Wargaming: Building Adaptive Leadership Capability with Ian Brown

Ready for a mental workout that will leave you with a deeper understanding of maneuver warfare, wargaming, and strategic thinking? Buckle up as we delve into the influential work of John Boyd, the man behind OODA Loop, and his significant impact on the US Marines. Our guest, the author of "New Conception of War, John Boyd, the US Marines and Maneuver Warfare," shares his insights on Boyd's contributions and the challenges of institutionalizing maneuver warfare.

We also traverse the captivating realm of wargaming, discussing its role in enhancing decision-making skills and understanding complex s environments. The conversation touches upon the potential misuse of war games, the importance of clear objectives, and the varying interpretations of the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game led by General Paul K Van Riper. Whether you are well-versed in military tactics or a novice, the insights in this discussion will change the way you view strategic decision-making.

Rounding off our intellectual expedition, we explore the potential pitfalls of wargaming and how these can be sidestepped by ensuring everyone has a thorough understanding of the game's purpose. Plus, we reflect on how war gaming could be a game-changer in developing the habit of decision-making and equipping individuals for complex circumstances. So, if you’re ready to revolutionize your strategic thinking, this episode is a must-listen.

A New Conception Of War: John Boyd, The U.S. Marines and Maneuver Warfare by Ian Brown
A New Conception of War PDF
The John Boyd Primer by Ian Brown

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Transcript

Mark McGrath: 0:56

new conception of war, john Boyd, the US Marines and maneuver warfare, now in its fifth printing and is the Commandant's Choice right on the Commandant on the Marine Corps' reading list, which we could talk about. That and how they came about with the story that you tell in the book. Why don't you give us a you know for a book in its fifth edition? Why don't you give us the continued pertinence, why it's important and everybody listening should either download it or order it, because they're tax dollars paid for it and it's freely available to them to learn about one of the great turnaround stories in the military.

Ian Brown: 1:35

Back in the Halcyon days of I don't know, I guess late 2018 is when my book was published New Conception of War John Boyd maneuver the US Marines and maneuver warfare and it was kind of the result of a labor of love that came out of work I'd done on my master's degree at Norwich University and it was just kind of a happy accident because I've done a lot of. You know, it was a journey of discovery for me as a Marine, like going back to the intellectual roots of the doctrine that I was supposed to. You know, live and breathe and feel and in garrison, as General Gray said in the you know the intro to FMFM-1. And I was going through this master's course on military history and I came to this point where one of the instructors asked us to write a paper about a military theorist and I didn't want to write like the 500th paper for this guy about Sun Tzu or Klaus Witz, and I thought, you know, I'll try to do something different. You know it'll be interesting for him and hopefully more interesting for me, and maybe it can be a chance to go back to, you know, like I said, the intellectual roots of my own doctrine because, you know, marine Corps got near for warfare as it's worth fighting philosophy, and that's about all I really remembered.

Ian Brown: 2:54

But I knew that, you know, there was somebody called John Boyd who had had a significant impact on the development of that doctrine back when it first came out, you know. So if it was good enough for the Marine Corps, hey, it's probably good enough for this course. So I'll go and research some stuff about John Boyd, you know, learn a little bit about my own roots in the process. But you know, my professor, who is now, I assumed he was not familiar and part of that was because he was a retired Canadian Army officer, I mean, really smart guy. But I was like if me as a Marine, I don't know anything about this guy who influenced my own doctrine. There is no way this, you know, this Canadian dude is going to know who this dude is. So maybe I'll get some points for originality along with that too. And, as I mentioned in the book, I completely backfired because the instructor was like Ian Boyd is one of my favorites, don't screw this up although he didn't use those exact words, they were a little more fore-lettered, but it was and it was. So I was like man, I really ought to do a good job on this and, you know, wrote the paper to eventually became the master's thesis that I did for that class.

Ian Brown: 4:00

And then, as I was going out the door, my thesis advisor said I should submit. I should submit that thesis to the Marine Corps History Journal, which was another imprint from Marine Corps University Press, and this was I'll call it 2017, no 2016, I want to say and they were in the process of revamping some of their publications to include their history publication. They wanted to make it bigger sort of more in line with what a lot of other academic journals are in terms of, like you know, the rigor and the quality of content. So I fired it off to them and they said, sorry, this is too long, too much, too long to be one of our articles and I was ready to just sort of move on with my life after that. I didn't have high expectations that it would be published in the first place, but then they followed up and I said if I wanted to make it longer, they would turn it into a monograph for a book under their under Marine Corps University Press imprint. And you know, not knowing what I didn't know, I was like, sure, write a book why not? Sounds like fun, maybe. And I spent another year so revising, doing additional research able to fill in some blanks in terms of the research that I didn't have time to do for my master's thesis, and they published it as New Conception Award in 2018. And, like at that point, I was happy, right, like I had never thought I would have, you know, a book with my name on it, and I thought I appreciated them taking the chance on me as a, you know, an unproven author who had not written a book before. So I was good.

Ian Brown: 5:42

And then, about a year later, when Journal Burger came on, you know, as the comment on the Marine Corps every comment on gets to put their stamp on their own reading list, and my book went through the screening process and was added to the Comanoss Professional Reading List as essentially the history book about Boyd and Maneuver Warfare for the Marine Corps. It had displaced some other. There have been other books about Boyd that were on there previously and in this, you know, just displaced it as the new one. And you know so kind of getting to your initial question, like, what is the relevance is? I think it's always relevant to go back and look at. You know where you came from to understand the. You know there's the boilerplate in terms of the doctrine that we profess and that we read, and MCDP won.

