How to Design War Games to Answer Research Questions

Abstract

In war gaming, to produce data for analysis, the game itself and the forms of data extraction must be designed to give outputs conveniently usable in answering the specific research questions that the game seeks to solve. This paper presents methods developed with this purpose in mind and employed in a rigidly-assessed, manually-played war game. With a brief historical sketch of the uses of war gaming from the 19th century to the present as background, present war games are classified into three groups, manual, computer-assisted, and computer-programmed, and defined. The design of manually-played war games is then considered separately in the context of a laboratory research tool. Finally, the application of the design requirements is illustrated by a description of TACSPIEL, RAC's division level war game.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1963
Accession Number
ADP014627

Entities

People

  • William L. Pierce

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Sensors
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Defense
  • Aircrafts
  • Ammunition
  • Armored Vehicles
  • Artillery
  • Artillery Fire
  • Battles
  • Casualties
  • Combat Vehicles
  • Experimental Design
  • Military Research
  • Reconnaissance
  • Simulations
  • Surveillance
  • Vehicles
  • War Games
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Game Theory.
  • Systems Analysis and Design