106. Whipping Wargaming Into NATO SHAPE with COL Arnel David

[Editor’s Note: Army Mad Scientist continues our series of blog posts and podcasts in the run up to our Game On! Wargaming & The Operational Environment Conference, co-hosted with the Georgetown University Wargaming Society, on 6-7 November 2024 — additional information on this event and the link to our registration site may be found at the end of this post (below).

In today’s episode of The Convergence podcast, Army Mad Scientist welcomes back COL Arnel P. David, a frequent contributor to the Mad Scientist Laboratory and returning podcast guest, to learn how NATO is injecting new technologies into wargaming to integrate and build staff proficiency across the Alliance’s 32 member nations’ militaries — Enjoy!]

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COL Arnel P. David is the Director of the Strategic Initiatives Group at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). He is a distinguished military graduate from Valley Forge Military College, completed a Master of Arts from the University of Oklahoma, a Master of Military Art and Science in the Local Dynamics of War Scholars Program at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and is a distinguished graduate of the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) where he was a National Defense University Scholar and completed a Master of Science in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy. COL David is a PhD candidate with King’s College London. He is the cofounder of Fight Club International, a global gaming network seeking to improve the efficacy of warfighting across the spectrum of conflict and competition — find information on Fight Club‘s current online Tactical Decision Game at the end of this post.

Army Mad Scientist sat down with COL David to discuss his views on wargaming in the U.S. Army and NATO, how technology is shaping its evolution, and how to push it to the forefront of Professional Military Education (PME). The following bullet points highlight key takeaways from our conversation:

• NATO SHAPE recently stood up a wargaming department. They are creating and prototyping games at the strategic level that can incorporate many of the 32 member countries as well as counter-terrorism games.This nascent team is just beginning to build out its wargaming capability and is looking for experts to contribute to its mission.

• The aforementioned wargaming department is crowdsourcing input to help better understand “what Multi-Domain Operations(MDO) looks like.” They plan to take the information they collect and use it to construct games that will help explore the crowdsourcing prompt. Additionally, the best ideas will be evaluated and briefed out to Senior U.S. Army and NATO leaders.

• A mixed-method approach to wargaming is best. The wargame itself is not the end state; rather, the post-game analysis and the lessons learned from multiple iterations is what is important. For wargames that focus on the Balkans, NATO incorporated large-language models (LLMs) to create psychometric profiles on different ethnic groups in the region to help better unde...