Ian Brown: 6:32

Now, you know, but a lot of Marines didn't. They didn't understand where myself included didn't understand where it came from, like why it was so captivating and important at the time when it was discussed in the 70s and 80s. You know why the Marine Corps even bothered to go through this intellectual renaissance in the first place, and so I you know one. I think that that's a story we should know anyway, because it's a fantastic story and example of how an institution reforms itself. Maneuver Warfare was not the only output of that reform effort after Vietnam, but it was a significant part of it and it shaped some other things and it remains the capstone war fighting philosophy of the Marine Corps today, you know.

Ian Brown: 7:12

But then about, you know, 2019, 2020 timeframe also, I think the book sort of gained some additional meaning because you looked at what General Berger was doing in again trying to reform the Marine Corps and, you know, get it ready to face potential threats and challenges in a new and different world than the one that came before it, and I think it's a it's good to look back and be like this is not the first time we've done it. We've done it before. In fact, we've done it many times throughout the history of the Marine Corps. This is just the latest iteration of it. So, hey, let's go back. And you know it's good to look back and see what we did the last time we we reformed ourselves and understand why we did it.

Ian Brown: 7:56

And you know what thing, what good things, we can take from that previous process, you know, but also what things don't necessarily apply anymore, because the world of today is not the same as the world that you know.

Ian Brown: 8:06

John Boyd and the maneuvers in the Marine Corps lived in back in the 70s and 80s. So you know, yeah, as Boyd would put it, like you got to. You know, you have to reframe your orientation, you have to do that analysis and synthesis of breaking things down. You keep and rearrange the things that work and make sense, you pull in new information and you discard the things that are not applicable anymore. You know, and it's I just. I think the book is still applicable because we've done that before, we've done it many times in the history of the organization and we're doing it again now. We're doing it again now. So let's you know we don't have to sort of be alone in going through this process. Our four, four bears did it. Let's go back and take a look and see what lessons we can take and then what new things we might have to do.

Mark McGrath: 8:52

One of the things that you point out in your introduction to is something that Punch and I can relate to, is that the more you look in the Boyd and the deeper you dig on, various iterations of his briefings and various transcripts of the same briefing you know in some cases can be completely different. You keep learning more and more and you find new angles. In other words, it's very hard to get stale with Boyd. It keeps you on your toes. Tell us about how you encountered that. You know when you're digging on this and you're getting thrown in the directions that you never thought of. Because generally speaking, you know as Marine officers we kind of get the basics in FMFM1 or you know MCDP1. We get Udalloop but also in the forward. General Van Ruiper wrote about your book that just knowledge of that and not what's behind it is an intellectual travesty. And that's kind of the journey that we're on to help people understand not only what's behind Udalloop but what has come since. You know, what are your thoughts on that?

Ian Brown: 9:57

Yeah. So I mean, I sort of went through that. You know, wow, there's more to this moment a few times in the process of writing the book and it's and it can actually continues today because I know I think last time we talked I made a small amount of progress on what was going to be a follow-up volume on Boyd, which was a full consolidation of all of, like, transcripts and slides of all those presentations. I'm farther along in that process now. I'm not where I want it to be for a number of reasons, but it's slowly ongoing. Yeah, but the point is was that like there's the version of Boyd that is like distilled down into the, you know, 90 pages of MCDP1 is not the fullness of it. And then you know you can, if you want to go deeper, you can go into his slides, which are, you know, relatively easily available. But then if you compare to him just talking through his presentations in the audio or video recordings, realize, yeah, the slides don't. They don't. They cover at best 50% and in some cases it's a lot less. And so in when I was sitting down and like listening to him talking and interacting with the people in his classroom, that's that really sort of that was like the aha moment when I was like, okay, now I get why. This, this guy, who, who? I you know, I can find his acetate slides online and some of them only have like two or three words on them.

Ian Brown: 11:26

What was the big deal? You understand what the big deal was? Because the bulk of the content and the knowledge was from him jumping off from the slide to have a deeper discussion about it. It was in the question and answer and the interaction he has with the students, the students and staff in the room with him in the recording, and which the slides don't capture at all, you know. So, for example, I'm was I going through, I'm going through the strategic game of you know question mark and question mark presentation, transcribing it right now. And hey, you know, look at that, mike Wiley is in the classroom and he and Boyd are going off on some tangents about you know Wiley's experiences in Vietnam and then some stuff that happened afterwards. And you don't get that, you don't get that interaction, you don't get those those sort of you know interesting branching, expansions and story lines, and so and so to me, that's partly why I went.

Ian Brown: 12:25

I thought there was value in the effort of going through the book to present more of that to a wider audience. Because you, like I, fully understand, if all your hand is MCDP one and you're told that Boyd was the, you know, the greatest thinkers in his class, which I understand, that you don't get there. You know you don't get there from here or get here from there, because it is not at all obvious why this guy, who was only mentioned I think he's only cited by name once or twice in the footnotes of MCDP one, why he was such a big deal back at the time. But when you listen and you get into the fullness of those eight hour presentations that like that's when you you get it and then fast forward to today.

Ian Brown: 13:06

You know why I have subjected myself to continuing to transcribe these really, really Screechy and horrible 1980s tape cassette recordings is because I think there's there's a lot of untapped information, untapped insights that that he said they're on the tape but they're not very accessible. So I think there's great value in making it more accessible. And to get back to your, you know, is it more than just the thing is. I think a lot of his most valuable insights are things that are are barely mentioned in the slides but that he talks about in great length verbally in the classroom in the presentation. Yeah, stuff there.

