The Cycle of Estimation & Action

 “War itself has been declared to be a game, and rightly so, for it has the game characteristic of the presence of an antagonist.”

— Captain W. McCarty Little, USN

I believe games of all kinds can teach us about ourselves and the world around us. Playing them can inform our lives, adjust our perspectives, and broaden our experiences. I’m also encouraged by the increasing trend of using games for learning — notably in professional military education, government consulting institutions, and even universities — and am sometimes dismayed when they aren’t used for learning in environments where they might inspire young people (such as libraries, museums, historical sites, and secondary education). The value of “estimating the situation” (and all that entails) remains one of the most important lessons games can teach us. It’s a phrase pioneered at the U.S. Naval War College that succinctly summarizes the process a player uses — knowingly or subconsciously — when making decisions in any game. It also applies to how we might make decisions in real life, though far too often we stumble along simply reacting to the flood of challenges inflicted upon us with little time for anything but reflexive instinct. We rarely have the time or clarity to step back in our hectic lives, consider immediate events or even the big picture, and rationally reflect on our situation and what we can do to affect it in our favor. We can take time to estimate the situation and form a course of action in a game; the more we do so, the more we train ourselves to use that approach to our benefit in everyday life.

The wargaming movement, nascent in Europe in the late 18th century, coalesced in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars in von Reisswitz’s kriegsspiel and its adoption by the Prussian officer corps as a training tool. When many attributed Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War to the use of kriegsspielen, other nations endeavored to develop and employ wargames to prepare their own officer corps for decision-making challenges in the face of combat. The U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, remained at the forefront of these efforts in America. The institution viewed the growing discipline of wargaming with an analytic eye and hence quickly distilled its approach in both education and analysis. Thanks to some strong personalities U.S. Naval wargaming emerged as a core training concept after the Great War as naval power became a political issue as an obvious means of extending a nation’s military capabilities abroad.

Like most wargames, the war college’s “manual” games consisted of various exercises centered on situations, or scenarios, plotted on playing surfaces, including charts and, ultimately, the floor. Unlike later computer simulations, a manual game is “a game in which the forces are represented by models, pins, pieces, or symbols, and the participants move them about by hand on a chart, map, board, or terrain model which represents the area of operations” (McHugh, p. 225). Like any board or miniature wargame, the form illustrates to participants the initial disposition of forces and terrain, which, when combined with objectives and other parameters, forms the scenario. Players command their forces (for movement and combat), a referee often adjudicates encounters, and the situation changes at the end of each turn.

Even before World War I, war college staff began considering the intellectual approach to gameplay in evaluating the current game state and formulating a course of action:

“During a lecture to the students in 1914, Captain V.O. Chase of the College staff said: ‘Observe the distinction between the problem and the maneuver. The stated problem sets forth the conditions of a situation requiring action. You study the situation, conceive your mission, form your decision and make your initial moves. As the maneuver proceeds new situations develop, presenting other problems, and these in turn require new estimates and subsequent decisions’” (McHugh, p. 63).

Admiral Sims

The concept of estimation and action became ingrained in naval war college when Admiral Williams S. Sims returned as Naval War College school president in 1919 (after serving America in the Great War as senior naval observer in England and later commander of all American naval forces in Europe). He coined the term “estimate of the situation.” “This phrase refers to the act of processing available information and determining a course of action.” He emphasized teaching officers how to think rather than what to think. “The estimate of the situation became the foundation of a deductive system of studying and solving war problems.... Learning how to properly assess situations, develop orders, and experiment with new applications was central” (Lillard, pp. 28-29).

This method involves two parts, analysis and action. Examining the game state at the start of a turn involves numerous considerations: the disposition of one’s own pieces and the resources one can bring to bear; an assessment of the opponent’s disposition and potential resources; and the environment in which they interact such as terrain and other non-player elements. To borrow from another branch of game studies, Dr. Jeremiah McCall’s game-focused educational scholarship, players assess the “problems space” a game presents — agents, resources, tools, and obstacles — estimating the situation of all factors before making choices to take actions that further their in-game goals. While McCall’s historical problem space provides a “design-focused framework for analyzing and understanding, designing, and teaching with historical games,” its structure also helps players focus on game elements to analyze in forming an estimation. (McCall, 2022). All this analysis serves the second part...formulating and implementing a plan of action. The plan must not simply advance a player’s position toward achieving a victory condition but also create a game state flexible enough to pivot against opponent actions.

As Captain Chase mentioned, “As the maneuver proceeds new situations develop, presenting other problems, and these in turn require new estimates and subsequent decisions.” The game — and in fact any situation — requires players to revise their assessment for decisions regarding the evolving situation, creating a cycle of estimation/assessment and action. The Naval War College recognized the importance of training officers using wargames as practice for assessing situations. With more and diverse practice, participants can become more experienced making and acting on estimations so, when confronted with situations in the real world, they have a greater capacity to assess and act in the face of a changing battlefield. Such game exercises occur in safe-to-fail environments simulating numerous real-world situations, providing a space where participants can test their skills, and tactics, without fear of catastrophic failure with loss of life and materiel.

Games afford us an opportunity to play, learn, and manage new experiences. But we don’t always have time to practice the cycle of estimation and action in our everyday lives. Even if we recognize this as an important life skill, our frantic pace of life managing school or work and other mundane daily duties rarely gives us frequent opportunities to practice estimating situations and formulating plans of action. And if we don’t consistently have the time to explore and practice these skills in safe-to-fail environments, we can’t become proficient in effectively applying them to our real-life situations. We barely have time to take stock of even the major challenges facing us, forming estimations of all the factors at hand and implementing a suitable course of action...certainly not in our relentlessly paced lives, and certainly not in safe-to-fail environments that encourage people to explore outcomes in exercises like wargames. Applying these — or any lesson — takes time, awareness, and focus; something our fast-paced society does not allow or encourage. By setting aside time for games, of any kind, we make time for to slow down, enjoy an entertaining activity, and navigate a safe experience from which we might learn.

“In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three courses of action open to him. Of those three, he will invariably choose the fourth.”

— Helmuth von Moltke

Sources

The U.S. Naval War College has a long and well-documented history of employing wargames for education and analysis.

These represent two of the best widely available volumes on the subject:

Lillard, John M. Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

A detailed historical account of wargaming activity, including specific games, during the inter-war years. It charts changes in the program as well as the affect games had on adjusting naval doctrine in the Pacific, Plan Orange, the naval strategy for prosecuting a war with Japan.

McHugh, Francis J. U.S. Navy Fundamentals of War Gaming. Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 2013.

A more practical look at naval wargaming, including a concise history of wargaming, a look at rules, procedures and data, “manual” gaming, and computer-based gaming, al in relation to games at the U.S. Naval War College.

Dr. Jeremiah McCall’s historical problem space model provides a useful framework for creating and analyzing a game environment (both analog and electronic).

McCall, Jeremiah. (2022, June 5). An Introduction to Historical Problem Spaces. Gaming the Past. https://gamingthepast.net/2022/06/05/an-introduction-to-historical-problem-spaces/

Toward the end of this article McCall offers a diagram, similar to the one shown above, but with blank categories to help analyze and understand how a game portrays the past; one might also use the diagram to analyze game elements one might consider when making an estimate of the game situation.