MODELING AND SIMULATION WARGAMING TOOL FOR NAVY STAFF OFFICER TRAINING

Abstract

We investigated utilizing serious games to train officers on Navy operational staffs, such as carrier strike groups (CSGs), destroyer squadrons (DESRONs), and amphibious squadrons (PHIBRONs). Such staffs are composed of officers from different warfare communities, such as aviation, submarines, and surface warfare. Most have not served on such a staff before and have limited familiarity with the inner workings and responsibilities of their command. We reviewed the current standards of training and serious games usage, and designed an experiment to determine whether serious games could provide a statistically significant improvement in training transfer for deployable staff officers compared to traditional methods of training. The experiment group was composed of West-Coast watchstanders. They played two different scenarios on two separate gaming applications for a total of four sessions. We compared performances between the experimental group and control group using a pre-test and a post-test given after the training. We also conducted another test one month later to see if a difference existed in long-term retention. The control group was enrolled in the joint maritime tactics course, using classroom lectures administered by Tactical Training Group, Atlantic. Small sample size merited nonparametric statistics usage, which increased the difficulty of obtaining significant results. Only one test produced a significant outcome, but the results feed into demand for future work.