During an exercise, the opposing force finds a weakness in the training unit’s plan. Exploiting it would prevent the unit from reaching the next scheduled activity, so the exercise director tells the opposing commander to hold back. The director has protected the timetable. The unit has lost the chance to discover what its mistake would cost.
Training areas are booked, scarce equipment has been assembled, and several headquarters expect their objectives to be covered. Those commitments give the director good reasons to intervene. The difficulty comes afterward, when the unit’s performance is assessed. Success achieved with the opposition restrained tells the commander less than success—or failure—against an opponent free to exploit the unit’s mistakes.
For military training exercises, like the rotations the US Army hosts at its combat training centers, the opposing force needs a genuine chance of winning within the exercise’s agreed limits. Without it, the training value is artificially capped. The challenge is one of managing an exercise without overmanaging it—and developing techniques to preserve learning opportunities even when safety, scheduling, and a host of other factors demand intervention. And overcoming this challenge is a necessity in order to produce forces and units prepared for the modern battlefield.
Give the Opposition a Problem of its Own
The Army’s opposing force program describes an independent-thinking training opponent whose capabilities create realistic conditions. The difficulty is preserving that independence within an elaborate exercise schedule.
Start with the opposing commander’s brief. Give that commander a result to pursue, resources, information, and constraints. A list of actions to perform against the training unit leaves little room for judgment. Within the agreed boundaries, the commander should choose a plausible course of action and be able to explain how it serves the assigned purpose. Delivering the next scheduled training event is the director’s responsibility.
The opposing force also needs reasons to conserve its capabilities. An opponent that can replace every loss or restart every failed attempt teaches the training unit that its own successes do not matter. Scarcity should apply to both sides. Exercise controllers can set resource limits to suit the training unit’s proficiency, but those limits should hold when the exercise becomes inconvenient.
A novice staff in the training unit may first need a scripted encounter and help from an instructor. Later, the same staff can attempt the task against active opposition. Both events have value, provided the report makes clear where the unit received help and what it subsequently managed on its own.
Set Boundaries Before the Contest
Freedom for the opposition requires rules that protect the integrity of the exercise as well as its safety. Neither side should gain access to information simply because its personnel happen to know an instructor or can see the exercise-control display. The opposing force must gather, interpret, and sometimes misunderstand information within the conditions being represented.
This matters particularly for deception. A false indication is educationally useful when participants have some opportunity to question it, compare it with other evidence, and decide what confidence to place in it. An unexplained reversal imposed by an all-knowing controller tests tolerance of surprise more than judgment. Exercise planners should establish what the opposition can misrepresent and how the effects will be adjudicated. They need not disclose the opponent’s choices to the training unit.
Controllers also have to distinguish an opponent’s capability from a defect in the exercise. A software loophole or privileged knowledge of the training area may give the opposition an advantage it could not otherwise possess. Rejecting such an action is reasonable when the adjudicator can explain which agreed condition it violates. An otherwise valid action should stand even if it embarrasses the training unit.
Writing these boundaries down gives the exercise director a stronger basis for intervention. It also protects the opposing force from contradictory instructions issued by several observers. One designated authority should resolve disputes over play, with safety interventions remaining immediate and unconditional.
Preserve the Consequence before Resetting the Exercise
The hardest case comes when a legitimate opposing action prevents the remainder of the planned training. The director may reasonably stop an attempt that offers little further training value, but should preserve the evidence of how it failed.
Before restarting, record the decision that mattered, the information available, and the consequence adjudicated. Then state what the director has changed. A restored resource or a revised starting position may allow useful training to resume, but the later result belongs to that new set of conditions.
A short entry in the exercise log is enough: the original outcome, the intervention, and the point from which assessment resumes. Include interventions that disadvantaged the training unit as well as those that helped it. The commander reviewing the event should be able to reconstruct what the unit actually faced.
Consider a hypothetical tabletop exercise in which the opposing commander continues to pressure one represented unit after the staff expected the opposition to shift elsewhere. That choice is permitted by the scenario. It creates a further recovery demand after the staff has committed its available resources to another task. The planned recovery cannot proceed. Preventing the opposing action would conceal the consequence of the staff’s allocation decision; supplying additional resources without explanation would do the same.