Mark McGrath: 13:49

Yeah, you're right on, and we will link to the transcription that you have that you used in the book and you have the complete transcription available on the website. I would agree, and it does verify that statement that you make. You got to keep learning this stuff. It's not so simple as OODA loop. You know, one of the things that punch and I run into all the time is that people have a very surface level understanding, even even military folks. They have a very surface level understanding of OODA and they think of it in that sort of circular diagram and they completely miss the the complex nature of OODA and what it does and the very fact that it's actually an abstraction, not something that you would paste up on your, on your, on your HUD, you know, to go to go through iteratively in order.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:41

Yeah, so I want to share something with you both right now. This is from LinkedIn. This is a comment on something I put out there about John Boyd Duda Loop and focusing on technology. This is from a principal defense and biological scientist that I'm not going to share all the names in here, but this is kind of important and I'm going to. This is going to lead to a question.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:59

I'm fairly certain that Lieutenant General Blankety Blank and the rest of US Army Command and General Staff College, where four star general X was an honors graduate they don't embrace trendy acronyms nor train the next generation of general and flag officers to be just another social visionary, podcaster, leadership trainer, youtube influencer, and that's. That's an attack on me. We need less of those people and more that actually accomplish something in their career, so they're worth listening to. So, based on what this person wrote, john Boyd would not be worth listening to because he's not a go foe. And then the other point that I'm reading from this is these generals know more than anybody. They do not take the time to learn about, in my opinion, what's behind John Boyd Duda Loop. So my question to both of you, and mainly Ian, is you know now that you're out. What are your thoughts on go foes and their understanding of Boyd?

Ian Brown: 16:19

I mean, I, you know I've only interacted with a handful, you know, even in my time in uniform, but I think the it kind of gets to a broader question of and something that I have thought about a lot, actually had some discussions with with folks when I was still in uniform only a few months ago, and continue to, but it's, it's essentially you know what, what is what is the institution? Say that values versus what does it actually incentivize in terms of how it, you know, selects, retains, promotes people, and that you know this is something that the talent management program in the Marine Corps has been looked at, starting to get at around the edges a little bit, although I'll give credit to the Army, I think they were a little bit ahead of this in terms of reevaluating how they selected for command some of their officers. But it's, it's a but. It's a problem that arguably goes back to, you know, when General Gray was doing his work in the red, like Institute, how do you institutionalize an ever warfare? And I think one of the things he talked about, you know, was you had to generate a manpower management model that prop, that incentivized, embracing that philosophy, and reward those who did and did not, reward those who don't. And I think I think I'm accurate in saying this is that after he left the command I see General Gray said is one one of his big regrets was he could never get after, he didn't get after the manpower model changes that were necessary to institutionalize maneuver warfare.

Ian Brown: 17:51

You know, I'd say Institute like across the institution, right, like have it truly be part of the fabric of every aspect of what you do. And you know, I'm confident there were reasons for that because he spent a lot of his capital on his energy just getting maneuver warfare adopted as the war fighting philosophy of the institution. And that could you know, I think it's been said. You know a command really has like maybe the first year or so to do the one big thing they want to do and then after that you're just trying to make that thing like stick and spread enough that it doesn't collapse when you leave.

Ian Brown: 18:25

So I think the it I you know, I say this like it's and I've talked about when I was a uniform is don't feel too bad about talking about it now but the things that the institution says it values are not necessarily the things that it incentivizes or promotes or retains Right. And so if we ever want that to change, like, you have to incentivize the. You know the cognitive professional development that it takes to have a deeper understanding of. You know the, the insights into warfare and competition that we say are vital today, right, we, we have to incentivize the people who you know pursue that. We have to find a way to get that into the evaluation and the promotion and the selection system, otherwise, you know, you might get some of those people but it'll be, you know, kind of a crack shape, right, because right now the system is structured to to promote or retain or select on managers.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:27

Yeah, to me the managers yeah.

Ian Brown: 19:29

Yeah, a fairly rigid trajectory. You know, like I know from time of uniform I was a you know pilot, right, and they like, if you wanted to progress, there was a very clear path that you had to follow. You know, get your hours, get your designations, don't get out of the cockpit if you can. If you do have to go out of the cockpit, try and do you know a competitive, be able to, or like, if you're a forward air controller, hey, that's still an aviation MOS. So you're still an aviation. You know that gives you MOS credibility, right, that MOS credibility was the big thing. And then you got to come back and do that department head tour, right, and do all these things. And so it's, it's, it's hitting all these wickets. There's nothing in there about. Are you like, are you smart enough to think about those higher levels of responsibilities? Right, is there anything in your evaluation metric that looks at okay, you went to this job and you sat in the seat as a department head Congratulations, you checked that. How well did you really do, besides not getting fired? You know and another thing, that there's incentive to follow that path. There's very little incentive to go outside of that path and do those things, those external things that Boyd would talk about, like that external information that builds your mental repository, that gives you new insights and just gives you a big bank of knowledge you can draw from when the prices comes, because you never know what's gonna be useful. So the bigger your bank is, the better you're prepared for that crisis.

