By MC2 Michael Ehrlich

Under the sponsorship of the NPS’s Energy Academic Group (EAG), students of the Operation Research (OR) Curriculum execute the ‘Operational Energy Wargame,’ which studies the challenges of insurgents creating a breakaway nation in a fictitious country, while focusing on energy shortages and incorporating energy resources during this crisis situation. Concurrently, the OR department is conducting four other wargaming exercises; ‘Defining Australia’s Future Battlefield Aviation Requirements’; ‘Distributed Lethality in the South China Sea’; ‘USMC Extreme Cold Weather System Wargame’; and ‘Operation Pressure Cooker 2020: Deterring Tension in the South China Sea.’

Senior Lecturer Dr. Jeff Appleget has coordinated with outside sponsors to identify real-world scenarios that NPS has the resources and manpower to tackle. Since 2009, the students have conducted 46 wargames for 27 different sponsors to include all United States services, Canada, Norway, and for the first time Australia.

“The NPS OR curriculum has taught wargaming for over 30 years. When I took over the course in 2009, I transitioned it from a focus on computer-based wargames to re-focus the course on having student teams design, develop, conduct, and analyze a wargame for a real world DoD or Defense partner sponsor,” said Appleget. “In addition, we take a week-long version of this course and teach it around the world. We have taught it for USSTRATCOM, USCENTCOM, the US Marine Corps, Royal Canadian Air Force, Australian Defense Forces, and the Indonesian Navy. We will do another course for CENTCOM and a course for NAVAIR-China Lake this summer.”

Royal Australian Army Capt. Adam Hepworth worked closely with his sponsor, the Australian Army Headquarters for Future Land Warfare Branch, to develop the ‘Defining Australia’s Future Battlefield Aviation Requirements.’

“The angle of today’s wargame is to look at the future operating concepts of the Australian army and aviation, looking at both manned and unmanned platforms and how they could operate in our contemporary operating environment,” said Hepworth. “What we have today are participants from Australia and from Stanford University, both military and civilian students, to come down and play through the game today. We will be producing a comprehensive report to bring back to Australia to feed into our actual planning on their acquisition processes as well as the employment of aviation into the future.”

Under the sponsorship of EAG, OR student Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Schaefer, along with several colleagues and international students from Germany, developed the ‘Operational Energy Wargame (OE).’ In addition, representatives from the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence in Lithuania, U.S. Navy Energy Coordination Office, and USMC Expeditionary Energy Office joined the wargaming team, their recommendations and expertise were instrumental throughout the exercise.

“Right now at the operational energy wargame we have two cells, a red and a blue, and for the last hour they have been learning the game, understanding their moves and implications, while developing strategies of how they want to go about it. Right now we are finishing up making their first round moves,” explained Schaefer.

“The base scenario is that there is a host nation that is influenced by an outside nation and insurgences that have taken over a portion of the country and created a break away country. The host country has its military forces combating the insurgents in the break away region but they have also asked for a combined joint task force from the international community.”

Developing the OE Wargame equipped the students with a unique opportunity to work on the real-world issues, where diverse constraints associated with delivering operational energy to locations where it’s needed is at increasing risks, ultimately resulting in a success or failure of military operations. Given the importance of the work done, the wargame will be incorporated into the curricula of a one-week course on Energy Efficiency in Military Operations, to be conducted by EAG end of June in Vilnius, Lithuania in close collaboration with the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence.

Hepworth will be graduating this Spring on June 16, and describes this activity as the culmination of his years of hard work at NPS.

“The capstone courses in the OR program of combat modeling, campaign analysis and war gaming really tie in to the foundation at eight months of the program,” said Hepworth, “we were looking at all the complex data analysis and mathematics and simulation that we undertake. All of those principles and metrics and quantitative tools we have been given in the program, get called into these two to three days activities or analysis pieces distilled into a single breath. It really is the capstone culmination of what we have been able to produce in the past two years in the program here.”