U.S. Naval War College

Hometown: Newport , RI, US

War game focuses on non-combat missions, country engagement

12.17.2014 | NEWPORT, RI, US
Courtesy Story

NEWPORT, R.I. – The Naval Services Game 2014 conducted by U.S. Naval War College (NWC) war gaming department, Dec. 8-12, was not devised for war at all.

One of this year’s largest, the game looked at how to improve the types of humanitarian interactions that are becoming increasingly frequent and important among sailors.

Those interactions could be offering soccer balls to school children in Nigeria or helping to train the Cambodian coast guard. It could also mean being the closest ship geographically when a natural disaster strikes, offering aid.

“The big premise of this war game is that the Naval Board (composed of eight Navy and Marine Corps general/flag officers) is exploring alternative missions for traditional platforms like engagement, theater security cooperation and low-end crisis response,” said Marine Lt. Col. Hunter Kellogg, game director.

The Navy and Marine Corps have spent a lot of time and energy using combatant ships for this sort of mission, said Kellogg, which adds to the already overtaxed nature of those ships.

“The focus of the game was that there has got to be a better way to do this type of engagement, or be the closest when disaster happens,” he added. “[We wanted to know] what other options are there?”

Answering that question required developing a war game to introduce a set of conditions with a limited amount of equipment and also the right personnel to know what could work and what wouldn’t work.

The equipment included three ships from the Navy’s Military Sealift Command that have the capacity to support the mission, including two large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off ships and one dry cargo ammunition ship.

“One of the first and most broad questions we asked is, ‘If you knew you were going to do some sort of mission of this type, what would you put on the ship?’” said Kellogg. “And we kept the question that general on purpose.”

Game players included Military Sealift Command ship captains, experts in Navy medicine, Marine infantry, communications, logistics, intelligence, helicopter operations and others.

The players were divided into three identical groups or cells, given the equipment, and asked to solve the problem for all three ships that had been slightly modified for the mission.

“The cells were given several scenarios and they had to decide how, given the gear they were handed, they would crack that nut,” said Kellogg. “And then they needed to tell us where it fell short, and what they would have done differently.

“In the end, what we wanted to discover is some insight as well as the limitations.”

One stipulation was that the humanitarian equipment and embarked force could not impede the ships’ original mission, which in the case of two of the modified vessels was part of MSC’s Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF).

The three groups all looked for solutions independently and didn’t share data during the game.

The results will be analyzed over the course of the next several weeks and included in the forthcoming game report.