By Peter Bacon
Best Defense department of video reality

Video games have somewhat of a bad reputation today: individuals have attacked games for their supposed contribution to obscenity and their debilitation of male virtue. Despite these fears, scientists have identified some benefits from gaming, ranging from improved self-worth to augmented surgical skills. In the foreign policy arena, video games can and should serve as a powerful tool for educating civilian and military personnel about war and foreign affairs.

Video games can serve to help bolster America's glaring deficiency in one crucial discipline: history. Video games focused on war and IR provide refreshing bursts of information about often-overlooked leaders and wars. These games can offer descriptive backgrounds of leaders or events (e.g. Age of Empires' description of Genghis Khan or the Crusades). These methods can sometimes provide a deeper and more-engaging understanding of history than just a textbook or lecture.

A subgenre of games, so-called "serious" games, goes further by explicitly trying to educate gamers about historical or political issues. For example, Niall Ferguson in 2007 played the World War II serious game Making History and played out some of his WWII counterfactual scenarios, such as war breaking out over German seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938. His experience led him to conclude that his counterfactual historical scenarios "weren't as robust as [he] thought." As a result, Ferguson ended up advising this series. This episode, forcing critical re-examinations of events, anecdotally illustrates the range of useful educational experiences gleaned from games like Making History or other, current games such as Global Conflicts: Palestine or the future-themed Fate of the World: Tipping Point that can help civilians better understand history and policymaking, thereby making better choices when voting or arguing politics.

All of the above is great for civilians, but what about actual warfighters and policymakers? Games cannot finely simulate actual combat or crises, yet can provide training related to the planning and responses needed for tactical and strategic decisions. Indeed, military officers have engaged in a modern form of Kriegsspiel by using tactical warfare games for their training: for example, the Close Combat series proved so popular that in 2004 the developer released Close Combat: Marines explicitly for military training. Other games, such as the tank-simulator Steel Beasts or the situational training tools of WILL interactive, have been used by the military for realistic simulations of warfighting and decision-making.

Civilian practitioners, however, have not embraced gaming as readily as the military: while think tankers or civilian politicians outside the Pentagon may play games in an unofficial capacity, official efforts like the Woodrow Wilson Center's Serious Games Initiative have petered out. In stark contrast, DOD policy practitioners embrace video games even in non-kinetic planning: Michael Peck's article on a DOD budgeting game shows how policymakers can prepare for things as prosaic as the budget with games. Hopefully civilian policymakers in the future will use games, both serious, educational games and fun strategy games, to prepare for the decision-making necessary during times of crisis.

By "a Naval Officer Specializing in Information Ops"
Best Defense guest cyber columnist

Recently, cyber experts and journalists have taken a sensible step back from the heated passions that surrounded cyber security in the aftermath of Stuxnet, the world's first cyber weapon. Many well-informed individuals (including this correspondent) were initially swept up in the drama centered on the Iranian enrichment centrifuges, and were quick to herald the coming cyber wars. Others, less innocently, looked at cyber war as a new growth industry and contributed to the hype, sometimes promoting inefficient or unnecessary defensive policies. But now that clearer heads are prevailing, we must not discount the real and credible cyber threats that face the United States and other western powers. It is important that we do not under-react to Stuxnet, and dismiss valid cyber security concerns as an artificial product of media sensationalism or alarmist defense contractors (or both).

Of immediate concern is critical infrastructure, including both power grids and artificial constructs, such as the stock market. Both private researchers and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have warned that the adoption of smart grid technology has been progressing forward with inadequate emphasis on cyber security. Similarly, NASDAQ systems have been recently compromised, reigniting the congressional debate over the merits of new cyber security legislation. Nothing about these two areas of vulnerability is frivolous or "hyped"; it is well within the realm of possibility that a state actor (or a well funded private entity) could utilize cyber threats against these areas as leverage in conventional warfare or trade disputes. Moreover, these are areas of general consensus among cyber security experts, and should be addressed immediately. 

That said, not all advice from leading experts should be followed, especially from ones that are trying to drum up business for their consulting firms. For example, former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Michael McConnell (ret.) (who is now an executive vice-president at Booz Allen Hamilton), proposed the complete redesign of the internet - a task that could possibly be contracted out to his firm -- in a Washington Post op-ed.

Read on

I asked about the ethics of murdering a nuclear weapons scientist, and GSGF -- well, she's telling.

(HT to WOI)

The Army's chief thinker about the future dropped by the office yesterday to talk to CNASties about how his service is changing. It clearly is down with advances in information technology, which I would expect. "We're cranking out apps" for soldiers, reported Lt. Gen. Michael Vane. It is teaching soldiers differently, with, he said, less "sage on the stage" and more "guide on the side."

What the general had to say was almost all reassuring. The Army is thinking differently about leadership. It knows it needs to push down certain skills to lower levels. It also needs to develop leaders who can handle ambiguity, historically a weak point for American generals, according to a psychological survey I was looking at the other day.