Ian Brown: 21:07

And I remember one thing that really I think encapsulated this and it kind of disheartened me when I heard it was. I remember I was in Okinawa, we were on UDP, my thing was back in 2018 timeframe, but I think there was an O6 who was part of the Marinair Group staff out there who would just come back from sitting on an officer or promotion board, right and he was gonna give us, like the things he'd seen to, some guidance and counseling, which to me, that's great. Right, I've sat on a couple of promotion boards and I learned so much that I didn't know about, like how you help your Marines get promoted. I did the same thing when I came back. Like nobody taught us. So I'm gonna give you some insights, because not many people get this, but so he's talking. But then he said something and it was the way he said it that really disheartened me, but it also sort of captures, this is. But he said, and I'm quoting you know, there's the three M's in your record that nobody really cares about and that's medals, marathons and masters.

Ian Brown: 22:10

And so, like the first two, I understood up to a point. Right, like you know, you don't need to run 26 miles to be a good leader or a good commander, right, it's okay, you know and I say that having I used to do marathons before my body rebelled on me and I can't do it anymore. I thumb, you know, but I, hey, I got it right. Nobody like good CFT, cft is what really matters. Nobody's making you run 26 miles as a helicopter pilot. Got it the metal things.

Ian Brown: 22:41

I was up to a point I could accept that because, like again, I was having silence on promotion boards but also having written awards and seeing them done. There are some awards that are written for very little effort, right, but if I was on a promotion boards, the ones that made me sit up and take notice would be like you know, hey, this Marine got a frickin' silver star with a combat V. I'm gonna take a look at what's in that citation because that tells me this person is a little bit of cut above probably the rest of his peers. So you know I'm going to note that that doesn't necessarily define him as a full person, but man, he did something extraordinary to get that. So I'm at least gonna look harder at that. So you know I could go either way on the medals. But then when he said the masters you know was something not worth pursuing, I was like so you're telling this entire audience of officers that there is no reason they go beyond the minimum in their cognitive development, in their intellectual professional development, and to disregard the work that goes into a civilian masters program.

Ian Brown: 23:48

Again, I think that really bothered me. One because I had gone through one myself and it was a lot of work outside of my normal working stuff. Two, when I compared and contrasted it to the work I had to do for my required military PME and you know you get them, you can apply to do a military masters at our PME schools. The rigor of a civilian program was far deeper and harder than going through military PME. Right, and I'm not thinking military PME because it's teaching you basic things. You need to go to the next grade, you know. But I worked to help a lot harder for that civilian masters than I did for my military PME and you know.

Ian Brown: 24:29

Third to me again, having sat on some other promotion boards and looked at other like mostly enlisted Marines who have gone and done this on their own time, I look at somebody's profile and I see a master's in it that tells me you went an extra mile, you were curious enough and you were unsatisfied with your level of knowledge, enough to that point that you wanted to go out and know more, you wanted to learn more right.

Ian Brown: 24:50

And that intellectual curiosity and that desire for mental self improvement to me is like that is what we need to be a competitive and forward thinking force to look at future challenges around us in the military.

Ian Brown: 25:06

Like I'm gonna give somebody an extra A for effort on their profile if I see that in there. But then you had the O6 come in and give sort of the institution's answer which is we don't want. Not only do we not need you to want that, we kind of don't want you to do that, we don't even want you to do that right, follow your career track. Pme complete is good enough and don't go the extra mile because we don't care on the promotion board. And I think that sort of encapsulates the ways you were talking about right there, which is that's how you get senior officers, general grade, field grade officers who rise really high at a points. And then you look at some of the decisions they make later on, especially decisions in a crisis, and you're like, how did that person get there in the first place? And it's because what we say we value is not what the track for promotion retention incentivizes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 26:09

Yeah, so systems drive behaviors. The way we set up the system, the conditions we set up in it will drive the behaviors, not the values we post on the wall. And we get this actually from John Boyd's work when he looked at complex adaptive systems. And we say the same things when we're working with organizations that it doesn't matter what you tell people, it's actually what you do, the conditions you set up, how you reward performance, promotion and so forth.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 26:34

Hey, ian, I wanna switch gears a little bit. We're in the context of a couple of wars going on. We have Ukraine, we have a crisis in the Middle East that's emerging. We're in about day four of this right now. There's a lot of questions about what did they miss? What did we miss? We're not gonna dive into that, but I do wanna make a connection to the world that you're in right now, which is war gaming. So, in your view, what should we take away from the lessons we know about Ukraine and what we think we know about what's going on in the Middle East and Israel right now, and apply that to your world of war game? What are some good lessons and takeaways you're thinking about right now?

Ian Brown: 27:16

Sure. Well, I will preface this with these are my opinions and not any agency or employer I work for. But there are also things I would have said, or I may have said when we last talked back when I was in uniform, but my thoughts is one of the things that I think professional war gamers are war gaming for education or war gaming for analysis.

Ian Brown: 27:43

Generally trying caveat is war games do not necessarily predict the future. You can argue that they mostly don't predict the future, but there are still valuable things they can do. And so I guess, going back to your point, was there ever a war game that predicted Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine? I don't know, but I can't think of one off the top of my head. Was there a war game that predicted what's been going on in the last 96 hours? I don't think anybody predicted that at all. I think most war games focusing on the Middle East have focused on what if Iran proper starts getting salty and being more aggressive, trying to close off the streets of Hormuz or something like that you know I like, if there was a game out there that predicted this.

