Good morning all! In response to some questions I've been getting about my thesis, I'm going to post notes from a short presentation I gave to the @ArtofWarScholar program at the Command and General Staff College.

Several years ago, I read an article by Nick Lemann about how, in at least one way, the South had won the Civil War. While the Confederacy utterly failed to impose its will through violence, white supremacist culture ultimately triumphed, not only in the South, but across the US.

If military force is only one of the tools governments use to achieve policy, the decision-makers that evolved out of the Confederacy came to rely on politics to end the occupation, information to divide poor white and black laborers, economics to keep Freedmen subordinate...

and, of course, both legal and extra-judicial violence to keep the system from imploding.

I promptly forgot about this for the next five years, until I interviewed with Dr. James Sterrett at @USACGSC 's Directorate of Simulation Education.

Of the several thesis topics I pitched, the one that stood out was designing a war game to model counterinsurgency warfare during the Reconstruction Era.

And so, here we are!

My thesis, tentatively and unimaginatively titled, "Modeling Reconstruction as a Wargame" tries to figure out whether or not Reconstruction can be modeled as an asymmetric conflict, in order to educate decision makers.

Note that the word, "Counterinsurgency" has disappeared.

In order to graduate, I'm going to have to do the following:
1. Demonstrate the validity of Wargaming in education.
2. Describe the essential features of Reconstruction must be modeled.
3. Develop mechanics to represent these features.
4. Build a prototype wargame using the model

Somewhere in there, I have to read a bunch of books too. Research falls into three broad categories: Reconstruction History, Game Design, and Education.

So what was Reconstruction? Everyone seems to agree that it was a period of tremendous change, as different sources of power competed to define the social, political, and economic future of the South. From there it gets tricky...

Depending on where and when you went to high school, you might describe Reconstruction as:

The first choice (corruption), represents the Dunning School, which, along with the myths of "the Lost Cause" and "States Rights" represents the core of white supremacist attempts to write off the accomplishments, contributions, and humanity of black Americans after the Civil War

Choices 1, 2, 3 competed with each other during the majority of the 20th century, differing on the relative magnitude and importance of social, economic, and political changes after the Civil War, but generally agreeing that Reconstruction represented a "Tragic Era"

This began to change in the 1980s, with Eric Foner's thesis that while, "Reconstruction may not have succeeded in the 19th century...it made possible radical changes realized through the civil rights movements a century later." (Foner, 2002)

Similar to DuBois' observations 45 years prior, Foner's work describes the conflict in the Southern economy, as it lurched between Northern desire to expand industrial capitalism, Southern attempt to return to slavery-by-another-name, and the Freedmen's struggle to chart a 3d way

This change in economic systems would necessitate a change in the social relations between workers and property owners, and in the model used by the game, drives the conflict between the different factions.

Here's another way of looking at Reconstruction:

What happens when an outside power forcibly replaces an entrenched ruling minority with a formerly powerless majority, creates previously unknown economic opportunities, and enforces this system through occupation?

Slide Please.

What does all this have to do with a Wargame? Where are the hexes?

The real work I'm doing here is to design an underlying model that accurately, but maybe not precisely, describes Reconstruction.

Why does that distinction matter?

Well, if the model describes the relationships between the essential features of Reconstruction, it's up to me to decide what those features are. I need to define the following:
-What has to happen
-What can happen
-What shouldn't happen
-What can't happen

These describe the limits of the model, and let me know if the model is accurate:
If my model allows:
-conventional warfare between the North and South,
-player interaction without the interference of racism,
-Time travelers to supply the ex-Confederates with AK-47s,

...it's probably not a very good model...at least for historical education.

If we collect up all these possible events, we'll have a set of everything the model can accomplish. We can further arrange these events into new sets by time; instead of all the events happening at once, we separate them by player turns and rounds of the game.

To get from event to event, or as shown in the slide, from one set of events to the next, the model needs to present the player with meaningful decisions.

In this model, player decisions are based on the Instruments of National Power. More on this later.

Let's assume for the moment that we can, in fact, model Reconstruction as a Wargame.

Q: Why should we bother doing it in the first place?
A: I dare you not to.

Game play as a phenomenon is neither unique to our time, nor to our species.

With the development of modern representative games out of ancient abstract games, a few trade-offs can be observed. Designers should to keep these in mind as they build their models, ensuring the mechanisms they use line up with the purpose of the game.

-Precision vs. Accuracy: the tendency of a model to focus on details vs. the big picture.
-Complicated vs. Complex: Does novel play emerge from a large or small set of rules? Is play deterministic? Think Mousetrap vs. Go.