My worry is that it is one thing to say it, but another to do it. Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, and people who know what they are talking about talk personnel policy. It's been nearly 10 years since 9/11, and I really don't see any significant changes in how the Army thinks about raising the force, training it, or promoting it. Why does there seem to be no relationship between command performance in combat and subsequent posts? I will believe that the Army is really responding to its strategic and operational shortcomings in Iraq and Afghanistan when I see changes in personnel policy. For example, why do generals appear to have tenure these days, with removal occurring only in response to zipper problems or other moral embarrassments? How about rewarding success and punishing failure? You can talk about change all you want, but until you change the personnel policies that create the internal incentive systems, you probably won't be able to institute sustainable change.

One of the most obscure and confusing echelons of command is the "Army" designation. It is above division and corps -- you remember, like "Patton's Third Army today grabbed more headlines." I mention it because I learned this morning that the U.S. Army (the "big Army") has designated 2nd Army its cybercommand, under the command of Maj. Gen. Rhett Hernandez, who frankly gives a damn.

(HT to MT)

By Matthew Acocella
Best Defense deputy congressional bureau chief

National Security Agency Director Lieutenant General Keith Alexander finally got the chance Thursday to appear before the Senate Armed Services committee for his confirmation hearing to head the Department of Defense's newly formed Cyber Command operation. If confirmed, General Alexander would concurrently run both the NSA and the Cyber Command.

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee clearly understand that the threat of cyber attacks is real and growing. (During his testimony, Alexander stated that hundreds of thousands of unauthorized probes are made each day into the Department of Defense's networks, and that he has seen a sharp spike in infiltrations and attacks since the beginning of this year.) Despite a six-month delay in holding a hearing, members of the committee expressed a sense of urgency that General Alexander get to work in standing up the command, which would be responsible for defending U.S. military networks against attacks and for launching retaliatory electronic counterattacks. Chairman Carl Levin attributed the significant delay in confirmation for Alexander to the still unresolved questions pertaining to the new command's mission, scope, and oversight.

One of the major themes of Thursday's hearing was questioning where the Cyber Command would fit within the traditional military chain of command and when and how Alexander and his team of computer whizzes would launch a counterattack. General Alexander admitted that we are in uncharted territory, but insisted that his command would defer to standing rules of engagement and that any order to retaliate would come from the Secretary of Defense and the President. In written responses to a Senate questionnaire obtained by the Associated Press ahead of his hearing, General Alexander asserted that commanders have clear rights to self-defense, and that while "this right has not been specifically established by legal precedent to apply to attacks in cyberspace, it is reasonable to assume that returning fire in cyberspace, as long as it complied with law of war principles... would be lawful."

Read on

These cats are thinking about air, sea, space and cyberspace warfare:

Admiral Gary Roughead, USN, Chief of Naval Operations
General Carrol H. Chandler, USAF, Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force
Chris Inglis, Deputy Director, National Security Agency
Norman R. Augustine, Renowned Aerospace Expert and Former Chairman of the Defense Science Board
Abraham M. Denmark, CNAS Fellow
January 26, 2010
1:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
The Newseum's Knight Conference Center

You can catch their act by signing up here. It's not everyday that you get the deputy director of the NSA to appear during the light of day.

This comment, posted the other day in response to the item about the book on the experiences of platoon leaders, wins the contest in which the prize was my extra copy of the platoon leaders' book. Mark M., please send me an e-mail so I can mail it to you. 

ThePL and majors' books

by MarkM on Fri,10/02/2009 - 12:27am

Tom:

Just as we now have asymmetric warfare, which is certainly evolving in both theory and practice, we also now have asymmetric journalism. The platoon leaders compilation you cite and the majors' book are part of this new, rich, stunning, sometimes-chaotic, multi-pronged way (largely over the Internet) to better understand the various environments of a war -- and it's available through mainstream and freelance media, soldier diaries, jihadi Web sites, policy journals, Osama audiotapes, blogs, embeds by reporters and photographers, YouTube clips from the field, academic papers, foreign media, left-right rants, NGO reports, political and military memoirs, accounts from released detainees, leaked documents from the ICRC, you name it.

Any one of these, taken alone, delivers the classic "drinking-straw view" ---that is, a view not inherently inaccurate but also narrow, tunneled and tightly focused. A corporal's view of a firefight, for example, is not necessarily the definitive one. Nor is a major's. Nor is an emebedded journalist's. It's a Rashomon world.

But asymmetric journalism --- or maybe it's asymmetric history --- offers great promise and a fuller accounting of what is transpiring in our wars, ourmilitary, our government and our lives.

I think he is on to something here. The claim journalism makes is, yeah, that other stuff is good, but we move around and talk to lots of people and get the overview, so we're not just looking through a soda straw. But the platoon leader book gets an overview of that experience better than any journalist can, I think.

Journalism also is being changed by technology. The old line in newspapers was that news was defined by those who owned printing presses -- that is, the rich. (The golden rule being that those who have the gold make the rules.) But nowadays everyone who has a laptop effectively can publish a daily newspaper.  

chris.corwin/flickr

Defense Secretary Gates's aircraft starts having mechanical problems when he is on the far side of the planet. Hmm.

"You say you need to be in Manila tonight, Mr. Secretary? Wow, tough deadline. Now, about those F-22s..."

Jerome_K/Flickr