We haven't gone out to 2025. I'm not sure the value of that. Who knows what the world is going to look like in 2025?"

Expeditionary Warrior 06, scheduled to take place in January, will examine counterinsurgency operations. Earlier games focused on the relationship between preemptive operations in the global war on terrorism, as articulated in the National Security Strategy, and coordination between forward-deployed Marine units and special operations forces.

In 2002, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushing for greater interoperability between regular military forces and special operations forces, the Marine Corps and special operations command signed a memorandum of agreement to work together more closely. The Marine Corps has expeditionary units, which have some special operations capabilities, so it made sense that they combine forces for some missions, says Maj. Joseph Gigliotti, a pilot who served with Task Force Tarawa during the invasion of Iraq and is now the action officer responsible for running the Expeditionary Warrior game.

Because special operations forces have been in such high demand in Afghanistan and Iraq it is important to find ways to relieve the pressure on them, Gigliotti says. The game was designed to gain insight into how each organization operated, how they used air assets, how they could share air assets, and more. "Everybody understands that there is a finite number of resources being increasingly tapped," he says. "We wanted to see what we can do for one another in terms of our technologies, communications."

Three-Block War

In May, the Marine Corps and U.S. Joint Forces Command co-sponsored a five-day war game called Joint Urban Warrior 05. The scenario was Baghdad, April 9, 2003, prior to the mass looting that destroyed so much of the country, along with American hopes of a quick withdrawal. In the scenario, a combined task force including contingents from the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada and Australia conducted stability operations. One of the war game's objectives was to continue to develop "political-end state planning first" as the driving factor in joint, combined and interagency urban campaign planning.

There were more than 250 participants in Joint Urban Warrior 05, which sought to frame the operation in the context of what the Marines call the three-block war, a phrase used by former Gen. Charles C. Krulak, Marine Corps commandant in the 1990s, to describe the challenge of having to simultaneously conduct combat, provide humanitarian aid and run stability operations in the same geographical area.

"The three-block war . . . also emphasizes the transitions among [the phases] and stresses the point that forces may go back and forth. It's all potentially going on at the same time," says Jordan. "We don't see the improved conduct of urban operations predominately in technological terms." He adds, "Technology is important, capabilities are important; however, concepts for conducting complex urban operations, how you may organize differently to do them, are just as important. The idea is to create a synergy between those three: operational concepts, organization and technologies. If you can synergize those well you will get something on the other end that is more than the sum of the three parts."

The Marines are especially keen on improving interagency cooperation, in part because when the State Department, the Agency for International Development and the military fail to work together effectively, things on the ground tend to fall apart and troops find themselves responding to crises that might have been avoided.

To explore the efficacy of alternative approaches to a particular problem, war game leaders often create more than one blue team and assign them different scenarios, which might be set in different places or even different time periods. "Two blue teams might be given two different scenarios to play," says Gigliotti. "A concept, ideally, should be applicable anywhere. You should be able to do it out in the desert or in the littoral. Just to test the continuity of that concept, we might give one cell a South American problem or scenario, and another cell a scenario in Asia."

Gaming the Game

The utility of any war game depends on how well it is designed and on the players. In particular, the red team players can make or break a game. "We like to have an interactive red team that is actually fighting blue, because we are actually fighting against intelligent enemies. You want to try to replicate that degree of realism to the greatest extent that you can," says Jordan.

At the same time, an overly ambitious red team can end a war game before anything of value is learned, for instance, by detonating a nuclear bomb (that is if the red team is playing an enemy believed to have nuclear capabilities). It's a difficult balance to strike. While in some games the red team commander is free to play the game however he likes, within the capabilities he has been assigned, in other games, red is restricted so game designers can ensure they will get to try out the concepts they designed the game to test.

To ensure that designers are not gaming their own game, Gigliotti says it is essential that they vet their scenarios with outside experts who have no vested interest in the outcome. Still, striking the right balance between red team freedom and control can be difficult. "It's a fundamental problem in this business," Jordan says.

It's a problem that came to a head during the largest, most expensive war game ever conducted by any military organization. After two years of planning, Joint Forces Command staged Millennium Challenge 02, a $250 million three-week game in the summer of 2002 that included live-fire exercises and more than 13,000 players. The classified game was set in a fictitious country in the Middle East.

Joint Forces Command officials had billed the game as central to military transformation. The red team commander was retired Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, who was head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in 1997. Van Riper is a frequent red team commander in military war games and widely known as a formidable, if somewhat controversial, opponent. Using low-tech means-motorcycle couriers-he managed to thwart blue team's satellite-based intelligence capabilities. He launched a successful attack against the Navy using small boats and cruise missiles. To move planes without giving away his position he avoided radio traffic between pilots and air traffic controllers and relied instead on a lighting system pioneered during World War II.

When Millennium Challenge 02 game designers tried to rein in Van Riper after he sent half the blue team's fleet to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, he quit the game in frustration. He told Army Times that the game was rigged to validate joint warfighting concepts the Pentagon was pushing.

"If you have a preconceived notion of exactly what you want to come out of a war game, and you design the war game to try to achieve that, you're not getting value out of that war game," says the Combat Development Command's Akst. "On the other hand, if you want to gain insight into particular types of operations and something happens in the war game that takes away the ability to gain that insight-let's say red [team] drops a nuclear weapon and everyone's dead, end of game-that opportunity is lost."

"I think Millennium Challenge was an example in which there was a tension between those two things. The idea is to strike a balance between totally gaming it and having some unusual occurrence happen that does not enable you to gain those insights. It is a judgment call. There is no absolute right or wrong answer. War games are not intended to be predictive."

In Expeditionary Warrior 05, the red team country had a nuclear weapon, Gigliotti says. Nonetheless, the red team was not allowed to use it. "We didn't want a nuclear explosion going off. We had four days and very specific areas we wanted to look at for distributed operations. A nuclear detonation of any kind is going to immediately turn everyone's efforts toward something very appropriate-consequence management." But the objective of the game was not to explore consequence management following a nuclear explosion. "Somebody should have those objectives-but they weren't our objectives," Gigliotti says.