Wargame 2nd Korean War

[Elisabet Schwartzkopf]

JeremySepinsky is CNA's lead wargame designer. In FY18, he designed and facilitated more than ten wargames for Navy and Joint Commands, as well as for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. His wargames help strategic decision-makers understand the broad context of actions, as well as the tactical impacts of their decisions. (sepi...@cna.org)

The various rules published in Next War: Supplement 1 and Next War: Supplement 2 (GMT Games, 2019) have slowly evolved the game model. In 2019, GMT Games released a Second Edition with the most up-to-date compilation of the rules and a more current order of battle. The game evolved somewhat like the threat.

North Korean publicized events in late 2020 and into 2021 indicate a pace of weapons development and modernization in North Korea that DIA, much less wargames with multi-year development cycles, cannot seemingly keep up with:

Kim Jong-il died in 2011, the year before the first edition of Next War: Korea was published. His youngest son, Kim Jong-un, took the mantle of power at age 27. His reign has been marked by an accelerated pace of development for both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. By the end of 2017, North Korea had conducted four additional nuclear tests, including what may have been one of a higher yield thermonuclear device. He also oversaw the testing of several new ballistic missile designs with varying ranges including a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), two types of mobile intermediate-range missiles (IRBMs), and the tests of intercontinental-range missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the continental United States.34

The exact conditions that North Korea would use nuclear weapons, delivered via ballistic missiles, is unknown. In North Korea Military Power, DIA suggests that Kim Jong-un would only use nuclear weapons if his regime was in danger of ending:

Indeed, in April 2022 Kim Yong Jo, younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, released a statement condemning comments by the outgoing South Korean defense minister who talked about preemptive strikes against North Korea. In her statement, Kim Yong Jo gave what appears to some to be a declaration of North Korean nuclear doctrine:

A recent study published by the Nautilus Institute of Security and Sustainment looked at nuclear use cases on the Korean peninsula. They tell us that there are many, many different cases in which nuclear weapons might be used on the Korean peninsula; and not all of them end neatly:

If we really want to understand how a future Korean War may impact our future, we need to get busy designing wargames that better depict the rapid military developments on the Korean Peninsula. Significantly, this means there is a need to better show the use and impact of ballistic missiles in theater campaigns. Alas, we may also have to once again look into the nuclear abyss, long thought left behind with the end of the Cold War.

All decision makers face conditions of imperfect information that limit their capacity for fully rational decisions. Upon recognizing the presence of potentially significant unassessed risk, decision-makers attempt to expand the boundaries of the known-knowns by disclosing sensitive or even confidential information, soliciting group feedback, seeking perspectives from multidisciplinary stakeholders, hiring creative thinkers and directly investigating the unknown (Luft & Ingham 1955). Wargaming often combines all these elements.

US-NK relations improved in March 2018 when President Trump announced plans to meet with Chairman Kim Jong Un. That month, Chairman Kim made his first official state visit to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing. In April, South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Chairman Kim for the first time in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Then in June, President Trump met with Chairman Kim in Singapore. Their meeting produced a joint-statement committing to four goals: 1) A new relationship aimed at peace and prosperity; 2) Lasting and stable peace on the Korean Peninsula; 3) Complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and; 4) Recovery and repatriation of POW/MIA remains (White House 2018). At the time the wargames were played, these unresolved issues presented a backdrop for the DPRK Matrix Game.

These courses were scheduled across five days, with the game introduced on Monday, objectives prepared on Tuesday, gameplay on Wednesday, and debriefing on Friday. The aims of the game were to explore this complex transnational security issue, develop collaborative approaches to the problem, and develop and strengthen security sector networks in the process.

Prior to attending the game, players representing the United States, DPRK, Japan, China, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and Russia were provided with a short informational packet describing their assigned nations and a concise situational brief on current events in the Korean Peninsula.

