Why this Marine general says it's okay to lose your wargame
Marine leaders emphasize wargaming to foster learning and adaptability in troops.
Wargaming helps Marines understand adversary tactics and adapt to emerging technologies.
Marine leaders say it's important to embrace losing.
A Marine Corps general said this week that officers and troops can't shy away from wargaming, tough exercises in critical thinking.
They also can't be afraid to lose, he said.
"Why isn't everybody wargaming today, right now?" Brig. Gen. Matthew Tracy, the commanding general for the Corps' Education Command, asked Tuesday at the Sea, Air, and Space symposium, a big annual event for military and defense industry insiders.
"We know it's the best way to learn," Tracy said.
"We know they need to get some reps."
Some military leaders might be holding back from making wargaming more common because they fear losing in front of fellow Marines, including junior troops. It will take some bold leadership to help overcome fears of embarrassment, he said.
"We have to get down behind the weapon and show that it's okay to fail." That's key to leadership.
Thoughts of military wargames might bring to mind images of senior military officers clustered around a table with figurines representing maneuvering units. That's not wrong. Such games are still important for wargaming.
But nowadays, wargames also come in boxes, on computers, and even in the form of plain flash cards. Some are also played in the field with red and blue teams and aggressor squadrons.
They're for all ranks, but not as commonplace as some would like to see. Leaders like Tracy don't just want to see colonels sweating through these mental gymnastics. They also want to see the trigger-pullers at the lowest tactical levels involved.
At the symposium, a young Marine officer demonstrated the latest computer-based wargame while nearby cadets from the Naval Academy played an almost human-size version of a game that resembled the classic board game "Battleship."
Other games included increasingly complex elements for troops to consider, such as friendly and enemy nations' economic and diplomatic concerns, or how another country's civilians might react to the presence of US troops.
"When you have the time to think, it gives you the muscle memory about things to consider," explained retired Marine Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds. She previously led the service's Cyber Command and also participated in Tuesday's event.
According to Reynolds, wargaming "improves your ability to understand adversary tactics and capabilities."
The tests force players to constantly check their assumptions about what's happening on the battlefield, she said, making it an ideal environment for learning by failure.
"It's important that we lose when it's okay to lose," she said. Better at the table than in battle.
Amid the Corps' efforts to modernize for a great-power fight in the Pacific after decades of war in the Middle East, checking old assumptions is even more important.
"When you think about Marine Corps Force Design efforts, we're going to be in a more distributed laydown than ever before," Reynolds said, referring to the Corps' initiative to cut mainstays like tanks and sniper units to build a force for combat on the island chains in the Pacific.
The geography of the Pacific — with its remote islands and varying degrees of infrastructure availability — has had war planners spinning their wheels in recent years to discern what the logistics support for such a war might look like.
Wargaming has previously forced planners to confront uncomfortable realities about Pacific warfare. For the rank-and-file, it could help troops to grapple with other emerging issues, like drone warfare and advancements in electronic warfare.
"The ability to teach at the lowest levels, not just what the capability of these emerging technologies can do, but how to properly employ it," makes wargaming more critical, Reynolds said, especially for the most junior ranks.
The notoriously rigid Marine Corps is known for favoring decentralized command structures to foster decision-making in the most junior ranks.
The idea is that when far removed from high-ranking leadership in combat, even the most junior enlisted troops can understand what's going on and make sound decisions to lead their small squads effectively.
"Each year's wargaming efforts should surpass the last in complexity, challenge, and effectiveness," Tracy told Business Insider in an email after the symposium.
Part of the complexity that he envisions for thornier gaming could come in the form of AI-assisted games.
By including AI in wargaming scenarios, "you can look at a whole lot more potential outcomes, and you can look at them a whole lot faster," said Steven Wills, who moderated Tuesday's event and who serves as a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses.
"Being able to examine a wider problem set, the thought is that we can think and operate faster than the bad guys and get ahead of their decision-making." Good wargaming, he explained, exposes unforeseen consequences of decision-making, setting off more complex chains of events.
But it doesn't give a participant a road map for winning.
"It lets you play through a whole lot of different outcomes so that when you think about an actual fight, you have an idea of what the outcomes might or could be," Wills said.
"It's all about trying to get you to think about the problem."
But thinking about those problems is going to take a level of vulnerability from Marine leaders, Tracy said.
"Creating a culture of wargaming starts at the highest levels, where leaders set the example by participating directly, making themselves vulnerable, and demonstrating a willingness to lose in order to learn," he told BI.
If you're always winning, you aren't being challenged, Reynolds explained. "It's okay to fail in a safe place that teaches growth."
"It teaches the importance of being a learning organization," she said. "You don't learn if you constantly win."
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