FORGING WARGAMERS

i
 FORGING
WARGAMERS
A Framework for Wargaming Education
Edited by
Sebastian J. Bae

Quantico, Virginia
2022
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bae, Sebastian J., editor. | Marine Corps University (U.S.). Press, issuing body.
Title: Forging wargamers : a framework for wargaming education / edited by Sebastian J. Bae.
Other titles: Framework for wargaming education
Description: Quantico, Virginia : Marine Corps University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical ref-
erences and index. | Summary: “How do we establish or improve wargaming education, includ-
ing sponsors, participants, and future designers? The question stems from the uncomfortable
truth that the wargaming discipline has no foundational pipeline, no established pathway from
novice to master. Consequently, the wargaming community stands at a dangerous precipice
at the convergence of a stagnant labor force and a patchwork system of passing institutional
war-gaming knowledge. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to ill-informed sponsors, poorly scoped
wargames, an unreliable standard of wargaming expertise, and worst of all, risks the decline
of wargaming as an educational and analytical tool. This fundamental challenge is a recurring
theme throughout this volume and each author offers their own perspective and series of rec-
ommendations”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022024420 (print) | LCCN 2022024421 (ebook) | ISBN 9798985340327 (paper-
back) | ISBN 9798985340334 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: War games—Study and teaching—United States. | War games, Naval—Study and
teaching—United States. | Military education—United States. | Naval education—United States.
Classification: LCC U310 .F68 2022 (print) | LCC U310 (ebook) | DDC 355.4/80973—dc23/eng
/20220701 | SUDOC D 214.513:W 23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024420
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024421

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iv
 CONTENTS
Foreword vii
Preface xiii
Select Abbreviations and Acronyms xvii

Introduction 3
by Sebastian J. Bae

Chapter One 9
Professional Wargaming:
From Competence Model to Qualifying Certification
by Natalia Wojtowicz

Chapter Two 30
Immerse Early, Immerse Often:
Wargaming in Precommissioning Education
by Kyleanne Hunter, PhD

Chapter Three 51
Simulation-Based Analysis and Training (SimBAT):
Wargaming in the Office of Naval Intelligence
Chapter Three Addendum: 85
SimBAT Introductory Course: Syllabus and Materials
by Timothy J. Smith

Chapter Four 100

Building Wargame Designers and On-the-Job-Training
by Major Paul M. Kearney

Chapter Five 115

Wargaming in PME:

v
 CONTENTS
Introducing Wargaming to the Australian Defence College
by Lieutenant Colonel Scott Jenkinson
and Group Captain Jo Brick

Chapter Six 139

Make It Stick:
Institutionalizing Wargaming at EDCOM
by Major Ian T. Brown and Captain Benjamin M. Herbold

Chapter Seven 173

Wargaming:
Sponsor Education
by Jeff Appleget, PhD; and Robert Burks, PhD

Chapter Eight 193

Wargaming for Social Science
by Brandon Valeriano, PhD; and Benjamin Jensen, PhD

Chapter Nine 215

Whole-of-Government Collaboration:
Educational Nuclear Wargaming and Policy Makers
by Brooke Taylor, DSL

Conclusion 231
The Die Is Cast
by Sebastian J. Bae

Select Bibliography 239

Index 255
About the Editor and Authors 261

vi
 FOREWORD
During the 2020 Connections Wargaming Conference, author
and wargaming consultant Graham Longley-Brown summa-
rized his recently published book, Successful Professional War-
games, by distilling each of its 26 chapters; looking for a more
finite response, the moderator pushed Longley-Brown to sum-
marize the entire book to one point. His answer: “Wargames are
about people.”1
This seems like a simple answer, but it gets to the heart of
what makes wargaming work. We know all models are wrong,
but George E. P. Box’s warning extends particularly to models
of human activity that leave out the human element.2 We can
construct a very good model of how a ball moves when acted
on by forces, but it tells us very little about soccer, baseball, or
cricket. By adding competitive human decisions to the simula-
tion, wargaming emotionally engages the participants through
competition. As a result, participants in wargames remember
pivotal decisions, points of crisis, and moments of satori for
the rest of their lives. Wargames are inherently experiential, and
therefore wargames are inherently educational, because the
players learn from experience.3
Anecdotally, the military lost its culture of wargaming in

1
Graham Longley-Brown, Successful Professional Wargames: A Practitioner’s Handbook,
ed. John Curry (Bristol, UK: History of Wargaming Project, 2019).
2
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do
they have to be to not be useful.” George E. P. Box and Norman R. Draper, Empirical
Model-Building and Response Surfaces (New York: John Wiley, 1987), 74.
3
For an easily read discussion of how games stimulate the same parts of our brains that
learning from real experience does, see Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design
(Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press, 2005), 12–33. Koster argues that people enjoy games
precisely because they learn from them.

vii
 FOREWORD
the 1990s, as disruptive technologies drove manual wargam-
ing out and replaced it with computer wargames.4 Computers
offer real capabilities; but in doing the work for us, they all too
often ensure that we do not understand how they arrived at re-
sults, and thus we cannot learn from them. Worse, many senior
leaders expect wargames to act as an electronic oracle provid-
ing fast evaluations of plans. By removing human understand-
ing of the course of events leading to the computer’s pass/fail
evaluation, there is no understanding of the answer and thus
the value of conducting the wargame is lost. Douglas Adams
provided an eerily prescient parody of this in The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, where a supercomputer is tasked to pro-
vide the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe,
and Everything.” Thus, 7.5 million years later, the supercomput-
er delivers its simple but incomprehensible answer: 42.5 War-
games are about people, and they become pointless when we
remove the people from them.
At the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
(CGSC), one of our goals is to “Create an Army of Wargamers”—
an Army in which everyone understands wargaming and uses
it routinely and well. In our pursuit of this, we support the use
of wargames in education across many different courses; teach
courses on the selection, utilization, and design of wargames;
run the Wargame Design track in the CGSC Master in Military

4
As recently discussed in Sebastian J. Bae and Maj Ian T. Brown, USMC, “Promise
Unfulfilled: A Brief History of Educational Wargaming in the Marine Corps,” Journal
of Advanced Military Studies 12, no. 2 (2021): 45–80, https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj
.20211202002; and Col Eric M. Walters, USMC (Ret), “Wargaming in Professional Military
Education: Challenges and Solutions,” Journal of Advanced Military Studies 12, no. 2
(2021): 81–114, https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj.20211202003.
5
Adams’ novel presents a group of hyperintelligent beings who demand the answer
from the supercomputer Deep Thought, which takes 7.5 million years to compute and
verify the answer of 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer is meaningless be-
cause the beings who demanded it never knew what the question was. Adams would
later claim in a 1998 interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio that there was no deep
analytical meaning behind the number 42; rather, he was looking for a simple ordinary
figure. Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979).

viii
 FOREWORD
Art and Science program; and offer frequent opportunities
for voluntary hobby wargaming.6 We also operate to support
the Army Modeling and Simulation Office’s wargaming educa-
tion program. While we may never fully succeed in creating an
army of wargamers, even partial success is worthwhile for its
improvement of the force.
The effort consists of three core tasks. First, we need to
use wargames in education, for the direct educational benefits
they provide, and because doing so provides initial exposure
to wargaming and education by the good example of its val-
ue, which in turn serves as a recruitment mechanism for the
core cadre of wargamers. Second, we need to educate war-
gamers to develop the core cadres who will design and facili-
tate wargames across the force in both classrooms and units.
Third, we need to ensure that end users of wargame products
understand wargaming so they make appropriate use of their
results. All of the authors within this edited volume address at
least one of these lines of effort.
Timothy J. Smith provides a proven example of using war-
games in education, carefully backing up their utility for both
educational theory and measured outcomes. While the spe-
cific example covers training naval intelligence analysts, the
point is much more broadly valid. Wargaming in the classroom
comes at a real cost in time and effort, and we need studies
such as this one to help convince our educational institutions
that the time and effort pays off in improved outcomes; oth-
erwise, we will not be able to expand the use of wargaming in
curriculum and fail in the first task.
Dr. Kyleanne Hunter argues that educational wargaming
needs to begin at the lowest possible level, focusing specifically
on adapting wargaming into precommissioning courses. This
should improve their overall education and simultaneously in-
troduce and teach the use of wargaming at the beginning of
6
“Wargaming Courses at the Command and General Staff College,” eduwargaming.
org, accessed 6 January 2022.

ix
 FOREWORD
officers’ careers. This early recruitment of the wargamer cad-
re should be instrumental in spreading effective wargaming
across professional military education.
Along similar lines, Group Captain Jo Brick and Lieutenant
Colonel Scott Jenkinson argue that the Australian military needs
to create formal positions within its educational institutions so
that each has personnel whose job requires them to provide
professional wargaming support and advocacy. These people
can teach the courses and support others’ instruction to pro-
vide formal education and good examples, and help promote
hobby wargaming to further assist in recruiting the wargaming
cadre. Moreover, they note that these professionals need to or-
ganize and attend seminars and conferences on wargaming in
order to expand their efforts and trade best practices with their
colleagues.
Major Paul M. Kearney focuses on the critical need to in-
crease the scale of the pipeline producing wargamers. He con-
tends that the pipeline should leverage commercial wargames
and wargame design practica, aiming to recreate many of the
steps of a hobbyist’s accidental pathway into professional war-
gaming through a structured introduction. Properly applied,
this should help expand the ranks of the wargaming cadre.
Major Ian T. Brown and Captain Benjamin M. Herbold sim-
ilarly argue that the Marine Corps needs to create a structured
program to train a cadre of wargamers who will carry wargam-
ing back to their units. They see Education Command (EDCOM)
as the key means of doing this: conducting wargaming educa-
tion across all levels of EDCOM, with games tailored to each
schools’ curriculum as explained in their selected examples.
Dedicated institutional support, they conclude, is necessary to
make wargaming’s current popularity more than a passing fad.
When we educate wargamers, what skills do they need?
Unfortunately, different applications of wargaming require a
mix of skills. Natalia Wojtowicz summarizes her extensive re-
search for an answer to this question, and categorizes the vari-

x
 FOREWORD
ous applications and the skills that they require, assisting those
who will train the wargaming cadre.
Equally important, we need to educate the sponsors of
wargames. Dr. Jeff Appleget and Dr. Robert Burks go well be-
yond noting the necessity of this education, and provide spe-
cific advice to wargamers for ensuring the sponsors have both
clearly explained their objectives for the wargame, and under-
stand what they can and cannot get from it. Clear, tested guide-
lines such as these assist the wargaming cadre in learning to
ensure a successful wargame.
Education of sponsors extends beyond the military. Dr.
Brooke Taylor argues for the need to increase the inclusion of
congressional members and staffs in wargames to improve
the ability of the U.S. Congress to understand what the military
needs. Expanding her point, sponsors need to participate in
wargames in order to understand their outputs, or they may
fall into the trap of getting ultimately useless ultimate answers.
While Timothy Smith used social science techniques to
demonstrate the utility of wargaming in the classroom, Dr.
Brandon Valeriano and Dr. Benjamin Jensen explore what war-
games have to offer social science. They find that analytical
wargames offer an opportunity for social scientists to explore
problems with contingent outcomes that are often challeng-
ing for traditional social science methodologies, and explain a
number of concrete examples where this has been done in the
past few years.
Each of these authors addresses at least one of the three
key tasks. However, their writing is meaningless without our
action. Start a wargaming club or support the efforts of a lo-
cal one or with USA Fight Club (wargaming experimentation
group). Include wargaming in the current courses you teach.
Offer and teach new courses on wargaming. Both inside and
outside the military schoolhouse, work to educate your peers,
subordinates, and superiors on better methods of wargaming.
Push back against the flawed understanding that limits warga-

xi
 FOREWORD
ming to a computer-automated black box performed only in
course of action analysis. Get decision-makers engaged in their
wargames and ensure they are run well. Together, we can ex-
pand wargaming and support victory.

James Sterrett, PhD
Directorate of Simulation Education
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

xii
 PREFACE
In 2021, I had the immense honor of leading the Wargaming for
Education working group for the annual Connections Wargam-
ing Conference. A standing tradition of the conference, each
working group sought to add to the wargaming literature, aim-
ing to advance our field through the collection and synthesis of
knowledge and experience. As chair, I posed a simple yet press-
ing question, “How do we establish or improve wargaming
education, including sponsors, participants, and future design-
ers?” The question stemmed from the uncomfortable truth
that the wargaming discipline has no foundational pipeline, no
established pathway from novice to master. Consequently, the
wargaming community stands at a dangerous precipice at the
convergence of a stagnant labor force and a patchwork system
of passing institutional wargaming knowledge. Unsurprisingly,
this can lead to ill-informed sponsors, poorly scoped warga-
mes, an unreliable standard of wargaming expertise, and worst
of all, risks the decline of wargaming as an educational and an-
alytical tool. This fundamental challenge is a recurring theme
throughout this volume and each author offers their own per-
spective and series of recommendations.
Yet, from its inception, this edited volume was never envi-
sioned as a textbook or definitive manual for wargaming ed-
ucation. Instead, the volume represents the first step toward
an answer by gathering expertise and experiences from a wide
range of wargaming practitioners, experts, and educators. Ul-
timately, this volume aims to help raise the next generation of
wargamers—to provide the necessary tools and skills for the
advancement of our field. In that spirit, each author poses a
question of their own:

xiii
 PREFACE
In “Professional Wargaming: From Compe-
tence Model to Qualifying Certification,” Na-
talia Wojtowicz asks, “What are the core skills
and competencies required for wargamers?”
In “Immerse Early, Immerse Often: War-
gaming in Precommissioning Education,” Dr.
Kyleanne Hunter asks, “How can wargaming
literacy be improved by integrating wargam-
ing into precommission education?”
In “Simulation-Based Analysis and Train-
ing (SimBAT): Wargaming in the Office of Na-
val Intelligence (ONI),” Timothy J. Smith asks,
“How can wargames help create better intelli-
gence analysts?”
In “Building Wargamer Designers and On-
the-Job Training,” Major Paul M. Kearney asks,
“What are the best practices for training new
wargamers on the job?”
In “Wargaming in PME: Introducing War-
gaming to the Australian Defence College,”
Lieutenant Colonel Scott Jenkinson and
Group Captain Jo Brick ask, “How can a pro-
fessional military education institution es-
tablish and incorporate wargaming into its
curriculum?”
In “Make It Stick: Institutionalizing War-
gaming at EDCOM,” Major Ian T. Brown and
Captain Benjamin M. Herbold ask, “How do
organizations retain and build on progress in
educational wargaming?”
In “Wargaming: Sponsor Education,” Dr.
Jeff Appleget and Dr. Robert Burks ask, “How
do we better educate and inform wargame
sponsors?”
In “Wargaming for Social Science,” Dr.
Brandon Valeriano and Dr. Benjamin Jensen

xiv
 PREFACE
ask, “How can wargames be utilized for social
science research?”
In “Whole-of-Government Collaboration:
Educational Nuclear Wargaming and Policy-
makers,” Dr. Brooke Taylor asks, “How can ed-
ucational wargames bridge the gap between
Congress and the Department of Defense?”

Each chapter lays the initial groundwork of a nascent war-

gaming educational pipeline in several directions—into the dai-
ly work of Service wargaming centers, into the hallowed halls
of academia, and into the classrooms of officers and analysts.
The spirit and ambition of this volume is best reflected by
a quote from John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, originally penned
in 1159:
We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of
giants. We see more, and things that are more
distant, than they did, not because our sight
is superior or because we are taller than they,
but because they raise us up, and by their
great stature add to ours.7

Thus, as we stand on the mighty shoulders of our pre-

decessors, invoking the collective works of Peter P. Perla, Ed
McGrady, Philip Sabin, Yuna Wong, and so many others, I
hope future generations of wargamers will build on our ever-
incomplete work.

7
Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter provide a deeper discussion of this work in “John of
Salisbury, Metalogicon, 1159,” in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and
Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford university Press, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1093
/acprof:osobl/9780199653782.003.0027.

xv
 SELECT ABBREVIATIONS
AND ACRONYMS
AAR after action review/report
ABSG Army Battle Simulation Group (Australia)
ACE Agile Combat Employment (Air Force)
ADC Australian Defence College
ADF Australian Defence Force
ADFWTC ADF Warfare Training Centre
AOR area of operation
ASM antiship missiles
AWGC Army War Game Centre (Australia)
BOPSAT bunch of people sitting around talking
C5ISR command, control, communications, computers,
cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
CEME College of Enlisted Military Education
CENTCOM Central Command
CLA constraints, limitations, and assumptions
COA course of action
COTS commercial off the shelf
CPG Commandant’s Planning Guidance
CSC Command and Staff College (Marine Corps)
CSG Carrier Strike Group
CTSA Critical Thinking and Structure Analysis
DCMP Data Collection and Management Plan
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency
DIME diplomacy, information, military, and economic
DOD Department of Defense
EABO Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations
EDCOM Education Command (Marine Corps)

xvii
 SELECT ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
ELT experiential learning theory
EOCX end-of-course exercises
EQ essential questions
EWS Expeditionary Warfare School (Marine Corps)
FFM Five Factor Model
FFRDC federally funded research and development centers
FICINT fiction intelligence
FMF Fleet Marine Force
IC intelligence community
ICAAP Intelligence Community Advanced Analysis Program
IPT integrated product team
INDOPACOM Indo-Pacific Command
JPME Joint Professional Military Education
JPMET Joint Professional Military Education and Training
JTF Joint Task Force
LVC live-virtual-constructive
M&S modeling and simulation
MAGTF Marine Air-Ground Task Force
MBTI Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
MCPP Marine Corps Planning Process
MEF Marine Expeditionary Force
MET Mobile Education Team
MLR Marine Littoral Regiment
MORS Military Operations Research Society
MOS military occupational specialty
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCO noncommissioned officer
NHWL Naval Historical Wargaming Laboratory
NPS Naval Postgraduate School
NWC Naval War College
OB order of battle
ODNI Office of the Director of National Intelligence
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
OR operations research
PLANMC People’s Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps (China)
PME professional military education

xviii
 SELECT ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
PoNG Project on Nuclear Gaming
ROTC Reserve Officers’ Training Corps
S&TI scientific and technical intelligence
SAG Surface Action Group (China)
SAT structured analytic templates/techniques
SAW School of Advanced Warfighting (Marine Corps)
SimBAT Simulation-Based Analysis and Training
SME subject matter expert
START Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
STEM science, technology, engineering, and math
SULE Small Unit Leadership Evaluation
TDG tactical decision games
TECOM Training and Education Command (Marine Corps)
TO&E tables of organization and equipment
USNA U.S. Naval Academy
WEIRD Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and demo-
cratic

xix
FORGING WARGAMERS
 INTRODUCTION
Heated debates on the definition of a wargame continue to
this day.1 Peter P. Perla, one of the giants of professional war-
gaming and the author of the seminal The Art of Wargaming,
characterizes wargaming as being composed of four major
elements: a synthetic environment, containing an abstraction
of conflict, using human decision making, and demonstrating
consequences for those human decisions.2 In 2016, Perla fur-
ther defined wargames as “a dynamic representation of con-
flict or competition in a synthetic environment in which people
make decisions and respond to the consequences of those
decisions.”3 Admittedly, there exists a variety of definitions of
wargaming, but for the purposes of this edited volume, Perla’s
definition serves as its foundational touchstone.4
The abstraction of human conflict in the form of games is
ancient, tracing its roots back to games of antiquity such as Go
or Wei Hai, an abstract strategy game played on a 19-by-19-inch

1
“What Is a ‘Wargame’?,” Mentioned in Dispatches (podcast), Armchair Dragoons, 4 De-
cember 2020.
2
Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists, ed., John
Curry (Bristol, UK: History of Wargaming Project, 2011), 23–24.
3
Philip Pournelle, “Designing Wargames for the Analytic Purpose,” Phalanx 50, no. 2
(June 2017): 48–53.
4
For additional resources exploring wargame taxonomy and its uses, the author recom-
mends Elizabeth M. Bartels, Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analysis:
Towards a Scientific Approach (Santa Monica, CA; Rand, 2020), https://doi.org/10.7249
/RGSD437; Graham Longley-Brown, Successful Professional Wargames (Bristol, UK: His-
tory of Wargaming Project, 2019); and Erik Lin-Greenberg, Reid B. C. Pauly, Jacquelyn
G. Schneider, “Wargaming for International Relations Research,” European Journal for
International Relations 28, no.1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211064090. The
aforementioned works provide seminal insights into the design of wargames and the
implications for both analysis and education.

3
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
board, or Chaturanga, a predecessor to modern chess from
the Indian subcontinent. Yet, from the perspective of the pro-
fession of arms, the development of the Kriegsspiel by Georg
Leopold von Reisswitz in the early nineteenth century and its
continued development by his son, George Heinrich Rudolf Jo-
hann von Reisswitz, is the seminal origin point. The Reisswitz’s
Kriegsspiel is a landmark moment for professional wargaming
for its departure from legacy systems such as chess and its wide-
spread introduction and adoption into the Prussian military.5
Over time, the use of wargames, as tools of entertainment, ed-
ucation, and analysis, has been prolific. H. G. Wells and Fletcher
Pratt, both renowned novelists, designed their own wargames
to explore warfare and its contours in the twentieth century.6
The Second World War featured the predominant use of war-
games, ranging from the wargames by the British Royal Navy’s
Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU) to combat German
submarine attacks, to the infamous Japanese wargame prior to
the Battle of Midway. Since then, wargames have proliferated
and evolved into the robust commercial game industry and a
vibrant professional wargaming field focused on analysis and
education.7
But this begs the question: How does one become a war-
gamer, whether as a player, sponsor, analyst, or designer?
When most professional wargamers are asked how they
enter the field of designing or using wargames for the study
of conflict, most if not all will sheepishly offer some form of,
“I stumbled into it.” This author counts themselves among the
5
Earlier versions of wargames, such as war chess by Johann C. L. Hellwig, elaborated
on the design of chess with additional rules and mechanics such as terrain. Although
critical to the development of wargaming, war chess and its variations simply resem-
bled warfare and the Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel marked the movement toward simulating
warfare.
6
H. G. Wells, Little Wars (London: Palmer Press, 1913); and Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War-
game (self-published, 1929).
7
Jon Peterson, “A Game Out of All Proportions: How a Hobby Miniaturized War,”
in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, eds. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G.
Kirschenbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 4–21, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress
/10329.003.0005.

4
 INTRODUCTION
ranks who serendipitously wandered onto the path of the war-
gamer. Unfortunately, the prevalence of wargamers produced
by convenient accidents is not a rarity but a consequence of
there being no formal system to produce them. The absence
of an established talent pipeline for wargaming—whether as
participants, sponsors, analysts, or designers—risks making
the wargaming field increasingly small and insular. Within the
military, wargaming experience among officers is principally
constrained to resident professional military education (PME)
and select assignments directly engaged with wargaming as
part of the analytical cycle. For the enlisted force, wargaming is
tragically a rare commodity largely constrained to enterprising
individuals’ use of commercial wargames and tactical decision
games (TDGs) for unit-based training.8 The current wargaming
enterprise remains piecemeal and disjointed at best; small is-
lands of excellence tangentially connected to one another.
For aspiring designers, there are only a handful of insti-
tutions that offer courses in game design for defense profes-
sionals. In the military, this includes the Air Force Institute of
Technology (AFIT) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio;
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in
Leavenworth, Kansas; Marine Corps University (MCU) in Quan-
tico, Virginia; National Defense University (NDU) at Fort Lesley
J. McNair in Washington, DC; U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in
Newport, Rhode Island; and the Naval Postgraduate School
(NPS) in Monterey, California. On the civilian side, a handful of
universities provide wargaming courses in programs focused
on security studies, such as Georgetown University, MIT, Johns
Hopkins University, McGill University, and King’s College Lon-
don. However, most of these are introductory courses for as-
piring designers. After students receive their initial induction
into wargaming, there are few avenues for continued learning
and development. This is best reflected by Caitlyn Leong’s arti-

8
Sebastian J. Bae and Major Paul Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical
Edge,” War Room, 8 March 2021.

5
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
cle “How to Raise a Wargamer,” where she highlights the variety
of challenges facing young designers. She poignantly writes,
“Beyond the occasional individual mentor, the connection
between student-run wargaming organizations and the pro-
fessional wargaming community is infrequent—if not nonexis-
tent.”9
The trials and tribulations of educating and cultivating
a wargaming expertise is a regularly recurring topic and per-
sistent complaint from the community. In 2018, the author
wrote that the defense enterprise needed to foster wargaming
across the ranks, leveraging a myriad of wargames and tools.
This included the use of digital platforms like Steam and de-
signing custom educational wargames to foster familiarity
and appreciation for wargaming as a tool.10 Elizabeth Bartels of
Rand offered a two-track solution for wargaming education,
tailoring wargaming experiences either to those seeking to be-
come specialists or designers, or those seeking to learn how to
leverage wargames, such as sponsors, project managers, and
analysts.11 In contrast, Jeff Appleget, Jeff Kline, and Robert Burks
argue the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) should aim to de-
velop and revitalize wargaming expertise within its uniformed
ranks. Given the dominance of external organizations in war-
gaming, such as federally funded research and development
centers (FFRDCs) and defense contractors, they argue that
this reliance outsources “the intellectual underpinnings of the
nation’s defense strategy, officer professional development,
and the department’s acquisition process.”12 Likewise, the 2019
Connections Wargaming Conference, an annual professional
conference for wargaming, featured a workshop focused on
the next generation of wargamers, both civilian and uniformed
9
Caitlyn Leong, “How to Raise a Wargamer,” PAXsims, 21 May 2020.
10
Sebastian J. Bae, “Just Let Them Compete: Raising the Next Generation of Wargamers,”
War on the Rocks, 9 October 2018.
11
Elizabeth Bartels, “Building a Pipeline of Wargaming: A Two-Track Solution,” War on the
Rocks, 14 November 2018.
12
Jeff Appleget, Jeff Kline, and Rob Burks, “Revamping Wargaming Education for the U.S.
Department of Defense,” CIMSEC, 17 November 2020.

