2 September 2016 MILITARY REVIEW EXCLUSIVE ONLINE

Big Data War Games 

Necessary for Winning 

Future Wars

Maj. Mark Van Horn, U.S. Army

Advanced war games, not advanced weapon 

systems, will be the most promising technological investment for the future force.1

Whether dominating cyberspace and the electro-magnetic spectrum or providing wide area security in a 

sprawling, impoverished megacity or beating back 

a belligerent’s attempt to seize scarce fresh water or 

securing an ally’s border, no advanced weapon will ever 

replace well-trained soldiers and adaptive soldiering. 

Since the rain of explosive steel in the First World War, 

the modern battlefield’s lethality has placed a premium 

on adaptive soldiers and mission driven leaders. And no 

smart weapon algorithm or automated command and 

control system can obviate the soldier’s need to learn 

the skill set of modern war in ever better war games 

and simulations. Innovations in the information and 

Air Force Lt. Col. Chris Power, deputy division chief of North American Aerospace Defense Command operations support, takes part in the 

Amalgam Eagle 16 tactical exercise between the U.S. and Mexico 27 July 2016 in Colorado Springs, CO. The three-day exercise aimed to 

strengthen information sharing and coopration in response to a simulation of an illicit cross-border flight. (Photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
MILITARY REVIEW EXCLUSIVE ONLINE September 2016 3

Big Data War Games

cognitive sciences will pull war games into the era of big 

data and revolutionize how we prepare ourselves to win 

future wars (whether we know with whom we’ll fight, 

where we’ll fight or what those wars will be like).

The End of Weapons Technology

Keeping our edge with physical weapons development alone will be increasingly intractable for two 

key reasons: physical laws and proliferation. Physical 

weapons development is culminating because weapons 

technology has boundaries imposed by the laws of hard 

science.2 There are simply walls which can’t be scaled, 

even if you spend mountains of money.3 Many of the 

truly revolutionary discoveries like combined arms 

maneuver, missiles, and drones have been invented. You 

can observe this technological plateauing in the changes in cars and airplanes. No doubt, cars and planes are 

better than they were in 1970. They last longer, are safer, 

more efficient, and cleaner, but they do the same thing 

today as they did in 1970–move people across countryside at average rates of speed that haven’t changed 

substantially since.

The Army Research Laboratory predicts a revolutionary future for 

the Army of 2030 from 

developments in the 

physical, life, information, 

and engineering sciences.4

This could come from 

technological improvements such as lighter 

materials, the continued 

improvement of command and control, precision fires, autonomous 

and semi-autonomous 

systems, and new vertical 

takeoff and landing capabilities. But while new 

technologies may be developed, overmatch will 

be ever harder to sustain 

with these kinds of incremental improvements 

being quickly matched 

through proliferation 

or hybrid warfare.5

Advanced weapons technologies will spread—future 

threats will have access to the same technologies 

we do and at a decreasing cost. Or, at the very least, 

they will have technologies threatening enough as to 

render the capability gap operationally and tactically 

surmountable due to the inherent snags of complex 

terrain. Combined arms maneuver tactics and operational art have changed little since World War II, and 

fieldings of any new technology in the next twenty 

years stand to not change them that much either.6

Many U.S. weapon systems, even though developed 

thirty to fifty years ago, are still some of the best in the 

world but other world powers will soon catch up and 

for the next twenty years, the U.S. Army will be operating with systems developed in the 1970s and fielded 

in the 1980s; further advancements will be improvements to original designs.7

So senior leaders should be skeptical of industry 

claims to produce any kind of “revolutionary” weapon 

systems. Enemies adapt quickly and often cheaply.8 The 

development of advanced weapon systems are a high 

risk investment for what may be minimal returns (as in 

the revolution that occurred when manual can openers 

became “automatic”).

While impending enemies will inevitably avoid or 

negate U.S. technological superiority, it doesn’t matter 

your technological advance or the systems you hold, 

you must compete against the ultimate weapon—other 

minds. Future innovations must focus on the social and 

human dimension of war.9

For the discipline and exercise of the warrior’s mind, 

war games are an inexhaustible arsenal, and the best 

sparring arena ever developed for it.10 War games are 

like chess and fingerprints, they are practically infinite in 

possibility and uniqueness. Their application to soldiers’ 

cognitive, and social training requirements nests perfectly with the U.S. Army’s Human Dimension Concept. 

