COIN Sim: Modeling Civilians in Task Force Series
Pat Proctor says in his manual “I think I have built my last tactical-level game”. He is interested in three things:
1) “How does a joint force commander marshal every element of military power to achieve the nation’s strategic objectives.”
2) “What happens when the use of force isn’t enough.”
3) “How do insurgency, national will, the media, and terrorism interact to complicate the problem?”
So first there is the tactical vs. strategic, that is, the question of scale. Games such as Decisive Action do this by expanding to the division and corps level. But this model is completely inadequate to address the second and third questions, questions of war by other means, that is, politics.
I don’t want this to be the end of the Task Force series, but the reality is we are no longer fighting military on military. Today’s wars are more complicated. Force isn’t enough to win these battles. The Task Force series can’t simulate today’s wars, and this is a challenge.
I am not a vet, but I am by a social scientist, urban planner, and avid mil-simmer. I believe that politics is local, especially in a warzone, especially in unstable countries like Iraq, Vietnam, Africa, and other places that have a tribal and local rather than national identity. The battles are still won and lost village by village, on the brigade scale. I have been thinking hard about how to model guerilla war (and city planning) in a sim. “Counterinsurgency is armed social work”, as it says in the current field manuals. I think that the political dimension is essential to understanding, conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Modeling the political dimension to conflicts would be a great educational tool, but more importantly, it is the only way to simulate the dynamics of counterinsurgency warfare.
I believe that with the current ProSIMCo architecture, we have enough to model the dynamic. It can be done simply. A simple game with simple rules can result in very complex results. A few very minor additions to the ProSIM Company model would be enough to model the political aspects of war and insurgent dynamics.
The place to start with is civilian units. Currently there are not enough civilians running around on the battlefield. In the Mogadishu Campaign in AATF, anything that moves is hostile. So we need more running around. But what do they do?
First, because guerrilla warfare is protracted, it will be necessary to extend the game over longer periods of time: from hours to weeks and months (I envision a mission taking place over a month). With this longer time period you are going to need to add three basic variables to every unit: rations, morale, and fuel, (fatigue would also be nice).
Rations:
Rations represents all resources a unit has: food, supplies, cash, etc. This added feature would be helpful in a classic sim anyway, if you wanted to wage a battle over days you have to be resupplied. As an artillery piece gets its ammo from an ammo carrier, a unit would re-supply its income from what I call a “workshop”. A workshop is a generic name for a resupply platform,that provides rations. A resupply truck (a type of workshop) can give rations (income) to troops. A factory (another workshop), resupplies civilians with their rations. Each side, Blue, Red, and Yellow, has its own workshops to provide rations. If your units don’t get enough rations, morale may suffer, and they may even starve.
Allegiance/Morale:
Morale is allegiance to a particular side. Let’s say you are a Blue Force. If you get cut off from supplies, if you have been suppressed for too long, if you are taking casualties in your unit, your morale is going to decrease. As it drops you might lose combat effectiveness. If it drops too far, they may even desert and turn neutral. You might even join the insurgency.
So the civilian model so far would contain civilians running around, and once a week (or once a day) they automatically pick up their daily rations from their workshop. The workshop platform would be like a platoon leader, with multiple civilians working under it, units of the same allegiance. If they are provided with rations, morale points toward you go up. You have just created a small economy, based on nothing more than morale and supply variables.
You turn your game from a traditional maneuver warfare sim into a counterinsurgency sim by designating the population as the victory condition. The purpose of the game, as in COIN, is not to destroy the enemy. The purpose is to turn as many of the civilians blue instead of red. You do this by giving the civilians their daily rations. You give them rations by keeping workshops open. Therefore a victory condition might be “pacify 95% of all rice paddies by x date”, or “provide 95% of civilians with adequate rations”.