6
 INTRODUCTION
servicemembers. Unsurprisingly, the discussion was hotly con-
tested on what comprised the best steps forward. Due to the
elusive nature of a solution, the question of how to raise the
next generation of wargamers remains a perennial topic of de-
bate for the Connections Conference.
The question of developing wargaming expertise is not a
sterile academic inquiry, but a pressing imperative with poten-
tially dire consequences. The wargaming community is rapidly
approaching an inflection point, where titans of the field are
steadily retiring, and the subsequent generation is struggling to
fill the void. Meanwhile, even within the Department of Defense
(DOD), wargaming remains hampered by misconceptions,
prejudices, and a lack of understanding of wargaming’s utility
and limitations. In “Getting the Story Right About Wargaming,”
Ed McGrady, a distinguished wargamer and former director
of wargaming at CNA, stated, “There is a widespread misun-
derstanding of what wargaming is and a reluctance to accept
both the power and limitations of wargames.”13 This has led to
the misuse and abuse of wargames, ranging from mischarac-
terizations born from ignorance to malign misapplications of
wargaming.14
Thus, the issues and recommendations highlighted by the
authors of this edited volume are timely for the continued de-
velopment of the wargaming field. The authors explore a wide
array of issues, broadly defined within three major themes:
cultivating wargamers, applying wargaming for education, and
educating external stakeholders on the value of wargaming.
Natalia Wojtowicz, Kyleanne Hunter, Timothy Smith, and Major
Paul Kearney address various aspects of developing warga-
mers and wargaming literacy. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel
Scott Jenkinson, Group Captain Jo Brick, Major Ian Brown, and
Captain Benjamin Herbold explore how wargaming can be ap-

13
Ed McGrady, “Getting the Story Right About Wargaming,” War on the Rocks, 8 No-
vember 2019.
14
Stephen Downes-Martin, “Your Boss, Players, and Sponsor: The Three Witches of War
Gaming,” Naval War College Review 67, no. 1 (2014): 31–40.

7
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
plied for PME. Lastly, Jeff Appleget, Robert Burke, Brandon Va-
leriano, Ben Jensen, and Brooke Taylor explore how better to
inform and engage external stakeholders in wargaming, rang-
ing from Congress to social scientists.
Admittedly, this volume is far from perfect and as editor, I
wished I had more time to supplement this collection of works
with additional perspectives and voices. Despite my best ef-
forts, this volume is DOD-centric, Anglo-American, and pre-
dominantly male—indicative of the poor diversity within the
wider wargaming field. Although the demographic of the field
is changing, ever so marginally and slowly, there remains a tre-
mendous amount of work to be done. Thus, beyond adding
to the wargaming literature, this volume seeks to spur wider
discussion about the future of the wargaming field. If you find
your voice is excluded from these pages, understand that it is
not born from malice, but reflective of a perpetual incomplete
work. Consider its shortcomings as a call to arms to write your-
selves into the literature of the wargaming community. And
when future generations examine this work, the author hopes
they look on this volume and its authors kindly and find all wor-
thy shoulders to stand on, despite our shortcomings.

Sebastian J. Bae 15
Editor and Working Group Chair

15
The opinions expressed in this volume are solely reflective of the authors, and do not
constitute the official opinion or policy of their respective employers, affiliated organi-
zations, or the U.S. government.

8
 Chapter One

Professional Wargaming
From Competence Model
to Qualifying Certification

Natalia Wojtowicz

Is wargaming a profession? Can practitioners call themselves

professional wargamers? What qualifies a person as a war-
gamer? Those questions are elusive due to lack of universal-
ly agreed definition of competence or a baseline knowledge
that is shared by professionals. By definition, a professional is
engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation
rather than as a pastime.1 Wargaming has historically proven
its worth, but it is rarely seen as a job or a certifiable skill. In a
recent survey conducted during the 2021 Connections War-
gaming Conference, only 24 people declared having wargam-
ing in their job description and working on it full-time. Among
the responders, three main professional sectors were named as
employers: armed forces, government agencies, and commer-
cial providers of wargames. Jobs included lecturing, designing,
consulting, analyzing, advising, and researching. Additionally,
75 percent of responders noted more than five years of expe-
rience, with salaries ranging from $60,000 USD gross annual
salary in design and facilitation up to $152,000 per year in lead-
ership positions. Only 25 percent responded that they could be
promoted if their knowledge on wargaming increased, most-

1
Stephen Billett, Christian Harteis, and Hans Gruber, eds., International Handbook of Re-
search in Professional and Practice-based Learning (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer,
2014), 33–34, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8902-8.

9
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
ly referring to “no formal career path” ahead.2 These findings
imply that even marked improvement in available education
would not automatically provide more opportunities.
In terms of received education, the most common an-
swers to the survey were: self-study and on-the-job training. So
not courses, but informal education, is prevalent as a learning
tool at the moment. When asked about interest in wargaming-
related education, responders’ remarks listed digital war-
games, invitations to observe wargames at other institutions,
new courses for hands-on design, online tutoring (especially
for tabletop simulator), certifications that could be transferred
to other jobs, facilitation techniques, and a Wargaming 101
seminar.
Education holds a prominent place in the process of de-
veloping a profession, acting as the link between needed train-
ing and empowering certification. Given the robust history of
wargaming, it can be concluded that professionalization is not
proceeding with time, but rather with the organization of pro-
fessionals in the given area.
Given the low response rate to the survey, it can be pro-
posed that less than 5 percent of the wargaming community
is considered a professional wargamer (the qualifying factor
being full-time appointment and job description including
wargaming).3 Those two factors correspond to the profession-
alization process described previously in relation to: psycholo-
gists, pathologists, or journalists.4 Harold L. Wilensky identified
five necessary steps for professionalization: starting with full-
time employment, establishment of training, established pro-
fessional association, certification, and a formal code of ethics.5
2
Survey was conducted by the author, with support from the organizers of the con-
ference.
3
Based on the assumption that the 2021 U.S. Connections Wargaming Conference was
attended by approximately 450 participants.
4
Billett, Harteis, and Gruber, International Handbook of Research in Professional and
Practice-based Learning.
5
Harold L. Wilensky, “The Professionalization of Everyone?,” American Journal of Sociol-
ogy 70, no. 2 (September 1964): 137–58, https://doi.org/10.1086/223790.

10
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
Wargaming has the characteristics of an emerging profession,
with most areas being permanently under development but
not quite fully established.

AN EMERGING PROFESSION
The process of professionalization requires practitioners to
organize toward a recognized status rather than accepting the
current conditions. Despite an increased demand for wargam-
ing expertise, often referred to as the reinvigoration of wargam-
ing, support for practitioners remains an event-by-event basis.
Reinvigoration of wargaming initiatives depend on pro-
fessionals able to design, execute, and analyze results of war-
games. Until now, those abilities have been linked to personal
interest in gaming and analytical tools known from previous
work functions (e.g., intelligence analysts creating players’ pro-
files or technicians previously working with satellite imagery
preparing the maps). This combination of independent com-
petence and unstandardized practice caused three leading
characteristics in the community of wargamers:
1. Variety in competence: due to personal interest and
previous work insights dictating how individuals ap-
proach tasks, there is no standardized conduct. It
can be viewed as an advantage to harness interdisci-
plinary approaches or a disadvantage due to lack of
replicability of results. In most cases, wargames are
seen as singular events. Competence is defined rather
through validation from the community than a repli-
cated result. The variety in competence is also clus-
tered, meaning that certain designers will specialize
in a given type of wargame or a particular topic. The
individual baseline translates into rare agreements on
practice and education required to succeed in war-
gaming.
2. Expanding knowledge base: given the community-
based competence validation, there could be a base
of knowledge that levels the playing field and allows

11
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
for introducing people to the discipline in a reliable
way. The case of wargaming is peculiar due to an ex-
tensive number of wargames existing (counting in
thousands) and limited sources to learn about them
(i.e., literature, handbooks, or instructional videos).
There are a number (counted in tens) of books that
address wargaming as well as handbooks produced
within the armed forces, but none of them are univer-
sally applied by wargaming professionals. The knowl-
edge base is expanding due to the commitment of
individuals rather than an educational initiative.
3. Wargaming is not a recognized profession: it is a rare
designation, often limited to a few functions within
the armed forces and almost nonexistent at civilian
universities or think tanks. That does not mean that
wargaming is limited to few people. It is rather taken as
an additional function if a person has an interest and
experience in gaming. The danger of not rewarding
competency with professional progress is a basic defi-
ciency of personnel striving to achieve it.

Lack of recognition for the profession of wargaming has a

collateral effect that should not be underestimated. Due to its
informal and interest-based key of selection, wargaming has
become a community that is open to receiving new talent and
encouraging exchange of ideas. It might be precisely because
of low competition and high demand combined with a lack of
external recognition that produced an innate solidarity among
its practitioners. It would be most beneficial to development
to retain this solidarity of practitioners while combating lack of
recognition of professionals.
Wargaming is also not recognized as an academic disci-
pline, causing a “wrap-around” effect. In short, the topic of war-
gaming is covered with other, older disciplines, linking it with
pedagogy, game theory, or operations research. Publications
on wargaming are rare, and in most cases linked to a research

12
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
problem from other disciplines, causing lack of independent
research on wargaming.6 This in turn causes a lack of academic
wargaming professionals, but rather academic staff that under-
take wargaming as an additional function.
The limitations in prospects for professionalization de-
scribed above are consistent with an emerging profession re-
maining below the status of respected occupation. Wilensky
recognized the steps leading toward change, starting from
building jobs exclusively dedicated to the subject:
1. Start doing full time the thing that needs doing. In the
case of wargaming, this would require moving from
additional function toward the sole duty of profession-
als. Financially speaking, salary should be connected
to competence in wargaming rather than other re-
quirements taking precedence. On a personal level, this
would also mean refusing to work on wargaming tasks
without remuneration.
2. Establish training. Training that leads to certificates
gives testimony of qualification.
3. Create a professional association. For wargaming,
this would require further organization and ways of
supporting association members. Currently, the big-
gest conferences (Connections Wargaming Conference

6
It is worth noting that articles about wargaming are almost never accepted for pub-
lication in academic journals. Most articles describing only wargaming without ref-
erence to other disciplines can be found in professional military periodicals such as
Phalanx, Naval War College Review, Inside the Army, The Cyber Defense Review, and
Army History. Articles that treat wargaming as a link to other disciplines rather than one
of its own standing are published mostly in historical context. See Solomon K. Smith,
“Pounding Dice into Musket Balls: Using Wargames to Teach the American Revolution,”
History Teacher 46, no. 4 (August 2013): 561–76; on decision making, see Ben Caldecott
et al., “Wargaming: Using the Decision-Support Tool to Understand the Likely Success
of Different Strategies,” in Crude Awakening: Making Oil Major Business Models Climate-
Compatible (London: E3G, 2018), 27–29; for a subset of operations research, see Robert
M. Chapman, “Appraising Warfighting Concepts with Wargaming Simulations,” Military
Operations Research 3, no. 4 (1997): 23–38; or for game studies, see Nick Yee, “The New
World,” in The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us —and
How They Don’t (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 9–21.

13
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
series) are organized by volunteers who provide their
time and skills without financial compensation. This
could be further professionalized (by turning the volun-
teers into employees) with an awareness of rising costs
causing limited availability to broader audiences.
4. Political agitation for legal protection of the job territo-
ry. This point is particularly difficult, given that anybody
interested in wargaming is at the moment a wargamer.
The differentiation of a professional should be linked
with training and experience gained through full-time
work. The goal is not to discriminate but to profession-
alize. The requirements create exclusivity needed for
separation of job from the interest area.
5. Formal code of ethics (eliminating the unqualified
and unscrupulous).7 Much attention has been given
to wargaming pathologies, but not to defining success
and avoiding individuals who are unqualified.8 Given
the previous step of association, the code of ethics could
be linked with membership or its refusal for individuals
who do not follow it. To establish a code of ethics, the
norms of wargaming would need to be investigated.

Rolf Torstendahl differentiated minimum and optimum

norms existing in professionals of a given field.9 The minimum
norm defined the negative aspect—the limitation, deficiencies
and faults. The optimum describes what is required and desir-
able, striving to excellence rather than delineating from insuffi-
ciency. Currently, there are “best practices” and “pathologies”
described for wargaming, but there is no professional associa-
tion that oversees how they are implemented. So, within multi-
ple interpretations, there is no structured norm.

7
Authors comments shown with emphasis. The numbered items come from Wilensky,
“The Professionalization of Everyone?,” 137–58.
8
Christopher A. Weuve et al., Wargame Pathologies (Alexandria, VA: CNA, 2004).
9
Rolf Torstendahl, The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism (New York:
Routledge, 2015), 44.

14
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
The main dangers of either no norms or the more com-
mon straying away from them include:
1. Deficiency in logical consistency, mainly in the use of
concepts, which give rise to contradictions. For exam-
ple, the eternal discussion about a definition of a war-
game that cripples potential rise of theories in the field.
2. Inability to check the empirical basis of mistakes in the
handling of primary source facts. Since protocols for
wargaming are rarely published, replication of results
is almost unseen.
3. Lack of clarity for the relevance of arguments for a
specific result. In many cases, wargames are treated
as exploratory and therefore do not collect meaningful
data. In practice, that means results are abstract and do
not translate into actionable analysis.
4. Lack of new results.10 Innovation requires stepping
away from a common base; but given a lack of stan-
dard, it is difficult to note the original contribution.

To regulate the professional code of conduct, the opti-

mum norm needs to be rewarded and minimum norm up-
held. Both norms regulate how a field becomes a profession
and how the competencies in practice differentiate between
amateurs and professionals. Education has the potential to
convey those norms to the next generation of wargamers. It
solidifies the area of competence and allows for the distinction
of competent from incompetent and progression in standards.

EDUCATION OF WARGAMING PROFESSIONALS

Within gamers and the staff of military and civilian universities,
a need for wargaming-specific education becomes more ap-
parent.11 Moving the discipline from well-intended hobbyists

10
Authors comments shown with emphasis. The numbered items are adapted from
Torstendahl, The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism, 44.
11
James Fielder, “Reflections on Teaching Wargame Design,” War on the Rocks, 1 January
2020.

15
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
to professional practitioners is difficult due to the overarching
wargaming goal: practicing decision making against a thinking
enemy.12 This imperative could be extended to all military func-
tions and civilian professions related to security. The enormity
of target audience dictates a myriad of solutions addressing
different competencies. Educating wargamers requires efforts
to channel the available courses to a common curriculum and
to identify which skills are in the highest deficiency (and utili-
ty).13 The following section lists forms of education and types of
organizations that offer training in wargaming.14
Armed forces worldwide are the biggest target audience
for wargaming education. Few of them have (or openly de-
scribe) wargaming built into their personnel structure and
educational institutions. Prominent schools within the known
practice include (in alphabetical order): American, Australian,
British, French, and German. That is not equivalent to no war-
gaming outside of this group, but it is simply less known to the
public.15 Traditions differ in culture and forms, but generally ed-
ucation resides in the following categories:
1. Professional military education (PME)
PME spans across all competence development with-
in the armed forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff vision
and guidance from 2020 called for leveraging gaming
methodologies and wargames leading to “deeper in-

12
Jeff Appleget, Jeff Kline, and Rob Burks, “Revamping Wargaming Education for the U.S.
Department of Defense,” Center for International Maritime Security, 17 November 2020.
13
Commonly understood as transferable. It would not be applied to all, but a reference
in methods and content linked to competencies used for different courses in varied
ways. It is more a destination on a map rather than instructions on reaching it.
14
Although the section samples existing solutions, it is acknowledged that the list is
growing as the chapter is being written. Please contact the author to add your institu-
tion to the list.
15
A view into Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Polish, or other wargaming cultures would be
invaluable to practitioners; but due to different reasons, the traditions of those armed
forces are not debated, published, or involved in the international community of prac-
titioners.

16
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
sight and ingenuity” of students.16 One of the students
recommended in turn a complementary role of war-
games within all levels of study. Jeff Wong prescribed di-
viding wargaming into three main levels: starting from
Service schoolhouses integrating games into curricula
for career-level courses, moving into intermediate-
level schools teaching about design and execution of
wargames, and ending with top-level schools focusing
on institutional application of wargames.17
Where institutions have not yet harnessed the full
potential of wargaming, “underground” movements
have been prospering in connecting willing war-
gamers. Fight clubs have been branching out in the
United Kingdom, Australia, and Netherlands to orga-
nize extracurricular activities for their members.18 This
represents wargaming’s common need and rare pro-
fessionalization.
PME can mean using wargames as a method
to teach skills, as well as a way to determine level of
competence (e.g., replacing traditional examination).
Among the essential subjects, Jo Brick names the
planning process with the following course of action
analysis, tactical and operational case studies, civil-
ian experience in a war zone, resource management,
strategy, and force design.19 With those extended goals
considered, both Brick and Wong warn against using
wargaming without strictly linking it to the learning ob-
jective and ensuring it is the best method of reaching

16
Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Ways of War: The Joint Chiefs of
Staff Vision and Guidance for Professional Military Education and Talent Management
(Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020), 6.
17
Jeff Wong, “Wargaming in Professional Military Education: A Student’s Perspective,”
Strategy Bridge, 14 July 2016
18
Sebastian Bae and Paul Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical Edge,” Rand
Blog, 8 March 2021.
19
Group Capt Jo Brick, “Gaming and Professional Military Education,” Forge, accessed
3 March 2021.

17
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
it. This requirement also applies to civilian universities
that often undertake a broader perspective and a mix
of topics related to security, but they are not limited to
proficiency in military skills.
2. Civilian universities
Wargaming has been steadily growing in its applica-
tion to teaching and providing a method for research.
There is a prevalent bias against wargaming that has
stifled its growth in the past, based around two prem-
ises: first, that gaming war would represent its losses
as trivial; and second, that it would show mindless
escalation of players rather than a fair view of reality.
Those biases are admittedly usually raised by those
who have never played a wargame with educational
goals. Sebastian Bae described his campaign for war-
gaming at the university as an insurgency: starting with
spreading basic awareness, through a building up of
teams and collaborations toward a lasting use of ed-
ucational wargames.20 It is a prompt way of thinking
about developing wargaming at civilian universities:
despite its high value proven by multiple successful
projects at Georgetown University, King’s College Lon-
don, MIT, McGill University, and the Hague University
of Sciences, it is a constant challenge to turn the in-
dividual drive of lecturers into a lasting educational
standard. Universities have high potential to exchange
knowledge from other disciplines available to faculty,
resulting in educational hybrids of commercial, tailor-
made educational tools and experiments in new for-
mats best suited to build competence.21

20
Sebastian J. Bae, “Establishing a Wargaming Insurgency at the University,” Forge, ac-
cessed 7 June 2021.
21
Antoine Bourguilleau, Philippe Lépinard, and Natalia Wojtowicz, “Wargames for Train-
ing Future Managers,” Management et Datascience 5, no. 1 (December 2020), https://
doi.org/10.36863/mds.a.14547.

18
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
Wargaming at the universities starts with introduc-
tion to the method, often offered as a basic course in
game design and conceptualization of real-life prob-
lems. Advanced classes teach game design for com-
plex problems, organizing wargames and applying
them within organizations. Master classes often focus
on innovation and leadership, utilizing wargaming in
military, business, and research laboratories.
Students respond to the active mode of learning,
and embrace change from the exclusivity of lectures.
The novelty must be paired with a chance to practice,
prescribed by most programs in the form of playing
exemplary wargames and adapting to the required
decision making. An element that is mandatory with-
in military wargames and needs to be included in the
university wargaming curricula is the debriefing, or af-
ter action report (AAR). It ensures that learning objec-
tives are met, and the results are explained rather than
only noted.
Universities have the potential to use wargaming
in teaching and in experimentation. Similarly, think
tanks develop analytical and conceptual wargames
applied to target audiences’ objectives.
3. Think tanks
With the rising need for professional wargames, think
tanks have been filling the gaps by researching con-
cepts, complex problems, and executing series of
iterations to gather structured results. Educational ef-
fects are often not the primary goal, but can achieve
increased networking between different target audi-
ences. Due to the scarcity of jobs related to wargam-
ing within armed forces, think tanks are often chosen
to design and conduct wargames for government
agencies or in preparation of budgetary plans. Com-
mon approaches include capability analysis, “what-

19
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
if” exploratory wargames and quantitative analysis
of simulated scenarios.22 Myriad solutions currently
developing within civilian, military, and commercial
settings offer different levels of skills and points of ref-
erence. The following section presents a catalog of
wargaming roles and required competencies.

WARGAMING COMPETENCIES
Wargaming requires a set of competencies, depending on the
role in the task. J. D. Smith and S. G. Barker proposed three levels
of training/education for wargaming personnel, starting with
basic awareness and proceeding to expert:
1. Awareness: basic knowledge of most principles.
2. Practitioner: detailed knowledge of principles and an
ability to implement some elements of a wargame
system.
3. Expert: expert in principles and with extensive experi-
ence in implementing elements of the wargame sys-
tems.23

This description can capture the functional distinction of

progress, but it does not define how to reach the next qual-
ification or what is precisely required in preparation for the
next level. There are multiple roles discussed in detail, both to
differentiate between them and to discuss their educational
needs.

PROFESSIONAL ROLES IN WARGAMING

Wargaming as an educational activity requires a desire to exe-

22
John R. Emery, “Moral Choices without Moral Language: 1950s Political-Military War-
gaming at the RAND Corporation,” Texas National Security Review 4, no. 4 (Fall 2021),
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/17528; and Peter P. Perla et al., “Rolling the Iron Dice: From
Analytical Wargaming to the Cycle of Research,” War on the Rocks, 21 October 2019.
23
J. D. Smith and S. G. Barker, “A Consideration of Training and Education in Defence
Wargaming” (paper presented at the Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium
of Military Operational Research, Royal Holloway University, Surrey, 17–20 July 2018).

20
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
cute, from the exercise director to the observers. Among the
main areas of organization, design, control, facilitation, and
play, the following personnel roles can be distinguished:
1. Wargame director: responsible for management of
involved personnel and oversight of the coordination
and partnerships, ensuring that results are credible and
visible for relevant stakeholders.
2. Wargame planner: responsible for establishing time
lines, planning each step of the wargaming event, re-
porting on potential scheduling conflicts, and tracking
progress toward execution.
3. Technical expert: if the topic or format requires special-
ist support, a technical expert can be employed. They
are responsible for their specific expertise delivered to-
ward wargames.
4. Facilitator: responsible for explaining the rules of the
game, presenting the context and scenario, and mov-
ing the wargame through rounds or other progression
lines. The facilitator is also responsible for debriefing
and enabling feedback exchanges.
5. Wargame control: ensuring good coordination and ac-
curate results and looking into any distortions of con-
duct of the wargame. Control is also often synonymous
with the role of information manager, making them
responsible for forwarding the information to partici-
pants.
6. Higher command: acting as leaders who motivate par-
ticipants, they observe the conduct and evaluate value
of the wargame. If the wargame is at strategic level, they
might be actively participating in the event in their re-
spective role (as commander or senior officer).
7. Role players: taking on a role to replicate issues encoun-
tered in reality when interacting with others. Often role
players use a script to show the challenge of interaction
and stimulate the storyline to progress.
8. Observers: noting impressions and observations in or-

21
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
der to provide feedback to wargame organizers or to
evaluate the participants.
9. Support personnel: arranging the logistics and re-
quired technical or organizational details.24

This team view of the personnel might be misleading. Most

professionals operate individually or in a small group, especial-
ly if wargaming is not placed in a separate branch or organiza-
tion, but rather an additional function within their regular jobs
(as visible in armed forces and universities). The list above cov-
ers only the wargame itself, but there is also data collection and
analysis that requires qualified personnel. Roles that are more
a sign of the current job market than a need within wargaming
include project managers and subject matter experts (SMEs).
Those two roles are used within organizations to respond to
the need for niche expertise and coordination. Largely not
discussed, competence resides in the players of wargames,
shown either in good understanding of rules and mechanisms
or lack thereof. For each of the mentioned roles, there is a cat-
alog of competencies that are required to perform assigned
tasks.

ROLES AND COMPETENCIES

The combined wargaming knowledge, skills, and attitude forms
the specific competencies. Knowledge is the first requirement
that needs to be satisfied. The second element of competen-
cies—the skills—is a reflection of the craft of wargaming. The
third element—attitude—is the closest to capturing the art of
wargaming.25
If the competencies were the key to distinguish the pro-
24
How to Master Wargaming: Commander and Staff Guide to Improving COA Analysis
(Fort Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2021), 21.
25
Col Jeff Appleget, USA (Ret), Col Robert Burks, USA (Ret), and Fred Cameron, The
Craft of Wargaming: A Detailed Planning Guide for Defense Planners and Analysts (An-
napolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020); and John Curry, ed., Peter Perla’s The Art of
Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Bristol, UK: History of Wargaming
Project, 2011).

22
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
fessionals, the issue of generic and wargaming-specific abilities
could be raised. Among the generic competences, the initial
distinction of organizational, instrumental (including anal-
ysis and design), executive, and innovative units can be pro-
posed.26 The order of these categories can be linked with the
prerequisites to excel in later categories. Instrumental skills are
needed to execute wargames, and mastery in execution sup-
ports subsequent innovation. Without organizational compe-
tencies, none of the three categories following it can be applied
successfully.