The director records the opposing decision, the staff’s assumption, the resources committed, and the recovery task left unfulfilled. After the staff examines the sequence, the director restores enough resources to practice recovery. Both attempts remain in the record. A later run can test a revised allocation against an opponent still free to choose its approach, with any coaching recorded alongside the result.
Make Losing Worth Examining
Competitive pressure can expose a weakness without explaining it. A hurried review may turn defeat into a story about an exceptionally clever opponent, an unfair scenario, or a single individual’s mistake. None necessarily identifies what the unit should change.
The Army’s guidance on after-action reviews emphasizes observed performance, participant discovery, and follow-up through retraining or changes to procedures. For a contested exercise, the discussion should bring together the training unit’s expectations and the opposing force’s reasoning. Participants should reconstruct what each side believed and which observations changed those beliefs. They can then examine indications that went unheeded and ask whether an apparent error was reasonable given what the participants actually knew.
Ask the opposing commander to explain the decision before hearing the training unit’s account. Notes made during play help both sides resist the temptation to reconstruct a tidy explanation after the event. Sometimes a poor decision succeeds by accident; sometimes a reasonable decision fails. The discussion should establish which features of the decision deserve to be carried into the next exercise.
Time for this discussion must be protected. In their account of introducing commercial wargames into an ROTC program, William Kuebler, Steven Lohr, and James Sterrett described allowing cadets to make decisions without continual instructor correction. They also identified insufficient time for a thorough after-action review as a weakness of the event. Directors need to allow time for both the unsuccessful attempt and the discussion that follows it.
Use the next iteration to test a specific correction. If an ambiguous reporting responsibility kept information from reaching the right officer, change that responsibility and follow the report through again. Changing the scenario, staffing, and procedure at once makes it difficult to tell what helped.
Judge the Opposition by the Quality of the Test
The opposing force should have incentives of its own. Reward victories alone and it may repeatedly exploit a narrow advantage that teaches the unit little. Reward adherence to the timetable and it may begin to accommodate mistakes. The director needs to judge the decisions that produced the result.
Directors should assess whether the opposition made coherent decisions within its assigned capabilities, used information legitimately, reacted to the training unit, and exposed assumptions relevant to the training objectives. The training unit must have a reasonable prospect of succeeding through competent decisions. If the opposition defeats every approach regardless of what participants do, planners should examine the exercise before drawing conclusions about readiness.
Difficulty can grow over successive events. Begin with limited choices and time to think; introduce competing demands and incomplete information as the staff becomes proficient. Give the opposing commander room to adapt. A harder decision can teach more than another incident added to the schedule.
Major General Curt Taylor’s recommendations for units preparing for the National Training Center emphasize preparation at home station, clear procedures, and familiarity with the operational environment. Meaningful opposition works best on that foundation. It should reveal where practiced arrangements fail under pressure, rather than compensate for the absence of basic instruction.
Put the Decision in the Director’s Hands
Before the next major exercise, ask the planning team to describe a plausible way the training unit could fail its mission. Then follow that failure through the schedule. Which activities would be lost? Where could training resume? What would the commander’s report say about the original attempt?
Include the people responsible for resources and the timetable in that discussion. They can establish which activities can move or be repeated before hundreds of participants are waiting for the next event. A short competitive phase followed by time for retraining may be a better use of the available days than an uninterrupted scenario whose outcome requires constant protection.
At the final review, explain what the opposition was permitted to do, where controllers intervened, and which corrections were tested. Leave the commander with a clear account of the weaknesses still to be addressed.
The director remains responsible for safety, resources, and the opportunity to learn. Within those limits, the opposing commander’s decisions need to carry consequences. Let the training unit encounter a defeat it can examine, while there is still time to change the plan and try again.
Jean Langlois-Berthelot is a simulation advisor at the Military Academy of the French National Gendarmerie. He is a former lieutenant colonel in the French Army and a former visiting scholar at Stanford University.
Christophe Gaie is a major in the French Army’s operational reserve, serving at CAST. He is also a researcher affiliated with the Magellan Research Center at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University. His work concerns artificial intelligence and simulation.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spc. Thomas Dixon, US Army