War games can provide data about ourselves and inform 

human resource management. They are a powerful cognitive aid, a thing to help us think, and an aid for probing 

the future, as well as how soldiers decide.11

Ultimately, war games are the only venue which 

affords the military the opportunity to wage wars and 

campaigns without taking lives. They are the closest 

thing we can get to a reconnaissance patrol of the future.12 While there are many things of which we haven’t 

an idea and have no idea that we haven’t got one, just 

Maj. Mark Van Horn,

U.S. Army, is an intelligence officer currently 

assigned as the battalion 

operations officer in the 

522nd Military Intelligence 

Battalion, 207th Military 

Intelligence Brigade. 

He worked as a theater 

war games planner for 

U.S. Army Europe from 

2014-15 and was at the 

Mission Command Training 

Program from 2011-12, 

where he observed over 

a dozen brigade staffs 

conduct war games. He is a 

graduate of the Command 

and General Staff College, 

the University of Southern 

California, and Norwich 

University.
4 September 2016 MILITARY REVIEW EXCLUSIVE ONLINE

because the future is uncertain and unknowable does 

not mean that it is a complete wash—impenetrable to 

wisdom and experiment.13

As an example: in 1994, the Office of the Secretary 

of Defense commissioned the RAND Corporation to 

perform a series of futures war games. Their results were 

nearly identical to what passes today as the future of war 

twenty years later. The authors remarked how uncertain 

the security environment had become, and forecasted 

the rise of area denial systems, irregular warfare, regional 

threats, and the strategic overmatch that comes from opponents who are far more willing to use weapons of mass 

destruction. They did not predict 9/11 or Operation 

Iraqi Freedom or a Global War on Terrorism but in the 

broad outlines and trends of future nation state warfare 

their forecast was mostly right.14 War games are vital as a 

tool for coping with uncertainty.

Yet, in spite of all their promise, in war gaming there 

are limits. They are not like physics experiments.15 It 

is difficult to record what happens and to repeat and 

replicate. It is difficult to explore variations in the 

decisions made and their outcomes; it is infeasible to 

explore all the possible mistakes.16 And good luck trying 

to imitate the ways Murphy so painfully complicates 

the actual strategy and execution of military operations. Many of the difficulties above stand to be mastered by coming inventions in big data. Collect large 

enough stacks of data and probabilistic correlations and 

forecasts can be sufficient to understand human behavior and thinking.17 Inside war games, the Army can use 

big data collection methods to study the human side of 

warfare in revolutionary ways.

Big Data War Games Make Military 

Decision Making Quantifiable

While physical weapons technology stalls, big data 

innovation rockets upward at an exponential clip. 

“When it comes to generating economic growth, providing public services, or fighting wars, those who can 

harness big data effectively will enjoy a significant edge 

over others. In time, big data might change our way 

of thinking about the world,” proclaim authors Cukier 

and Mayer-Schoenberger from their 2013 Foreign 

Affairs cover story. Data points, previously never even 

imagined as possible, like mouse clicks, the 207 pressure 

points on your backside as you sit in a vehicle, and the 

life on your smart phone, are being collected and stored 

and queried and analyzed by armies of statisticians and 

economists and social scientists.18

In Army operations, as well as in our command-post exercises, every war fighting function is 

represented by a corresponding digital information 

system that is a huge potential data source. War games 

are perhaps the only medium that the Army can use 

to capture the big data of the military decision-making process. Digitized war games, not just in exercises 

but for operations planning, can use already existing 

systems of record to collect data at a scale previously 

unimagined. This is the challenge of a military big data 

science: first deciding how to assign numbers to a qualitative process, then collecting large swaths of data, and 

then turning it into useful knowledge. Pulling the military decision-making process into the world of bytes 

is only realistically going to be done through big-data 

type war games. It would transform an ineffable and 

qualitative experience into one that can be measured 

and could correlate decisions with outcomes. Being able 

to digitize and collect a lot of information about how 

leaders are making decisions in war games will feed 

cognitive research into how we wage war.

The hope of the cognitive sciences and big data 

is that one day we may be able to use these kinds 

of large data sets to outwit the modern day maladaptations of our ape minds. Any army that could 

reduce cognitive biases in thinking would have an 

incredible advantage in war. There is a project from 

the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency 

called Sirius to train intelligence analysts out of their 

cognitive biases using simulations and interactive 

games.19 Results aren’t out but games that could reveal an individual’s own biases truly are a revolutionary technology for soldiers. Training organizations 

out of larger group based cognitive biases would be 

an even more significant innovation and could come 

from big data type war games.