Ian Brown: 28:36

They should probably share their findings because I think nobody like I I certainly didn't wake up Saturday morning expecting to see what I was going on on the screen, you know. But in both cases, though I think you know that you know we're gaming is not predicted. However, you know, back to the point of that mental repository, I think we're gaming is a way of building that orientation bubble inside yourself to equip you with different, different insights, different experiential learning opportunities, and it's essentially it's forcing you to do what the loop and what boy talks about anyway, which is we're gaming is forced you to make decisions and then respond to those decisions. You see the consequence of your decisions and then you go and make new decisions all over again. And that's what, that's one of the most valuable things I think that we're gaming can, can do, in which I, you know, reaching back to when the invasion of Ukraine started, myself and Tim Barrick over to MCU, we both sort of started. We did some pretty aggressive prototyping and development of war game scenarios for for two different war gaming systems, each of us sort of new, new one pretty well. So we tried to generate something of value, like in the moment for that invasion. And, and you know, he and I, both we ran like what if? Scenarios, right of things that had not happened yet, but trying to look out to see, based on what we were seeing, what you know, potential trajectories or you know, potential solutions of different weapon systems against you know things that had you know weapon systems that had never been fired before. While they're being fired now, what, what, what are they doing? But what can they do? And you know example I gave I ran in an expansion to Sebastian Bay's the Toro commander system. I actually worked with his civilian map maker to create new maps of Ukraine that didn't exist yet and I was trying to adapt Sebastian's game model to this new warfare. And I quickly found that I needed to adapt it a lot because the troll commander was designed for sort of distributed platoon, platoon, company size operations over a wide area, whereas the landscape in Ukraine was extremely dense or like dense troop concentrations, more than the game was designed for. So I bumped up all his whole order of battle, from platoon to company size, and then added some. I just added things that we were seeing in real time and I ran a. And then you know, I think it was late March maybe I ran the prototype through a.

Ian Brown: 31:15

What if the Russians wanted to do an amphibious hook and landed Odessa and and really try and seal off Ukraine from from the Black Sea? Obviously it didn't happen right, but it was really enough in the war. That that was. You know, there was a non zero chance that they could try and no, we ran it and or I ran it, and it was highly unsuccessful for the Russians. They were able to get a toehold but they were quickly isolated and then and those isolated beach heads were overrun, because you know, it's very hard to do amphibious landings.

Ian Brown: 31:52

I think it was fair to say at the time that the Russian naval infantry professional level or Russian military professional level at the time, was not up to the task and it was clear the, you know, ukrainians would fight back with everything they had to drive those things off the beachhead. So you know I didn't predict the future right, but I think it was. It was a fair example of had Russia tried it, it would have been really, really hard and likely unsuccessful, which is probably why they haven't. They'd ever tried it in the first place.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:24

So, ian, we have some listeners. A lot of listeners are not. They don't have a military background and they may not be familiar with the concept of war gaming. And I just want to check in with you on something before, before you kind of share with the listeners what war gaming is. When we talk about planning, we talk about not necessarily it's not about having a plan, it's about the act of planning so you can understand the environment and adapt to change, right, and that's kind of what I'm what I think I'm hearing from you when you talk about war gaming. So it's not about the plan, right? It's about always planning to adapt to a changing environment, to understand the environment, create that situation for us and that gives you the ability to adapt. So am I wrong in saying that war gaming can be thought of as something that allows you to adapt, to change based on what you shared with us?

Ian Brown: 33:11

No, it absolutely is. And that's like kind of one of the sort of how I applied it back in my you know my job and doing it professional military education back at the Freelax Interim Marine Corps University, which is it was. It was using war games to help people develop the habit to adapt to, like the mental habit to adapt to new situations, and I and I think war gaming is a great tool to do that. It's not the only tool, but you know it's sort of part of, I guess, the sales pitch to students and staff who would come into us. You know, common on said go do war gaming. You know well, why should I do it? What's the value proposition there?

Ian Brown: 33:49

And I often respond be like, you know, if we're being honest with ourselves, we think ourselves as military leaders, we are decision makers, right like, we're ready to make the hard choices. You know, think through all angles of a thing and make decisions in the moment. Boom, go do it. In your day to day existence though, you don't really make a ton of decisions and I and I think it's fair to say that, unless you're doing a very specific training exercise, you are not making, you're not develop, you're not making military decisions In in your space, in your job, or things that you would have decisions you have to make against an enemy, which is what we say we're training to do. But we don't really. We don't do a lot of repetitions of that type of training.

Ian Brown: 34:31

Right, like I look at as an aviator, do I have to learn enemy threat system? Sure, do I go to the sim and fly pro. You know training profiles against those systems to learn how to use all the survival. You're sure I do that. Do we go out into the real you know the human training training area and have radar emitters, little bottle rockets and stuff to practice in real in the aircraft itself, how to avoid those things. Yes, we absolutely do that and that is all incredibly valuable training so that you like develop those instantaneous responses like missile warning. I go left right, pop flares, hope to get out of there, but all of that is against that. It's a, it's a canned script. Right, I know exactly where the emitter is it's a new.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:13

So to us, that's a known thing. That's that's a complicated kind of a complicated environment is a known unknown. It's it's we know something's out there. We know how to defend against an essay, six or a, or a zoo that shooting at us and things like that. Those are things that you have to learn to do in order to adapt, to change. So that's that's what I'm hearing from you is that's the environment we're up against. However, things will change right.

