Project Details
Among the most important defense and national security challenges today are those posed by asymmetric threats, which come into being when adversaries have uneven power and resources. In such circumstances, the weaker power depends on strategies that exploit weaknesses in the superior power’s society and institutions. Terrorists, guerrillas, insurgents, militias, and paramilitaries are examples, using irregular methods and unconventional or improvised weapons to achieve their aims. But asymmetric methods and weapons are also used by smaller or weaker states against larger or stronger ones, and approaches have widened to include information operations, influence campaigns, grey zone warfare, and civilian-military resistance. National security decision makers and the wargaming community are well aware of these challenges, but navigating the complex social dynamics at play poses a clear challenge: wargames that do not accurately represent social complexity risk teaching the wrong lessons, and policies implemented without an adequate appreciation of complexity risk failing catastrophically.
The Wargaming, Social Complexity, and Asymmetric Threats Project was motivated both by the challenge of modeling human behavior in ways that are useful to decision makers and wargamers, and by the methodological and institutional disconnects between policy, wargaming, M&S, AI, and social complexity research. A major goal of the project has been to explore cross-disciplinary opportunities to inform the fundamental science and practice of wargaming while providing insights that might be useful as well to national security decision makers and to experts and practitioners of what we term “MAISC” (pronounced “mask”): modeling & simulation and artificial intelligence on topics of social complexity.
In practice, the study focused on two overlapping areas: the state of the art in methods for studying and navigating social complexity in general; and the practices and capabilities of professional defense and national security wargaming as they relate to the forms of complex social dynamics common in asymmetric threats and other conflicts today. The findings and recommendations have implications for both the effectiveness and of national security decision making and, ultimately, the cost-effectiveness of finding solutions and implementing policies and operations that achieve objectives without unwanted and unintended consequences.
The first four findings correspond to questions about social complexity and why institutions have difficulty solving complex problems. The next four findings relate to the wargaming community of practice and some key dynamics driving its use of emerging technology, artificial intelligence, and modeling and simulation tools. The study identifies a provisional set of best practices for the use of such tools across all phases of the wargaming lifecycle. The findings are as follows:
Social Complexity Findings:
- Problem-solving institutions are not systematically using even a fraction of the scores of tools and methods that exist for understanding complex problems or identifying feasible paths to durable change.
- Those tools and methods are also not being used to understand how the institutions themselves could be more effectively organized to mobilize the “systemic depth” needed to address complex problems.
- Those methods themselves are mutually unintelligible and not being used in ways that would enable their users to discover deeper insights into complex social dynamics and system change.
- Even if we use and connect today’s tools to identify and implement deep solutions, too much remains unknown about how human systems work and some social dynamics might be fundamentally—not just currently—unknowable.
Wargaming Findings:
- Three core values shape the behavior and decisions of the wargaming community: accuracy, creativity, and improvement.
- The operating environment of wargaming is competitive, high-stakes, and deeply shaped by U.S. defense culture; these characteristics shapes wargamers’ opinions, decisions, practices, and values.
- Wargaming is expanding beyond defense into crisis management, public health, business strategy, and peace gaming, but its identity and definition remain unsettled.
- Emerging tech is cautiously supported, but wargamers do not want “AI for everything” or for modeling and simulation to replace human-centered wargaming. Wargamers’ attitude toward emerging tech is driven by their values: accuracy is non-negotiable, creativity requires “keeping the human in wargaming,” and improvement favors technology that supports specific capabilities for specific stages of the wargaming lifecycle.
The project employed multi-methods research on social complexity, wargaming, and the overlap between them via interviews, workshops, literature reviews, ethnography, modeling, prototyping, epistemology, and platform development (ICONSnet). The research team conducted multiple literature reviews, a literature citation analysis, an analysis of government funding for wargaming, informal observations at wargaming conferences, semi-structured interviews, practical tests of AI and other tools in modeling pipelines, tests of methods to translate between wargames and models of complex social behavior, and stress-tests of a draft of best practices in wargaming.
More than 30 researchers at UMD contributed directly to the study, and more than a hundred experts were engaged by staff and collaborators via interviews and cross-disciplinary workshops. The study produced almost three dozen papers, reports, briefs, models, and simulations, as well as the ICONSnet Innovation Laboratory, a human-in-the-loop simulation and integration research platform.