@rjpeters70:
A and A is at best a game of grand strategy. It has zero operational or tactical utility. Hence, I’m not sure why you’d use it for ROTC guys, who will be doing tactical stuff for well over the first decade of their career. They won’t even start to think about operational stuff until they are 05s at the earliest.
Most of the games/exercises I run are at the strategy to grand strategy level. I am going to an operational to strategy level game in Newport in a couple months. We’ll have Blue, Green, Red, Orange, Yellow, and White (control) cells all playing in separate rooms over five days. About a hundred of us. Kind of excited, as the most complex game I’ve played is a forty person, three cell game over three days.
But for ROTC? A and A is borderline useless as a training tool. Fun? Yes. Educational? No.
I think you’re absolutely wrong in your assessment on the training value of using this as a training tool.
These kids are first year cadets, it’s about the concepts, not the strategy. There are fundamental concepts that work from the squad all the way up to the Army level that can be displayed through this game. Also, If you had read the rest of the thread, you would have seen that over time, I plan on scaling back the scope of the games to the point where they’re working at a platoon/company.
As a matter of fact, just this last weekend I playtested a concept using Flames of War as a base for being a commander in an operation. A Marine friend of mine shot me an WARNO/OPORD 2 days before the “operation” with a map he made displaying my “battle space”. He then took “recon” photos of the surrounding terrain and of a village I was to defend against an opponent that vastly outnumbered me. I deployed my forces through either Facebook instant message or text while they updated via the same devices, rolled the die, moved the individual pieces, and acted the part of squad leaders/ platoon leaders when reporting. I had a time limit to make decisions based off the intelligence I had on hand. My opponent was 400 miles away doing the same thing with his force simultaneously to me. It worked out brilliantly.
Eventually I’m going to work this all out. My concept is that if they see where they fall in the big picture, then it will become easier to understand the consequences of the decisions they’ll make as platoon leaders/ company commanders. In today’s current COIN/stability operations type setting, a platoons or even a teams actions can very much have strategic consequences. THAT’S the training value of it. Not to mention it is going to develop the portion of their brains that causes them to execute good judgement and being able to foresee 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects to the decisions they make. Let’s face it, how much practice does an 18 year old kid have at making good judgement calls? It’s a learned behavior that needs to be exercised just like anything else. 1st year curriculum for ROTC is not going to give that to them. This way, I can ask those questions about what their thought process is while at the same time give them tidbits on how it matters at the company level.