Beyond the Black Box: An Assessment of Strategic War Gaming

Abstract

War games are currently enjoying a revival of interest and popularity within the American defense community. Strategists, analysts, and policy-makers alike are turning more and more to gaming as a medium for education, planning and discovery. This thesis investigates the nature, utility, and limitations of strategic-level war gaming as a tool for strategic planning and international negotiations. It offers a perspective on gaming different (yet complementary) to that of operations research: war games are viewed as sources of synthetic history, to be studied and interpreted by historical-type methods. Theses.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1987
Accession Number
ADA198655

Entities

People

  • Arthur S. Mobley Jr.

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Combat Simulations
  • Computer Simulations
  • Contingency Operations (Military)
  • Game Theory
  • Geography
  • Human Behavior
  • International Organizations
  • International Relations
  • Mathematical Models
  • Military Science
  • National Security
  • Operations Research
  • Recreation
  • Second World War
  • Students
  • War Colleges
  • War Games

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Game Theory.
  • Strategic Security Studies