It means MOOTW and English as a Foreign Language

I've started a consultancy to furnish English-language training to military personnel. I know what I'm selling (I've been selling it for three years) but now is the time to take my course outside of its comfy environs, especially as the units I teach to may soon be moving themselves.

So. It's clunky but it speaks exactly of what I do: Operational English, Unconventional Methods. Well, at least on my good teaching days. My students' deployment cycles seem to be increasing, so I'm called on to do lots of varied teaching to classes whose membership is never stable.

This blog is to be about my efforts to stay abreast of a rather demanding audience of learners. Over the next few months, I'll blog about my efforts to create a matrix game dealing with crowd control in Mitrovica in 2000. I'm excited about the potential MGs (matrix games) have for EFL, even though I'm a little wary of the conceptual barriers that this will present to my students.

It is out of this concern that I'm designing another game meant to serve as a platform for lessons on PKO, LIC, SASO, and OOTW. I want a platform that will allow me to teach area knowledge documents, U.S. doctrine, and current events that will be less linguistically demanding than an MG. Tall order, I know, but it should be fun to do. Before designing something about, for example, the EUFOR mission in Chad, the first draft will be about LIC in Vichy, France 1943-44. This won't help my course, but it should be a good shakedown of my initial ideas.

Part of undertaking such a large design project obliges me to be very honest about my own prejudices as a player. In my judgment wargames are complex for complexity's sake. A large number of gamers relish wiffling through pages and performing seemingly difficult calculations. It is a validating experience for them. I think doing so makes a game feel "real" to them somehow. These calculation-fests explain why they don't cotton to computer wargames, in spite of the considerable time savings in setup and conflict resolution represented by such games.

I cannot abide this for pedagogical reasons but I think American troubles in Iraq and the necessity for a reorientation of American doctrine owes to blind faith in quantitative models. Real war is decided in part on who has the more deeply subjective way of employing language. An example that, by now, everyone should be familiar with. The Vietnamese stood up to the United States's combat power using a tactic of "hanging on to the enemy's belt." It is possible this tactic might have been conceived in by using quantitative methods, but more likely it was the result of decades of asymmetric warfare. As a metaphor for TTP it is perfectly clear and easily transmittable. NVA field commanders understood the justice of the metaphor and led their troops accordingly.

I recently spoke with a French intelligence officer about using TacOps in my course. He listened with interest and looked at the maps I had drawn up, complete with the proper symbols for NGOs, HN forces, etc. "What you need," he told me, "is some kind of roleplaying simulation." He then went on to describe his abiding frustration with JANUS-based force-on-force joint exercises. "We do force-on-force conflicts because that's what JANUS does best," he said. I think the future of military game design will be much more language based. I only want to teach basic operational English. But perhaps the stakes are larger. Perhaps the winning side will be the one to come up with the clearest metaphor for the conflict.


Design goals for MOOTWEFL: AOI Vichy.

1. Diceless. Chasing dice around a classroom is a pain in the ass. As a long-time wargamer, I must say that I actually hate dice. Other peoples' are often filthy. They make too much freaking noise. No thought is possible while they are tumbling. For many reasons, I would like this game to be as language-based as possible, not the least of which is that the officers I've taught to seem to have a mistrust of numbers-based games--they're often fighting assymetric actions undreamed of by the philosophy of JANUS and which require more than knowing the difficult choreography of march speeds and effective ranges.

2. Vocabulary-bearing components. The game pieces (I envision cards) need to reinforce target vocabulary. The game should be an emitter of positive stress but, above all, an opportunity to employ recently learned vocabulary.

3. Speed. It should be possible to play one turn per course. My classes are often weekly but sometimes I run intensive ones. A game provides a structuring narrative for the entire course and should help with the attendance problem. Results will be posted at the class site, in hopes of getting students who miss to log in to check the game's progress and then, perhaps, to also download their homework.

4. Successful Operations will depend on successful speaking and writing. The conflict resolution mechanic I have in mind is stolen from the RPG FATE and involves invoking aspects to change outcomes. FATE stands for "fortune at the end" which means that dice are thrown and then modified before the outcome is decided. The usual order in a wargame is that modifiers are counted up and then dice are thrown and modified before the outcome can be known. I think FATE is ideal for narrative-rich RPGs because it requires that you rationalize reasons for invoking aspects in a linguistic fashion. This sort of thing goes on in classical wargames of course, usually after a wild roll. A pleasure of certain new-generation wargames like Combat Commander, is the world they evoke by provoking similar rationalizations

5. Clean. (No CRTs, no play aids, no secondary maps). No counting above "ten." Cross referencing and fiddling about with components is really time consuming. The minute you ask someone to figure an odds ratio on a play aid, they usually begin thinking in their native language. Everything necessary to play of the game should be on the board.