Course of action (COA) development and wargaming are critical stages in the U.S. Army’s military decision-making process (MDMP), where command staff at battalion and higher echelons analyze COAs in detail, considering actions, enemy reactions, and counteractions. Teamwork behaviors involving coordination across warfighting functional areas are essential to wargaming effectiveness and therefore central learning objectives in training. Full-scale wargaming exercises involve teams-of-teams, as different functional leads and their subordinate staff make decisions and projections relevant to major COA events, to produce a detailed, synchronized operational matrix. In order for a training audience to work effectively in full-scale wargaming, there is a need for preparatory collaborative exercises where they can gain greater awareness as to their specific roles and contributions, and those of other team members. This paper describes a distributed training tool developed to prepare staffs for full-scale wargaming with a browser-based synchronous team dimensional familiarization exercise guided by an instructor. The exercise is presented as an integrated wargaming vignette, where command staff participants are prompted to review COA events and consider the role and impact of different warfighting functional areas. Since the exercise focuses on teamwork, much of the emphasis is on participants identifying relevant questions to be considered in the decision process, without the additional overhead of determining scenario-specific answers. Team performance assessment is captured via teamwork markers associated with an assessment model organized around team dimensions tailored for wargaming. Markers are created both by instructors and automated system rules during the exercise, for later incorporation into a debriefing for team self-correction. Markers are tagged with salient team constructs, qualitative assessments, and annotations about the flow of knowledge across warfighting functions. This paper presents initial training tool feedback from experienced instructors, as well as further discussion of the tradeoffs in team training for wargaming and other collaborative problem-solving domains.
Keywords
ASSESSMENT, PERFORMANCE, TEAM TRAINING
Additional Keywords
decision-making, wargaming