When War Games Go Digital
BOOK REVIEW: Cyber Wargaming: Research and Education for Security in a Dangerous Digital World
By Frank L. Smith III, Nina A. Kollars, and Benjamin H. Schechter, editors / Georgetown University Press
Reviewed by: James Voorhees
The Reviewer — James Voorhees is a cyber analyst with General Dynamics. He has extensive experience as an analyst and engineer working on cybersecurity, mostly for Federal agencies, and has been a judge several times in the Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge. He has a PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is the author of Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference.
REVIEW — Games, often played simply for fun, have long been used to shed light on conflict. Wargames held at the Naval War College before World War II influenced US strategy during the war, challenging the assumption that a war with Japan would be decided by a battle between fleets and leading to the island-hopping campaign. Cyber wargames held by the Defense Department (DoD) since 1991 have influenced the development of the cyber warfare doctrine and capabilities of the U.S. government. Their use and influence have grown since 2015 at the behest of DoD.
Frank L. Smith III, Nina A. Kollars, and Benjamin H. Schechter, three scholars associated with the Naval War College, have collected essays from authors who have helped to create cyber wargames. In their book, Cyber Wargaming: Research and Education for Security in a Dangerous Digital World, they paint a picture of how games are being developed and how they provide insight into problems that cyber warfare poses for national security.
The games they describe focus on the human dimension of cybersecurity, that is, on how people make decisions about cyber conflict, what those decisions are, and how they make them. The games do not focus on the technical aspects of cyber defense, which are the subjects of the capture-the-flag games and red-team exercises that have become commonplace.
An opening chapter sets out a framework for analyzing wargames based on three qualities that game designers must balance, a wargamer’s trilemma. These are analytical utility, contextual realism, and engaging play. There are tradeoffs between all three. For example, a game that is too complex may mirror reality but obscure cause and effect, making it useless for analysis. A game that is too simple may make analysis easy but bear too little relation to the real world to make the conclusions useful. Either extreme can leave the player twiddling thumbs, bored, with little invested in playing.
The volume divides the games into those designed for research and games designed to educate, though the distinction is not always clearcut. Arguably, all these games both teach and provide insight into the problems the players are asked to solve. They vary widely in objectives, the people asked to play, and the format chosen.
The objectives of the games are the key to their design. The 2017 Navy-Private Sector Critical Infrastructure Wargame brought civilian and military players together to examine when and how DoD would be drawn into an attack on critical infrastructure in the private sector. The International Crisis War Game examined the influence of cyber operations on nuclear stability, and Island Intercept played out a conflict over Taiwan. A game at the Army War College was designed to have students learn about military doctrine as put forward in Joint Publication 3-12, Cyberspace Operations.
Other games sought answers to more general questions, like the effects of limits on information and communications in cyber conflict, or how restraints on the resources and time needed to develop cyber capabilities change cyber conflict. Other games had C-suite executives consider cyber resilience. A team at the Naval War College simply wanted to develop a game to teach students how cybered conflict plays out.
The players in the games vary greatly in both background and experience. The Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is played by college students. Other games take students from the war colleges. Some games are designed for military officers or civilian executives, government and private, or both. Some players have a strong technical background, others have none.
The chosen formats range from tabletop exercises to country-wide simulations. The Naval War College’s Cyber Maritime Common Defense is a computer game akin to the commercial video games that have become ubiquitous. Island Intercept and Army War College’s game about doctrine are board games. Some games are played over days, others in hours. Utilities and other companies across the country take part in GridEx, which runs scenarios of cyberattacks against the electrical grid.
Not all the games described have been successful, and the authors willingly present lessons to be learned after a design had to be changed or simply failed. For example, the National Defense University found that Pinnacle Protagonist needed a way to make an actor’s moves anonymous and struggled before finding a way to do it. One game from the Naval War College looked at attacks on critical infrastructure but ran into problems stemming from the dynamics of small groups, showing the importance of those dynamics.
Games can extend the role of cyber well beyond the boundaries ordinarily given to the domain. Some of the games included physical attacks as well as pure cyber-attacks across a network. Two games included influence operations, a rarity in U.S considerations of cyber. Recent scenarios of the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge have focused on cybercurrency and spyware.
The primary goals that Smith, Kollars, and Schechter want to achieve with Cyber Wargaming are to show that wargames can improve decision-making about cyber and other emergent technologies, to provide examples of games recently played, and to let the designers talk about what they tried to do and how they went about it. Cyber Wargaming succeeds in that. Their hope is that the book inspires readers to play cyber wargames and take game design to the next level. There is much to be gained if they do.
Cyber Wargaming earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
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