I found two items of interested related to episode 5 and instead of editing and adding them to the listener's guide, I'm going to add them here with a bit of commentary for each.
The first is Mitch Reed's short article,
"The Operational Wargame Series: The Best Game not in Stores Now". This is a great overview with excellent pictures of the game. The
Marine Corps Gazette article about OWS is very detailed; however, it lacks much in the way of images of the game. Mr. Reed's provides a lot of great images to help you see how the game looks.
The second item is a new research article by Peter Perla called
"Wargaming and the Cycle of Research and Learning" published last month in
Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies. I'll let Dr. Perla speak for himself from the abstract:
Some thirty years ago, I coined the concept of the Cycle of Research, which described how wargaming, exercises and analysis, coupled with real-world operations and history, have worked together in concert to help the national-security community to understand better political-military reality and its past and future evolutions. When first proposed, I had in mind the uses of Wargaming in the analytical context, or what the community of professional wargamers most often calls research wargaming. Over the years, however, I began to recognize how much the same integration of tools and techniques can—and should—influence education and training for national-security professionals, both uniform and civilian: In essence, a Cycle of Learning. In this paper I explore these ideas more fully. I hope these musings can be of some help and inspiration for future researchers to probe deeper into the application of all our tools in the critically important task of educating future leaders. That task can be made more successful by using wargaming to help structure a framework for PME that integrates the inspiration, instruction, and application of the key knowledge and habits of mind—the mental muscle memory—required to operate effectively in the real world and to demonstrate those characteristics in the game, whatever form that may take.
Because the Cycle of Research was discussed during the podcast I thought this article might be of interest.