WikiCOIN

WikiCOIN by Michael Peck at Foreign Policy.

The U.S. Army wants you — to help to design a game that can help defeat baddies like the Taliban.

You don't need to be a gamer or a counterinsurgency guru. Just someone who can apply a little creative thinking to help the Army's Command and General Staff College (CGSC) design a computer simulation for its class in "stability operations" — the kinder, gentler name for the now-unfashionable concept of COIN. The target audience isn't teenage Call of Duty players, but Army majors who finish their stability ops training with a brigade staff exercise where they roleplay the staff decisions they would be making during deployment in Afghanistan or some other un-stabilized hotspot. Thus the need for a computer simulation that can help instructors run the exercise, by handling the bookkeeping and adjudicating the results of student decisions — such as beefing up patrols in Kandahar or rebuilding infrastructure in Kirkuk…