Player actions occurred over three phases: arguments, counter-arguments, and adjudication. First, a team of players representing an actor proposed an action based on reasonable assumptions and established facts. This included a description of the action, its intended outcome, and 1-to-3 clear reasons for why it was likely to succeed. In phase two, other players offered counter arguments pertaining to the likelihood and outcome of the proposed action. The counter-arguments offered in this phase require players step out of their role and respond in good faith as third-party analysts. In phase three, the facilitator adjudicated on the success of the proposed action and determined the extent to which it manifested and if it generated unintended consequences. When a proposed action occurs, it becomes an established fact and a permanent part of the game narrative, which affects the success or failure of future actions. Players may forgo their turn to conduct a covert action that is adjudicated in private by the facilitator and hidden from the other players until it is used.

Players propose their actions with supporting arguments in clockwise order of seating. Each round of arguments is followed by a briefing from the Rapporteur, review by a subject matter expert, and a 10-minute negotiation phase in preparation for the next round. Within three hours of gameplay, players generally complete 5 rounds.

When the DPRK Matrix Game is played with up to fifteen players, the game requires a support team of three people: A Facilitator, a Rapporteur, and a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Facilitators are responsible for moderating the discussion, adjudicating arguments, and maintaining the flow of the game. Players occasionally belabor a point when they feel they are losing an argument. Recognizing this, skilled facilitators identify when consensus on an issue has been reached and intervene to progress the discussion.

Rapporteurs are responsible for building a narrative from the game. Throughout each round, they record all arguments made, along with their respective outcomes. Then, at the conclusion of each round, rapporteurs brief the group on their notes. Skilled rapporteurs track multiple threads and developments on arguments across multiple rounds and integrate these developments into their briefings.

In these five games, there were 193 Actions (Asks) by players (averaging 39 per game) that generated 136 successful outcomes (Gots) after review (averaging 27 per game and 5 per round). Virtually all moves generated one or more outcomes by increasing or decreasing factors in the sixteen categories listed in Table 1.

* During the negotiation process between actors, as well as the adjudication process, some actions were awarded additional outcomes without the recipient making an explicit Ask for that outcome, which pushed the success rate over 100%.

The most popular move was improving relations through economic investments (22 Asks) and other means (22 Asks); closely followed by efforts to decrease sanctions in some form (21 Asks). Efforts to increase economic or political relations were fairly successful, with success rates of 68% and 72% respectively. However, in 8 cases, these factors actually decreased as a result of other moves.

Despite there being ample time for players to engage in negotiations between each game round, the third most popular move was attempting to initiate a talk. This included formal bilateral meetings, multilateral meetings, peace talks, treaty talks, and 6-party talks. Many of these failed immediately when the parties did not agree to participate in the talks and only a third succeeded. In cases where a meeting did take place, the expected outcomes of the meeting were often left unstated, requiring further elicitation by the adjudicator.

While there were not many efforts to increase or decrease military presence, they were often successful (73-100%). Of note, changes to the Japanese military were only made in one game and changes to the PRC military were only made in two games.

Overall, moves that focused on sensitive areas, such as borders, the demilitarized zone, missile testing and denuclearization had low success rates (25-36%). One reason for this was that players risked the odds and wasted moves by going for total denuclearization or other endpoints rather than proposing incremental steps, which might have had a higher probability of success. Inspections were, by contrast, totally successful as the DPRK used this concession effectively as a bargaining chip. Similarly, moves to increase or decrease the presence of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile systems within the ROK were marginally successful (67%) because the system was seen as non-essential and a useful bargaining chip. Two out of the five games did not attempt actions that made changes to missile testing or THAAD.

Despite the Japan actors being briefed on the need to reclaim their previously abducted citizens from the DPRK, only one game featured this move. In two other games, the DPRK offered abductees as bargaining chips without being asked. No games featured a move to reunify North and South Korea, but this was gained in one game as a consequence of a related Ask.

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