Ian Brown: 35:38

Yeah, well, you know again, that's all great training, but then you know, say I go my. My first appointment went to Iraq in 2007. You know, al Qaeda is not telling me where they're setting up an essay team, you know, or or a disc, right, they're not. I could be anywhere at any time that I'm going around and I, I've made a, I've made a handful of military decisions in those training events. Right, but outside of that, I didn't. I didn't, you know, go home and think about how to, how to avoid an essay 18 or a dish cut. And I didn't even think to put myself into some sort of practice environment where I could. I didn't even know, like, even if I wanted to, what tools would I have available? Well, you know, wargaming puts you and forces you to make those military decisions in an abstracted or official environment, sure, but you have to make tons of decisions in the course of playing that game against the thinking human adversary who you don't know what they're going to do. And that's the key point, I think to me is, I might know the game system, I know all the cards and chips and stuff that I have, I may know the scenario. I may even have like a pre-made order of battle for both sides. That I know. I know generally what my opponent's going to have. I don't know where my opponent's going to put it. I don't know how my opponent's going to use it. I don't know what. I don't necessarily know every single weapon system they have selected for this scenario, you know, in their bid for victory. And when I start my plan I don't know how long my plan is going to survive against that opponent. And so every turn, every decision inside that war game is building that mental habit pattern of oh crap, my plan didn't work. Oh crap, he just took out, like he just knocked out, my freaking missile cruiser. I was banking on that thing to provide fire support near defense to my area. What do I do now? And the game lets you go past that. What do I do now? And forces you to adapt and adjust your plan because your opponent is doing stuff you didn't think they would. And oh, by the way, you're doing the same thing to your opponent.

Ian Brown: 37:42

So if you get a bunch of military students, for example, around the table, you got all this experiential learning and they're making military decisions and making tons of them. And, like you know, in a two hour game, let's say, you could be making dozens, if not hundreds, of you know small decisions about. You know weapon to target pairing maneuver, you know use of non kinetic effects against your average. You're making like just dozens and dozens of these decisions and there are not a lot of other places or opportunities that we can go in military training to make hundreds of decisions in two hours. Like if you take a, you take a battalion to a field exercise, right, you will be making decisions, but not every Marine is making hundreds of decisions every couple of hours. In that you know you might have, you might have a half a day block out at one of the ranges, a life fire range, where you might be making decisions in that block of time, but then it's possible the rest of that week in the field the focus is on other units making their decisions and you're just kind of. You know now, you're just out there, right and you know.

Ian Brown: 38:54

So I think the use of war games to inculcate that, that habit pattern, getting you used to the unexpected, having to adapt to it and then having to continue driving forward because saying no, I quit is not an option, you know we need, we need opportunities to you know, to just to simply learn to get.

Ian Brown: 39:14

You know, get punched in the face and then how to recover and keep going, because that's what we're going to be expected to do in combat.

Ian Brown: 39:20

But if you've never practiced that, if you've never been punched in the face, you know in a cognitive sense to have to respond. How are you going to do it in you know, in the real thing, when it's great that you have like all the firepower, everybody's really physically fit and and you've got all the MREs you want. But if, if you don't have a habit of making decisions, of adapting to a changing situation, if you don't develop that habit beforehand, it's not going to magically appear in the moment. And that's why I think you know wargaming is a great tool for building that orientation. You know, because the whole point of orientation is you build up before you get there, you don't build it in the moment. Orientation is everything of everything about your brain and your body, from the moment you are born to the moment you arrived in that situation, and you can control how big and expansive that orientation is. And I see wargaming is just another way to expand and build that orientation.

Mark McGrath: 40:12

So so we agree and we use, we use gaming ourselves to hone the skills of teams you know that are we're trying to coach to be high performing. You know, in our work at AGLX We've got a couple of different variations. One is called ally triumph that we use and the design behind that is to get teams to communicate more effectively, to develop more self awareness as they create, more situational awareness, to understand goals and really to learn and plan, as, as Ponch was saying, not what a lot of wargames, I think, get misused as they become validations or verifications of somebody's pet project and the learning is stopped. Where, where teammates might find gaps or they might find weaknesses, they might find mismatches, as Boyd would say. That seems to me like that. So where do you feel about that? We feel that you could misuse these if they're not for planning, learning, education. You could completely misuse them if they are for validation and verification, for something that might not be effective or relevant in a complex marketplace, complex environment.

Ian Brown: 41:26

Yeah. So I'm going to start off with like the worst answer, which is it depends, but I so one thing I've learned in sort of my my wargaming journey over the last few years is yeah, absolutely any. Any wargame has a potential for misuse if it's, if it's not well designed, if it's not well run, if the, the after action analysis is poorly done or not done at all. And it's also possible where, you know, a sponsor comes in asking for a wargame to do a certain thing and then you make the thing to do the thing they asked you to, and then they don't like it, or they or they put constraints on you when you're running it and you're like, well, why did we bother here? Like I made the thing you wanted me to, but you don't want to, you don't want to go, you don't want to learn the lessons that you said you did, right. So you know, you know I'll take your money, but I, you know, kind of feel like we just wasted our time because you didn't want, you didn't treat the game with the, the, you know the respect and the intent that you know we thought you had because you asked us to do it, kind of thing. Right, you know.

Ian Brown: 42:31

But part of my wargaming journey too is, you know, is understanding that there are there's different uses and approaches for wargame. But it really comes down to, you know, making sure you are being, you know, clear and sort of honest with yourself, your players and your sponsor. If there is a sponsor about you know. What is the game here, to do what? What is it we want to walk away from here, you know, for the realm of educational wargaming, the, you know, the focus is the players. It is inculcating those mental habits, getting them to learn how to make decisions. If I can get them to do it, you know it kind of depends on is this for a specific program of interest, like a particular course in a school, or is this more just? I just want to, I just want general improvement of making better decisions and have it patterns right and that that will, that will drive sort of the game you choose and how you craft it. So you know, for example, if, if command and staff college at Marine Corps University, if they, if they want to run, do a wargame where they have to plan in a sort of near future operational environment and and and we want to have like a high level of detail in, like the weapon systems and the sensors that are on there. Okay, there's a certain games that might be able to let you do that, and so the players will see the effects of those weapons systems, the sensors, and see how they're they're playing, interacts with those things and whether it worked or not.

