Some thoughts about VCOW

Over the weekend I took part in several VCOW (Virtual Conference of Wargamers) sessions. These included:

Wake Island: A virtual battlefield tour of the Alamo of the Pacific

This presentation made extensive use of Google Earth images as well as contemporary and modern maps to tell the background to the United States occupation and defence of Wake Island. It was a fascinating insight to the little known event surrounding the Japanese attack and capture of the island group in the early days of the Pacific War.

Midway

The presenter of this session was injured in a car accident earlier that day (luckily, not seriously) but another attendee – who had seen the original presentation – stepped in and gave what turned out to be an excellent description of the Battle of Midway. There were lots of extremely interesting contributions in the subsequent discussion from the very knowledgeable attendees.

Matrix Game Simulation

This session looked at the way in which advances in Large Language Models (AI) – and ChatGPT in particular – is having an impact upon Matrix Games. After a short introduction, the presenter took the attendees through a Matrix Game about the growing US interest in acquiring Greenland. The results were very believable and went some way to convincing me that this technology has much to recommend it.

The presenter then used a Matrix Game about the Spanish Civil War (Viva la Muerta!) that I designed many years ago as an example of how quickly the text of a Matrix Game can be adapted for use with ChatGPT. This took a matter of minutes, and the presenter then ran through the first few turns of the game before asking the program to complete it. I was most impressed with the result ... and I became a firm convert to the concept of using such programs to enhance my tabletop wargaming.

As far as I am concerned, this was the standout session of VCOW, and it has convinced me to investigate the wargaming potential of such computer programs.

Article 5

Article 5 of the Treaty that set up NATO states:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

This session saw the participants take on the roles of leading politicians in NATO member countries. They were told that an armed attack had been made on a NATO member on Christmas Eve, and were tasked with identifying what NATO’s response would be.

After a short briefing, the participants were split into four groups, and each group was asked to come up with four or five responses to the attack. These were then summarised by each group’s chair during a plenary session … and it was interesting to see the range of answers the participants came up with.

An Introduction To Cyberwarfare

Much has been written about the threat (or non-threat!) of cyberwarfare, and this lecture looked at several examples of this form of warfare. For example, the fact that the Ukrainians lost nearly 90% of their artillery in the fighting that took place in 2014 because the artillery observers were using a smartphone app to control their guns … and were unaware that the Russians had infected the app with malware that transmitted the GPS location of the observer and their guns to the Russians!

Other examples included the cyber attacks made by China on the Philippines after a confrontation in the South China Sea. Most of these involved DDoS (Distribute Denial-of-Service) attacks on Filipino government networks by groups based in China to which the Filipinos responded with the help of hacker groups and software companies.

Although my participation in VCOW was somewhat limited by it taking place over the same weekend as my birthday, those sessions I did take part in were all excellent, and I’ve come way with lots of ideas that I want to develop.