CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO Truly challenging war gaming is essential to this dominance, Singer said. Tat means looking at new technologies across multi- ple different scenarios, as the NeXTech project did in 2009. “Too often in these war games—not just war games, but when we’re thinking about a certain weapon system or technology—we put it into the context that we’re most familiar with or we most want for the future.”
In NeXTech, by comparison, “we were thinking about scenarios that ranged from high-intensity conflict to counterinsurgency to an embassy evacuation to a response to an earthquake—all differ- ent kinds of settings that U.S. forces have been in—and saying, OK, in these different contexts, how might the technology be used? And then, secondly, not just how might the U.S. use it, but how might it be used against us? How might a drug cartel use it? How might a terrorist group use it? How might a high-end mili- tary use it? How might a midtier military use it?”
Te U.S. military conducts very useful war games and training exercises, he said, but with common challenges across the board.
“Even when it’s a challenging scenario, a high-end conflict with another state, it’s still framed in a very familiar way, instead of trying to come at it from multiple angles.”
A second challenge is the people chosen to be the “bad guys.” Te general approach is, “I take some part of my organization and say,
‘You go think like the bad guys’—as opposed to actual people who think like bad guys. So there tends to be a limited framing.”
Additionally, the exercises often are designed to validate existing concepts or planned programs of record to demonstrate “that this was a good investment, as opposed to really, really kicking at the tires. Tere’s also a little bit of what I call the back-to-basics prob- lem.” Tat problem, as Singer sees it, is that the exercise is not so much a war game as a large-scale training event with the guiding principle being, “We haven’t been doing X for 15 years. We need to get back to basics”—as opposed to asking, “OK, how maybe have the basics changed?”
Finally, he said, multinational exercises “too frequently are about making allies feel good about themselves.”
As an example of “a really good effort,” Singer pointed to Fort Polk, Louisiana, home to the Joint Readiness Training Center. On a historical note, Fort Polk was established in 1941 for the Louisiana maneuvers, in which, against the backdrop of World War II, the Army set out to “figure out what not just tanks, but
EMBRACING CHANGE
P.W. Singer, a prolific fiction and nonfiction author and “mad scientist” for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, is dedicated to making the most of the opportunities brought about by rapid technological and social change. (Photo by Sam Cole)
P.W. SINGER AT A GLANCE
Dr. P.W. Singer is considered one of the world’s lead- ing experts on changes in 21st-century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead, according to his official biography. He has consulted for the U.S. mili- tary, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI, and he served as an adviser to entertainment programs, including for Warner Brothers, DreamWorks, Universal, HBO, Discovery, History Channel and the iconic video game series “Call of Duty.”
He served as coordinator of the Obama campaign’s defense policy task force in 2008 and was named to the U.S. military’s Transformation Advisory Group. He currently is an associate with the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. In addition to his work on conflict issues, Singer served as a member of the U.S. Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy.
Singer received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and a B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
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CRITICAL THINKING
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