Organizational
O1. Capacity for organization and planning
O2. Communication
O3. Elementary computing skills
O4. Problem solving
O5. Teamwork
O6. Capacity to adapt to new situations
O7. Project design and management
Instrumental
IL1. Capacity for analysis and synthesis
IL2. Grounding in basic knowledge of the profession
IL3. Information management skills (ability to retrieve
and analysis information from different sources)
IL4. Ability to work on an interdisciplinary team
IL5. Capacity for applying knowledge in practice
IL6. Research skills
IL7. Ethical commitment
Executive
E1. Decision making
E2. Critical and self-critical abilities
E3. Interpersonal skills
E4. Leadership
26
Generic competences are based on the tuning list for the European Union, as de-
scribed in Andre Vyt and Antoon Ven, The Competence Chart of the European Network
of Physiotherapy in Higher Education (Antwerp, Belgium: Garant, 2007), 18.

23
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
E5. Concern for quality
E6. Will to succeed
Innovative
IE1. Capacity for generating new ideas (creativity)
IE2. Ability to communicate with experts in other
fields
IE3. Initiative and entrepreneurial spirit

These generic competences are not exclusive to the war-

gaming field, but they are required to plan, organize, execute,
and innovate it. The specific competences related to wargam-
ing are listed below.

Knowledge
K1. Functions of wargaming
K2. Methods of wargaming
K3. Basic history of wargaming
K4. Formats and materials required to execute war-
game
K5. Mechanics and gameplay
K6. Requirements of debriefing
K7. Modes of data collection
K8. Formats of reporting
K9. Lessons identified and learned from existing ap-
plications of wargaming
K10. Players profiles and motivations
K11. Common biases in wargaming
Skills
S1. Identifying objectives of the wargame
S2. Proposing the format best suited to the objectives
S3. Determination of mechanics needed to support
the chosen format
S4. Wargame design
S5. Wargame diagrams, illustrations, and graphic de-
sign
S6. Writing rules

24
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
S7. Explaining the rules to players
S8. Facilitation of play
S9. Data collection
S10. Debriefing
S11. Applying lessons learned process to the wargame
S12. Reporting results of the wargame
S13. Outlining limitations and directions for future war-
games
Attitude
A1. High tolerance for uncertainty during unstruc-
tured play.
A2. Curiosity toward new solutions and open to try-
ing multiple designs to determine best fit
A3. Empathetic to players if wargame is modeling a
personally difficult topic
A4. Energetic during the wargame, ensuring appropri-
ate tempo in execution
A5. Patient when explaining the rules of the wargame
and answering any question in detail.
A6. Inviting to players and personnel involved in the
wargame
A7. Imaginative in building the atmosphere of the
wargame with background information or story-
telling
A8. Determined to keep the wargame within the most
relevant topic
A9. Trustworthy in terms of preserving the results of
the wargame without causing harm to players’
reputation
A10. Objective in design, judgment, and execution of
the wargame
A11. Resilient to failing in design, prototyping, and exe-
cution of the wargame
A12. Respectful to any difference of opinions present-
ed in the wargame, as well as players voicing them

25
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
Many of the points above could be further extended, for ex-
ample, knowledge about tactical computer-assisted wargam-
ing simulators as a subset of the methods of wargaming. The
level of detail is closely tied with the organization and role of
the wargaming professional.

PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING COMPETENCIES MODEL

A discipline-wide model of competence can seem very com-
plex, but it provides an overview of detailed tasks with required
competences. It might also serve to zoom in on progression of
competence between roles (table 1). Table 2 can be used to see
how many competencies are needed for a specific role. If there
is a need to analyze a specific role, the competences could be
presented within more visible framework.
This role-based view shows which generic competencies
are required and what competencies are strictly related to
wargaming as a discipline. Those competencies need to be
translated into education—ideally linking roles with a qualify-
ing certificate (e.g., a professional observer would participate
in a course on competencies enumerated in its competence
profile in table 2).

CONCLUSIONS
Wargaming has been treated as an additional function rather
than a full-time occupation. It attracts a wide range of profes-
sionals, but most people working on wargaming are doing it
due to their interest rather than the potential for advancement
in the workplace. Professionalization of wargaming depends
on a refusal to wargame without reward and practice without
norms. Education can bridge the gap between competencies
and certificates, providing a step toward remuneration based
on qualification.
In summary, wargaming education is not structured or
leading to progress within the profession. Partially, this is an
unintended effect of a lack of recognition of wargaming pro-
fessionals, either due to their volunteering for the work or the

26
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
Table 1. Competencies required for professional wargaming roles
Role Required competencies
Logistics assistant (loca- O1, O2, O3, O4, O5, O6
tion and materials)
Spokesperson O2, IL3, IL4
Coordination (people) O1, O2, O3, O4, O5, E3
Planner O1, O3, O4, K2, K4
Project manager O7, K3, K9
Designer O2, O3, O4, IL2, IL5, IL6, E1, E2, E5, E6, IE1, K1, K2,
K3, K4, K5, K7, K9, K10, K11, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S11,
S13, A2, A7, A8, A10, A11
Developer O1, O2, O3, O4, O5, O6, IL2, IL3, E3, E5, E6, IE3, K1,
K2, K4, K5, K9, K10, S2, S5, S6, A2, A6, A7, A11
Producer O1, O5, IL3, IL6, IL7, E1, E3, E4, E5, E6, IE2, IE3, K4
Content-related IE1, IE2, A2, A3, A4, A7, A8, A12
Technique-related O3, O4, O6, IL2, IL3, IL5, K2, K4, K5, K7, K8, S2, S3,
S9, S13, A2, A5, A9, A10, A11
Analyst O3, IL1, IL2, IL3, IL4, IL6, IL7, E2, K1, K2, K3, K5, K7,
K8, K9, K10, K11, S9, S11, S12, S13, A10, A12
Researcher IL1, IL2, IL3, IL4, IL6, IL7, IE1, IE2, K1, K2, K3, K4, K5,
K6, K7, K8, K9, K10, K11, S1, S2, S9, S10, S11, S12, S12,
A1, A2, A3, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12
Director O1, O2, O5, O6, O7, IL2, IL4, E1, E3, E4, E6, IE1, IE2,
IE3, K1, K3, K8, K9, S12, S13
In-game control O1, O2, O3, O4, O5, O6, IL2, IL3, IL5, IL7, E1, E2, E3,
E4, E5, K1, K2, K3, K4, K5, K6, K7, K8, K9, K10, K11, S7,
S8, S9, S10, S11, S12, S13, A1, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8,
A9, A10, A11, A12
Facilitator O1, O2, O3, O4, O5, O6, IL2, IL3, IL7, E1, E2, E3, K1,
K2, K3, K4, K5, K6, K10, K11, S1, S7, S8, S10, A1, A3,
A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12
Instructor O2, IL2, S6, S7, A5
Player O6, IL4, E1, E2, K11, A1, A4, A6, A11, A12
Observer O2, O5, O6, IL1, IL2, IL7, K11, K9, S11, A9, A12
Source: compiled by the author.

27
 NATALIA WOJTOWICZ
Table 2. Example of competence profile of wargame observer
Observer competencies
Generic Specific
Communication Common biases in wargaming
Teamwork Lessons identified and lessons learned from
existing applications of wargaming
Capacity to adapt to new Applying lessons learned process to the war-
situations game
Capacity for analysis and Trustworthy in terms of preserving the results
synthesis of the wargame without causing harm to
players’ reputation
Grounding in basic knowl- Respectful to difference of opinions present-
edge of the profession ed in the wargame, as well as players voicing
them
Ethical commitment
Source: compiled by the author.

dismissal of required competencies (leaning toward interested

public instead). Several recommendations could be proposed
based on gathered insights:
1. Increasing awareness about current undervaluing
of wargaming professionals. Economically speaking,
what is being done for free will not be paid for. In this
case, moving from well-intended passion projects to-
ward full-time jobs is the first step to increasing the
reputation of wargamers. Adversely, this also means
refusing to volunteer time when the organizations
choose to spend their budget elsewhere or even to
recognize wargaming as an assignment within job de-
scriptions.
2. To make entry into the profession more accessible,
there needs to be a competence model linked with
courses that provide required knowledge, skills, and
attitude. This means that the profession is transparent

28
 PROFESSIONAL WARGAMING
in the ways it sees wargaming professionals as reach-
ing proficiency and progress from beginner to master.
More education linked with competencies in demand,
creating a flow from certification toward appointment,
for example receiving a certificate as a wargame de-
signer linked with possibility to work in the field.
3. Provide a repository of educational wargames and
share source materials, syllabi, resources, and best
practices in teaching of wargaming skills. Over time,
the standards and competencies should be integrat-
ed for a baseline of particular roles that could be cer-
tified and transferred to the next assignment (across
armed forces, industries, and research institutes).

Wargaming thrives off creativity, but a structured approach to

its career prospects and standards could create a profession.

29
 Chapter Two

Immerse Early, Immerse Often

Wargaming in Precommissioning Education

Kyleanne Hunter, PhD

INTRODUCTION
The Department of Defense (DOD) relies on wargaming for
both analytical and operational outcomes. Wargames offer a
low-cost, low-risk way to educate warfighters on tactics, strat-
egies, and operational concepts to prime their thinking for
future battlefields. Additionally, they offer a means to identify
and test possible outcomes of new policies or doctrinal chang-
es.1 While wargaming has been a practice for centuries, it is ex-
periencing a resurgence in popularity and importance among
the military Services and is being considered more broadly as
a vital part of military education. In 2015, Secretary of the Navy
Raymond E. Mabus noted that wargaming is an “invaluable
method” for warfighters to test new ideas in a low-risk environ-
ment and ordered the creation of a plan to increase wargaming
education and build communities of interest.2 Marine Corps
Commandant General David H. Berger affirmed this when he
noted in his Commandant’s Planning Guidance that wargam-
ing was essential to “practice . . . decision-making against a
thinking enemy.”3 Chief of staff of the Air Force General Charles
Q. Brown recognizes that wargames are essential to achieving
his directive to “accelerate change” in the face of a changing

1
Elizabeth M. Bartels, “Wargaming the Department of Defense for Strategic Advantage,”
RAND Blog, 3 August 2020.
2
Raymond E. Mabus, “Memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, Commandant
of the Marine Corps: Wargaming,” 5 May 2015.
3
Gen David H. Berger, Commandant’s Planning Guidance: 38th Commandant of the
Marine Corps (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2019), 19.

30
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
global strategic environment where U.S. dominance is not as-
sured.4 The assertions of the various Services are codified in the
Joint Chief’s guidance on professional military education (PME),
which directs that wargames be integrated across military cur-
ricula.5
Yet, despite the asserted importance of wargaming to
both the intellectual and tactical development of servicemem-
bers, the DOD suffers a dual deficiency when it comes to the
application of wargaming. First, servicemembers are most of-
ten not exposed to wargaming as a part of PME until they are
field grade officers, a decade or more into their careers. Sec-
ond, and relatedly, the DOD has increasingly relied on a cadre
of professional civilian wargamers to design, run, and evaluate
wargames to answer questions of future warfare. Taken togeth-
er, these deficiencies create a dearth of wargaming literacy in
the tactical levels of military operations (primarily comprised
of company grade officers and enlisted servicemembers) and
the inability to leverage the cognitive benefits of developing a
wargaming mindset that extends beyond the play of the game.
The current structure has made wargaming a transactional
exercise rather than a cognitive shaping tool that can give the
United States a strategic advantage.
Though the current military educational system has not
fully embraced the integration of wargaming, military leader-
ship recognizes the importance of wargaming as educational
and cognitive development. The Joint Chiefs’ PME guidance
recognizes the importance of wargaming not just for the out-
comes, but for how the process shapes the intellectual capaci-
ty of the force. The introduction states:
There is more to sustaining a competitive advantage
than acquiring hardware; we must gain and sustain an

4
Gen Charles Q. Brown, USAF, Accelerate Change or Lose, August 2020 (Washington,
DC: Department of the Air Force, 2020), 2.
5
Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Way of War: The Joint Chiefs of Staff Vi-
sion and Guidance for Professional Military Education and Talent Management (Wash-
ington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020).

31
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
intellectual overmatch as well. The agility and lethality
of the force must be applied appropriately to deter,
fight, and win against adversaries who have stud-
ied our methods and prepared themselves to offset
our longstanding military superiority. This cannot be
achieved without substantially enhancing the cogni-
tive capacities of joint warfighters to conceive, design,
and implement strategies and campaigns to integrate
our capabilities globally, defeat competitors in con-
tests we have not yet imagined, and respond to activ-
ity short of armed conflict in domains already being
contested.6

A route to achieving this “intellectual overmatch” begins

with creating a clear pipeline for wargaming early in a service-
member’s career. This chapter discusses one way to establish
this pipeline—integrating wargaming as part of precommis-
sioning education. It begins with a discussion of the current
problem—why waiting until field grade PME and the reliance
on contracted professional wargamers has created a deficien-
cy in developing a force that is prepared to face a near peer ad-
versary. It then discusses how wargaming can be integrated as
part of a holistic and immersive precommissioning education
program. Examples from the Service academies and Reserve
Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs are used to highlight
different ways of achieving this. The discussion focuses on the
benefits that can be gleaned from adopting this educational
pipeline, as well as some limitations. The conclusion focuses
on areas of additional research needed, as well as potential
challenges to implementing precommissioning wargaming ed-
ucation more broadly.

6
Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Way of War, 2.

32
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
Crusty Majors and Comfortable Contractors:
Why We Need a New Wargaming Pipeline
Though each of the military Services designs their own PME, a
generalizable trend is that wargaming is most robustly integrat-
ed into curricula during the respective Command and Staff (or
equivalent) schools. Officers typically attend Command and
Staff between the 10th and 15th years of their careers. Com-
mand and Staff schools mark the transition from an officer’s
tactical performance and specialization in their given job, to
Joint- and strategic-level operations. While these more-senior
officers can leverage their tactical experience in wargaming,
and the intellectual and cognitive skills learned in wargaming
are value-added to staff-level strategic positions, waiting until
Command and Staff to begin wargaming education results in
three primary problems.
First, by the time officers arrive at Command and Staff, they
are already fully indoctrinated into their Service’s—and often
their specific community’s—way of thinking. Commissioning
education and military occupational schools, in addition to
teaching skills, indoctrinate officers into a specific way of think-
ing. Service culture is ingrained through the transfer of skills and
knowledge from one generation to the next, and initial training
provides the means for most cultural transmission.7 The stron-
gest cultural development takes place within the first five to
seven years of a servicemembers’ career, when they are taught
how to act, think, and perform in accordance with the stan-
dards required for their particular Service and job within it, as
well as develop a sense of the ritualistic and informal practices
that give the Services a distinct culture.8 For officers, through-
out their company grade years, they are rated and evaluated

7
Kyleanne Hunter, “Warrior Culture: Ancient Roots, New Meaning,” in Bulletproofing
the Psyche: Preventing Mental Health Problems in Our Military and Veterans, ed. Kate
Thomas and David Albright (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018), 29–42.
8
Joshua J. Jackson et al., “Military Training and Personality Trait Development: Does the
Military Make the Man, or Does the Man Make the Military?,” Psychological Science 23,
no. 3 (2012): 270–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611423545.

33
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
on how well they conform to particular standards and actions,
but also their ability obtain “credibility” in their career field.
Pathways for promotion in each career are fairly set, and there
is little reward for deviating from a given route. By the time stu-
dents arrive at Command and Staff, they are firmly rooted in
their particular culture and way of thinking. Given the rigidity of
their early military experience, it is hard to leverage the benefits
of nonlinear thinking that wargaming provides at this stage in
their careers.
Second, by the time officers begin Command and Staff,
they have likely achieved tactical proficiency in their career
field. This is done through obtaining qualifications and com-
pleting assignments dictated by the requirements set forth in
training manuals and the promotion process. The introduc-
tion of wargaming after officers have been tactically focused
to achieve professional credibility results in it being seen as an
add-on educational tool, which is useful in classroom settings
to teach new skills, yet not fully integrated into career progres-
sions.9 A consequence of this is that wargaming is stovepiped
in military educational institutions and not fully integrated into
operating forces. While the PME institutions—particularly at the
Command and Staff level and higher—have been deliberate
about integrating wargaming, it remains elusive in the operating
forces.10 This remains largely true, despite evidence that having
continual touch points with the operating forces is essential to
reinforce the cognitive benefits of wargaming and to keep the
operating forces agile.11 This is particularly important as service-
members are being asked to quickly transition from a focus on
counterinsurgency operations to strategic competition and a
regional focus from the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
area of responsibility to the Indo-Pacific (INDOPACOM). Better

9
Maj Ian T. Brown and Capt Benjamin M. Herbold, “Make It Stick: Institutionalizing War-
gaming at EDCOM,” Marine Corps Gazette 105, no. 6 (June 2021): 22–31.
10
Jeff Appleget et al., Wargaming at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA: Na-
val Post Graduate School, 2016).
11
Brown and Herbold, “Make It Stick.”

34
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
integration of a wargaming mindset in the operating forces will
help with tactical agility.12 Because it is introduced so late in an
officer’s career and separate from operational requirements,
wargaming expertise remains largely segregated from opera-
tional implementation. The separation of wargaming from the
operational forces has made it seem elusive from much of the
operating force, giving it an air of ivory tower status.
Finally, the way Command and Staff education is con-
ducted means that only a fraction of all officers are exposed
to wargaming. Due to operational tempo and geographical
assignment constraints, online PME is increasingly common.
Additionally, Services are increasingly realizing that online PME
provides significant cost savings, as servicemembers are not
required to move, and can also often accomplish their PME re-
quirements while still in an operational duty status. The Joint
Chiefs’ instruction codifies that all PME can be accomplished
either online or in the schoolhouse, so the trend toward online
education will likely continue or even increase.13 While many
wargames can be played in a virtual environment, the asyn-
chronous nature of most online PME limits the time that can be
dedicated to deliberate wargaming. Additionally, the current
benefits of PME-based wargaming have been realized through
in-person games.14 A continued trend toward online PME
will likely further shrink the pool of servicemembers who un-
derstand wargaming and further entrench the educational-
operational divide.
A consequence of these problems is that the DOD and the
military Services are increasingly relying on professional con-
tractors rather than active-duty servicemembers to fulfill their
wargaming needs. While professional wargamers have created
valuable games for the DOD and specific military Services, rely-

12
Sebastian Bae and Paul Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical Edge,” War
Room, 8 March 2021.
13
Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Way of War.
14
Brown and Herbold, “Make It Stick”; and Appleget et al., Wargaming at the Naval Post-
graduate School.

35
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
ing on professionals outside of the military organizations raises
concerns as well. Jeff Appleget, Jeff Kline, and Robert Burks note
that this has led to the DOD outsourcing the intellectual capital
that is built by developing and running wargames.15 It is not only
technical expertise that they are missing in this regard, but the
expertise and insights that come from iterating on a strategic
and intellectual level. Professional wargamers are important for
their continuity and the deliberate hours they can dedicate to
creating, running, and analyzing games. However, as John Curry
notes, the way in which professional wargaming as an enter-
prise has developed, and the way in which professional war-
gamers are trained, set standards based on past precedent
rather than future-looking opportunities.16 The relationship
between professional wargamers and the DOD further strains
their ability to create reactive, just-in-time changes to wargam-
ing scenarios built on lessons learned from the operating forc-
es. The process of creating contracts or project scopes adds an
additional lag to the development and implementation of war-
games. It also highlights the transactional nature of wargaming,
and denies the operators a full understanding of how engaging
in games not only can be used to address analytical outcomes,
but shape their thinking.
One way to address these problems is to introduce war-
gaming early in the educational and developmental life of ser-
vicemembers. This will not only ensure that a wide range of
individual servicemembers are exposed to wargaming—giving
the DOD a broader swath of individual personnel capable of
meeting their wargaming needs—but also leverage more of the
cognitive and intellectual development aspects of wargaming.
Wargaming is not just about running simulations or learning
history. Especially when used as part of a broader education-
al curriculum, it develops mental agility and strategic thinking

15
Appleget, Kline, and Burks, “Revamping Wargaming Education for the U.S. Depart-
ment of Defense.”
16
John Curry, “Professional Wargaming: A Flawed but Useful Tool,” Simulation & Gam-
ing 51, no. 5 (2020): 612–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120901852.

36
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
skills. From a perspective of developing a talent pipeline for
the DOD, it creates the skills to both think creatively about the
future fight and fully embrace the principles of joint warfare.
Precommissioning education is an ideal place to introduce
wargaming to reap these benefits and create broader warga-
ming literacy among the DOD. This will set the foundation for a
career in which officer will continue to build on the principles of
wargaming and give the DOD access to a cadre of officers able
to think strategically about future problems. It will also allow
officers to integrate the cognitive and intellectual principles of
wargaming throughout their careers, which will also have ben-
efits for their tactical and operational requirements.
It is worth noting that there is also a benefit to expanding
wargaming more deliberately in the enlisted ranks. Major Ian T.
Brown and Captain Benjamin M. Herbold note that the fact that
enlisted make up a greater percentage of the force in general
should be reason enough to focus wargaming on the enlisted
ranks.17 Matthew Reed argues that the demands of the future
fight will require a more intellectually agile noncommissioned
officer (NCO) core, and that modeling enlisted PME after the
current structure for the officer corps (to include the integra-
tion of wargaming) is the most effective way to do this.18 Sebas-
tian Bae and Paul Kearney emphasize that wargaming creates
a tactical edge for servicemembers, a skill that would see great
benefit in the enlisted ranks.19 These arguments are import-
ant, and increasing the enlisted pipeline for and exposure to
wargaming is worthy of much more discussion and policy en-
gagement. However, the focus of this chapter is on the most ef-
fective way of growing exposure to wargaming among officers.

BENEFITS OF A PRECOMMISSIONING DOD PIPELINE

Though young officers are expected to be focused on tactical

17
Brown and Herbold, “Make It Stick.”
18
Matthew Reed, “Rethinking Enlisted Education: Expanding the Professional Military
Education Debate,” War on the Rocks, 19 November 2018.
19
Bae and Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical Edge.”

37
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
expertise for the first several years of military service, precom-
missioning exposure to wargaming has many benefits to the
DOD. By introducing wargaming at this early stage in their in-
tellectual and professional development, young officers are
developing the cognitive and intellectual curiosity wargaming
creates while being indoctrinated into their Service culture. A
precommissioning pipeline for wargaming also creates a big-
ger pool of individuals who are exposed to the principles of
wargaming, allowing the DOD to cast a wider net when looking
for qualified individuals to build, run, and analyze games. This
will overcome and begin to breakdown some of the current
stovepipes that exist in the wargaming community, and allow
for a more organic transition for servicemembers in and out of
wargaming roles. Additionally, most precommissioning educa-
tion—whether at a Service academy, ROTC, or Officer Candi-
dates School—is in person, providing the ideal environment for
achieving the most beneficial wargaming outcomes.
In addition to overcoming some of the deficiencies the
current system creates, there are three additional benefits cre-
ated by a precommissioning wargaming pipeline for the DOD.
First, it allows for casting a wider net when wargaming is need-
ed at the Service or Joint level, not just in terms of numbers,
but occupational specialties and levels of experience. Exposing
young officers to wargaming earlier in their career will create
a cadre of company grade officers who are literate in war-
gaming and can provide different perspectives to Joint- or
strategic-level problems. Reaching down into the ranks to those
closest to the tactical level can provide additive benefits to
more senior-level thinking. During their company grade years,
officers are engaged in the tactical level of warfighting. They are
the ones integrating new tactics and procedures, integrating
new technologies into the battlefield, and implementing new
doctrine at the ground level. Their lived experience is just as
valuable as the advanced education and strategic thinking that
field grade officers bring to wargaming. Having officers under-

38
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
stand wargaming early in their career will provide the DOD with
better inputs for their games.
Second, wargaming literacy will give the tactical-level oper-
ators another tool to “outthink” the adversary. Providing those
who are charged with the tactical decisions the tools to think
differently about problems is essential in the changing global
security environment. Wargaming is as much about cognitive
skills as it is the analytical findings. If officers are introduced to
wargaming while they are also learning the key functions of
their job, they will incorporate principles of complex thinking
and outmaneuvering an adversary as part of their primary job.
The skills necessary to be effective on the future battlefield are
not just tactical, and introducing wargaming early in the career
trajectory of officers will ingrain a competitive edge in how they
approach the future fight.
And third, introducing wargaming in precommissioning
education allows for more diversity in who is part of wargam-
ing. As noted above, advanced PME is becoming increasingly
virtual, shrinking the pool of those officers meaningfully ex-
posed to its benefits. Additionally, the DOD Board on Diversity
and Inclusion found that there are racial disparities in who is
selected for resident advanced PME and top-level schools, the
primary sources for receiving wargaming education. Women
and racial and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in
resident schools, meaning that white men receive the majority
of in-person wargaming experiences.20 The wargaming com-
munity—both within the military and among professional con-
tractors—has acknowledged this deficit, and recognizes that
there are negative repercussions to the fact that 98 percent of
professional wargamers are white and male.21 Introducing war-
20
Department of Defense Board on Diversity and Inclusion Report: Recommendations to
Improve Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Inclusion in the U.S. Military (Washington, DC:
Department of Defense, 2020).
21
Sally Davis, “Wargaming has a Diversity Problem,” Wavell Room, 15 January 2021; and
Brandon Valeriano, “The Need for Diversity in Wargaming,” PAXsims, 7 February 2020.

39
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
gaming in precommissioning education will allow for a greater
swath of the military to be part of wargaming discussions. As
the military is becoming more diverse, this will create an in-
creasingly diverse pool of wargaming-literate officers to draw
from, and the ability to leverage the benefits their diversity
brings.22

ADAPTING WARGAMING TO
PRECOMMISSIONING EDUCATION:
CREATING THE PIPELINE
Creating a wargaming pipeline for the DOD through precom-
missioning education requires tailoring the wargaming expe-
rience to the undergraduate learning environment. Currently,
the Service academies and ROTC are experimenting with mul-
tiple ways to do this.23 Though the use of wargaming is different
for each, the key principle of immersive education is central to
tailoring wargaming education to undergraduate level.
Immersive education focuses on wargaming being inte-
grated throughout the academic curricula as a culminating ex-
periential learning process that creates the basis for a culture of
wargaming. This requires addressing some of the unique struc-
tural challenges of precommissioning education that make the
traditional wargaming educational model ineffective. Indeed, it
would be difficult to produce technical or tactical experts giv-
en the constraints of precommissioning education. However,
there is an opportunity for an intellectual mindset that is root-
ed in the principles of wargaming. Before examples of immer-
22
“Demographics of the U.S. Military,” Council on Foreign Relations, 13 July 2020.
23
The military academies are increasingly relying on wargaming both for ped-
agogical purposes and to track undergraduate students’ understanding of
the principles of game design. These include classroom activities, immersive
wargaming environments, technologically advanced modeling and simu-
lation, and design competitions. For examples of what the academies are
doing see: “West Point Simulation Center,” U.S. Military Academy, accessed
30 March 2022; “USNA Museum, History Department Establish Naval History
Wargaming Laboratory,” USNA News Center, 5 August 2020; and “Institute for
Future Conflict,” U.S. Air Force Academy, accessed 30 March 2022.

40
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
sive education are discussed, it is important to briefly discuss
the constraints of precommissioning education that must be
overcome.

Constraints of Precommissioning Education

The two largest constraints in precommissioning education
are time and resources. Classes in precommissioning educa-
tion—whether at a Service academy or ROTC—rarely exceed
60 minutes in length. For traditional tabletop wargames, signifi-
cantly more time than an hour-long class is required. Students
also have unpredictable schedules, shuffling between classes
in mathematics, history, English, science, and military studies.
Unless enrolled in a gaming-specific class, there are rarely ded-
icated educational blocks to dive into gaming, and students’
days are so deeply segmented they are likely to forget material
between lessons.24 Additionally, the military knowledge base of
students in precommissioning education is substantially lower
than field-grade PME students. Baseline knowledge about his-
torical battles or campaigns, the structure of military units, or
the interactions between parts of the Joint force is minimal.25 To
effectively engage in wargaming thus requires quite a bit more
preparation on the part of the instructor, further contributing
to time constraints. All of this is coupled with the need to bal-
ance wargaming with a core undergraduate education.26
Cost and resourcing constraints also pose a challenge.
Undergraduate instructors and professors who choose to en-
gage in in-class wargaming have to do so at little to no cost,
24
Simon Lei et al., “Forgetting to Remember Important Course Information: Instructors’
Perspectives,” College Student Journal 45, no. 1 (2011): 36–47.
25
This data is based on the author’s experience teaching at the undergraduate level. As
course director of the core military studies class, cadets did not have any knowledge
of basic military activities. Since there are precommissioning education requirements
on Joint force structure, it is a safe assumption that field-grade students have a higher
knowledge base than those who have not had this knowledge.
26
While many precommissioning education programs offer electives in wargaming de-
sign, where students are able to get a deep dive into the mechanics of games and the
ability to analyze outcomes, these classes are not taken by all students and may serve
to further stovepipe wargaming if it not more broadly applied.

41
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
further constraining what can be done.27 Precommissioning in-
stitutions fund what they see as core and required education.
Therefore, so long as wargaming is seen as an ancillary elective,
it will suffer from a lack of proper resourcing. Clubs and extra-
curricular activities have invested in ensuring wargaming op-
portunities for students; however, the limited nature of these
activities does not allow for a true precommissioning pipeline
to be established.
Working within these constraints requires a change in
mindset about the purpose of wargaming. Rather than using
wargames as stand alone, or contained activities, a precommis-
sioning pipeline is best achieved through integrating wargam-
ing throughout the precommissioning educational experience
in an immersive and holistic way. This requires viewing warga-
mes not as ends but as a means for achieving learning across
the academic disciplines. Though it will take initial coordination
across academic departments, it will have positive advantages
for the DOD as a whole.

Overcoming Constraints
with the “Combat Snow Globe” Approach
A framework for thinking about how to overcome the challeng-
es of integrating wargaming into precommissioning education
is the “Combat Snow Globe” approach (figure 1).28 While the
various Service academies and ROTC programs approach war-
gaming in different ways, this approach provides a framework
to shift thinking about wargaming from being a discrete opera-
tion to a cultural mindset.
The key to developing a wargaming pipeline for the DOD is
to develop wargaming-literate young officers who have a truly

27
M. Scott Bond, “Wargaming at the Academy: Why Invest in NHWLAND and Building a
Culture of Wargaming,” Center for International Maritime Security, 4 January 2021.
28
The Combat Snow Globe was conceived and designed by Michael Golembesky
during the summer of 2020. Golembesky is the operations manager for the multi-
domain laboratory at the United States Air Force Academy, a Marine Corps combat
veteran, and New York Times bestselling author.

42
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
Figure 1. The combat snow globe

Source: courtesy of Michael Golembesky, U.S. Air Force Academy, adapted

by MCUP.

Joint understanding of warfare as part of the cultural indoctri-

nation into the Service and prior to their tactical instruction.
The combat snow globe approach does just that. There are
three aspects to this approach that can be adopted to differ-
ent precommissioning educational institution models. First,
a focus on inter- and multidomain operations is essential. All
Services have recognized that the future of warfare is Joint and
multidomain; and the earlier these concepts are introduced,
the more likely they are to be seen as a foundational aspect of
warfighting and military culture. Introducing multidomain and
Joint operations in a precommissioning environment has the
further advantage of bringing together several components of
undergraduate education in a holistic way. Second, a focus on

43
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
a narrative arc to the wargaming approach is required. Rather
than focusing on technical or analytical details, wargaming that
also incorporates narrative approaches is essential for creating
the cognitive and intellectual benefits that a wargaming edu-
cation brings to future officers. And finally, a human-centered
approach to wargaming can bring the benefits of precommis-
sioning wargaming to the forefront. Putting the student first and
foremost in the wargaming scenario teaches decision making,
strategic and agile thinking, and creative problem solving—the
characteristics that senior DOD leadership is calling for from a
wargaming education.

Multidomain Operations
Many war games that are used for educational purposes fo-
cus on a single domain or campaign. They are often used to
teach historical insights or to explore tactical decision making.
Single-domain games are also most often used when teaching
wargaming to new students focused on wargaming design.
There are benefits to gaining expertise in a single domain and
the historical expertise of a single campaign. They also provide
a good platform for teaching students how to design games.
However, single-domain games often require several hours to
execute and deep knowledge into one subject area. As noted
in constraints, time and tactical/technical expertise required
for many historical games or campaign-focused games used
at command and staff level PME institutions are challenging to
reproduce at the undergraduate or precommissioning level.
Rather than using wargaming to achieve specific tactical
outcomes or to train officers in specific operational concepts,
precommissioning education can help tie the various educa-
tional disciplines that are part of precommissioning education
into a multidomain mindset. Undergraduate education is in-
tentionally multidisciplinary. At the Service academies, and
in many ROTC programs, this multidisciplinary education is
heavily focused on science, technology, engineering, and math
(STEM). While the evolving shape of warfare preferences STEM,

44
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
to leverage its advantages it must be put into context. Multi-
domain wargaming puts specific aspects of STEM education
into context. For example, students who are deeply engaged
in computer science are able to better understand that cyber
is not a standalone domain, but it is also an enabler for oper-
ations in traditional land, sea, and air operations. Students en-
gaged in understanding how hypersonic technology works are
exposed to how it shapes decision making about both friendly
and adversary actions.
Further, an integrated, multidomain approach to warga-
ming will help address the need for servicemembers capable
of defeating a “thinking adversary” the Joint Chiefs note in the
PME guidance.29 For nearly a generation, the U.S. military was
engaged in armed conflict with a technologically inferior ad-
versary. Concepts such as air superiority and sea control were
not part of the main effort of operations. Additionally, space
and cyber capabilities still remain to be tested. The tactics, op-
erational plans, and strategies developed during counterinsur-
gency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same as
those required to (re)engage with strategic competition. In the
coming years, the military will be faced with a technologically
matched, if not superior, adversary engaging hybrid warfare
strategies that cut across the traditional domains of warfight-
ing. Introducing officers early in their career to how technology
plays into strategy and the importance of interdomain opera-
tions, will better arm them to address this “thinking adversary.”
A deliberate and cohesive multidomain approach to warga-
ming will also show young officers how the various academic
disciplines they are engaged with contribute to the future fight.

Narrative Arc
Given the time and resource constraints of undergraduate
precommissioning education, there is little time to play a tradi-
tional game. In traditional wargames, the narrative arc unfolds

29
Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Way of War, 3–4.

45
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
during the play of the game, or from the historical knowledge
of a specific event. Yet, precommissioning education offers
other ways of achieving buy-in through broad multidisciplinary
engagement of a narrative arc.
As noted in a discussion on multidomain operations, war-
gaming can weave a thread through different aspects of multi-
disciplinary education. A unique aspect of precommissioning
education—both at the Service academies and ROTC—is that
in addition to gaining an academic undergraduate education,
there is a deliberate focus on developing military leaders. Sto-
ries of warrior heroics, class exemplars, and the use of core val-
ues are all common ways used to create leaders of character
for the future fight. Including a common story line that can be
used throughout a precommissioning education as the basis
for an immersive and comprehensive wargame can bring stu-
dents into a game and overcome some common constraints.
A narrative arc as part of the combat snow globe approach
does not just focus on playing a linear historical event, but it
provides a story more akin to a “choose your own adventure.”
It allows students to explore a world and interject their diverse
educational backgrounds and personal interests.
An example of this can be seen in Operation Northern
Eclipse currently being used at the United States Air Force
Academy. This scenario is set five years in the future in the Indo-
Pacific region. Cadets are introduced to Operation Northern
Eclipse during their core Military and Strategic Studies Course,
where they learn principles of Joint operations and operation-
al design. This same scenario is integrated into several other
courses. Foreign language courses can use the scenario to
show the importance of understanding culture in translation.
Astrophysics can show how introducing hypersonic technolo-
gy changes military operations at the operational and strategic
level. This core scenario means that courses are not complet-
ed in a vacuum, but brought together to create future officers
armed with the ability to think in a multidimensional way about
the future of warfighting.

46
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
The U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) recently established the
Naval Historical Wargaming Laboratory (NHWL), in partnership
with the History Department and housed at the USNA Muse-
um. NHWL provides midshipmen with strategic-level gaming
to expose future officers to high-level decision making and an
understanding of the impact of Joint operations. NHWL pro-
vides both for-credit classes and deep immersive experiences
that carry throughout a midshipmen’s career. Through a mix
of tabletop and digital games, they help midshipmen tie their
education together, ultimately creating more deeply immersed
officers.30
Employing a narrative arc in precommissioning wargaming
education creates an understanding as to how small changes
in a given field will impact the overall Joint fight. Using the narra-
tive arc as a base, educators can change one small variable and
see its larger impacts. Using a standard narrative arc through-
out the educational experiences exposes students to the real
impact of change. Bringing a consistent story into precom-
missioning education will give young officers a baseline to tie
seemingly disparate threads together and give them key skills
to defeat a thinking adversary.

Human Centered Approach

The human domain is the glass that holds the snow globe ap-
proach to immersive education together. While there is much
focus on technological innovation of the future fight, wars will
still be fought by people. Communication, decision making,
and information interpretation are the key that future warfight-
ers are going to need to meet the demands of the future of stra-
tegic competition. While this immersive educational approach
focused on the human aspect of warfighting may not provide
precommissioning students with the skills to create war games,
it reinforces the need for thinking warfighters as the linchpin for
the future fight.

30
“USNA Museum, History Department Establish Naval History Wargaming Laboratory.”

47
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
An immersive educational approach to wargaming de-
mystifies some of the aspects of practice that often create an
artificial barrier to earlier involvement. Through wargaming is
encouraged by the chiefs of each of the Services, the chairman,
and several combatant commanders, only a small percentage
servicemembers actively engage in wargaming. Most of this is
focused on senior leaders and emphasis technical skills rather
than a holistic educational approach.31 While there is a dearth
of studies on the reason why servicemembers do not active-
ly engage in wargaming, anecdotal evidence suggests that the
complexity of several games coupled with a lack of early intro-
duction into wargaming makes servicemembers feel removed
from gaming and intimidated to start. This, coupled with the
fact that wargaming is not integrated into most career fields,
continues to stovepipe wargaming.
The Combat Simulation Lab at West Point is a prime ex-
ample of a human-centered approach to wargaming. The
Combat Simulation Lab places the individual at the center of
a virtual world where they can drive the outcomes. The lab is
used across different academic and military courses to rein-
force the human aspect of lessons cadets learn.32
While the Service academies are investing in high-tech
facilities, expensive equipment is not essential for achieving a
human-focused approach to wargaming. ROTC programs have
been experimenting with creating end-of-course exercises
(EOCX) that put students in roles that grow with them through-
out their ROTC career. Such EOCXs—due to the repeatability of
their use—create buy-in from students and reinforce the idea
that wargaming can be used for cognitive growth.33
The intention of integrating the human domain and draw-

31
Yuna Huh Wong et al., Next-Generation Wargaming for the U.S. Marine Corps: Rec-
ommended Courses of Action (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7249
/RR2227.
32
For more on the lab’s mission, objectives, and products, see “Combat Simulation
Lab,” Westpoint.edu, accessed 7 January 2022.
33
William Van Horn, “NROTC Wargaming,” U.S. Naval Institute Blog, 13 August 2019.

48
 IMMERSE EARLY, IMMERSE OFTEN
ing students in precommissioning education into the wargame
experience is not necessarily to make experts in creating war-
games as undergraduates, but to expose future officers to the
cognitive benefits of a wargaming education, while specifically
addressing the critical skills Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
notes as necessary.

THE IMPACT OF A PRECOMMISSIONING PIPELINE

While the various precommissioning institutions have unique
requirements, and each Service has a distinct culture that they
inculcate future officers into, the principles behind the immer-
sive education combat snow globe approach to creating war-
gaming literacy is a framework that can help create a pipeline
for the DOD of agile thinker-doers.
The purpose of this pipeline is not necessarily to cultivate
experts in creating specific games, or even the analytical in-
terpretation or application of specific games, but to leverage
the intellectual agility wargaming creates. There are, of course,
constraints to implementing such an approach as it requires
faculty buy-in and cross-departmental coordination and in-
tegration. This is often challenging at the undergraduate level,
with the time and resources constraints noted above. Experi-
ences at the Service academies have revealed that faculty often
feel that if they add in wargaming, they are being forced to drop
something from their syllabi. It also requires faculty to learn
the scenarios and mechanics of play, as well as standardizing
the experience for cadets as much as possible across a broad
swath of instructors.
Additionally, it requires an assessment mechanism to en-
sure that the intellectual principles of wargaming are being
absorbed and integrated. Assessing such an abstract concept
is often difficult, as it requires tracking students into their ear-
ly careers and creating consistent metrics across the Services.
Additionally, the diversity of faulty involved in this work raises
concerns about the fairness of assessing outcomes. While as-
sessment remains a challenge, there is deliberate work being

49
 KYLEANNE HUNTER
done to overcome these hurdles and to create evaluation
mechanisms that can ensure that wargaming remains deliber-
ately integrated in precommissioning education.34
The establishment of a precommissioning pipeline, de-
spite these challenges, is essential to create the agile warfight-
ers needed for the future fight. The changes in technology,
adversary, and geography that future warfighters are expected
to navigate means that they must not only be technically and
tactically proficient, but be mentally agile to quickly respond
to changing environments. The integration of wargaming with
precommissioning education is a necessary tool to do this.

34
Kate Kuehn, “Assessment Strategies for Educational Wargames,” Journal of Advanced
Military Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 139–53, https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj.20211202005.

50
 Chapter Three

Simulation-Based Analysis
and Training (SimBAT)
Wargaming in the Office of Naval Intelligence

Timothy J. Smith

SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING

(SIMBAT) PROGRAM OVERVIEW
This chapter reports on the history, concept, and status of a
wargame-based training and analytic support program the
author devised and has implemented in the Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI) since 2008, explaining its pedagogical bases
and objectives for learning and development in a military intel-
ligence organization.

Program History and Status

SimBAT originated in two mid-level training courses conduct-
ed as concept demonstrators in 2004, both wholly in-house
efforts with no contractor support. For the first, the author
assembled a team and organized a Battle of Jutland wargame
using Avalon Hill’s 1967 game on the World War I naval battle.1
In the second, the team wargamed the Battle of Midway using
Avalanche Press’s game.2 They modified both products for Na-
val War College-style white cell adjudication, emphasizing blind
search on the part of the blue and red (or in this case black)
player cells.3 For both of these early efforts, lecture-based train-

1
James F. Dunnigan, Jutland (Baltimore, MD: Avalon Hill, 1967).
2
Michael Bennighof and Brian L. Knipple, Midway, Second World War at Sea series
(Irondale, AL: Avalanche Press, 2002).
3
Stephen Downes-Martin, “Adjudication,” Naval College Review 66, no. 3 (2013).

51
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
ing was limited to a substantial briefing on naval warfare in the
respective eras.
SimBAT proper commenced in 2008, running full scale
until the federal budget crisis of 2011 (sequestration), when the
program was temporarily cut, resuming in 2014, and then only
in truncated form. From 2008 to 2011, the SimBAT team ran a
dozen iterations of six different mid-level courses. They com-
menced first with higher-level hex-and-counter simulations at
the mid level but many of the students were junior and found
these more quantitative models a discouraging challenge to
learn, even with intensive coaching. The team then ratcheted
back the complexity of the simulation models, while simulta-
neously augmenting the content and structure of the larger
pedagogical design and method of delivery. Thus, embedded
in sound pedagogy (explained below), the wargames provided
the warfare model students analyzed in class and then experi-
enced in each course’s simulation laboratory.4
The team found the Axis and Allies game series highly
suitable to meet the learning and analytic skills-development
needs of ONI’s targeted training audience, which consists of
analysts primarily in components charged with strategic, oper-
ational, and tactical warfare and technical systems analysis.5 As
fellow wargame grognards might imagine, the team was loath
to foist on fellow analytic professionals a simulation model fea-
turing plastic miniatures of tanks, ships, planes, and infantry.”6
However, it was sufficiently well received to warrant adoption
as the standard simulation toolset.
The main courses focused on strategy in the Second World

4
Technically, andragogy or the principles and practices of adult education.
5
Larry Harris, Axis and Allies (various titles) (Baltimore, MD: Avalon Hill, multiple publi-
cation dates).
6
The original definition of the term grognard refers to an old soldier, or a “grumbler.” In
current usage, it refers to individuals with deep and extensive expertise in wargaming.

52
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
War in Europe and the Pacific and operations during the Solo-
mon Islands campaign of 1942. The team has run other courses
on the Spanish-American War, the Battle of the Atlantic, and
tactical air combat.

Program Structure: SimBAT Analysis and SimBAT Training

SimBAT consisted originally of two elements: SimBAT Analysis
(SimBAT-A) and SimBAT Training (SimBAT-T). SimBAT-A uses
campaign- and mission-level computational modeling and
simulation (M&S) to support production analysis. The team
ran two such projects in 2004 and 2011. SimBAT-T uses manu-
al tabletop wargaming and historical scenarios. They resumed
a few years after sequestration, albeit at a reduced scale. The
return of great power conflict (GPC) appears to be increasing
demand for resumption on a larger scale.
Both applications follow the same methodology and busi-
ness process. Being a vehicle for organizational development
and learning as well a process for intelligence discovery, Sim-
BAT is governed by specific discovery and learning objectives
and is intended to promote a substantial advance in intelli-
gence analytic methodology.

SimBAT Methodology:
Synergy through Paradigm Integration
SimBAT employs mixed-methods analysis and synthesis, in-
tegrating intelligence community (IC) analytic tradecraft and
Department of Defense (DOD) analytic methodology. The two
paradigms are highly complementary in functional capability,
each providing a combined arms capability the other lacks
and needs. IC analytic tradecraft is informal and qualitative in
nature, serving best for the generation and initial vetting of hy-
potheses. DOD methodology is much more formal and quan-
titative, complicating the generation of multiple wide-ranging

53
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
alternative hypotheses; however, it is much better for testing
hypotheses.7
Service intelligence centers occupy the nexus between the
DOD and the IC, positioning them to lead this methodological
paradigm integration (figure 2).
IC analytic tradecraft, as applied in SimBAT, serves the
methodological functions of inductive and abductive synthe-
sis, and emphasizes the following methods and techniques:
1. Collaborative teaming
2. Facilitated brainstorming
3. Critical Thinking and Structured Analysis (CTSA) using
Structured Analytic Templates (CTSA/SATs) to
4. Generate alternative hypotheses

The DOD analytic methodology, as applied in SimBAT,

serves the function of deductive analysis and emphasizes:
1. Formal and quantitative modeling
2. Simulation-based hypothesis testing

The SimBAT process pursues a discovery and learning

spiral commencing with team formation and structured brain-
storming and proceeding through the definition of variables
and generation and testing of hypotheses, followed by further
spirals as needed (figure 3).
SimBAT-T trains analysts in cognitive orientation and rea-
soning and helps provide the pattern recognition and anoma-
ly detection skills required for effective threat assessment and
7
Neither DOD nor IC methodology/tradecraft are documented in any single reference
work. Any comprehensive citation would require a bibliographical annex. Military
analytic methodology supports the requirements of force and operations planners,
including, inter alia, the full range of threat and net assessment, force-structure analy-
sis, campaign modeling; capabilities- and requirements-based analysis and planning,
technical systems analysis and design; and the military planning and decision-making
processes (MPP/MDMP). All of these involve at least some degree of quantitative rig-
or, and they include M&S, wargaming, and operations research. Intelligence analytic
tradecraft is well-named, for except in military applications, it emphasizes qualitative
methods supported occasionally by structured methods for creative and critical think-
ing, some of which will be touched on below.

54
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Figure 2. SimBAT methodology combines the best of two philosophies
SimBAT
DEFENSE

   

•    •  
  
•    •   
    

Source: courtesy of the author, adapted by MCUP.

Figure 3. SimBAT learning spiral


 
 
   
 



 /


 

 
  
 
 

Source: courtesy of the author, adapted by MCUP.

55
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
warning. SimBAT-A works directly by teaching military model-
ing and simulation. Beyond that, however, SimBAT-T supports
analysis across the command by training analysts in the basics
of military affairs and warfare at the strategic, operational, and
tactical levels.
The following images convey the look and feel of SimBAT
materials and activity (figures 4 and 5).

THE NEED FOR ADVANCED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING

SimBAT is designed to develop and institutionalize advanced
methodology in intelligence analysis and production. The pro-
gram integrates today’s advanced qualitative methods and

Figure 4. SimBAT-T materials

Source: courtesy of Avalanche Press and Hasbro, adapted by MCUP.

56
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Figure 4. SimBAT-T materials (continued)

Source: courtesy of Avalanche Press and Hasbro, adapted by MCUP.

techniques while simultaneously laying the foundation for the

adoption of more sophisticated and rigorous logical and quan-
titative methods and tools.
Consistent with today’s analytic tradecraft, the SimBAT
program emphasizes critical thinking and structured analysis.
57
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Figure 5. SimBAT Course: Naval Intelligence and Strategy; Scenario: Pacific
War, 1941–45; Wargame: Axis and Allies Pacific

Source: courtesy of the Office of Naval Intelligence, adapted by MCUP.

58
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
ONI’s implementation, however, is more tailored to the military
intelligence problem set than it is basic intelligence analytic
tradecraft. SimBAT is designed as an integral component of an
analyst’s career development, and could in the future be of-
fered for IC- wide analytic training. As such, SimBAT is designed
to promote ONI and wider IC analytic tradecraft, quality stan-
dards, and analytic training requirements.
The author proposes a methodology of “cognitive and
computational collaboration” designed to enable organiza-
tions to implement this checklist with maximal effectiveness
in actual analysis and production.8 The intent is to reduce the
threat of intelligence failure and surprise through facilitated,
laboratory-based collaboration designed to maximize the
number of alternative hypotheses analytic teams conceive
and explore and to test them all as rigorously as time and
money allow. Emerging assessments and forecasts then can
be fleshed out with associated indications and warnings (I&W)
indicators and potential adversary branches and sequels. The
resulting products and support would arm national and the-
ater commanders with deeper insight into the adversary, and
a broader scan of the horizon, than intelligence has ever be-
fore supplied.
This analytic methodology can be developed with re-
duced costs and risks by inaugurating it as a training program—
one that is conducted as a rehearsal for the real thing—that is,
as an analytic project that produces everything but the final
intelligence product.

8
Timothy J. Smith, “Predictive Network-Centric Intelligence: Toward a Total-Systems
Transformation of Analysis and Assessment,” Galileo Essay Contest award winner
2006; and Timothy J. Smith, “Computational Collaboration: Methodology for Predic-
tive Intelligence,” Galileo Essay Contest honorable mention 2007. The 2006 paper was
published in an abridged format as “Predictive Warning: Teams, Networks, and Scien-
tific Method,” in Roger Z. George and James B. Bruce, eds., Analyzing Intelligence: Ori-
gins, Obstacles and Innovations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008),
chapt. 17.

59
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Today’s Advanced Methodology: Cognitive Collaboration
The current generation of advanced qualitative methods and
techniques subsumed under the rubric IC analytic tradecraft
includes interdisciplinary collaboration, facilitated team brain-
storming, and Critical Thinking and Structured Analysis (CTSA).
CTSAs include a variety of Structured Analytic Techniques
(SATs), such as red cell brainstorming, key assumptions checks
(KACs), multiple alternative hypotheses, and the analysis of
competing hypotheses (ACH). These concepts are taught at
the Central Intelligence Agency’s Sherman Kent School for In-
telligence Analysis and at DIA’s Joint Military Intelligence Training
Center (JMITC).9 The core principles involve the penetration of
the adversary mindset and the generation and serious con-
sideration of multiple alternative hypotheses concerning their
capabilities and intentions. Fully implemented, advanced qual-
itative methodology can foster a dramatic improvement in the
quality of intelligence analysis, especially in nonquantitative
domains such as social and political intelligence. For highly
quantitative domains such as warfare (and economics, sci-
ence and technology, etc.), qualitative methodology, although
absolutely necessary, is insufficient, failing to exploit quantita-
tive methods and tools widely available outside of the IC for
analyzing complex problems.

Tomorrow’s Advanced Methodology:

Computational Collaboration
To master the science of prediction, and indeed, simply to
remain relevant and effective, the IC must take advantage of
quantitative and computational methodology, especially in
the military domain. Although standard in other knowledge-

9
See, for instance, the original guide to SATs, A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic
Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence
Agency, 2009); the expanded title by Randolph H. Pherson and Richards J. Heuer Jr.,
Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis, 3d ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA:
CQ Press, an imprint of Sage, 2019); and for a sound overview, Intelligence Analysis,
Army Techniques Publication 2-33.4 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2020).

60
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
oriented professions, including DOD and the Services, ad-
vanced quantitative and computational methods and tools
are less familiar within the IC.10 The quantitative disciplines
most applicable to defense intelligence analysis consist basi-
cally of statistics, probability, and operations research (OR), all
of which subsume a vast array of methods and tools. These
include everything from basic spatiotemporal plotting and cal-
culation to Bayesian probability (named for Thomas Bayes),
systems and process modeling, and Monte Carlo simulation.
Simulation modeling includes technical systems modeling,
network modeling, project management modeling, and com-
prehensive systems-of-systems modeling, including advanced
complex adaptive systems techniques such as evolutionary al-
gorithms and agent-based modeling. All of these come under
the broad rubric of M&S, which uses statistics and probability
and can be classified under OR.
Although M&S is well-established in scientific and techni-
cal intelligence, traditional IC capabilities, as found in general
military intelligence (GMI), have not advanced to include for-
mal modeling and simulation-based assessment, and the and
culture in fact resists any such advance.11 And unfortunately,
traditional DOD and Service M&S not only is hugely expensive;
it is highly rigid and extensively prescripted, making it inappro-
priate to the wide-ranging exploratory requirements of intelli-
gence discovery. Defense intelligence centers cannot simply
import high-end DOD tools and techniques. They need their
own intelligence-tailored quantitative analysis capability.

10
See, for instance, Rob Johnston, Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community:
An Ethnographic Study (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central
Intelligence Agency, 2005); and Jeffrey R. Cooper, Curing Analytic Pathologies: Path-
ways to Improved Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC Center for the Study of Intelli-
gence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2005).
11
For example, in a keyword search through any authoritative text on intelligence tra-
decraft, the seeker is unlikely to find results for scientific method, methodology, war-
gaming, modeling, simulation, M&S, stochastic, Bayes, or any variant of these or similar
terms.

61
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Getting There from Here
To develop this competence, the intelligence centers need
to find an easier way to explore M&S and define their internal
methodological and system requirements. Fortunately, an easy
way is readily available: wargaming. One highly effective but
inexpensive method for this is Naval War College-style manual
wargaming using paper components on tabletop gameboards
or even occasionally on the floor, as used to be done in McCa-
rty Little Hall.12 Commercial hobby wargamers have developed
thousands of historical wargames that can, at negligible cost in
money and time, be adapted to meet or support a wide range
of internal capability development requirements, including:
1. Modeling: basic principles of systems and warfare
modeling using aggregated systems characteristics
and performance (S&T/C&P) data and unit/force or-
der of battle and organizational data (OB/TO&E), all
integrated through algorithms (i.e., rules, matrices) de-
fining systems/unit behaviors and interactions;
2. CTSA: scenario- and simulation-based analytic proj-
ects provide a fertile environment for the deploy-
ment of today’s advanced techniques, with special
reference to the development of alternative red cell
hypotheses. They also afford the opportunity to in-
corporate traditional military command and staff
tools and techniques such as checklists and planning
matrices and organize the entire team-­collaborative
process and product within the format of a five-
paragraph operations order;
3. Simulation: experimental testing of multiple alterna-
tive hypotheses. Manual gaming can realistically test
only a very few hypotheses compared to computa-
tional Monte Carlo simulation; however, it engages the
12
The literature on U.S. Naval War College wargaming is extensive. See, for example,
Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990); and
Shawn Burns, ed., War Gamers’ Handbook: A Guide for Professional War Gamers (New-
port, RI: Naval War College, 2015).

62
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
entire analytic team in the action, providing a superb
environment for training, familiarization, brainstorm-
ing, and reconceptualization. Manual wargaming can
help shape scenarios for testing via computational
M&S, which in turn can test many different variables
and hypotheses through high-speed batch runs.

Commercial hobby and research board games are high-

ly adaptable and applicable to both intelligence training and
advanced analytic support requirements. Many games are his-
torical, but a good number are available on modern and even
future-hypothetical scenarios. Commercial computer games
offer potential opportunities as well, but by design they are
not typically manipulable or adaptable by users, limiting their
utility. Moreover, few are designed to be used on local area net-
works, and all would pose IT challenges for information assur-
ance and systems administration.
The SimBAT program encourages progress by small stages
from today’s world of individual analysts huddling alone at their
desks using largely intuitive reasoning, through team-based
brainstorming and CTSA, and then wargame-based simulation
experimentation, toward a full-scale computational analytic
capability. At this fully mature stage, team debating techniques
and flipchart matrices will be supplemented by computational
mathematical tools, while the board wargames will be com-
plemented and completed through the use of computational
warfare M&S.

SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING

SimBAT Insight, Knowledge, and Discovery
As part of low-risk development, SimBAT commenced with
training. The team conducts simulation-based training as a
graduate seminar with a lab. The pedagogical philosophy
emphasizes active, experiential, discovery learning, and the
basic format consists of courses combining instruction and
simulation. Extensive materials are developed for each phase.

63
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Seminars are conducted through elicitation—the Socratic (dia-
logue) method of guided inquiry rather than lecture. This takes
the form of facilitated brainstorming and structured analysis
using predefined templates.
The lab, of course, is the wargame. For the instructors, it
functions as a demonstration experiment; for the students,
however, it provides an opportunity for exploration and dis-
covery. The wargames follow the Naval War College (NWC)
format. The instructors become controllers (the white cell),
while the students divide into national teams (the blue and
red cells), both of which perceive only those parts of the bat-
tlespace where they have assets and communications. Using
the instructor-supplied background data and worksheets,
which have been studied and filled out in the pregame semi-
nar sessions, the teams formulate alternative hypotheses as to
enemy capabilities and intentions and then develop an own-
force operational plan (OPLAN) based on the assessed threat
and expected enemy action. They then formulate all of this in
a five-paragraph operations order (OPORD). Finally, they at-
tempt to execute their plan and thwart that of the enemy in
the wargame. The white cell subjects the teams to some of the
fog and friction of real operations to convey the challenges of
operational command and decision making under conditions
of uncertainty and at least modest stress.

Fog, Friction, and Surprise:

Preparing Analysts for Crisis and War
One of the implicit learning objectives intelligence education
should address is the very real threat of surprise. History is a lit-
any of contingency and unforeseen consequences. Intelligence
failure and policy/strategy misjudgment (based on misper-
ception and/or misconception and poor collection, analysis,
and decision) is a common occurrence, and catastrophic na-
tional security consequences occasionally follow. Recent re-
search demonstrates the extent of judgmental overconfidence

64
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
among analysts and decision-makers, and hence susceptibility
to deception and vulnerability to surprise.13
Traditional pedagogy contributes to this judgmental over-
confidence, leaving students and graduates cognitively dis-
armed for the challenges of intelligence and war. Deskbound
“chalk and talk” education and the social order of the school-
house and classroom inculcate in students a belief system built
around an image of people as truthful and cooperative and the
world as orderly, knowable, and controllable. Routine intelli-
gence deskwork and current reporting do little to counteract
this complacent worldview, and thus provide poor preparation
for analysts charged with anticipating and warning of emergent
threats posed by adversaries who can exploit deception, ma-
neuver, and unexpected American vulnerabilities.14
Simulation, by contrast, and especially historical simula-
tion, provides a superb training laboratory for experiencing the
unexpected. Player teams often form conflicting images and
definitions of the situation, especially under NWC conditions
in which the belligerent teams huddle in separate rooms. Ad-
versary gambits seek to exploit vulnerabilities. White cell injects
intelligence of mixed quality and timeliness (fog) and of com-
mand and control vicissitudes (friction) that disrupt the pat im-
age of a predictable world.
Historical simulation strengthens this teaching lesson.
Most education conveys a teleological sense of history as de-
termined and inevitable, reinforcing students’ sense of predict-
ability in world affairs. In fact, however, historical events often
turn on contingencies that could have gone the other way.
This is especially true in naval affairs. Confederate army general
Robert E. Lee might not have been able to win at Gettysburg,
nor Adolf Hitler in Russia, but the outcomes of many naval en-

13
See Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
14
See Johnston, Analytic Culture; and Cooper, Curing Analytic Pathologies.

65
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
gagements result from contingent and fleeting combinations
that could more easily have gone the other way. Consider, for
example, the stunning victory of the French admiral François-
Joseph-Paul de Grasse over British admiral Thomas Graves
at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781 that sealed the fate of
Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown and thereby ensured the in-
dependence of the American colonies, and the temporary
disarray in the Japanese carrier force at Midway that enabled
the Americans to inflict sudden, catastrophic damage. War-
gaming exposes participants to these unexpected outcomes.
Intelligence analysts, and especially naval intelligence analysts,
therefore need the kind of preparation for unexpected emer-
gencies and sharp shifts in fortune that only fog-and-friction-
riven simulation can provide.

Team Bonding, Morale, and Retention

This assault on junior analysts’ comfortable image of life and
the world, however, induces a certain level of stress. Simu-
lation confronts them simultaneously with uncertainty and
with perceived stakes for judgmental error. It does so in the
lab, however, not in the National Military Command Center,
Combatant Commands, Joint Task Force Headquarters, or
afloat staff, where the consequences are far more severe.
Student stress is real but manageable. And, as military train-
ers have known for centuries and modern pedagogical the-
ory has rediscovered, moderate stress can intensify learning
while forging interpersonal and institutional bonds—morale
and esprit de corps.
Simulation seminars are designed to contribute to this
organizational objective. The social dynamics of team-based
wargaming involve both collaboration and competition. Ego
and emotions engage. Participants long remember these expe-
riences. They feel challenged individually while they bond col-
lectively. Extensive exposure to simulation training across the
analytic workforce could build a culture of unity and cohesion

66
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
across the command, potentially contributing to improved re-
tention in the long term.

Analytic Standards and Methodological/

Pedagogical Model
Armed Services have known for centuries the pedagogical
power of combined schoolhouse and exercise-based training,
whether the exercises be tactical problems, NWC wargames,
command-post exercises, or full-scale field and fleet exercis-
es.15 The simulation seminar brings that pedagogical power
to ONI.
Being experiential education, however, the program
teaches cumulatively: it is as much enculturation and indoc-
trination as it is instruction. It both builds an analytic culture
(integrated set of beliefs, values, principles, and practices for
intelligence production), and socializes analysts into that cul-
ture—a process that can succeed only cumulatively. Each indi-
vidual course, typically two to five days in length, contributes
to a broader campaign to enhance the expertise of the analytic
workforce.
Each course provides great breadth of exposure to con-
cepts, principles, and practices. Each exposes the trainee
teams to the full range of command staff data analysis, assess-
ment, and decision making concerning the operational theater,
the enemy, and their country/force, involving both capabilities
and intentions and enemy course-of-action assessment. It is an
immersion and experiential overload that is challenging, even
stressful and perhaps somewhat frustrating (especially first-
time exposures for complete novices). What the trainees take
away is a highly memorable orientation toward the military
operational problem domain and the command staff solution
(intelligence, planning, and decision making).
Simulation participants typically remember the experi-

15
See, for instance, Perla, Art of Wargaming.

67
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
ence, especially when their role requires publicly visible lead-
ership or decision making that then is tested and succeeds or
fails. Though it all might seem chaotic while immersed, multi-
ple high-intensity exposures deepen the trainees’ understand-
ing of the fundamentals of warfare and intelligence, especially
for operating in the wartime arena.

Cognitive Diversity and Thinking/Learning Styles

Simulation and lab-based education in general help meet the
needs of diverse cognitive and learning styles across typical stu-
dent populations. Two schools contend in educational theory:
one argues that human cognitive development progresses up
universal developmental stages and the other contends that
humans vary by personality and cognitive profile. The stage
model is associated with Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose
schema and clinical studies track students (children, specifical-
ly, where most educational research naturally focuses) along
stages from physical and emotional development to cognitive
and intellectual.16
The adolescent and adult cognitive modes are “concrete
and formal operations.” Individuals in the concrete operational
stage reason rationally but narrowly, focusing closely on factual
empirical data and current events. The skills they lack are those
associated with full development into formal operations: the
ability and tendency to generalize and abstract from observed
data, seek and recognize universals, and theorize, exploiting
the power of counterfactual (hypothetical) reasoning. Formal
operators have well-developed pattern recognition skills, in-
cluding trend detection, and as such they can and do extrapo-
late, hypothesize, and predict.17
The human variability model is associated with personality

16
See, for instance, one treatment within a vast literature, by Rodger W. Bybee and Rob-
ert B. Sund, Piaget for Educators, 2d ed. (Columbus. OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing,
1972/1986).
17
Bybee and Sund, Piaget for Educators.

68
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
theory and cognitive psychology. It holds that humans differ
in their cognitive aptitudes as they progress developmentally,
and that these traits tend to persist throughout life.18
The two most well-known personality models are the
Myers-Briggs inventory and the academic Five-Factor Model
(FFM, a.k.a. Big Five Personality Traits). The Myers-Briggs Type In-
dicator’s (MBTI) power for understanding “knowledge workers”
lies in its focus on perceptual-cognitive traits, while the FFM is
more of a generic personality inventory. The MBTI distinguishes
16 personality types, each of which possesses particular per-
ceptual, cognitive, and practical strengths and weaknesses.19
The FFM is similar and, although currently less well-tailored
to support pedagogical design, is the subject of extensive re-
search. The MBTI differentiates personality types across four
binary character oppositions:
1. Extroverted (E) versus introverted (I) (self-­explanatory);
2. Intuitive (N) versus sensory (S) (formal versus con-
crete, á la Piaget above);
3. Thinking (T) versus feeling (F) (cognitive versus emo-
tional); and
4. Judging ( J ) versus perceiving (P) (convergent/conclu-
sive versus divergent/open).

Individuals vary also in their learning styles and modes

of processing information—note that learning is not just what
knowledge workers do in training; it is what they do for a living:
acquire and develop new knowledge, with intelligence analy-
sis and production being a form of learning. In his Experiential
Learning Theory (ELT), David A. Kolb has developed a model

18
For an overview, see Thomas J. Smith et al., Variability in Human Performance (Boca
Raton, FL: CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2015).
19
The Myers-Briggs website is a convenient source for an overview and to take the in-
ventory. Isabel Briggs Myers et al., MBTI Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of
the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, 3d ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press,
1998).

69
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
of learning styles highly consistent with Piaget and the MBTI,
which postulates the following orientations:20
1. Methods of grasping experience:
• Concrete experience;
• Abstract conceptualization;
2. Methods of transforming experience:
• Reflective observation;
• Active experimentation.

Combining Piaget and Kolb in alignment with principles

from analytic methodology suggests the relationship depicted
in the following matrix, producing four learning styles in two bi-
nary pairs: divergent versus convergent and assimilating versus
accommodating (table 3).21
Kolb’s resulting experiential learning theory (ELT) argues
that the optimal pedagogical method engages all four of these
cognitive modes.22
The concept of cognitive variability has been applied to
pedagogical theory in recent years, such as that by Howard
Gardner and Mel Levine. Their very similar schemata, multi-
ple intelligences (Gardner) and neurodevelopmental systems
(Levine), differentiate individual cognitive traits in ways that
appear highly applicable to professional education, especial-

20
David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Devel-
opment(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentiss-Hall, 1984), chap. 2.
21
Assimilation and accommodation are also Piagetian concepts. Assimilation refers to
the tendency to perceive incoming information as consistent with extant beliefs. Ac-
commodation refers to a tendency to change beliefs based on new data. See Bybee
and Sund, Piaget for Educators. This issue is critical for intelligence assessment and
is the core question in modern cognitive psychology, as distilled by Richards J. Heuer
Jr., Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelli-
gence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999). Heuer’s analysis of competing hypotheses
and related decision-theoretic tools and techniques are designed in great part to help
analysts choose between assimilation and accommodation.
22
Other learning style models exist as well. See Frank Romanelli, Eleanora Bird, and Mel-
ody Ryan, “Learning Styles: A Review of Theory, Application, and Best Practices,” Amer-
ican Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 73, no. 1 (2009): 9, https://doi.org/10.5688
/aj730109.

70
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Table 3. Learning styles framework for SimBAT
Kolb’s Concrete Abstract
learning styles experience conceptualization

Reflective observation Divergent Assimilation

Active experimentation Accommodation Convergent

Source: adapted from David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of
Learning and Development (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentiss-Hall, 1984); and Rodger W.
Bybee and Robert B. Sund, Piaget for Educators, 2d ed. (Columbus. OH: Charles E. Merrill
Publishing, 1972/1986).

Table 4. Multiple intelligences/neurodevelopmental systems

Levine’s neurodevelopmental systems

Attention Memory Language Motor Spatial Sequential Higher Social

control ordering ordering thinking thinking

Gardner’s multiple intelligences

--- --- Linguistic Bodily Spatial Musical Logic- Interper-

kinesthetic math sonal
Source: Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York:
Basic Books, 1983); and Mel Levine, A Mind at a Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

ly that of knowledge workers (table 4).23 They also incorporate

the noncognitive modes of experience and learning that often
form the implicit, latent, or subconscious but emotionally and
behaviorally important substratum that lays the foundations
for success in the explicit, manifest element, thus achieving the
instructional learning objectives.
Finally, individuals vary in their perceptual learning styles.

23
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic
Books, 1983); and Mel Levine, A Mind at a Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

71
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 5. Strengths of traditional DOD/IC schoolhouse education and training
compared with simulation-based training
DOD/IC curriculum: teaches the what
SimBAT: fosters discovery of the how and why
Knowledge, skills, and
abilities Facts, regional and functional

Educational
Functional facts
programs Regional facts (area
(disciplinary familiar- History
familiarization)
ization)

DOD/IC curriculum
√ √ √

SimBAT
√

Source: author’s assessment.

The oft-cited VARK schema delineates four preferences:24

1. Visual;
2. Auditory;
3. Reading/writing; and
4. Kinesthetic/tactile.

Broadly speaking, human learning, reasoning, and problem-

solving involve a range of different traits and aptitudes, some
more or less optimal for productive, insightful analytico-
synthetic knowledge acquisition and creation, but all being
present in greater or lesser proportion across the analytic work-
force (table 5). To summarize, analyst-learner aptitudes and
preferences range across the following dimensions:

24
See “VARK: A Guide to Learning Preferences,” VARK-Learn.com, accessed 24 January
2022.

72
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING

Methodology: command-staff process (intelligence and operations)

Conceptual Creative
Problem Team col-
and critical thinking Persuasive
Situation solving and laboration
thinking (imagi- argumenta-
assessment decision and problem
(analysis/ nation, tion
making solving
logic) synthesis)

√ √ √ √ √ √

1. Cognitive:
Abstract versus concrete;
Conceptual versus factual;
Theoretical versus experiential/experimental;
Intellectual versus emotional;
2. Sensory:
Visual, auditory, or tactile.

This variability demands what in modern business theo-

ry is known as mass customization, the ability to meet variable
demand with a single multidimensional family of products or
services.25 Simulation-based training meets this need by com-
bining four basic pedagogical modes:
25
See for instance B. Joseph Pine II, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business
Competition (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).

73
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
1. Classroom and study:
• Readings/study materials;
• Lecture/briefings;
2. Lab and exercises:
• Elicitation and structured brainstorming using
templates;
• Simulation gaming (lab experimentation).
This combination is designed to help diverse students
progress from concrete to formal operational skills and ap-
titudes, whatever their cognitive tastes and learning styles.
An implementation overview is provided below; individual
courses are detailed in their associated course guides and
syllabi. Table 5 compares the strengths of traditional school-
house education with multidimensional simulation-based
education.

Integration with Intelligence Analytic Career-Development

Reform based on the principles advocated above should
proceed in complementary interdependence with the ex-
isting program of analyst career development. Current train-
ing and development consist of day-to-day job experience
(reading and writing factual, peacetime intelligence reports),
the prescribed analytic progression along the agency/com-
munity curriculum, and the IC’s interagency Analysis 101 and
Intelligence Community Advanced Analysis Program (ICAAP)
curricula, as well as deception analysis, asymmetric warfare,
and other courses. Much of the associated instruction in
structured analytic techniques is generic, using examples in
political intelligence, law enforcement, the war on terrorism,
money laundering, noncombatant evacuation operations
(NEOs), human intelligence source evaluations, etc. Many ex-
ercises are lifted from critical thinking texts unrelated to mili-
tary problems. Military examples are relatively rare and naval
ones even rarer.
ONI-based maritime mission-tailored simulation instruc-
tion is designed both to prepare analysts to master the IC’s

74
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
CTSA curriculum, priming their cognitive readiness to extract
maximum value from the coursework, and to then apply CTSA
directly to ONI’s functional responsibilities in intelligence pro-
duction. Within the ONI in-house program, maritime and naval
examples are used primarily, both sea chases for operational
intelligence watch and civil maritime training, and wars, cam-
paigns and battles for general military intelligence (GMI) train-
ing. And again, the classic military command-and-staff CTSA
analysis and planning techniques are introduced.
By bridging the gap between the analyst’s career develop-
ment and ONI’s mission area, this in-house training program
provides maximal learning transfer in both directions between
the schoolhouse and the workstation.

Integration with the IC and ONI Analytic Standards

The command staff process enacted in simulation seminars
drills analyst trainees in the step-by-step implementation of the
checklists specified in IC analytic tradecraft.
At the same time, the Office of the Director of National In-
telligence (ODNI) has promulgated guidance on analytic trade-
craft.26 The simulation seminar program maps directly to these
standards and to the structured analytic techniques that im-
plement them, as shown in tables 6–9.
These tables demonstrate how the analytic quality stan-
dards promulgated in ICD 203 and ONI’s analytic tradecraft
instruction can be implemented through structured analytic
techniques and simulation-based training. In fact, full-scale
development of simulation courses should afford enough
scripted intelligence feed to support the incorporation of these
structured techniques directly into team decision making in
the simulations.

26
Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203, “Analytic Standards” (Washington, DC:
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 21 June 2007).

75
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 6. Intelligence Community Directive 203, “Analytic Standards”
1. Objectivity
2. Political independence
3. Timeliness
4. Based on all sources of intelligence
5. Proper standards of analytic tradecraft:
a. Properly describes quality and reliability of underlying sourc-
es;
b. Properly caveats and expresses uncertainties or confidence
in analytic judgments;
c. Properly distinguishes between underlying intelligence and
analysts’ assumptions and judgments;
d. Incorporates alternative analysis where appropriate;
e. Demonstrates relevance to U.S. national security;
f. Uses logical argumentation;
g. Exhibits consistency of analysis over time, or highlights
changes and explains rationale; and
h. Makes accurate judgments and assessments.
Source: adapted from Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203, “Analytic
Standards” (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
21 June 2007), 2–3.

Analytic Capabilities and Learning Objectives

Organizational-Developmental and Educational Purpose:
Strategic Learning Objectives
Beyond training analysts in individual skills, the simulation sem-
inar program is designed to foster a multiplier effect across the
organization as more students are run through multiple cours-
es. As such, it is intended to serve as a program of organiza-
tional learning for the purposes of organizational development
and business process reengineering in analytic methodology.
These organizational and individual developmental objec-
tives can be summarized as follows:
For the command:
• Provide organizational learning/development that fos-
ters methodological modernization, specifically in the
development and application of cognitive collabora-
tion and eventually computational collaboration.

76
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Table 7. Standard Intelligence Community Structured Analytic Techniques
Diagnostic techniques:
1. Key assumptions check
2. Quality-of-information check
3. Indicators of change
4. Deception check
5. Analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH)
Imagination techniques:
1. Brainstorming
2. Outside-in
3. Red team
4. Alternative futures (multiple scenarios)
Contrarian (reframing) techniques:
1. Devil’s advocacy
2. Team A/team B
3. High-impact/low-probability
4. What if
5. Quadrant crunching
Source: A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving
Intelligence Analysis, Tradecraft Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (Langley, VA: Central In-
telligence Agency, 2005).

For students:
• Inculcate student analysts in fundamental principles
of war, seapower, command decision making, and in-
telligence analysis, while instilling the associated cog-
nitive and behavioral skills and abilities;
• Build instruction around the fundamentals of naval
warfare, command and staff processes, warfighting
capabilities and intentions, and critical thinking and
structured analysis (CTSA); and
• Prepare analysts for CTSA coursework in intelligence
community schoolhouses, and provide naval war-
fighting exemplification and application of the stan-
dard curriculum of CTSA concepts and techniques.
For instructor/facilitators:
• Provide instructors/facilitators (analysts and manag-
ers) experience in the design, planning, coordination,

77
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 8. Mapping: Implementation of Intelligence Community Directive (ICD)
203, “Analytic Standards” via Structured Analytic Techniques
ICD 203, “Analytic Standards” Structured Analytic Techniques

1. Objectivity Contrarian techniques 1 and 2: devil’s advocacy

2. Political independence and team A/team B

3. Timeliness (not applicable: unlike interactive wargames,

scenario exercises will not exercise time-critical
intelligence cycling)
4. Exploitation of all sources of Imagination technique 1: brainstorming
intelligence

5. Proper standards of analyt- Promoted by:

ic tradecraft:

5.1. Properly describe quality Diagnostic techniques 2 and 3: quality-of-

and reliability of underlying information check and deception check
sources
Contrarian technique 1: devil’s advocacy
5.2. Properly caveat and express Diagnostic techniques 1 and 3: key assumptions
uncertainties or confidence in check and deception check
analytic judgments
Contrarian technique 1: devil’s advocacy
5.3. Properly distinguish be- Diagnostic techniques 1, 2, and 3: key assump-
tween underlying intelligence tions check, quality-of-information check,
and analysts’ assumptions and and deception check
judgments
Contrarian technique 1: devil’s advocacy

5.4. Incorporate alternative Diagnostic techniques 1–5: key assumptions

analysis where appropriate check, quality-of-information check, indica-
tors of change, deception check, analysis of
competing hypotheses (ACH)

Contrarian techniques 1–5: devil’s advocacy,

team A/team B, high-impact/low-probability,
what if, and quadrant crunching

Imagination techniques 1–4: brainstorming,

outside-in, red team, alternative futures
5.5. Demonstrate relevance to (Exercises will train analysts to understand war-
U.S. national security fare and military threats and perform analytic
work that supports U.S. national security.)

78
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Table 8. Mapping: Implementation of Intelligence Community Directive (ICD)
203, “Analytic Standards” via Structured Analytic Techniques (continued)
ICD 203, “Analytic Standards” Structured Analytic Techniques

5.6. Use logical argumentation ODNI-endorsed technique: argument map-

ping (Facilitated collaboration and structured
analysis in general will tend to promote logical
reasoning and expose bias/fallacies.)
5.7. Exhibit consistency of Diagnostic techniques 1–5: key assumptions
analysis over time or highlight check, quality-of-information check, indica-
changes and explain rationale tors of change, deception check, and ACH

5.8. Make accurate judgments (Facilitated collaboration and structured analysis

and assessments in general will tend to promote valid, accurate
judgment and assessment.)

Source: adapted from Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203, “Analytic

Standards” (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
21 June 2007); and A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for
Improving Intelligence Analysis, Tradecraft Review vol. 2, no. 2 (Langley, VA:
Central Intelligence Agency, 2005).

and implementation of projects, with special refer-

ence to training courses and analytic-support projects
that result in intelligence discovery, new findings, and
new production.

SimBAT Organizational and Individual Learning Program:

Specific Learning Objectives
Since warfare simulation exposes analysts/students to the full
range of operational and planning variables, the range of sup-
ported learning objectives is vast. Table 9 (and the following
chapter addendum) lists these with text boxes on the right that
specify seminar and/or simulation activities that fulfill the ob-
jectives.
At the same time, participating in the development and ex-
ecution of simulation seminars offers career-enhancing train-
ing benefits to participating instructor/facilitators (table 10).

79
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 9. Simulation-based analysis and training learning objectives

I. Substantive principles and practices/KSAs

I.1. Strategy, doctrine, capabilities, and operations
I.1.1. Strategic requirements of different belligerent powers/postures;
I.1.2. Principles of war
I.1.3. Naval roles and missions
I.1.4. Principles, roles, and missions associated with different strategic
postures
I.1.5. Operational capabilities required for different principles, roles,
and missions
I.1.6. Force/units types associated with different capabilities
I.1.7. Basic principles of operational doctrine and tactics
I.2. Systems, tactics, and operations
I.2.1. Interpreting technical data: characteristics, performance, and
tactical capabilities
I.2.2. Tactical doctrine
I.2.3. Operational implications of tactical capabilities
I.2.4. Operational doctrine
II. Methodological principles and practices
II.1. Command and staff: intelligence, decision making, and planning
II.1.1. Intelligence operations
II.1.1.1. Threat of surprise
II.1.1.2. Intentions, alternative hypotheses/courses of action (COAs)
II.1.1.3. Capabilities, alternative hypotheses
II.1.1.4. Collection: I&W, essential elements of information (EEIs), and
collection planning
II.1.1.5. Assessment: threats/opportunities; CTSA (e.g., ACH)
II.1.2. Command: operational decision and planning
II.1.2.1. Operational planning, alternative options/COAs: principles of
war; roles/missions; phasing; plotting
II.1.2.2. Force organization, orders of battle and tables of organiza-
tion and equipment (OB/TO&E)

80
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Table 9. Simulation-based analysis and training learning objectives
(continued)
II.1.2.3. Command, control, and communications
II.1.2.4. Logistics and supply
II.1.2.5. Operations order (5-paragraph OPORD)
II.1.3. Command: execution and adaptation
II.1.2.1. Command, control, communications, computers and intelli-
gence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) cycle (i.e., the
observation, orientation, decision, and action [OODA] loop)
II.1.2.2. Contingency response (recover, adapt, exploit)
II.2. Cognitive reasoning (critico-creative thinking)
II.2.1. Situation, threat, and net assessment (Critical Thinking and
Structured Analysis)
II.2.1.1. Inductive synthesis: data collation; data comparison/evalua-
tion; CTSA: matrices, timelines, network diagrams; generation,
multiple alternative hypotheses.
II.2.1.2. Deductive analysis
• Deduction of hypotheses probable or necessary correlates:
Prerequisites; Implications; diagnostic observables (indica-
tors)
• CTSA: key assumptions checks (checklists, matrices), analy-
sis of competing hypotheses (ACH), etc.
II.2.1.3. Integrative synthesis
• Elimination of least plausible hypotheses
• Elaboration of most plausible
• Comprehensive scenario development
II.2.2. Decision making/planning
II.2.2.1. Alternative options
• Ends versus means
• Threat versus opportunity
II.2.2.2. Selection of best
• Multiple competing objectives
• Expected utility/optimization
• Decision

81
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 9. Simulation-based analysis and training learning objectives
(continued)
• Decision
II.2.2.1. Cognitive processes
• Judgment/decision making under uncertainty
• Cognitive virtues
• Incisiveness; prudence; boldness; imagination; creativity;
decisiveness
II.2.3. Staff process
II.2.3.1. Leadership
• Authority/influence
• Decision making
II.2.3.2. Teamwork
• Collaboration
• Team self-organization
II.2.3.3. Management
• Time management
• Stress management
• Execution
II.3. Scientific methodology (quantitative and computational
analysis)
II.3.1. Modeling
• Structural architectures: objects, properties, networks
(quantification of military capabilities);
• Functional processes: relationships, causal algorithms,
probability;
II.3.2. Simulation
• Experimental design: hypothesis formulation, scenarios,
variables, excursions;
• Hypothesis-testing: Monte Carlo randomization, sensitivity
analysis, analysis of experimental results.
Source: author’s pedagogical design for SimBAT.

82
 SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS AND TRAINING
Table 10. Learning objectives for instructor/facilitators
II. Leadership and management
III.1. Preparation and planning
III.1.1. Course design
III.1.1.1. Learning objectives
III.1.1.2. Syllabus
III.1.1.3. Agenda
III.1.1.4. Selection of conflict scenario for case study
III.1.1.5. Selection of simulation game (e.g., commercial hobby
wargame)
III.1.1.6. Design of scenario exercise when COTS product unavailable
III.1.2. Instructional materials
III.1.2.1. Design adaptation of wargame(s)
III.1.2.2. Graphics/photographic reproduction of materials (if needed)
III.1.2.3. Development of templates (tables, charts, and checklists for
facilitation/structured analysis)
III.1.2.4. Preparation of additional background materials (readings
and reference data, evaluation forms)
III.1.3. Command participation
III.1.3.1. Eliciting support from ONI managers
III.1.3.2. Eliciting participation by ONI analysts/students
III.2. Implementation
III.2.1. Event management
III.2.1.1. Leadership of white cell
III.2.1.2. Leadership of students
III.2.1.3. Time management
III.2.1.4. Maintenance of the objective(s)
III.2.1.5. Maintenance of morale
III.2.2. Instruction
III.2.2.1. Facilitation/elicitation (Socratic method)
III.2.2.2. Student participation
III.2.2.3. Balance (objectives versus time)

83
 TIMOTHY J. SMITH
Table 10. Learning objectives for instructor/facilitators (continued)

I. Lessons, reports, and program development

IV.1. Evaluation, lessons, and action
IV.1.1. Evaluations
IV.1.1.1. Design of the student course evaluation form (mapped to
learning objectives)
IV.1.1.2. Distribution
IV.1.1.3. Agenda
IV.1.1.4. Elicitation of participant submission of course evaluations
IV.1.1.5. Collation of findings
IV.1.2. Program improvement
IV.1.2.1. Lessons learned
IV.1.2.2. Design of program improvements
IV.1.2.3. Implementation
IV.2. Reports to management
IV.2.1. Reports
IV.2.1.1. Drafting of report
IV.2.1.2. Development of brief
IV.2.2. Presentation
IV.2.2.1. Dissemination of report
IV.2.2.2. Presentation of brief

Source: author’s pedagogical design for SimBAT.

84
 Chapter Three Addendum

SimBAT Introductory Course

Syllabus and Materials

SimBAT courses provide command and staff in miniature. They

consist of a variable number of students whom the instructor
leads through a standard staff planning session in which the
students perform intelligence preparation of the battlespace
(IPB) and implement the military decision-making process
(MDMP). Joint Chiefs of Staff publications provide doctrinal
guidance.1
The format and layout follow the basic concept of U.S. Na-
val War College (USNWC) wargaming. We divide the students
into blue and red cells, with the instructor, game master, and
event adjudicator forming the white cell (in the introductory
course, this is a cell of one). The instructor or an expert col-
league briefs on the subject matter, event, or era under exam-
ination and then the instructor facilitates team brainstorming
as they lead the blue and red cells through a series of IPB/
MDMP exercises in which the teams reason through and fill out
structured analytic templates (SATs). These typically are matri-
ces, although white boards are available for flow-diagramming
during course-of-action (COA) analysis.
This appendix provides an annotated guide to this intro-
ductory course.

1
Joint Planning, Joint Publication (JP) 5-0 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020);
Joint Intelligence, JP 2-0 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2013); and Joint Opera-
tions, JP 3-0 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2018).

85
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM

Simulation-Based Analysis and Training Course

Introduction to Global Strategy
2-Day Course
Intelligence analysis, strategic planning and
execution in a simulated conflict:
Global Strategy in World War II

Format:
• Collaborative student teams (red cell/blue cell) sup-
ported by instructor team (white cell);
• Briefing on intelligence preparation of the battlespace
(IPB) and the military decision-making process
(MDMP);
• Team exercise: intelligence and ops planning: stra-
tegic analysis, alternative hypotheses and predictive
forecasting in support of force-structure and cam-
paign planning, providing insight into adversary deci-
sion-makers and the U.S. national-level customer;
• Simulation exercise: student teams test their intelli-
gence hypotheses and execute their ops plans;
• Critical Thinking and Structured Analysis (CTSA):
students will be trained in structured analysis us-
ing specifically military analytic templates (matrices,
checklists, plotting charts);
• Learning objectives, syllabus, and agenda detailed
below.

86
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL STRATEGY
Knowledge areas This course will introduce entry-level analysts to
basic concepts, principles, and practices in the
following analytic skills and disciplines
I. Principles
1. National-level strat- Students will be introduced to basic concepts of
egy military strategy and planning. Course will exam-
ine the European theater of operations in World
War II.
2. Roles and missions: Students will compare the relative strengths and
sea, air, land weaknesses of land, sea, and air forces with re-
gard to offense, defense, surprise, mass, and sta-
bility as they plan and employ their forces within
the simulation.
II. Military forces and operations
1. Capabilities and op- Students will be introduced to the comparative
erations: sea, air, land evaluation (costs/benefits) of force types and ca-
pabilities as they build and employ theater-level
forces.
2. Modeling and quan- Students will explore the simple warfare model
titative evaluation embedded in this simulation as they evaluate
the costs versus capabilities of military forces in
alternative roles/missions.
III. Methodology for intelligence and military decision making
1. Team collaboration Students will utilize team analysis processes and
collaborative problem-solving.
2. Situation assessment Students will be introduced to the staff planning/
and planning military decision-making process (MDMP), in-
cluding IPB and threat and net assessment.
• CTSA: Critical Think- Students will learn to use military CTSA tools (IPB/
ing/Structured Anal- MDMP decision aids) in analysis and planning.
ysis
• Intelligence prepa- Students will be introduced to basic concepts,
ration of the bat- principles, and practices of estimative strategic
tlespace (IPB) projection.

87
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM

• Alternative intelli- Students will learn how to generate, describe,

gence hypotheses and plot alternative enemy COAs.
3. Threat/net assess- Students will learn how to compare and assess
ment the relative strengths and weaknesses of con-
tending forces and assess the overall correlation
of forces relative to strategic and operational
mission requirements.
4. Campaign planning The students will learn how to develop COAs
and a phased campaign plan based on strategic
requirements, their net assessment, and the un-
folding strategic situation.
5. Force structure plan- Students will design and build forces optimized
ning for the strategic objectives and plans they devise.

COURSE SYLLABUS:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES AND TRAINING ACTIVITIES
Day one Syllabus Learning objectives
Morning 0800–0830: Course orien- (Foundation for all LOs)
(0800–1130) tation
0840–0940: Staff exercise: I. Principles:
· Intelligence analysis and 1. National strategy;
assessment 2. Roles and missions,
· Strategic situation and net sea, air, land;
assessment II. Military forces and op-
erations:
0950–1130: Staff exercise: 1.Capabilities and op-
Strategic campaign and erations: sea, air, land;
force structure planning III. Intelligence analysis/
military decision making:
1. Team collaboration,
2. Situation assessment
and planning.
3. Net assessment,
4. Campaign planning,
5. Force structure plan-
ning.

88
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE

Afternoon Theater strategic simula- I. Principles:

(1200–1600) tion wargame: European 1. National strategy;
theater of operations, 2. Roles and missions,
1941–45 sea, air, land;
II. Military forces and op-
erations:
1. Capabilities and op-
erations: sea, air, land;
III. Intelligence analysis/
military decision making:
1. Team collaboration,
2. Situation assessment
and planning.
3. Net assessment,
4. Campaign planning,
5. Force structure plan-
ning.
Day Two Syllabus Learning objectives
Morning Theater strategic simula- (as above)
(0800–1230) tion wargame: European
theater of operations,
1941–45
Afternoon After action review (facili- AAR will consummate all
(1330–1530) tated team discussion) learning objectives.

89
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM

Cornerstone Module
Simulation-Based Analysis and Training
(SimBAT) Course:
Introduction to Global Strategy
Course Guide

ORDER-OF-BATTLE INTELLIGENCE TABLE

German Japan Soviet Great United
Union Britain States
Army
Armor
Infantry
Artillery
Air Force
Bombers
Fighters
(TACAir)
Navy
Aircraft
carriers
Carrier air
Battleships
Cruisers
Destroyers
Submarines
Transports

90
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE
STRATEGIC PLANNING CHECKLIST

National Power of the Belligerents (starting strengths):

What country has the strongest army? ________________________
What country has the strongest air force? _____________________
What country has the strongest navy?_______________________
What country is militarily the strongest? ______________________
What countries have the largest economies?_______________
Do the Axis or the Allies have greater military power? ________
Do the Axis or the Allies have greater economic power? _____

Strategic Implications:
What is the Axis’s greatest strategic advantage? _____________
_______________________________________________________________________
What is the Axis’s greatest strategic disadvantage? _________
_______________________________________________________________________
How can the Axis employ their advantages and negate
those of the Allies? ______________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
What is the Allies’ greatest strategic advantage? ___________
_______________________________________________________________________
What is the Allies’ greatest strategic disadvantage? _________
_______________________________________________________________________
How can the Allies employ their advantages and negate
those of the Axis? ________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________

91
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM
AXIS AND ALLIES 1940
UNIT COSTS AND CAPABILITIES TABLE (V4)
Weapons systems costs Cost Movement Combat
and capabilities
Offense Defense
Ground Infantry 3 1 1(2) CB
2
Mechanized 4 2 1(2) CB,B
2
infantry
Artillery 4 1 2CC 2
Armor 6 2 3 CC
3
Naval Aircraft 16 3+1 N
0 2
carriers
Battleships 20 3+1N 4 4
Cruisers 12 3+1 N
3 3
Destroyers 8 3+1 N
2CC
2
Submarines 6 2 2 S
1
Transports 7 2 0 S
0
Air* Strategic 12 71/102/145 4CB,S 1
bombers
Tactical 11 6 3CB 3
bombers
Fighters 10 53/64/105 3CB 4
Strategic AAA 6 1 0 1
Major fac- 30 -- -- (1)AA
tory
Minor fac- 12 -- -- (1)AA
tory
Naval base 15 -- -- (1)AA
Airbase 10 -- -- (1)AA
Notes:
CC: combined-arms contributor; see combined-arms table.
CB: combined-arms beneficiary; see combined-arms table.
B: can blitz with armor.
AA: organic AAA.

92
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE
N: naval maneuver: three zones in combat move plus one in admin move,
even for units that already moved/fought.
S: special capabilities: sub surprise attack/evasion; transports and amphib-
ious lift/assault; strategic bombing (check A&A rules).

Air movement and combat: see aviation at sea movement-point modifica-

tions, below.
1. Junkers Ju-88s (note: Germans get two free airbases at the outset).
2. Japanese, RAF, and USAAF bombers.
3. European fighters (non-Japanese, non-U.S.).
4. U.S. fighters (e.g., Lockheed P-38 Lightnings/Republic P-47 Thunder-
bolts, Grumman F6F Hellcats) other than the North American P-51 Mus-
tang.
5. Extended-range fighters and strategic bombers: Mitsubishi A6M Zeros,
P-51s, and Boeing B-29 Superfortresses (late war: turn six or so). (Note:
need to adapt U.S. miniatures; e.g., using silver spray paint).

Naval Forces: Rules Modifications

· As noted above, all surface ships can move in the noncombat move
phase even after having conducted combat (e.g., two-three sea zones
out [with/without major base], then two back [or farther on]). This
makes them more like aircraft.
· Submarine interdiction: subs can attack, but not impede the further
movement of passing enemy naval units.
· Submarine evasion: subs can be attacked only by DDs, and may, after
the first die roll(s) by the attacking DD(s), declare evasion and, forfeiting
the option to return fire, break off contact. This applies when subs are
attacked; when subs are attacking, they use the normal A&A sub rules.
· Heavy unit damage: CVs/BBs that take damage suffer reduced combat
capabilities: BBs fire at two vice four, and CVs must suspend flight oper-
ations (air wing recovers aboard but cannot launch again).

Aviation at Sea: Rules Modifications

· Sea zones cost two MPs for aircraft to enter;
· Land-based aircraft pay two to enter sea zones adjacent to or surround-
ing their point of origin and one to enter a destination landmass from a
sea zone;
· Carrier-based aircraft do not/not pay an additional cost to fly in their sea
zone of origin.
· Carrier airstrike surprise: (1) defending land-based fighters cannot
scramble against attacking carrier-based aircraft, (2) defending land-
based AAA cannot fire against attacking carrier aircraft, and (3) attacking

93
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM
carrier fighters get one round of combat against land targets without
incurring enemy counteraction.
· RAF/USAAF strategic bombers: no capability against ships.
· German/Japanese strategic bombers: German bombers: two vs. ships;
Japanese: four vs. ships (torpedoes).

Additional Modifications:
· Strategic bombers vs. land/naval forces: can undertake a single unop-
posed attack (like NGFS and undetected sub attacks). In any continued
rounds, ground forces/ships can shoot back.
· German/Japanese strategic bombers: roll on two vice four column
when conducting strategic bombing.
· Chinese reactive mobilization: during the turn after any Japanese attack,
Chinese infantry cost one IPC each. Must be brought on one per prov-
ince. Any additional units must be distributed no more than one per
province (maximum total: two new per province per turn).
· Lend-lease (L/L): Anglo-Americans can provide financial support to
each other and/or the Russians. Maximum amount: approximately 15
percent of current cash holdings.
· Transaction costs: U.S. L/L to UK: three of every four IPCs provided arrive
in UK. UK/U.S. L/L to USSR: two of every three IPCs arrive. (Costs apply
only when convoy rule not used.)

AXIS AND ALLIES GLOBAL

ROLES, MISSIONS, STRATEGY, AND FORCE STRUCTURE
Roles and missions of military force types
Continental Maritime
Offensive
Defensive
Based on your assessment in your strategic planning checklist, number each
cell above from one to four (ordinal) to rank the importance of each role/
mission in your country’s threat environment and optimal strategy.

94
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE

Weapons systems Continental Maritime Aerial

role/mission
capabilities
Offense Defense Offense Defense Offense Defense
Ground Infantry
Mechanized
Infantry
Artillery
Armor
Naval Aircraft
Carriers
Battleships
Cruisers
Destroyers
Submarines
Transports
Air* Strategic
bombers
Light bomb-
ers
Fighters
The AA40 unit costs and capabilities table quantifies the mission capabilities
of the various weapons system types. Here the reader will infer from that data
the higher order role capability the weapon type affords. Procedure: based
on the unit-type offensive and defensive strengths and mobility specified in
the AA40 unit costs and capabilities table, number each cell above from 1
to 3 (cardinal) to rate the capabilities of each weapons system type for the
performance of the six distinct roles/missions.

Capability levels: 3 = high; 2 = medium; 1 = low.

Note that multiple weapons types can warrant similar ratings.

95
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM
INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE:
GERMAN CAPABILITIES AND INTENTIONS

PROBABLE OBJECTIVES:
Retain: Take:

ESTIMATE OF GERMAN INTENTIONS:

German course of action 1 (most dangerous): ____________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
German course of action 2 (most likely): __________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

I&W INDICATORS:
COA 1:

COA 2:

96
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE
NATIONAL STRATEGIC PLAN
OBJECTIVES:
Retain: Take:

STRATEGIC PLAN OF OPERATIONS:

Grand strategy: ________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Offensive or defensive? _______________________________________________
Phasing of offensive versus defensive ops: ________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Continental strategy: offensive or defensive? ______________________
Phasing of offensive versus defensive ops: _________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Maritime strategy: offensive or defensive? __________________________
Phasing of offensive versus defensive ops: ________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

DIPLOMACY:
Seek support (from whom, in the form of what, to accomplish
what?): __________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Lend support (to whom, in the form of what, to accomplish
what?): __________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

97
 CHAPTER THREE ADDENDUM
MILITARY OPERATIONS/PLAN OF CAMPAIGN:
Phase I: (attack/defend, where, against whom, to accomplish
what?): __________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Phase II: (attack/defend, where, against whom, to accomplish
what?):___________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Phase III: (attack/defend, where, against whom, to accomplish
what?):___________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Phase IV: (attack/defend, where, against whom, to accomplish
what?):___________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

STRATEGIC MILITARY FORCE

STRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS:
Continental/Army: priority: ____________________________________________
Roles (offensive/defensive): _________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Missions: _______________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Maritime/Navy: priority: ________________________________________________
Roles (offensive/defensive): __________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Missions: _________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

98
 SIMBAT INTRODUCTORY COURSE
Air/Air Force: priority: __________________________________________________
Roles (offensive/defensive): __________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Missions: ________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

AFTER ACTION REVIEW:

Report on the Conduct of the War
· Your prewar estimate of enemy capabilities and intentions:
- Europe-Africa/Atlantic
- Asia/Pacific
· Your strategic war plan
· Your force structure design and build plan
· Your conduct of operations:
- Successes
- Failures
· Unexpected turns of events:
- What/when/where
- How/why
· Additional thoughts

99
 Chapter Four

Building Wargame Designers

and On-the-Job Training
Major Paul M. Kearney

INTRODUCTION
Wargaming comes from a well-established pedigree. Wheth-
er tied to the genesis of modern wargaming and Kriegsspiel
or tied to ancient wargames like Chinese Wei-Hai, wargames
have always had the military profession at their forefront.1 Un-
fortunately, wargaming within the military profession suffers
from a severe talent problem. Wargaming education within the
Services is rare, compartmentalized, and insufficient. To over-
come these challenges, organizations who wish to use war-
gaming methods effectively have sought to train wargamers in
an on-the-job fashion, relying on a guild-like apprentice-master
structure.2 While wargames have become accepted as invalu-
able tools for military analysis and planning, wargame design
still holds the stigma of grade-school geekery, and only those
professionals with a hobby gaming background tend to break
into the ranks of professional wargamers. Without significant
investments, including new training and education courses, re-
peated engagements, and senior leader buy-in, the on-the-job
nature of wargame design training is not likely to change.
Training new wargamers and wargame designers is not
a trivial task. This chapter looks to establish and underscore
1
Peter P. Perla, “Now Hear This—Improving Wargaming Is Worthwhile—and Smart,” U.S.
Naval Institute Proceedings 142, no. 1 (January 2016).
2
Sawyer Judge, “The Wargaming Guild: An Art or Science?” (presentation, Connections
2021, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 21–25 June 2021).

100
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
best practices in developing novice wargamers and building
a cadre of skilled wargame designers by using a literature re-
view of adult education research, best practices from wargame
designer training programs, and the author’s first-hand experi-
ence with on-the-job wargame designer training. An optimized
pipeline for wargaming education is important to meet the
growing demand for wargames and ensure that uniformed
noncommissioned and commissioned officers, whose tenure
in wargaming positions is often short, receive the appropriate
development and ensure useful game design.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WARGAMERS GONE?

Interest in wargaming within the Department of Defense (DOD)
has never been higher. With the 2015 establishment of the
$10-million-a-year Wargaming Incentive Fund, headquarters of
every type have looked to conduct wargames.3 Unfortunate-
ly, the resident expertise in wargaming is extremely limited in
most units.4 Except for a small cadre of wargame designers that
are clustered in war colleges, federally funded research and de-
velopment centers (FFRDCs), or analytical centers, and within
those organizations, experienced wargame designers are few
and far between.
A lack of experienced wargame designers leads to two
obvious problems. First, these individuals only have so much
throughput. The wargaming handbook developed at the Cen-
ter for Army Analysis estimates that a typical strategic war-
game takes on the order of 13 weeks to design and execute.5
Overloading experienced designers with additional products

3
For more on the genesis of this initiative, see Robert O. Work Memorandum, “Warga-
ming and Innovation,” 9 February 2015.
4
Yuna Huh Wong and Garrett Heath, “Is the Department of Defense Making Enough
Progress in Wargaming?,” War on the Rocks, 17 February 2021.
5
Paul M Kearney, “Analytical Wargaming at the Center for Army Analysis” (presentation,
Connections 2021, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 21–25 June 2021).

101
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
leads to suboptimal wargames and potentially false learning.6
Second, with experienced wargamers unavailable, wargames
may turn into a BOPSAT (a bunch of people sitting around
talking).7 Or worse, they will have enough of the tactile features
of a wargame to fool participants, but they will be bad designs.
Succinctly put, “wargames are only as valuable as the design-
ers who create them.”8 In short order, bad games will dampen
interest in wargaming as a field.9
There is currently no pipeline to train wargamers. Instead,
wargaming talent within the Department of Defense relies on
self-motivated hobbyists who find their way into wargaming
positions as civilians (general schedule or contracted warga-
mers) or by vagaries of the military human resource processes.
Once in their positions, these hobbyists “turn pro” through on-
the-job training, merging their personal interests with a deep-
er understanding of military activities and benefiting from the
mentorship of more senior wargamers.10 Unfortunately, this
makes the talent pipeline “informal, difficult to access, and
produces games of uneven quality,” according to Dr. Elizabeth
Bartels, a wargamer at Rand.11 As a result, the most respected
wargamers in the field today are products of this informal, on-
the-job system.12
These experienced wargamers are nearly all civilians. While
many have served in uniform at one time, there are few, if any,

6
False learning refers to the phenomenon wherein incorrect assumptions, biased ad-
judication rules, or other wargame factors lead to insights that are incorrect. See Wil-
liam F. Owen, “What’s Wrong with Professional Wargaming?,” PAXSims, 26 April 2020.
7
Perla, “Now Hear This.”
8
Sebastian Bae, “Just Let Them Compete: Raising the Next Generation of Wargamer,”
War on the Rocks, 9 October 2018.
9
Stacie L. Pettyjohn and David A. Shlapak, “Gaming the System: Obstacles to Reinvigo-
rating Defense Wargaming,” War on the Rocks, 18 February 2018.
10
Mark Wallace, “Wargaming Needs New Recruits to Save Lives,” How We Get to Next,
25 November 2016.
11
Elizabeth Bartels, “Building a Pipeline of Wargaming Talent; A Two-Track Solution,” War
on the Rocks, 14 November 2018, 1.
12
John Curry, ed., Peter Perla’s the Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hob-
byists (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 275.

102
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
truly experienced wargame designers currently serving in the
military. According to a Military Operations Research Society
(MORS), Wargaming Community of Practice survey, most de-
signers did not consider themselves master-level wargamers
until they had at least 10 years of professional experience lead-
ing wargaming efforts.13 Since Service wargaming efforts gen-
erally take place at staff schools, war colleges, and dedicated
centers, wargaming experience for an officer does not begin
professionally until around their 10th year of service.14 In the un-
likely event that an officer is placed in a wargaming billet from
first exposure to wargaming at a staff school like the U.S. Army’s
Command and General Staff College to an officer’s eligibility for
retirement, this officer would only develop mastery around the
time they would exit military service.
The broad consensus of the wargaming community is that
this organic pipeline is not sufficient to support the educational
and analytical needs of the Joint Force.15 This chapter will look
at the two dominant types of formalized wargaming education,
historical and practicum approaches, and the broad literature
on adult education to see how the organic pipeline can be im-
proved to shorten the time requirement between novice and
skilled wargame designers. Lastly, this chapter will close with
recommendations for best practices for any staff headquarters
with a wargaming mandate.

13
Elizabeth Bartels, “Insights from a Survey of the Wargaming Community” (brief, MORS
Community of Practice, Santa Monica, CA, 7 September 2017).
14
Sebastian J. Bae and Paul M. Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical Edge,”
Rand (blog), 8 March 2021.
15
Sebastian Bae, “Just Let Them Compete”; Bartels, “Building a Pipeline of Wargaming
Talent”; Elizabeth M. Bartels, Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analy-
sis: Towards a Social Scientific Approach (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2020), https://doi
.org/10.7249/RGSD437; Owen, “What’s Wrong with Professional Wargaming?”; Perla,
“Now Hear This”; Wong and Heath, “Is the Department of Defense Making Enough
Progress in Wargaming?”; Wallace, “Wargaming Needs New Recruits to Save Lives”; Bar-
tels, “Insights from a Survey of the Wargaming Community”; and Curry, Peter Perla’s the
Art of Wargaming, 275.

103
 PAUL M. KEARNEY

ADULT EDUCATION AND WARGAMING

Wargaming education is adult education. Teaching complex
skills like wargame design to adult learners requires an under-
standing of its unique conditions. This section will look at mod-
els of adult learning and discuss barriers to adult learning that
are important to consider for wargaming education.
Adult learning is a broad academic field. The principles in
this field are varied and often contradictory.16 On the whole,
the literature suggests that adult learners have a few common
traits. Adults learn best when the information or skill they are
trying to learn is salient, has an immediacy to their professional
lives, and is experiential.17 One important theory of “functional
adult learning” first proposed by Graham Gibbs recommends
that adult learning ought to be experience-centered and that
experience must be meaningful to the learner.18 Additionally,
adults are often more self-directed than their youthful counter-
parts. This means that adult learners are often more successful
at learning skills that they have chosen to learn and are motivat-
ed to see through.
The most widely accepted model for experiential learning
is the David A. Kolb learning model (figure 6).19 While some-
times criticized for being a simplistic, four-step model to de-
scribe complex learning, its simplicity makes it an adaptable
template for describing experiential learning. It is especially
useful for adult learning because the model depicts an iterative
cycle rather than the Paulo Freire “banking model of learning.”20

16
For an outline of several adult learning principles, see Stephen D. Brookfield, Under-
standing and Facilitating Adult Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis of Principles and
Effective Practices (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1986), 31–33.
17
Brookfield, Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning, 25–32.
18
Graham Gibbs, Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods (Lon-
don: Further Education Unit, 1988).
19
David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Devel-
opment, 2d ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2015).
20
Gabrielle Micheletti, “Re-Envisioning Paulo Freire’s ‘Banking Concept of Education’,”
Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 2, no. 2 (2010).

104
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
Figure 6. Kolb learning model

 
 
    
    

 
 
   
   

Source: David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of

Learning and Development, 2d ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2015),
adapted by MCUP.

The banking model of learning imagines that a learned teach-

er unidirectionally transmits information to a student. Adult
learning is less about received wisdom than it is about acquired
understanding. This is particularly true of learning complex or
art-based skills.
The Kolb learning model stresses active participation in
learning by the student. In addition to experiencing something
new, students must critically examine their new capabilities,
conceptualize the important insights, and actively experiment

105
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
with those insights. This experimentation may result in a new
experience, restarting the cycle. This learning model will be fa-
miliar to most wargamers because it is this same sort of learn-
ing that educational wargames try to elicit.21
There are significant obstacles to adult learning, however.
They include indecisiveness or hesitation and barriers to break
through or professional impact. Indecisiveness or hesitation
serves as a mental block to adult learning. Adult learners are
often more successful at skill acquisition and complex skill
learning than children because they have greater autonomy
over what they want to learn.22 While it may take an incredibly
engaging teacher to get an engineering major excited about
the required English literature course, adult learners are typi-
cally self-motivated or incentivized. Adult learners are either
studying topics they are interested in personally or, in a work
setting, only learning what is necessary for their chosen profes-
sion, and are therefore incentivized by career concerns.23 But
indecisiveness still affects learners in this setting. Novice war-
gamers might not think themselves capable of wargame design
because of the noticeably unrepresentative make-up of the
wargaming community.24 Adult learners in other settings may
see themselves as not fitting into the mold of what that profes-
sion seems to be. Therefore, there is hesitancy even to start the
investment in learning.
Adult learning also has a high barrier to breakthrough.
Since adult learning for complex skills is primarily experiential,
learning at the beginning is difficult and overwhelming. The
hallmark of a positive start to experiential learning is the right

21
Peter P. Perla and E. D. McGrady, “Why Wargaming Works,” Naval War College Review
64, no. 3 (Summer 2011).
22
Horng-Ji Lai, “The Influence of Adult Learners’ Self-Directed Learning Readiness and
Network Literacy on Online Learning Effectiveness: A Study of Civil Servants in Taiwan,”
Journal of Educational Technology & Society 14, no. 2 (2011): 98–106.
23
Lai, “The Influence of Adult Learners’ Self-Directed Learning Readiness and Network
Literacy on Online Learning Effectiveness,” 98.
24
Sally Davis, “Wargaming Has a Diversity Problem,” Wavell Room, 15 January 2021.

106
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
initial experience and appropriate support through the first
cycles of reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation.
Often getting the first opportunity to try a complex skill can be
hard. If an adult learner is able to get the first experience, they
will likely still need a guiding hand through the reflection, con-
ceptualization, and experimentation portions of the first cy-
cle(s). They also might not feel that failure in experimentation
is an option in situations where professional reputation or even
livelihood is on the line. Without a foundation of experiential
learning in the complex skill that an adult learner hopes to mas-
ter, they will not be equipped with the tools to develop beyond
the most basic level.

WARGAMING EDUCATION
The field of wargaming has very few formal training programs
to train and educate wargame designers. There are two simi-
lar but distinct approaches for getting new wargame designers
into the design process for wargaming.
The first approach is a historical wargaming approach. This
method is employed by several organizations like the U.S. Naval
Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the Marine Corps Command
and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia; and at Georgetown Uni-
versity in Washington, DC, among others.25 These relatively new
programs use well-documented battles or operations, allow-
ing new wargamers to research the commanders’ critical de-
cisions and available capabilities. Under the steady hand of an
experienced wargamer, these apprentices build wargames de-
signed to have their players experience the battle from the per-
spective of one of the historical figures. Apprentice wargamers
get the benefit of being able to examine the actual course of a
battle, posit counterfactual histories, and experiment with var-
ied game mechanics with a known historical outcome to judge
against. At the end of this semester-long course, students will
have completed a full, working wargame based on a historical
25
Sebastian Joon Bae, interview with the author, 19 June 2021.

107
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
operation and been exposed to many of the design consider-
ations a wargamer must deliberate when building a game.26
The second approach is the practicum model. This mod-
el is employed at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monte-
rey, California, and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado
Springs, among others.27 In this approach, new wargamers are
matched with sponsors who have specific analytical questions
that could benefit from wargaming. The instructor, in this case
experienced wargame designers such as Dr. Jeff Appleget or
Dr. James D. Fielder, works with the student-officers to design
wargames for real-world customers.28 Similar to the historical
wargaming approach, students end the course with exposure
to many design considerations and will have completed the
design of a full analytical wargame.
Both approaches combine classroom instruction and
practical experience. The curriculum for each course introduc-
es apprentice-students to theory and practical considerations
for designing wargames, and both methods typically involve
exposure to existing wargames to develop familiarity with
game mechanics, different turn sequences, and the tradeoffs
between realism and simplicity.
Formal educational programs that teach the underlying
requirements for wargaming, or any such design-based skill,
will invariably fall short in practical usefulness as the field hosts
more specialties and variations than any single course could
cover.29 This shortcoming is why on-the-job training exists to
some extent in every field.

26
Caitlyn Leong, Charles Lewis, and Nikolai Rice, “Designing a Wargame: Reconquering
Rome” (presentation, Georgetown University Wargaming Society, Washington, DC, 2
June 2020).
27
Jeff Appleget et al., Wargaming at the Naval Postgraduate School, CRUSER Report
(Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 2016); and Course of Instruction, 2021–2022
(Colorado Springs, CO: U.S. Air Force Academy, 2021), 356.
28
Appleget et al., Wargaming at the Naval Postgraduate School, 19–20.
29
Jacob Mincer, “On-the-Job Training: Costs, Returns, and Some Implications,” Journal
of Political Economy 70, no. 5, pt. 2 (October 1962): 50, https://doi.org/10.1086/258725.

108
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING

OPTIMIZING THE ORGANIC PIPELINE

Despite the emergence of formal wargaming programs at cer-
tain professional military education and civilian schools, the
path from a novice wargamer to a skilled one relies on the or-
ganic guild-like pipeline.30 What follows are some best practices
in wargaming education that are supported by the academic
literature on adult education, interviews from experienced
wargamers, and the experiences of the author.

Concrete Experiences in Design and Iteration

As with many skills, learning by doing remains the gold stan-
dard for complex skill acquisition. The sooner that a wargamer
can begin to design games, the sooner they are on the path to-
ward mastery. Much as with other guild-like training, one senior
wargamer says, “There is no replacement for actually standing
at the anvil.”31 This is why formalized training courses generally
include designing a wargame. This is intuitively obvious for oth-
er complex skills-based tasks. Using the previous example, no
one would hire a blacksmith who has read all the latest books
on metallurgy but has never hammered steel. This comports
well with the Kolb model of experiential learning.32 Since com-
plex skills are not directly transferable from teacher-to-student
via lecture halls, it makes sense that wargame design training
would be experiential in nature.
Getting even a single repetition completed is a large hurdle
for adult learners and novice wargamers. It shatters the belief
that wargamers are “born, not trained” and overcome mental
blocks.33 After the design process of a single wargame, novice
wargamers will have built confidence and will have the tools
required to continue self-development. Self-development, es-
30
Judge, “The Wargaming Guild.”
31
Sebastian Joon Bae, “In seriousness, I found being a copilot with someone senior
teaching me as I go was how I learned. Reading or watching materials is good, but
there is no replacement for actually standing at the anvil and designing games,” Twitter,
21 July 2021, 1346.
32
Kolb, Experiential Learning.
33
Bartels, “Building a Pipeline of Wargaming Talent.”

109
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
pecially with adult learners, is a key factor in determining future
success.34 That single event equips a novice wargamer with
the ability to build on that foundation to continue their own
training.
A best practice for developing novice wargamers is finding
ways to allow them to design new games quickly. One tool for
this activity is Andrew Peterson and Matthew Smith’s Rapid Pro-
totyping Game.35 It is a card-based game that allows wargame
designers to think through the game design process without
needing a broad repertoire of game mechanics and designs.
This is because the game provides an encyclopedic deck of
common mechanics and design considerations. Pairing nov-
ices with experienced wargamers and allowing the novices to
build and pitch game designs in a structured way, using the
Rapid Prototyping Game or a tailored deck of mechanics and
designs most useful to their field, provides novices with a way
to get more experience designing wargames in a free-to-fail
way—or wargame wargaming design!

Hobby Game Utilization
To expose novice wargamers to the myriad of possible game
mechanics, one best practice is to use hobby games as teach-
ing vehicles. It is no accident that the most celebrated war-
gamers were first hobby gamers.36 Commercial off-the-shelf
games have several advantages that are important for novice
wargamers. Successful commercial games tend to be engag-
ing. Their commercial success generally hinges on how they
draw a player in and how much fun they are to play.
Hobby games also do not typically take days to complete.
A recent wargame conducted by the Center for Army Anal-
ysis was conducted during three days of gameplay with an

34
Kolb, Experiential Learning.
35
Andrew Peterson and Matthew Smith, The Rapid Prototyping Game, 1st ed. (Boca Ra-
ton, FL: CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2020).
36
Curry, Peter Perla’s the Art of Wargaming, 275.

110
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
additional half-day to train players.37 Many hobby games can
be set up, the basics understood, and played in a few hours.
More importantly, completing the game is not necessary for
the game to become an educational tool. One best practice
along these lines is an intensive on-the-job training course that
utilizes a “wargame lab.”38 In the Strategic Wargaming Division
at the Center for Army Analysis, novice wargamers are exposed
to different hobby games for three hours each week during
the first eight weeks of their employment. Some games, such
as Risk, are used to examine the basic elements of a wargame
and their adaptability.39 Different versions of Risk, including Risk:
Star Wars and Risk: Game of Thrones, teach novice wargamers
how a solid system can be adapted to different objectives.40
Other hobby games, such as Terraforming Mars, are used to
explore cooperative-competitive relationships and how those
relationships can be understood through wargaming.41 In ad-
dition, all wargamers meet for wargaming labs monthly. The
key to these wargame labs is not simply playing new games—
though increased exposure is valuable in its own right—but
also to critique and explore the design tradeoffs with a larger
group of wargamers at every level of experience. This ties the
wargaming lab back to the Kolb cycle of learning.42
Hobby games also have thematic hooks. Part of the chal-
lenge of training new wargamers is overcoming the mental bar-
riers of adult learners. Using a hobby game based on a theme

37
Devon Suits, “Army Implementing ReARMM Unit Life Cycle Model,” Army News, 2
March 2021.
38
This approach is used for the internal new strategic wargamer’s on-the-job training
developed at the Center for Army Analysis by Dr. Josh Jones and Ms. Claire Fisher, sup-
ported by Dr. Karsten Engelmann. Their efforts provided a way to bridge the author’s
previous research on wargaming and experiential learning with practical examples for
teaching wargame design. The author is deeply indebted to them for their support
and mentorship.
39
Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest (Pawtucket, RI: Parker Brothers, 1959).
40
Risk: Star Wars Edition (Pawtucket, RI: Parker Brothers/Hasbro, 2005); and Risk: A
Game of Thrones Edition (Carlsbad, CA: USAopoly, 2015).
41
Terraforming Mars (Vellinge, Sweden: FryxGames, 2016).
42
Kolb, Experiential Learning.

111
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
that excites and engages the target audience helps overcome
anxiety about learning a new adult skill. Adjunct Professor Se-
bastian Bae uses Risk: Game of Thrones to hook his students
in at Georgetown University. Once students are immersed in a
learning environment, the experience is more salient and im-
pactful. On-the-job training can benefit from thematic hooks.
The variety and breadth of available commercial wargames en-
sure that there is likely a wargame to match the interests of new
wargamers.
Hobby games represent fertile ground for design starting
points. Seeing how commercial designers replicate battlefield
effects can be incredibly useful for novice wargame designers.
In a formal program at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Professor
James Fielder reports that deconstructing the game mechanics
and “innards” of hobby games allows novice designers to learn
design fundamentals more completely than lectures or reading
alone can accomplish.43 Novice designers in his program used
elements from several different hobby games to achieve their
sponsors’ objectives for the wargame. This gave the designers
a tested starting point, rather than requiring them to begin the
difficult design process from an unknown point.

Leverage the Wargaming Network

As a guild-type organic pipeline, there is no escaping the need
for skilled master wargamers to guide and support novice war-
gamers through their development; however, this does not
need to be limited to the novice’s organization. The community
of hobby wargamers is actively engaged. While the community
has challenges with diversity, efforts are underway to remove
this barrier to entry.44
Wargaming communities and conferences such as MORS’
Wargaming Community of Practice and Connections have re-

43
James “Pigeon” Fielder, “Reflections on Teaching Wargame Design,” War on the Rocks,
1 January 2020, 1.
44
“The Derby House Principles,” PAXSims, February 2021.

112
 BUILDING WARGAME DESIGNERS AND ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
sources available for new wargamers and provide a vehicle for
connecting with experienced wargamers, most of whom are
excited to share their love of wargaming with novices.45 With
the increased popularity of virtual conferences, the cost of
traveling to conferences has been greatly reduced. Moreover,
a growing number of university-based wargaming groups such
as the King’s College London Wargaming Network and the
Georgetown University Wargaming Society bring wargaming
content to novice wargamers online for free.46

A STRONGER PIPELINE
Increasing demand for wargames and a limited pool of expe-
rienced designers means that developing new wargamers is
more important than ever. But the process of adult education
to take a novice wargamer and equip them with the tools for
rapid self-development and complex skill mastery is difficult.
The challenges of adult education and experiential learn-
ing for complex skills stifle efforts to develop new wargame
designers. Hesitance to start and barriers to breakthrough limit
the numbers of willing candidates. Lacking formal pipelines for
wargame design means that organizations that conduct war-
gaming must develop their own wargame designers.
Organizations that hope to shorten the time from nov-
ice to skilled wargame designers should follow best practices
supported by adult learning models and practical experience.
They include teaching by doing to build concrete experience
and overcome barriers to breakthrough, incorporating hobby
games both to drive interest and explore game mechanics/

45
In recent years, the Connections series of wargaming conferences have been host-
ed virtually, including Connections-U.S., Connections-North, Connections-UK, and
Connections-Oz due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. A new annual event for the Con-
nections series, Connections-Online, has been added to the roster to remain as a vir-
tual conference.
46
“Georgetown University Wargaming Society (GUWS),” GUWargaming.org, accessed
31 March 2022; and “Wargaming Network,” King’s College London, accessed 31 March
2022.

113
 PAUL M. KEARNEY
design. To do this, they should leverage the wider field of war-
gaming groups to reduce barriers to entry and foster a more
inclusive environment in wargaming.
Novice wargamers, when supported in this way, have the
opportunity to realize their potential and grow the population
of skilled wargame designers needed to support educational
wargaming efforts.

114
 Chapter Five

WARGAMING IN PME
Introducing Wargaming
to the Australian Defence College

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Jenkinson

and Group Captain Jo Brick

The qualities needed to play all strategic war games

well include forethought, the ability to make a plan
and execute it, avoidance of the temptation to over-
reach oneself when experiencing an advantage, and
the courage to face unexpected adverse develop-
ments calmly and with resolution. These are some of
the same qualities which are required of real-life lead-
ers, not just in military jobs but as statesmen and as
the managers of large companies.
~ Christopher G. Lewin1

Social historian Christopher Lewin highlights the value of us-

ing wargames in education. The development of strategic
foresight, critical thinking, judgment under pressure, and col-
laborative approaches to problem solving are some of the key
learning outcomes when games are used for education. The
origins of wargaming for education in standing military forces
are generally attributed to the Prussians and the game Kriegs-
spiel, which was developed by a civilian, Baron Georg Leopold
von Reisswitz, for Crown Prince Frederick William in 1811.2 Since
then, many modern military forces use wargames for educa-

1
C. G. Lewin, War Games and Their History (Stroud, UK: Fonthill Media, 2012), 9.
2
Lewin, War Games and Their History, 41–42.

115
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
tion, analysis, and experimentation. In Australia, the current
focus is on using wargames for analysis and experimentation.
However, the use of wargames in education does not have a
strong foundation and is currently employed inconsistent-
ly across the Australian Defence Force (ADF). As a result, the
ADF has limited experience in the use of games for education
and a minimal appreciation for how wargames can enhance
learning. The Australian Defence College (ADC) is focused on
five key lines of effort to reinvigorate the use of wargaming for
education:
1. Find opportunities to incorporate games into formal
courses and encourage efforts by current directing
staff at the Australian War College to use games to en-
hance the delivery of formal curricula.
2. Establish a deputy director of wargaming position,
whose primary duty is to review ADC courses, to work
with commandants and instructional staff, to iden-
tify and enhance opportunities for learning through
formal/informal incorporation of games into ADC
courses and to engage with partner educational insti-
tutions across allied and partner nations.
3. Establish an ADC Wargaming Society—a network with-
in the college to normalize gaming—as a means of
introducing interested personnel in games and war-
gaming and is backed by a funded and resourced
base at the ADC.
4. Host a seminar on advocacy and education that gath-
ers like-minded groups in the Australian Defence Or-
ganisation who have used games for education and
training, but also for other purposes (such as analyt-
ical wargaming) and to promote the usefulness of
games as models.
5. Establish a national and international network for war-
gaming in education.

This chapter will be confined to an examination of warga-

116
 WARGAMING IN PME
ming for the purposes of education. It will examine the brief
history of wargaming in the ADF and discuss how these lines
of effort will form the foundation for a more consistent and en-
during framework for the incorporation of wargames into pro-
fessional military education (PME) in Australia.

WARGAMING FOR EDUCATION

Why, while the clouds of war thickened above them,

would a group of serious-minded, middle-aged men
waste their time on a board game?
~ Simon Parkin3

A Short History
Games offer a means by which students can play with the con-
tent and concepts presented to them in lectures and seminars.
Games enhance learning through the development of tactical
insight and planning and test military plans through simulation.
Further, other nonmilitary games may offer learning outcomes
about leadership, high-level strategy, and interagency coop-
eration through abstract game concepts and mechanics. The
answer to the rhetorical question posed by Parkin, is that time
spent in gaming is there to enhance and complement other
education methods by discovery learning, where students take
an active role to create, integrate, and generalize knowledge
and establish broader applications for skills through activities
that encourage risk-taking and problem solving.4
The Prussians are generally recognized as the first to
use wargames to educate their military forces. As previous-
ly stated, Baron Leopold von Reisswitz created Kriegsspiel to
educate the crown prince. However, the real success of the
3
Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Secret Game that Won the War (Lon-
don: Hodder & Stoughton, 2019), 41.
4
Joyce A. Castronova, “Discovery Learning for the 21st Century: What Is It and How Does
It Compare to Traditional Learning in Effectiveness in the 21st Century?” (unpublished
paper, 2002), 1–12.