The Future of War Games

Big data war gaming is a way the Army can grab 

hold of the big data revolution and apply it to the indeterminate art of war.

First, the Army will need to learn how to sieve 

petabytes worth of data and find those correlations 

most pertinent to military decision making. This is 

no small task. It requires the collection and storage of 
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Big Data War Games

the right data sets, then the tools and analysts to turn 

it into knowledge. We should not think this comparative to running a startup. Facebook and other social 

media sites are designed to capture metrics about 

qualitative decision making: likes, follows, retweets, 

exhaustive question and answer surveys for online 

dating, your music library, the spending of imaginary 

and real monies, and so forth. Our war fighting function information systems in contrast, do no such thing. 

There is no survey or background data taken when 

you start using Command Post of the Future or the 

Distributed Common Ground Station. Users are not 

tracked through either of these systems for the life of 

the user. Perhaps we should start. Big data war games 

offer the perfect opportunity to track how users use the 

Army’s various information systems. Advantageously, 

this dovetails with other opportunities to figure out our 

approach to big data war games like correlating performance records with observations in war games.

Our evaluation system is being converted into digits. 

The ability to finally see correlations in performance reports from the time tens of thousands enter the service 

to when they exit and to do this longitudinally is both a 

start to figuring out data points for war games and the 

MDMP and a way to see if evaluations are capturing 

actions in the only environment that can approximate 

war. In data science, different fields, such as human 

resources in the case above, can offer surprising insights 

into areas previously thought unrelated so our gaze in 

developing big data wargames should be rather broad.

The Army should develop digitized board game- or 

computer game-like tools to help staffs from battalion 

to corps plan during the war gaming step of the orders 

process. My vision for this technology would be table 

top size, interactive electronic maps, like an iPad, that 

participants can use to create enemy and friendly orders of battle and to record moves and outcomes. These 

war gaming tools would connect to centralized databases so that war gaming inputs can be collected from 

across the Army.

Regardless, the future of victory is not about silver 

or titanium or nanotube bullets. Neither should war 

game innovation be bound to the timelines and budgets 

of R&D. The exploration of how we capture and store 

big data about our war games is surely something that 

the Army Research Laboratory can explore. One immediate and needed improvement is the development 

of a war game or exercise planners course that moves 

beyond the models and sims and instead provides an 

introduction to the broad discipline of war gaming.20

Regardless of the data or the correlations that we 

can collect and point to in the outcome of our war 

games, war games are stories, and big data can’t compensate for poor or biased narratives that are designed 

to test processes instead of outcomes.

Characteristic of the plot is that friendly forces have 

a three-to-one advantage and we are either attacking or 

performing wide area security missions. In combined 

arms maneuver war games, the Army is given overmatch and the Air Force has air superiority, because of 

course the Air Force doesn’t need the Army to acquire 

air dominion. And the truly damaging or catastrophic 

impacts of a contested electromagnetic spectrum or the 

loss of electric power could derail exercises so let’s not 

do that either. The plot is fixed in that the opposition 

force can’t derail the locomotion of a commander’s 

training objectives; a self-compromising standard if 

expecting a tough fight.

For many war games, the story is simple: liberate a 

country in however long the exercise can afford to be 

(usually about a week). This worked for the Gulf War 

but we should not expect this in our future wars. When 

facing a hybrid threat in particular, campaigns can go 

on for years so you need small scenarios with matching 

objectives. You aren’t going to defeat a hybrid threat 

in a week. Even if the training objective is to fight 

force-on-force, it’s dangerous to think it will always be 

guaranteed quick and easy.

Such storylines fail to prepare soldiers and leaders for the winning part of “Win in a complex world,” 

because the training audience knows they can’t lose. If 

you want to practice the “win” then you have to be willing to experience the loss. Otherwise, all your training 

is just in processes, instead of correct thinking.

One war game story the Army needs to play at is a 

retrograde scenario. The greatest weakness we have is 

projecting land power. While we wait to build up forces 

we are vulnerable and it is not unrealistic to think we’ll 

be challenged when we are weakest. This scenario is important to war game because it can reveal things we haven’t any idea or experience about yet. Institutionally, 

we don’t think we’ll lose because we’re so much better 

than everyone else’s army. If anything, playing a retrograde scenario prevents professional hubris and gives 
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Big Data War Games

the Army an experience we need, albeit one we never 

want. I think it is also something we should do to build 

resiliency, when you are facing hard odds, it helps that 

you’ve worked through it conceptually.