Ian Brown: 43:55

And then, along the way, the players are making decisions to adjust their plan and in stride within the game, and that's the focus is the players learning, the players learning. And then there's and a little core gaming right, which is, I don't want to say the players are unimportant, but where the focus is not necessarily the players, but the focus is a problem that you're trying to to learn more about. And I'm trying to think we get example here, like if you're, you know, say, say you've got like I don't know, like an off-the-shelf you know plan of some kind that you know, maybe it was, you know bill ten or fifteen years ago, nobody's, it's never really been stress-tested. Well, maybe you take the plan out, you build the parameters inside a game and then the players coming in and like they will play the game in these roles, but they're, they're there to sort of Ensure the they're there to bring the pieces of the plan to life right. But then Learning or making that the decision-making, having patterns, is not the focus of the game. The focus of the game is is this a good plan? Or if it's not, where are the holes in it? And that's one thing.

Ian Brown: 45:02

That analytical wargaming I think it definitely helped do, especially in the realm of using digital wargames. You know computer-based wargames, because you can, you can take and sort of indigitize a plan and put in. You know how many missiles you got, how much fuel you got. And this is something actually that dr Ben Jensen over at school of events were fighting. It's a school but he I think he's sort of used it in an analytical sense is Putting, inputting stuff into a game and then you run the computer like two, three hundred times, right, and so you're running that plan two or three hundred times and you can start to identify trends inside of that plan.

Ian Brown: 45:43

Now there's there's you know there's limits to what I can do, right, because if you're running your plan Inside the computer, the farther away you get from when you hit play, the farther away you're getting from when humans would have like input points and decision points of that plan. So I. I'm always hesitant, like if I, if I put a something in a computer game and ran it for like a year of computer time it didn't touch it. After I can play. I May be a little more skeptical about what I see in the back half of that games. Out boys them when I do at the front side, right. But I may be able to identify certain trends. Like you know, holy crap, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot a lot more missiles in the first 24 hours and I thought and my resupply is not gonna get there for a long time I'm gonna have a missile gap, I'm gonna burn more fuel, I'm gonna lose more aircraft.

Ian Brown: 46:29

So using, you know, analytical war games to look at those things, I think is very useful too. Because, though, like yeah, the point of war gaming or, you know, building your orientation, is that you've identified flaws or gaps or weaknesses before the crucial moment, so that you can fix them or address them, or at least be ready for them, right? So if I run a, a plan through a war game 300 times in the computer realm and I find that like 290 times out of 300, I'm short on gas and missiles a lot sooner than I thought. I need to fix that part of the plan, and that's good for me to know now, rather than when the balloon goes up in real time in the real world and I'm called to do that plan and I find out in the real world that I'm short on fuel and missiles, and now people are dying for that mistake, for not identifying that flaw beforehand. So so the value.

Mark McGrath: 47:19

So the value is identifying probabilities, possibilities, plausibilities, the vulnerability is using it strictly as a validation or verification tool. The other value that that you know the punch and I are big on through our work at a GLX is that when you have teams working together on war games, decision-forcing games, that sort of thing, that you're optimizing the team lifecycle right, the, the planning, the briefing, the executing in the debriefing, like you're getting people comfortable with that sort of process of interoperating with each other comfortably, building mutual trust, building building Finger spits in good fuel right, building our intuitive feel as we, as we drive hard to the, to the shrapunked.

Ian Brown: 48:07

Yeah, no, absolutely, and that's you know. I don't know if that falls into the the education realm or the training realm or the analytical realm, but you know, I think that's another good value of of a dynamic like a dynamic exercise or dynamic activity is you can learn surprising things that, like that, you don't want to find out who your weak players are in the moment. Right, you should know that before it happens. And you know a wargaming activity or exercise is a way to do that, because if you put your staff like if your staff has never really been under stress or or really come together to exercise all the different you know functions that there's about to exercise A game is a way to find out who's good at it, who's not good at it, to fix those shortfalls. And you may.

Ian Brown: 48:54

You may also find some surprising, like good things about the people in your team that you never would have found out If all you did was hang around. You know and build. You know position papers or PowerPoint briefs, right, like you might find that that that you know quiet as six corporal, who everyone thinks is, you know, kind of weird, a little bit off. It's actually brilliant at at repairing and in keeping computer networks resilient when they're under stress. Right, that's a good thing to know. And you, you may not have known that if you had a, maybe built a simulated C2 architecture, put your staff around and then stressed it and and degraded it and see what happens. You know, ian, I guess, as we're sitting here talking is, we're winding down here.

Mark McGrath: 49:37

One of the things that makes me think of as I relate it back to to your book, certainly the person who Wrote the introduction, general Paul K Van Riper. Malcolm Gladwell featured him in a chapter of one of his books about a war game where General Van Riper showed what was possible, possible, plausible and probable by Bringing Millennium Challenge 2002, which anyone can Google. They can also read about it in Micah Zankos book on red teaming. Yeah, brought that game to a crashing halt and I don't know that the, I don't know that the learning and the planning occurred. I don't know that the, the, the team life cycle. Got the got the do that it needed to learn from my team. Got the got the do that it needed to learn from what, what, from what happened In that he wrote the intro to your book and he was also a collaborator of John Boyd and in attendee a lot of Boyd's early briefings with the, with the Marine Corps.

