Andrew Mara, Kelly Diaz and Kevin Mather
Twenty years ago, an explosion occurred in professional baseball as traditional baseball scouts — relying on decades of personal experience — collided with data scientists bringing new approaches and technology into the evaluation of baseball players. There were raucous debates on which approach would reign supreme: human expertise or numbers and statistics? We now know that neither approach would win out; the best baseball teams across the major leagues rely on a mix of human expertise and advanced statistics to provide the most complete assessment of talent.
Fast forward to today and a similar tension has formed in the field of defense wargaming, where traditional wargamers — relying on years of expertise and bespoke game designs — are coming to grips with rapid advances in modeling and simulation and artificial intelligence. At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, we have been living and breathing that tension as we have worked to incorporate generative AI and modeling and simulation into defense wargaming. The results of that work? We don’t think we need a 20-year debate.
Just like in baseball, the future of wargaming lies in a marriage of modeling and simulation, human expertise and AI. To understand why wargaming is having its “Moneyball” moment, you have to first unpack what makes traditional wargaming so valuable. Wargaming is fundamentally about human decision-making, but its magic is in the experiential learning opportunities the games provide. War is never simple. There is no “all-seeing eye” that provides perfect information. Hence, wargaming explores how humans make decisions in imperfect scenarios, and how other humans respond to those decisions.
Armies of psychologists have spent entire careers attempting to understand human decision-making. It’s not easy to boil down to numbers and equations. Moreover, it’s conveyed through conversation, discussion and debate, something that technology has yet to harness or replicate. Wargames have served as an indispensable tool in this exploration. They provide a way to exercise the decision-making process, explore why choices were made and determine what the implications might be. However, being human-centric isn’t always efficient. Wargames often require months of planning by experienced wargamers who deeply understand the defense issues at play.
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