The New Map "Gamed"

Dateline: Cracker Barrel, Dumfries VA, 13 April 2005

Grabbing a nice meal after a long day (see below) at a favorite restaurant (yes, I do indulge in nostalgia). Would have popped this in on the day I wrote it, but I had the misfortune of staying at a "Quality" Inn tonight, so no Internet.

I just wanted to take a moment and remind both you and me of the upcoming wargame (The New Map Game) my firm (The New Rule Sets Project LLC) will be putting on in Newport at the end of May (31 May-2 June) with our partners in this effort, Alidade Incorporated and Alphachimp.

I was approached by Alidade's CEO, a retired naval officer named Jeff Cares, near the end of last year with the proposition, Would I be interested in putting on a wargame with players from the defense community and international business looking at how the Core-Gap model of The Pentagon's New Map might play out in coming years? Naturally I was simultaneously intrigued and quite delighted by the prospect.

Cares' firm is full of really smart people who've essentially re-imagined wargaming from its historic military focus on just positing crisis and resolution to a war-within-the-context-of-everything-else mindset that's equally at ease exploring unexpected successes as well as traditionally expected failures. They've elevated the concept beyond just free-play to co-evolution, meaning their players don't just act, they're expected to learn within the game process and generate most of their best challenges and opportunities in terms of growth and not just move-following-move dynamics. You may start a game that feels like checkers, but end up with something that's more like soccer not because the Control has re-jiggered the rules between moves, but because the teams playing simply moved on in their learning curve. Point being, you're not just supposed to stay in character, your character is expected to develop along with the plotline.

To me, this approach is essential for generating a game of the sort made possible by PNM's vision: not just gaming bad events within a Global War on Terrorism, but frankly, gaming the GWOT as just a subset of a much larger process you can call globalization but I like to call "shrinking the Gap." In other words, let's not just game how this thing (GWOT) continues, let's game how we win the whole shebang, or exploring what the pathway would look and feel like that involved making globalization truly global, which isn't just about killing bad guys but re-imagining who can be the good guys. Remember: to shrink the Gap is to grow the Coreóby definition.

And that's what we're really looking at in The New Map Game: gaming the successes that need to occur, not just testing the failures we can already imagine. Contingency planning is about running failures to ground, but serious strategic planning is about exploiting successes for all they're worth. To shrink the Gap may well involve dealing with plenty of contingencies, but the pathway to success will be defined by seeing opportunities for Core expansion where they lie, banking them historically along the way.

I think this game will be quite amazing, and if you're interested, I encourage you to enroll soon, while the "early bird" special lasts (next Monday). To me, this is the closest thing yet to recreating the type of "economic security exercises" I led atop World Trade Center One with Cantor Fitzgerald in the original Naval War College research project I dubbed "The New Rule Sets Project." I chose to name my consultancy similarly, because I feel deeply that the military-market nexus we explored in those historic workshops wasn't just an interesting sidelight to the perceived "big issues" of international securityóthey simply defined them far more than any of us realized in our stovepiped mindsets. I think we have an opportunity here to make similar discoveries, similar co-evolutions in business and security outlooks that will not only inform how we wage a Global War on Terrorism, but actually determine the nature of that struggle's long-term success.

Some details on the game. The four player countries (you'd be assigned to one for the duration) are the United States (Old Core), China (New Core), Brazil (Seam State), and Iran (Gap). Tell me you're not intrigued already by that quartet! China-US-Iran is one triangle we're just beginning to understand (we tend to assume we drive this dynamic, when actually we're in third place on that one), and frankly, the China-US-Brazil one is going to be even more interesting and seminal for how the Core holds together in coming years.

The game will use the "four flows" concept from PNM (people, money, security, energy) to animate the moves and moves-within-moves (i.e., the usual diplomatic actions and strategic investments) that Alidade typically employs in their innovate approach to gaming.

As Alidade puts it, they're looking at the game as a chance to explore my theories in an interactive forum with a diverse group of people whose take on PNM's validity will match their disparate backgrounds, meaning the more skeptical the merrier. Across the entire events, we're planning five "turns," or moves representing two years of ìreal-time,î so the game will last a decade (2006-2016). Why so stretched out? Rome wasn't built in a day, and shrinking the Gap will be similarly long term in nature. If you want to explore grand strategy, then expect to cover a lot of future "historical" ground, not just the summer of 2005.

Again, "early bird" registration will end next Monday, April 18th, so get moving if you want to save the bucks. Plus, there's the simple reality that there's only so many slots, so when the rush kicks in, you don't want to be shut out just as everyone starts realizing that three days at the Hyatt Regency in Newport after Memorial Day ain't exactly hardship duty. Hell, I'm excited just to be on the hook for two briefs, the first of which will be the usual PNM show but the second of which will start exploring Blueprint for Action's big themes, and I'm psyched about getting some of that in PowerPoint.

As for the quality of the people you'll interact with (besides your humble narrator), try these on for size:

* Assoc. Lab Dir., Nat'l Security Directorate, UT-Battelle/Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab

* Analyst, Center for Army Analysis

* Chief, Future Warfare Studies, US Army Training and Doctrine Command

* Vice President, American Systems Corporation

* Exec. Dir., Center For Strategic Leadership Development, ICAF, NDU

* Professor, Department of Warfighting, Air War College

* Director, Advanced Concepts, Lockheed Martin Corporation

* Principal, GLS Consulting, Inc.

* Program Exec., DoD Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office.

Beyond that kind of quality player, we'll have participants from top-notch private-sector firms like Boeing, Raytheon, and The Rendon Group. These are premier organizations, making the networking opportunities significant in and of themselves.

I hope to see as many of my consistent blog readers at this event as possible. While the email exchanges over the months have been great, getting this type of face-to-face interaction can't be beat, as I've learned in these wargames in the past. Knowing how much these exercises have charged my intellectual battery over the years, plus built some of the best professional relationships I currently enjoy (and yeah, the competition in these things bonds one helluva lot better than the usual panel presentations!), I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity.