Paratus Futurum Strategic Gaming

To gain insight into challenges and changes it could face and make long-term plans to prepare for them, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) operates a strategic foresight initiative, Project Evergreen. After several years of Evergreen workshops, researchers designed an analytic game in which players assess possible changes to demand for USCG missions and the service's capacity to execute them. Paratus Futurum (Latin for "ready for the future") was developed specifically for the initiative to work through the scenarios. The game is more engaging than the workshops, the consequences of players' decisions are more vivid, and the game's outcomes are more robust. Players make distinct choices about mission priorities and investments and experience the consequences of their choices in a safe-to-fail environment. By weighing the long view of changes in the operating environment alongside existing or nearer-term demands, the USCG can gain greater awareness of potential blind spots in current strategies and plans. The game focuses on how the USCG can fulfill its roles and missions over a 20-plus-year time horizon filled with uncertainty and under constrained resources. It also considers how decisions might be viewed and evaluated by the USCG's core constituencies: its own workforce, the U.S. public, Congress, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other U.S. executive branch entities. This report documents the researchers' findings and recommendations for coming iterations of Paratus Futurum and Evergreen VI.