Peter Perla, Ph.D.

Change is a wonderful thing.

CNA’s Dr. Peter Perla was recently honored as the recipient of the 2009 Military Operations Research Society's (MOR’s) John K. Walker, Jr. Award.

The Walker Award recognizes one individual each year whose technical writing has initiated or contributed to technical analytical understanding and is judged to be the best article published in Phalanx during the previous calendar year. Dr. Perla received MOR’s 2009 Award for his article “So a Wargamer and a Black Swan Walk into a Bar...” (Phalanx Vol. 41, No. 4, Dec. 2008).

Dr. Perla joined CNA in 1977 and has 27 years’ experience in operations research and analysis, organizational assessment, and systems simulation and gaming for government and commercial clients. His experience ranges from performing detailed assessments of client operations and processes to analyzing the data and making recommendations to clients. He is also an expert at gaming, particularly in the use of wargaming to explore issues and teach concepts.

He has written numerous articles, authored a leading book on gaming – The Art of Wargaming, (Naval Institute Press), and designed three commercially published simulation games – Bloodiest Day: The Battle of Antietam, and They Met at Gettysburg (Spearhead Games) and Risorgimento (GMT Games).

Honors and Professional Affiliations

• Invited speaker and participant in nearly all of the U.S. Air Force’s Connections conferences on the interface of commercial and DoD wargaming, since their inception in 1993
• Best Working Group Paper, Military Operations Research Society
• Hugh Nott Award from Naval War College Review
• Member, U.S. Naval Institute and American Statistical Association

Education

• PhD, Statistics, Carnegie-Mellon University
• MS, Statistics, Carnegie-Mellon University
• BA (SCL), Mathematics, Duquesne University

“So a Wargamer and a Black Swan Walk into a Bar…” (extract)

(Phalanx Vol. 41, No. 4, Dec. 2008)

We are well into the mythical 21st Century, now nearly a decade gone. The close coincidence of the change in the calendar with the change in the global geopolitical system and an increasing belief in some fundamental changes in the physical climate has resulted in enormous pressures to cast all new work in terms of transformation and, at the very least, evolutionary change—if not, indeed, revolutionary change—in virtually every facet of defense policy and operations.

Change is a wonderful thing. Except, perhaps, to a well-entrenched community of political pundits and defense demigods who long to apply "tried and true" (that is, old) modes of thinking to new, and a few not-so-new, problems. I am going to resist the almost overwhelming temptation to fire repeated broadsides at such slow-moving targets. Instead, I am going to focus on the positive contributions a very old technique—wargaming—can make to our understanding of, and operating in, the new world of the new century.

Profiting from these contributions will, nevertheless, depend on our ability to break free from the shackles of our old ways of thinking about and doing wargaming. My goal in this paper is to ground our thinking in some basic ideas about what wargaming is and is not, to discuss why we need it more than ever to help us prepare for the challenges of the 21st Century, and to propose how we can apply wargaming in ways that are most likely to help us produce workable solutions to the challenges we face in the coming years.

Some of the most important of those challenges are events and situations we cannot even foresee from our vantage point of today. In the words of a best-selling book which swept the financial world—of all things—in 2007, these events are Black Swans.

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