Mr. Sebastian Bae, a wargaming expert, discusses integrating board games into military training, incorporating moral and ethical decision-making into game design. He explores the importance of wargaming for strategic thinking and decision-making skills, challenges of diverse educational methods in military training, ethical decision-making in game design, randomness in war game design, and strategic insights into the Latorl Commander Indo-Pacific game for military training.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Integrate Wargames in Training
Teach enlisted and junior leaders how to use wargames to maintain institutional knowledge during frequent rotations.
Pair games with books, podcasts, and discussions to create a mixed-method learning environment at the tactical level.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Ethics in Wargame Design
Mr. Bae is co-designing a card-driven ethics wargame highlighting commander dilemmas on morale, integrity, and readiness.
The game fosters discussion on difficult command decisions and varied ethical perspectives among players.
insights INSIGHT
Value in Wargame Discussion
The greatest educational value in wargames comes from the discussions about decisions made, not the decisions’ outcomes.
Debate helps players understand diverse perspectives and decision rationales, improving judgment.
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Season 1, Episode 14 of the Operational Arch. This is part two of our conversation with guest Mr. Sebastian Bae where he talks about Wargaming and its utility to military planning and training. In this episode, Sebastian explains how to integrate board games into your units training. He also talks about the processes of incorporating moral, ethical, and diverse decision making into board game design.
Mr. Bae is an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic Studies. He serves as the co-chair of the Military Operation Research Society (MORS) Wargaming Community of Practice. Formerly Sebastian served six years in the U.S. Marine Corps infantry and deployed to Iraq in 2009. He is the developer of the game Littoral Commander, and has been published in War on the Rocks, Strategy Bridge, Task and Purpose, The Diplomat, and Georgetown Security Studies Review. His professional focus is wargaming, emerging technologies, future warfighting concepts, and strategy and doctrine for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.
Links to Mr. Bae’s Publications:
- Put Educational Wargaming in the Hands of the Warfighter. https://shorturl.at/dqsGH
- Promise Unfulfilled: A Brief History of Educational Wargaming in the Marine Corps. https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/JAMS_Fall2021_12_2_web.pdf
- Forging Wargamers. https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/Forging%20Wargamers_web.pdf
MAJs Josh Bedingfield, Kesley Kurtz, and Dan Warner are the hosts for this episode. You can contact them at operationalarch@gmail.com with any questions you may have.
School of Advanced Military Studies: https://armyuniversity.edu/CGSC/SAMS/SAMS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/us_sams
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/us.sams/
Intro and Outro Music: "On and On" by Christian Bedingfield