Well, the wargame that we spent a week executing (including Saturday) is now officially over. It was a success… no one won, no one lost, and everyone learned what they were supposed to… officially a success in our books!
The funny thing is that this wargame required a lot of coordination between various “nations” played by different groups of students. You were supposed to concentrate on diplomatic means before you thought about military ones, and so on and so forth. It was funny, because we had a group of diplomatic types there to consult with us, and after a day’s prolonged back-and-forth with one of the nations as they were doing the run-up to war, the diplomats and the people running the game got in a heated debate.
“They just did all this hard work today,” spluttered one of the diplomats, “and you’re STILL going to force it to escalate to war?”
On the other hand, the (military) faculty member in charge of that group was saying, “They wasted all this time today… we’re going to show them what happens when they do that!”
Basically, the talking types (diplomats) wanted to have the in-game diplomacy to have resolved the (manufactured) crisis, and have the students “rewarded” for all their hard work this way. Whereas the “let’s take this kinetic” types (military) thought it’d been a day all but wasted.
I just thought it was a funny illustration of the varying mindsets of the military and the diplomatic corps. No matter how hard we work at delaying/derailing conflicts, we in the military are likely to feel that we haven’t actually “done something” unless we spring into action. If they’d “rewarded” the students by telling ‘em they’d solved the crisis with diplomacy, that entire military group would have felt cheated of the full wargame experience… which is something I don’t think the professional talkers realized (and might have been horrified if they did).
This is why I and the people I work with, probably, are so mystified when some politicians imply that if we just talk to the rest of the world, all will be sweetness and light, and we’ll never be disliked again. (Well, we might have to throw in an apology or two just to be safe.)
Posted by Kjirstin 
