Wargaming Urban Conflict: A PhD in Progress

About this event
The world is becoming increasing urbanised, and the “urban triad” of complex man-made terrain, a human population and supporting infrastructure offers a host of evolving challenges to any military contemplating operations in the urban environment. This session will present an overview of the work so far on my PhD in wargaming urban conflict including: a (very) brief history of urban conflict; a consideration of some of the key characteristics of modern urban warfare (and how those are challenged or reinforced by events in Gaza and the Ukraine); an initial analysis of existing urban wargames and an outline of the urban wargames that I have been working on so far. The presentation will end by examining the issues of civilians, civilian infrastructure and civilian livelihoods in urban conflict and urban wargames.
Biography
David Burden has been a wargamer and creator of wargames for around 50 years - although ironically not for the 10 years he spent in the British Army. David founded Daden Limited in 2004, working mainly in virtual reality and conversational AI. Whilst working with the UK MOD to automatically generate social media to support urban wargames David developed a wider interest in the issues of urban conflict and how they could best be wargamed. David started his part-time PhD on wargaming urban conflict at Bath Spa University under Dr John Curry in early 2022, and is currently researching the unique features of urban warfare and how it has been wargamed in the past. Alongside book research and interviews David is also designing new wargames looking at different aspects of the urban challenge. David is an ex-Royal Signals officer, a Chartered European Engineer, a TEDx presenter, and is also series co-editor for Taylor & Francis on their Metaverse Series of books.
Image
January 31, 2014 photo released by UNRWA, showing residents of the besieged Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, lining up to receive food supplies, in Damascus, Syria. (UNRWA via AP)

[@jaydugger3291]

You wrote Pocket Empires!

[@davidburden3835]

Expanding the Empire was my main section, with contributions elsewhere in the book, it was a team effort by the CORE team. My chapter is basically a set of rules for what we'd now call sub-threshold/grey-zone operations.

[@MagpieNation]

Wargames are a modeling tool not a predictive tool, it's true, but if the model fails to accurately predict an outcome given a set of accurate inputs it's likely not a great model.

[@lorenzonannetti1628]

You can't predict actual actors' choices. If the model is good you can highlight relevant dynamics and get valuable insight, but not peedict how real decision-makers will use, exploit, respond to (or fail to) those same dynamics, and therefore how it will end up. That's exactly because that's a model, not reality. At best, large numbers of repetitions can give you some statistical insight... but with care

[@MagpieNation]

@@lorenzonannetti1628 I should have put a timestamp. I was reacting to the statement about real-world decisions and actions not leading to real-world outcomes (and the seeming expectation that this should be so) around the early mid-point of the video.

[@davidburden3835]

Agree with @lorenzonannetti1628 that the model needs to be fit for purpose, and that each play gives you a point on the outcomes map. In reality you're unlikely to get many points/plays, but at least they might give you some idea of the size and the shape of the map, and points to navigate off of when you start to find yourself on that map in reality. In the case of the Hue games (and really any other games) I'd expect the micro level decisions/actions to give you plausible immediate real world outcomes, but there are so many of them in the game that the outcome of the game, whilst still plausible, is unlikely at a detailed level to be the same as happened in reality.

[@MagpieNation]

@@davidburden3835 So long as reality's outcome is within the realm of plausibility, I see nothing wrong with that, but I still contend that the stronger a model is the more likely such repeated inputs will result in the real-world outcome. Whether a feasible number of games can be played isn't a sound argument in my opinion: The stronger the associated bell curve of possible outcomes aligns with the actual outcome the better the model, full stop.

[@VrilWaffen]

The point of wargaming is testing out possible scenarios and assuming the enemy will react as rationally as possible to your moves, then devising contingency plans for each reaction scenario. For example at an operational level if your opponent has reserve formations and several targets you plan to attack, you would wargame several dozen scenarios in which each of those scenarios the enemy commits their reserves in different ways based on the targets you choose for attack. When enemy reserves are committed to the defense in the wargame, you then devise contingencies for how best to exploit the enemy's decision. Wargaming is not about accurately predicting an outcome; wargaming is making contingencies for EVERY outcome.