This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 19th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What's the value of war games?

Certainly military

understand weaknesses, guide policy, and decide where future resources should be devoted.

Economist Garrett Wood has explored the value of war gaming. We discussed how

war games are used and how they might be abused. We're constantly trying to come

up with maps of reality and we're often told the map is not the territory. And so when we're

modeling something like a reality with a game, we have to take some liberties in designing the game.

Right? It can't be perfect. It's not lived experience. It's different. The stakes are different.

The incentives may be different. We want them to be

substantially the same. So explain to me what do military officials and you know more like a civilian leaders in governments what do they

see as the enduring value of war gaming I think you get two answers to that question.

The first is probably the one that your typical layman thinks of, which is we put in the data,

we had experts, warriors, you know, military scholars and whatnot.

Look at the data and run through a number of scenarios, a number of strategies,

test different tactics.

And through all this testing, we've come up with an idea of how we should fight, what weapons we should buy, where we should fight when, etc.

That is, the game is being used to guide policy. That's one way to look at war games.

The other way to look at war games, and I think this is a minority view, but it's the one I come

down in favor of, is just as an intuition training device, almost the same way that chess is.

You might hope that your military leaders are good at chess because you imagine the game developing strategic forethought and a concept of how to move around in clever ways that minimize your own losses and impose your will on the opponent.

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