Mark McGrath: 50:37

Maybe, maybe give us some comment on on that. You know that because it seems to me that's a very sound application of Boyd type ideas that use the war game for what we would want it to do. Help us learn what are the possibilities, pros and probabilities, plausibilities yeah, the Millennium Challenge.

Ian Brown: 50:53

You become like this. It's almost like a Rorschach test in some ways. You know, you look at it, people see different things. It's the.

Ian Brown: 51:03

I think that the Micah Zanko book you mentioned. I Remember when I first started like kind of digging more into wargaming and Millennium Challenge. I I think the Micah Zanko narrative is a more more well well-rounded one than the Malcolm Gladwell one. I I don't generally like to speak ill of other authors, but I've found Gladwell's had some problematic stuff and in a few of his books. So if you're gonna read about Millennium Challenge, I would go at the Micah Zanko. So I think that one is is a more robust thing and I think one of the big lessons from the Millennium Challenge was that or whether Van Ruiper, like was told he could do one thing and they yanked it away, or if there was, if there was a misunderstanding about the broader purpose of that war game.

Ian Brown: 51:48

But I think it's still a good example of the people who were all involved were not on the same page about what they thought that war game was supposed to do and and and that goes back to like who you know, the people who organized it may not have had a full understanding of like Van Ruiper came in and and I I think he was told and it was represented to him You're here to be a free-thinking red team, right, so go do a red team stuff.

Ian Brown: 52:14

He was like, okay, I'm gonna go do your red team stuff, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you where you're all jacked up and and Identifying those flaws is like I think that's the point of the game, because you brought me in to do that, to find, to be a red team, find flaws. You know why does it happen? Like the purpose of the game was also to let other two included live units, exercise and do some training and learning on their own, and when the game got killed on day one, their learning opportunity in that exercise would have been gone. They wouldn't have learned anything if the game had just been over at that point.

Ian Brown: 52:53

So, they thought they were there to learn and exercise some stuff in real time and they thought that they would be allowed to get to that point to do that. So which side had it right or which side had it wrong? I don't know, I wasn't there right. I just know what I've read From what I've getting deeper into the challenges and the possible pitfalls of wargaming. I think that's a perfect example, because if you're not there, all on the same page for what this wargame is supposed to accomplish, what level of decision making everybody has inside that game, that's when they can really go off the rails and that can kind of be a setback for those who are enthusiastic about wargaming.

Ian Brown: 53:37

Because if somebody walks away and says that was a waste of my time or I've burned a lot of money or time or resources, what have you, and I didn't get out of it what I wanted to, that's not good, right, and I don't want me personally and I think most of the wargammers I work with never want people to walk out saying that that was a waste of their time. We want them to walk out saying either one wow, I really learned something myself. I feel like I'm a more capable leader, officer, thinker, what have you coming out of that game? Or I walk out. Wow, I thought I had the best plan since, you know. Think of a perfect military plan. I don't know. You know, I think I had.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 54:17

I thought my plan was freaking awesome.

Ian Brown: 54:19

There's no such thing really good. The point is like I thought my plan was fantastic and the wargame just shredded it and I need to go back and I need to, I need to fix a lot of flaws and we need to, you know, maybe do some better staff work and maybe do some more dynamic exercises ourselves, because what we thought, we thought we had it right, we did not. And now and I know that now, so I can fix it and not have to pay a worse price finding out that mistake in the real world, where I'm going to be sacrificing, you know, blood and treasure and assets.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 54:50

I think Macho Grande is the best run campaign and that's from the movie airplane.

Mark McGrath: 54:56

So yeah that's your, that's your new standard. Well, ian, we want to thank you for coming back and you know your book is so important and we hope that again everybody honor their tax dollars by going on the Marine Corps University Press and getting the fifth edition, which is available also in PDF, and they can have it. They can have a chip to them. We'll also link to your.

Mark McGrath: 55:20

You have a great primer on Boyd available on the internet that includes the transcription of patterns of conflict. Now, tell anybody that's interested in patterns of conflict. This is probably one of the better transcriptions out there to listen to and to follow along with, because one you number the slides, which, which, which corresponded to the briefing perfectly and also to it was the, the Marine thinkers that Boyd was was speaking with as they were going through the Renaissance. And you know that model and you know we would challenge businesses out there that are listening to this to talk, to punch in myself. That's a really good model of an organizational turnaround, of using these ideas and understanding these concepts to have a phenomenal resurgence and intellectual and, as as complexity unfolds in the marketplace, to stay, to stay relevant and stay on top of things. So we want to thank you for coming back and we want to have you back again, if that's great, and we'll continue discussions on on Boyd, but certainly certainly wargaming to.

Ian Brown: 56:27

Yeah, well, someday I'm going to get that second book done and and you know, like I said, that's supposed to be kind of like, you know, the full Boyd, you know, as best as we can get without him coming back from the dead. So yeah, I don't know when that's going to happen, but I'm trying to get it done so that that can be added to the discourse will keep us posted and anything we can do to help those efforts, help drive those efforts.

Mark McGrath: 56:50

It would be a tremendous gift to the, to the world of strategic. So it's a good thing, all right. Thanks, ian Brown.

Ian Brown: 57:01

All right, yeah, thank you both again, appreciate it.