CONFERENCE REPORT Kriegspiel Renaissance The wargaming community met at Connections UK 2015 ö in September supporting the revival of wargaming (Kriegspiel) as a vital tool in training, education and analysis. Gareth Davies reports. W argaming, an important and longstanding form of training and education, as well as a vital tool in the analytical armoury, has undergone something of a revival in recent years and part of that revival can be directly attributed to the Connections community of practice. Connections was established in the US in 1993 and for many years was the only formal group that brought together the users and players from defence, the research community, academia, and industry. This side of the Atlantic there are a number of wargame evan-gelists including Professor Phil Sabin of King’s College London who has studied, taught and published on wargaming for many years. He, together with Graham Longley-Brown from LBS Consultancy and Major Tom Mouat from the Defence Academy saw the benefits that spread-ing this community would bring and they are the leading lights behind the first Connections franchise, Connections UK, which came to life in 2013. The network is continuing to grow, Connections Aus-tralia followed in 2014 and Connections Netherlands is the newest member. Connections UK 2015 held their annual convention event over three days at King’s College London’s Strand cam-pus in early September, the aim of which was to "to advance and sustain the art, MS&T MAGAZINE 6.2015 science and application of wargaming." Day 1 focused on the basics, aimed at those with limited knowledge of war-gaming, and then built that knowledge rapidly so that by the close delegates would be able to understand the con-cept and its application. Days 2 and 3 were very much all about how to war-game better, how to spread the word about wargaming developments, and the opportunity to participate in a number of wargames. The 130 attendees were a mix of academics, game designers, MOD analysts, defence contractors and con-sultants, and serving military personnel. The number of people attending the UK event has steadily risen over the past three years and it is now almost as large as its US cousin. While there were four main themes to the conference: Global developments, UK developments, best practice, and hobby/professional syner-gies, this article looks at the conference from two perspectives: training & educa-tion, and analysis & research. Above International delegates participating in Connections UK 2015. Image credit: PAXsims. Analysis & Research The main speakers in the first session were all American. Peter Perla, the very well-known game designer and war-game expert, spoke about the recent reinvigoration of wargaming in the US that is being led by the Office of the Sec-retary of Defense. He explained how the US DoD leadership have identified the proven importance of wargames in simi-lar periods of rapid change, that they real-ize the importance of learning from and about wargames in professional military education, and that they recognise that wargaming needs to take place in con-cert with other analytical and experimen-tal activities. Matt Caffrey, who set up Connections, followed with an overview of international wargaming efforts. His central point was that wargaming not only provides its users with an edge, it is the catalyst for other edges. Wargaming can help refine ordinary ideas (and pos-sibly bad ones) into much better ideas. As one would expect from a UK event the UK’s research and analytical use of wargaming was a major part of the agenda. The UK MOD’s research organi-sation, Dstl, briefed on how it uses war-gaming as an analytical tool. Emphasis was placed on how wargaming can aid divergent thinking and innovation. David England from Niteworks, who is leading the Army’s Combat experimentation, spoke on how wargaming formed a criti-cal element of the analytical process, and he made the very interesting point that 42
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