These are a few suggestions, my own recommended 

probes for the future of war gaming. The broader point 

is that beyond the technological possibilities of big data 

and war gaming there are needed innovations, which 

are cheap and can have an immediate impact, to be 

made in the stories we play right now.

The End Game

Narrowing technological gaps, the phenomenal rate 

at which knowledge is disseminated, a contested electromagnetic spectrum, and the speed at which events 

occur means the returns on trying to develop next 

generation physical weapons technology are inevitably bound to dwindle. The future of war is to leverage 

our industrial and research base to support one of the 

instruments warriors play for learning how to win in a 

complex world.

Notes

1. “A war game is a simulation involving two or more opposing 

forces using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an 

actual or assumed real-life situation.” Joint Publication ( JP) 1-02, 

Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: U.S. 

Government Printing Office [GPO], 2015).

2. Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (Liveright Publishing, 2015), 56-57; Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots

(Basic Books, 2015), 64-67.

3. For an overview of rising defense R&D costs see: James 

Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” The Atlantic ( Jan/

Feb 2015), http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/

the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/. Fallows blames 

exponential costs on politics and corruption but does not consider 

that it is just more expensive to develop technologies that are ever 

more complex.

4. Army Research Laboratory, Army Research Laboratory Technical Strategy 2015-2035 (U.S. Army RDECOM, 2015).

5. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Pamphlet 525-

3-1, The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World 

(Fort Eustis, VA: TRADOC, 31 October 2014); Army Capabilities 

Integration Center, Future Warfare Division, “Strategic Trends 

Analysis: The Landscape of Future Conflict,” Unified Quest Deep 

Future Wargame 2030-2040 (Fort Eustis, VA: Army Capabilities 

Integration Center, 20 November 2013).

6. Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and 

Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton University Press, 2004).

7. Michael Howard and John F. Jr. Guilmartin, Two Historians in 

Technology and War Monograph (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1994), 21-22; Robert D. Jr. 

Hooker, American Landpower and the Two-War Construct (The Institute of Land Warfare, Association of the United States Army, 2015).

8. Insights from an industrial design class at MIT see: Lt. Gen. 

H. R. McMaster, “Superiority by Arthur C Clarke,” Professional 

Reading Series 18 (Fort Eustis, VA: Army Capabilities Integration 

Center, 3 December 2014), http://www.arcic.army.mil/LPD/professional-readings-archive.aspx?pageNo=6.

9. United States Army Combined Arms Center, The Human 

Dimension White Paper: A Framework for Optimizing Human Performance (Fort Leavenworth, KS, 9 October 2014).

10. Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming (United States Naval 

Institute, 1990).

11. The technical concept and term is “cognitive artifact;” see, 

The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, accessed 2 July 

2015, http://ai.ato.ms/MITECS/Entry/hutchins.

12. “If done carelessly, war games can seem to the players to 

produce insights or conclusions that have a basis no more solid 

than that of a debate or play” from Kenneth Watman, “War Gaming and it’s Role in Examining the Future.” Brown Journal of World 

Affairs 10, no. 1 (2003): 51-61.

13. Martin Krieger, “Uncertainty Principles,” Academic 

Minute (March 2015), http://academicminute.org/2015/03/

martin-krieger-usc-uncertainty-principles/v.

14. Bruce W. Bennet, Samuel Gardiner, Daniel B. Fox, and Nicholas Witney, Theater Analysis and Modeling in an Era of Uncertainty: The Present and Future of Warfare (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 

Corporation, 1994).

15. For an example of war gaming as experiment see Ryan 

Kort, “UNIFIED CHALLENGE 2014 Experimentation: Thinking 

Clearly About the Future of Armed Conflict” (Fort Eustis, VA: 

Army Capabilities Integration Center 24 March 2015), http://www.

arcic.army.mil/Articles/cdld-Unified-Challenge-2014-Experimentation-Thinking-Clearly-About-the-Future-of-Armed-Conflict.aspx.

16. Peter P. Perla and Ed McGrady, “Why Wargaming Works,” 

Naval War College Review 64, no. 3 (Summer 2011).

17. Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think 

No One’s Looking) (New York: Crown Publishers, 2015), Kindle 

edition, loc. 128-146.

18. Kenneth Cukier, and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, “The 

Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think About the 

World,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 3 (2013).

19. IARPA. Sirius, accessed July 3, 2015, http://www.iarpa.gov/

index.php/research-programs/sirius.

20. I could find no Army Training Requirements and Resources 

System course for either an exercise planner or war game planner.