-Representation vs. Abstraction. Does the model reflect something that happens in real life, or broader concepts? ASL as opposed to Chess.

Finally, Outcome vs. Decision. Is the intent of the model to get the player to achieve a certain end-state, or to present them with dilemmas?

This distinction is often frustrating to players who are used to playing to win, but is extremely important to educators.

At least it was to me when I was introduced to Tactical Decision Exercises at @316CAVBDE 's @CavalryCourse, where the point of the game isn't to win, but to practice making decisions.

TDEs at Cav Leader's Course are similar to matrix games or D&D, with less emphasis on narrative. But if sand table exercises are games, what isn't? STX Lanes? Gunnery? Rehearsals? They all have an underlying model and meaningful decisions.

My take: it's games all the way down.

Armed with a pretty OK idea of what a game is, lets build our model. From my reading, four factions emerge:
the Union, Freedmen, ex-Confederates, and Carpetbaggers. Each faction has a current situation defined by physical location and resources, as well as an goal to achieve.

Connecting the two are the Instruments of National Power: broad categories we can use to describe the ways groups of people achieve their goals:

Diplomatic: the use of civil power
Information: the ability to affect public opinion
Military: violence
Economic: generate resources

Let's take the Union player as an example. The Republican party wants to maintain control of the government. In order to achieve this, the model should allow them to take actions roughly in line with the Instruments of National Power.

After some thought and research, the Union player should be able to do the following:
-Readmit States to the Union (Diplomatic)
-Arrest members of other factions (*Diplomatic)
-Use violence (Military)
-Generate revenue (Economic)

Additionally, the Union player's actions should be constrained in ways that reflect the historical reality at the time:
-Actions seen as favoring Freedmen will anger Carpetbaggers and ex-Confederates (Information)
-Radicalization of the Republican Party should shift (Diplomatic)

I put an asterisk next to the Unions power to arrest. During Reconstruction, the Army took on broad civil powers in the states it occupied, fulfilling many non-military needs. Here, Arrest is just a stand in for peacekeeping and civil governance.

Finally, these abilities and constraints are going to force the Union play to deal with some dilemmas:
In order to maintain control of the gov't, they need to bring states back into the Union. To do that, they'll need to use the Army to maintain peace in the South.

The problem is that their constituents don't have an appetite for more war. Enlistments are up, budgets are getting tight, and the troops want to go home. Will the Union player risk political upset in order to achieve Reconstruction, or will they leave security up to the states?

OK, we've got a model and a dilemma, now we need some mechanisms to force players to deal with the results of their decisions. Has anyone else done this before?

We need to:
-Define player actions
-Tie turns to historical events
-Create asymmetry between players
-Model an economy
-Create consequences for violence

Fortunately, there's a system with these features we can adapt to model Reconstruction...

@Volko26 's COIN system gives us a framework we can modify to get where we need to go. The first game in the series, Andean Abyss was published in 2012, and since then has handled conflicts as varied as the American Revolution, and the war in Afghanistan.

We'll have to make a few changes and additions though.

Here's a map from a month ago:
-Map shows the 11 states of the Confederacy and a selection of Union and Border states.
-Small circles are locations where farms and factories can be placed.
-Squares show whether the state is controlled by a Democratic or Republican government.

-The current map traded in the large city squares for dashed lines dividing up states.
-States north of the blue line start out under Republican control, while states below the line (grey squares) need to be brought back into the Union.

We'll also need a way to represent the people effected by Reconstruction:
-The Union, Freedmen, and Carpetbaggers all have Workers. These are used to generate resources and conduct operations.
-Workers have two sides: Active and Inactive.

A Worker's side reflects whether or not it is politically active. Inactive workers can generate income, Active workers can arrest or attack other pieces.

The assumption underpinning the game is that workers will turn to political activity if their economic needs aren't met.

Meanwhile, the ex-Confederates are grouped into cells. They can also be active or inactive, but are unable to generate income, as they represent elements of the former Confederate ruling class.

Union troops are represented by blue and black cubes, with black cubes specifically representing regiments of US Colored Troops. By 1865, these troops made up one-third of all soldiers occupying the South. These will be the primary way the Republicans maintain order.

Finally, each side takes the disks used for bases in other COIN games, and repurposes them as industry. These are placed on the small circles, and represent farms, factories, and repairs to rail roads.

Like workers and cells, they have a marked and an unmarked side. After being used to generate resources, they are flipped to their marked, or exhausted side.

There's plenty more to talk about, including rail roads as lines of control, Unrest, Republican Radicalization, and just who exactly the Carpetbagger faction is meant to represent.

Hopefully this was able to answer some of your questions, and maybe spark some new ones!