Of course, the red team is going to try to stop you. Their objective is to cause morale to drop so low that civilians defect from the blue or yellow side and join the red side. They do this by disrupting your supply chain, in this case, attacking civilian infrastructure and the civilians themselves. They bomb the workshops units (aid stations, factories, government ministries, mosques, grain silos) that provide the rations to the population. Without rations, the people will lose morale (allegiance), and defect. Alternatively, they can attack the population itself. If civilians are attacked (suppressed), then they won’t come to work that day. If their workplace is cut-off by enemy activity, or captured by the enemy, or destroyed by the enemy, they won’t come to work, and civilians won’t receive rations. And if a workshop does not have enough loyal workers, it will close, and the remaining workers won’t receive rations. Without rations morale drops until they either find a new vacancy at a friendly workshop, or they change over to the red team, which have their own workshops, including terrorist “workshops”, which provide income to insurgents and their loyalists. If the locals aren’t happy, they will turn into insurgents if someone pays them. The terrorist leader is just another type of mobile workshop that goes around providing rations to insurgents.
Workshops, when they are operating or when they are closed-down, can provide bonuses. In addition to providing income they could provide other multiplier effects. A radio station, for example, could increase allegiance/morale across the board. A bus station could multiply the speed civilians can travel. A mosque, if destroyed, could alter morale toward different factions. Now, with two new variables and some modifiers to existing variables, you have simulated a very complex urban environment.
Fuel
There is only one thing left to model: territory. These civilians have to be constrained in where they go. This can be done either by giving civilians a “fuel” limit. So the home, or shelter, is a new type of unit, but essentially another type of resupply platform, one that provides fuel to pedestrians. The civilian will wander about within walking distance of the unit's house, and go to workshops within range. Access to a transportation workshop might expand the zone where a particular civilian is able to go, perhaps through a speed multiplier. Now instantly you have populated your city with civilians, they have places to go, and it is all automatic.
If that civilian unit is attacked on his way to work, or at work, it is “suppressed”, not for minutes, but for a day or so. When suppressed, there will be an immediate allegiance/moral penalty, the unit will not make it to work to get rations, and the lack of rations further reduces morale. Maybe the next day it will try again. If it can’t get to a workshop without getting suppressed, morale might collapse and it will become an insurgent (or neutral), or rations might run out and it could starve. Shelters, like workshops, might be destroyed if you can’t maintain certain requirements (you must pay x units income a week or be evicted, if you have not been to your home in three days it is considered abandoned). Or maybe it will abandon its house and find one closer to friendly workshops (maybe under a bridge, in a refugee camp, in a green zone, or in a nearby village enclave). Having adequate shelter could modify morale as well.
In my model every unit belongs to “platoon” which is associated with a workplace, and it has a separate home as well. If you kept the platoon hierarchy, would not be unlike an artillery battalion, with separate guns (civilians), ammo pallets (workshops and homes), and commanders (employers) all grouped together.
Fatigue
Speaking of housing, shelters it can give civilians a place to sleep. Fatigue is simple: a unit needs down time. If it doesn’t get it, the fatigue factor takes a toll on combat ability. That is an example of a traditional variable in most wargames. Maybe a unit can go to a shelter to reduce fatigue. The shelter is like a supply platform that reduces fatigue points (supplying negative points). It can also provide fuel points for pedestrians, as mentioned previously.
Patrols
Because this type of battle would take place over longer periods of time, it would be necessary to set up recurring automated patrols for your military units. This can be done through some sort of mission scheduling system similar to that used in Harpoon for air patrols, or based on the existing mission system.
Applications
With this civilian modeling, based upon loyalty, rations, and fuel, there are so many scenarios that you could model. You can make a new world come alive just by changing the map, and giving these generic “civilians” a name, as students, farmers, factory workers, city officials, tribal elders, policemen, and clerics. You could model war refugees in Darfur and Somalia. You could model genocide in Yugoslavia. You could model natural disasters, (attack looters, house and feed population). You could model all phases of the Iraq war, including opening day riots, ethnic cleansing, protecting critical infrastructure. You could model the Arab-Israeli conflict as you attempt to break the insurgency by assassinating terrorist leaders terrorist leaders. You could model the Vietnam Conflict, with its enclave hamlets and search-and-destroy missions. You could even simulate the drug wars going on in our own cities. It can all be done with rudimentary tweaks to the civilian AI model.
And it has been done before. The game Dwarf Fortress is a game that attempts to simulate an entire society, from food production to economy. It is an excellent example of what can be done, but it is too complex. What I propose isn’t a simulation of everything, like Sim City. All I want is a tactical-level mil-sim with civilians, civilians that will turn against you if they aren’t safe and well-fed.
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