117
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
Prussians came after Helmuth von Moltke, as chief of staff of
the Prussian Army, mandated the broader use of wargames,
particularly at the war colleges.5 Wargaming was part of the
curriculum, which already included strategy, military history,
and planning. However, wargames also complemented an-
other innovation von Moltke introduced—the staff ride. This
involved von Moltke taking the war college class to a Prussian
invasion corridor and asking students to present a plan for bat-
tle between the Prussians and attacking forces. Officers were
expected to present in turn, starting with the most junior, and
the subsequent discussion between the students would re-
sult in the development of the plan. This plan would be played
on a simple map-based game and be tested.6 According to
Matthew B. Caffrey Jr., the institutionalization of wargaming in
the Prussian military enhanced the ability of officers to plan
and to mitigate the haphazard competence of their officers,
who were often selected on the basis of their aristocratic lin-
eage rather than merit.7
Prussian innovation in military education and training was
borne out of the drive to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte. But why
should the ADF wait for an equivalent formidable adversary to
manifest itself? As U.S. Army lieutenant general David Barno and
Nora Bensahel argue, predicting the future nature and charac-
ter of warfare is unlikely to be accurate and this can only be ef-
fectively addressed by creating an adaptive culture in modern
military forces.8 A strong planning capability and adaptive cul-
ture are keys to success and can be developed through the use
5
Matthew B. Caffrey Jr., On Wargaming: How Wargames Have Shaped History and How
They May Shape the Future, Newport Papers no. 43 (Newport, RI: Naval War College,
2019), 17–18.
6
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 18–19.
7
Edward Melton, “The Prussian Junkers, 1600–1806,” in The European Nobilities in the
17th and 18th Centuries, vol. 1, Western Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007), 118–71.
8
See David Barno and Nora Bensahel, Adaptation under Fire: How Militaries Change
in Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso
/9780190672058.001.0001.

118
 WARGAMING IN PME
of games in education by instilling critical thinking, flexible and
adaptive planning in the midst of the contest, and managing
the available resources to achieve objectives as the plan makes
contact with an adversary.
In the U.S. Army, it is unclear when wargaming became
an institutionalized practice. Caffrey estimates that it probably
started at the Command and General Staff College, where it
was introduced as part of the curriculum.9 Part of the “applica-
tion method” used at that school involved teaching subjects in
conventional lectures, then small group discussion, and final-
ly an individual plan development that culminated in a group
wargame (“map maneuver” or writing orders and executing
them against an actual adversary).10 William McCarty Little
wrote and delivered the earliest known lecture on wargaming
in 1886, and subsequently wargames were introduced in the
Naval War College in 1894.11 In 1913, William S. Sims introduced
wargaming to the broader Navy fleet.12

A Problem of Definition
There is no single, commonly accepted definition of warga-
ming. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defines
wargames broadly as: “a simulation of military operation, by
whatever means, using specific rules, data, methods and pro-
cedures.”13 Such a wide-ranging and broad definition is of lim-
ited use, however, and ignores the central role placed on the
decisions of the players.
A purposive approach to defining the term offers greater
utility by distinguishing it from other uses of wargames, such
as for analysis and experimentation. Focusing on education as
the purpose of wargaming ensures that the method is linked
9
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 24.
10
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 24.
11
The lecture given by William Little Hall at the Naval War College was reproduced in the
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 38 (December 1912): 1213–33.
12
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 25.
13
Quoted in Wargaming Handbook (Shrivenham, UK: Ministry of Defence, 2017), 5.

119
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
to the learning objectives of a particular program of education
or training.

Purposive Definition
For the purposes of this paper, the term wargame covers
games that are representative
of military activities, using rules, data, and pro-
cedures, not involving actual military forces,
and in which the flow of events is affected by,
and in turn affects, decisions made during the
course of those events by players acting for all
actors, factions, factors and frictions relevant
to those military activities.14

Themes and Concepts in Abstract

Further, the use of the term wargames may be driven more by
the need to convey the message that the uses of games are
not frivolous but are a serious endeavor for education. This ap-
proach allows for a broader perspective on the types of games
that can be used for PME. Games, not just wargames (or games
with a focused military theme), can enhance PME through the
abstract themes and concepts that they present by focusing
on conflict and competition through a nonmilitary lens. What
becomes important are the characteristics of the games them-
selves. As noted by Robert T. Hays, “It is not the medium on
which the game is played, but its characteristics that make it a
game.”15 For this reason, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of De-
fence Wargaming Handbook list of the “core of wargames” is
useful. The core of wargames is defined as:16
• The players;

14
“What Is Wargaming?,” LBS Consultancy, accessed 11 August 2021, an acknowledged
adaptation from Peter Perla.
15
Robert T. Hays, The Effectiveness of Instructional Games: A Literature Review and Dis-
cussion, Technical Report 2005-004 (Orlando, FL: Naval Air Warfare Center Training
Systems Division, 2005), 11.
16
Wargaming Handbook, 5.

120
 WARGAMING IN PME
• The decisions they make;
• The narrative they create;
• Their shared experiences; and
• The lessons they take away.

Under this construct, a game does not need a military fo-

cused theme to have relevance to PME. The key is to ensure
that the game selected is appropriate for the learning objec-
tives and outcomes of the particular course. In the ADF con-
text, it is possible to use either the term game or wargame. The
theme of the game is not as important as its relevance to the
learning outcomes of education and training courses at each
level of the Australian Joint Professional Military Education Con-
tinuum, which is Australia’s system to develop mastery in the
profession of arms and aims to cultivate an intellectual edge
(figure 7).17
More work is required to link appropriate games to the
learning objectives in various ADF courses. For example, Joint
Professional Military Education and Training ( JPMET) levels 1
and 2 are focused on ab initio (beginner level) training and ju-
nior officers would generally be focused on tactical mastery. In
an army context, this would mean focus on combined arms
and tactics. Games such as Advanced Squad Leader or Flames
of War may be of use as part of courses for this cohort of offi-
cers.18 By contrast, officers from O4 (major) and up (at JPMET
levels 3 to 5) would require a greater focus on operational and
campaign planning. The U.S. Marine Corps game Assassin’s

17
See The Australian Joint Professional Military Education Continuum (Canberra, AU:
Defence Publishing Service, Department of Defence, 2019), 17. Australian Joint PME lev-
els are: Learning Level 1–Professional foundation (ab initio to first appointment course
O2 (1stLt)/APS 2–4); Learning Level 2–Tactical Mastery (O2–junior O4/APS 4-6); Learning
Level 3–Operational Art (mid O4–mid O5 (LtCol)/APS 6–EL1); Learning Level 4–Na-
scent Strategist (senior O5–O6 (Col)/EL1–EL2); and Learning Level 5–National Security
Leadership (O7+ (BGen)/SES 1+). These ranks are compatible with those of other NATO
members.
18
Advanced Squad Leader (Baltimore, MD: Avalon Hill Game Company, 1985); and
Flames of War (New Zealand: Battlefront Miniatures, 2002).

121
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
Figure 7. Australian Joint Professional Military Education Continuum (modified for context)

Induction Intermediate Joint Integrated National

       
       

      

DEFENSE

      

         

      
        
       

    

 
     
TECHNICAL

 

 

      
   
  

         
    
 
        
SOCIAL

     

    
      
 
        
  
     

 

Foundation
1 2 Tactical

Operational
 3 Enterprise
 4 5 Strategic


Source: The Australian Joint Professional Military Education Continuum (Canberra, AU: De-
fence Publishing Service, Department of Defence, 2019), adapted by MCUP.

Mace or Twilight Struggle by GMT Games would be effective

complements to education and training courses focused on
operational and strategic plans.19
The drive to include wargames into the ADC curriculum
is based on the goal of enhancing lifelong learning that is nec-
19
See Wargaming Division, “An Invigorated Approach to Wargaming,” Marine Corps
Gazette (February 2020): 19–21; Ananda Gupta, “Wargame Design Decisions in Twilight
Struggle and Elsewhere,” Forge, accessed 21 June 2021; and Twilight Struggle (Hanford,
CA: GMT Games, 2005).

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 WARGAMING IN PME
essary for the military profession and to develop strategic
acumen or strategic thinking traits in the senior cohorts of the
defense organization. Wargaming is central to achieving these
objectives, as outlined by Philip Sabin as follows:20
• Games highlight questions that are generally over-
looked when using only “selective and linear approach
of conventional scholarship.” These questions consid-
er underlying influences in conflict, such as the rela-
tive importance of leadership, logistics, terrain, and
time, and alternative options for key decisions actually
taken.
• Wargames convey a vicarious understanding of some
of the strategic and tactical dynamics associated with
real military operations. This experiential approach to
learning provides students with an instinctive under-
standing for some of the decisions and interactive as-
pects (action/reaction) that are central to warfare.
• Wargames are a form of “active learning” when com-
pared to traditional lecture and seminar pedagogical
methods. Sabin highlights that lectures have the ad-
vantage of “rapid delivery of precisely tailored infor-
mation and interpretations to large audiences” and
require minimal preparatory work on the students’
part.21 However, lectures have their weaknesses and
Sabin states that “reducing a module equating to
nearly three months of full-time study into the learning
and repetition of a few dozen hours of lecture material
seems to me the very antithesis of education.”22

PME institutions covet the development of strategic think-

20
Philip Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education: Contributions and Challenges,” Arts
and Humanities in Higher Education 14, no. 4 (October 2015): 333, https://doi.org
/10.1177/1474022215577216.
21
Philip Sabin, Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 36.
22
Sabin, Simulating War, 37.

123
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
ing as a means of growing the intellectual edge necessary for
senior appointments across the defense portfolio. Major Gen-
eral Mick Ryan, commander of the Australian Defence College,
wrote:
We should seek to provide our strategic thinkers with
real-world experiences that challenge them; construct
diverse, multidisciplinary teams that test and extend
their skills; and expose them to a wide variety of edu-
cational opportunities.23

The dynamic, interactive, competitive, and collaborative

nature of wargames provides valuable opportunities to de-
velop strategic thinking through the practical experiences they
provide. When combined with the development of knowledge
and expertise, wargames fulfill the need articulated by Major
General Ryan for “a community of thinkers whose expertise
and experience can be connected and meshed to ensure a
more fulsome strategic discussion and debate on specific is-
sues.”24
Dr. Murray V. Simons also proposes the importance of
“learning the profession” in PME institutions rather than “learn-
ing the game” (tricks to earn high grades with less effort) or
“learning to be an expert” (topic specific knowledge). Ac-
cording to Simons, learning the profession is the ultimate goal
of PME, such as staff college, as it involves students gaining a
system-level appreciation and the larger strategic picture. This
involves students “joining the dots” and “filling in gaps.”25 Dr. Si-
mons taught and implemented many of his ideas at the New
Zealand Command and Staff College.
The New Zealand Command and Staff College introduced
23
Mick Ryan, Thinking about Strategic Thinking: Developing a More Effective Strategic
Thinking Culture in Defence, The Vanguard, no. 1 (Canberra, AU: Department of De-
fence, 2021), 2, https://doi.org/51174/VAN.001/ILJO7539.
24
Ryan, Thinking about Strategic Thinking, 11.
25
Murray V. Simons, “Nurturing Professional Military Wisdom: Holistic Professional
Military Development” (presentation, International Military Testing Association, South
Kuta, Bali, 30 October–3 November 2011).

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 WARGAMING IN PME
several different initiatives that did not focus on the produc-
tion of academic products, such as essays or papers, but other
pedagogical approaches such as reflective journals and ses-
sions.26 By comparison, significant parts of the PME programs at
ADC have a traditional, output-based academic focus. Further
work needs to be done to include alternatives, such as periods
of reflection and practical participation sessions to enhance
learning, with wargaming as an important option to draw to-
gether the different elements in a system level appreciation
that is necessary to learn the profession rather than just focus
on purely academic products.

HISTORY OF WARGAMING IN THE ADF

Unfortunately, the people who had a major impact on

wargaming itself are unknown not only to the general
public but also, largely, to today’s military. This struck
me as both unjust and dangerous. I also observed
that the art, science, and application of wargaming are
not always passed on to the next generation. History
seems to show that, when used effectively, wargam-
ing provides a powerful advantage, while wargaming
amnesia contributes to higher casualties.
~ Matthew B. Caffrey Jr.27

The ADF suffers from wargaming amnesia. There is no single

record of the ADF’s forays into wargaming throughout its his-
tory. It is only through the effort of a former U.S. military offi-
cer—retired Air Force Reserve colonel Matthew Caffrey—that
we have written snapshots of the ADF’s history of wargaming.
In On Wargaming, Caffrey provides brief outline of the history
of wargaming in the ADF, primarily in the Australian Army.
In the early history of the Australian military forces, officer’s
26
Simons, “Nurturing Professional Military Wisdom: Holistic Professional Military Devel-
opment.”
27
Caffrey, On Wargaming, vi.

125
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
mess halls were the focal point for socializing and profession-
al development. Sir John Monash was a keen user of games to
develop himself and his subordinates. Then-Lieutenant John
Monash recommended that wargaming be used as principal
development opportunity in messes.28 Later, as Major General
Monash, he directed the use of a purpose-built trench system
for field training events and wargames to train units up to bri-
gade size.29
The early years of Australian wargaming involved sending
senior officers to allied and NATO war colleges, where warga-
mes are used as part of PME. However, these games were not
suited to Australia’s strategic environment due to their scale
and the first attempts to develop games of relevance to Aus-
tralia occurred in the 1970s.30 In 1972, then-Lieutenant Colonel
J. C. Grey (who later became a lieutenant general and the chief
of the general staff) visited the U.S. Army and saw the utility of
wargaming. He wrote a paper that recommended the use of
wargames in the Australian Army. This recommendation was
endorsed, and in 1977, a Field Force Command War Gaming
Conference was held, chaired by then-Colonel Henry John
Coates (who was later promoted to lieutenant general and was
chief of the general staff prior to Grey). The conference con-
firmed the value of wargaming to the Australian Army, resulting
in the acquisition of wargames from the United States and the
United Kingdom.31
The 1980s were perhaps the pinnacle of wargaming activ-
ity in Australia. The Australian Army released “Training Simula-
tion Techniques: War Games,” Training Information Bulletin 52
(TIB 52), which defined wargaming and described its applica-
tion. TIB 52 also provided guidance and a list (in the appendix)

28
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 22.
29
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 42; as cited in Peter A. Pedersen, Monash as Military Com-
mander (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1985), 166–67.
30
Peter J. McCarry, This Is Not a Game: Wargaming for the Royal Australian Air Force
(Canberra, AU: RAAF Air Studies Power Center, 1991), 10–11.
31
McCarry, This Is Not a Game, 11.

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 WARGAMING IN PME
of wargames to be used for individual and collective training.32
A significant milestone was the creation of the Australian Army
War Game Centre (AWGC) in 1984. AWGC was part of Head-
quarters Training Command, and focused on two categories
of games “pertinent to the Australian Army”: training wargames
(decision and procedural games) and wargames for opera-
tions research (analysis of force structure and exercise/contin-
gency planning). The AWGC was also focused on developing
wargaming skills in the Australian Army.33 An AWGC Working
Paper (WP 84-21) was subsequently published that explained
the requirements for future wargaming in Australian Army. The
focus would be on “practicing decision making at all levels,
practicing staff procedures from company through to corps
headquarters; helping develop, refine, and test contingency
plans; and examining force structure alternatives.”34 The AWGC
became the Army Battle Simulation Group (ABSG) in the 1990s,
with a renewed focus to explore the use of simulation for Aus-
tralian Army capability and analytical wargames for unmanned
systems.35
The creation of the ABSG perhaps represents the decline
of wargaming in the Australian Defence Force, commensu-
rate with the rise in simulation throughout the 1990s. The ADF
Warfare Centre was established in the 1990s to conduct joint
operations training for the ADF. The center is now the ADF War-
fare Training Centre (ADFWTC) and part of the Australian De-
fence College. The ADFWTC includes a small Wargaming and
Simulation Centre that is focused on “the exploit[ation of] new
technologies to improve learning outcomes through the use of
Virtual and Augmented Reality products and associated game
software.”36 Currently, there is minimal focus on the use of ta-

32
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 112.
33
Army Office Staff Instruction No. 17/84, “War Gaming in the Australian Army,” 1984.
34
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 114.
35
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 165.
36
“Australian Defence College: Wargaming and Simulation Centre,” Defence.gov.au,
accessed 12 July 2021.

127
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
bletop games for PME in the ADF. Most of the extant wargaming
capabilities in the ADF are focused on either analytical warga-
ming or simulation in joint collective training in a live-virtual-
constructive (LVC) environment.37 These LVC capabilities are
often employed in major exercises such as Exercise Talisman
Sabre in 2021, which is the largest bilateral combined training
exercise between the ADF and the U.S. military.38
Compared with its strategic allies, particularly the U.S. mil-
itary, the ADF does not have a strong history or cultural mem-
ory of wargaming within PME. The current strategic security
environment, punctuated by the blurring of the distinction be-
tween war and peace, and characterized by enduring conflict
and competition, requires more intellectual effort to develop
imaginative and innovative ideas to address contemporary
security challenges. As previously discussed, the core charac-
teristics of games and the benefits of using wargames for an-
dragogy necessitate a reinvigoration of wargaming for PME in
Australia. However, when compared to the U.S. military, the
ADF is a small military force with limited resources. There are
existing obstacles to enhancing the use of games for PME in the
ADF that need to be addressed to ensure that wargaming for
PME is effective and enduring.

OBSTACLES TO WARGAMING IN THE ADF

The ADF’s wargaming amnesia means that there are scant
foundations on which to establish a reinvigorated culture and
framework for education in PME. This is further complicated by
the practical constraints to effective wargaming and by the de-
traction from using wargames due to the entrenched cultural
stigma attached to them.
Sabin outlines three practical constraints that need to be
addressed for the effective use of wargaming: expertise, time,

37
Caffrey, On Wargaming, 240.
38
See, for example, the data on the 2021 exercise at “Talisman Sabre 21,” Australian
Army, accessed 27 January 2022.

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 WARGAMING IN PME
and resources.39 In an educational context, the most important
of these is expertise, particularly the need for experienced and
confident instructors skilled in the effective use of wargames to
achieve learning outcomes.

Expertise and Instructor Buy-in

Sabin points out that it is difficult for nongamers to grasp or
understand basic wargames. The price of entry to the expe-
riential learning provided by wargames can be high.40 ADF is
in a Catch-22 situation: it needs more personnel experienced
in wargames that can facilitate seminars and discussions that
enhance learning via wargames; however, the ADF also needs
to start using wargames in education to develop expertise in
personnel who can then instruct and facilitate using games in
education.
The way to overcome this gap is to just start using games
in education as an alternative method for teaching, particular-
ly when PME institutions have staff who are enthusiastic about
games and are willing to both demonstrate their utility through
trial and in assisting other instructors. These instructors with
wargaming or broad gaming experience are rare and should
be nurtured and developed when they are identified in ADF
PME institutions.
Dr. Johan Elg goes further than Sabin. The presence of ex-
pert wargaming facilitators and instructors is one thing, but
instructor buy-in is more important as it is a committed ap-
proach to the use of games in education. Elg defines instructor
buy-in as “when an instructor has overcome perceptions of de-
ficiencies in comfort, control and credibility when it comes to
managing a specific game.”41 Significant investment in instruc-
tor development is required to build confidence in the use of
games to enhance learning objectives. Instructor development

39
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 337.
40
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 337–38.
41
Johan Elg, “Instructor Buy-in: Pitfalls and Opportunities in Wargaming,” Tidskrift (April/
June 2019): 7.

129
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
courses and guides are essential, particularly for incoming staff
at PME institutions. For example, the development of a guide
for the use of games similar to the Facilitators Guide to Learning
developed by the Australian Defence College specifically for in-
structors at the Australian War College is an initiative that will
assist with instructor buy-in.42
Instructor buy-in is essential for learner buy-in because
“the importance of learners’ perception of the instructor’s cred-
ibility by far surpasses the actual use itself of games regarding
effectiveness of learning.”43 Elg argues that having instructors
provide logical explanations for the outcomes in wargames is
essential for overcoming “gamer mode” (a concept by Anders
Frank, cited by Elg, which means that players play the wargame
to win rather than to learn).44 Instructors are necessary to en-
sure the students make the logical link between the game and
the learning outcomes.

Time
Minimizing the time to learn and play games is essential if they
are used to complement traditional pedagogical methods
such as lectures, readings, and seminar discussions.45 When
used in this manner, there may not be time to play entire games
as part of a lesson plan, and it would be more useful for the in-
structor to play a scenario or snapshot of the game to demon-
strate a concept or dynamic that is of relevance to the learning
objective. For example, a few turns of the game Twilight Strug-
gle, which has an average playing time of 120–80 minutes for
experienced players, can be used to demonstrate some of the
trade-offs that the adversaries faced to counter or prevent the
dominance of the adversary in a particular line of effort: Do I
focus my efforts on military operations in one or more regions,

42
Facilitators Guide to Learning (Weston Creek, AU: Defence Education Learning and
Training Authority, Australian Defence College, 2020).
43
Elg, “Instructor Buy-in,” 7.
44
Elg, “Instructor Buy-in,” 9.
45
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 337.

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 WARGAMING IN PME
or do I focus on winning the space race?46 Is there any way to
achieve both strategic goals?

Resources
Resource allocation refers to decisions on whether to invest in
the purchase of myriad games (table top or computer), the de-
velopment of bespoke games by talented individuals that are
specifically designed for the needs of the ADF, and the instructor
time in learning and effectively facilitating a wargame.47 These
various considerations require finding the right mix between the
need to have wargames that can be delivered quickly within fa-
cility constraints and staff expertise and providing the students/
players with a realistic experience in decision making.48

The Stigma of Wargaming

The perception of wargames in academia significantly impacts
their legitimacy as an educational tool, particularly as part of
andragogy. Sabin argues that “the real problem underlying the
limited use of wargaming in academia is less that it is imprac-
tical and more that it is poorly understood and viewed with
real disdain.”49 This necessitates an approach to increase un-
derstanding about the use of games to achieve learning out-
comes. This approach involves holding open demonstrations
and being clear that there is an element of trial and error when
finding the right game to achieve the appropriate outcome
for the learner. By contrast, there is little opposition to the lec-
ture-focused approach in most ADF PME institutions and their
assumed effectiveness, despite evidence to the contrary.50
However, more work needs to be done to find the right bal-

46
Estimate from Board Game Geek for Twilight Struggle.
47
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 338.
48
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 338.
49
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 341.
50
Mehdi Farashahi and Mahdi Tajeddin, “Effectiveness of Teaching Methods in Business
Education: A Comparison Study on the Learning Outcomes of Lectures, Case Stud-
ies and Simulations,” International Journal of Management Education 16 (2018): 131–42,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2018.01.003.

131
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
ance between experiential and traditional classroom methods
for education. Wargaming is not relevant to every seminar or
course. Wargames are only effective when educators and in-
structors understand their strengths and where they can most
effectively contribute to learning:
Wargaming is simply one more technique, one more
complementary perspective, with which to try to
come to grips with the intractable problem of un-
derstanding the dynamics of human conflict. Rather
than providing reliable answers, it is best at highlight-
ing neglected questions. Rather than offering secure
predictions, it is most helpful when it produces flawed
or unexpected outcomes, since these force users to
re-examine the assumptions programmed into the
model and think about how it could be improved.51

PATHWAYS TO IMPLEMENTING WARGAMING FOR EDUCATION

The ADF currently suffers from a loss of wargaming corporate
memory, but the ADC is considering several initiatives to rein-
vigorate the use of wargames for joint PME in Australia. The ef-
forts of the ADC are underpinned by a few principles that will
guide the reintroduction of wargaming into Australian PME:
• Games are merely another educational method. As
such, they must be connected to the learning out-
comes.
• Games have much to offer through abstraction. Take
a broad approach to the type of game to use. There
is no need to focus solely on traditional wargames or
games that have only a military focus.
• Investment in instructional staff is the key to success.
The ADC must assist its instructors through develop-
ment and guidance to be confident and effective at
using new educational tools, such as wargames, to
enhance the education of all students at the ADC.

51
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 344.

132
 WARGAMING IN PME
• Invest in broadening awareness of games for edu-
cation. This is important in overcoming the stigma
attached to wargames. Create an inclusive and acces-
sible wargaming culture at the ADC that encourages
people new to gaming to participate and learn.
• Develop a wargaming network in Australia and the in-
ternational PME community. This connects with other
educational institutions using games for education,
for exchanging ideas, and for remaining current on an-
dragogical research on games for adult education.

These principles manifest in five broad lines of effort for ADC.

Line of Effort 1. Trial

Commence a 12-month trial period for using games in formal
curricula. PME programs across the ADF are primarily founded
on traditional methods of education such as lecture and sem-
inar-based work, with limited use of games to allow students
to explore concepts and historical accounts presented to
them. Wargames are not appropriate in every case to achieve
learning objectives. However, learning management plans can
be developed to involve practical learning applications, where
appropriate, through wargames. Courses at the Australian De-
fence College span from ab initio training at the Australian De-
fence Force Academy to the education of senior officers at the
Australian War College. As previously noted, further analysis of
each course’s learning outcomes and wargaming is necessary
to inform the decision to use wargames to enhance course
learning outcomes.
ADC will also need to invest in instructor development
and work with its contracted academic partners to develop
the confidence and effectiveness of instructional and academ-
ic staff in the use of wargames to achieve learning outcomes.
Another important consideration in the trial phase is to ensure
that debriefing and reflection time for learners is built into the
wargaming parts of the course. Periods of learner reflection

133
 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
and feedback with instructors and other students is essential
to consolidate the experiential nature of wargaming and to
help students understand how the game connects to learning
objectives.52

Line of Effort 2. Establish an ADC Wargaming Society

Von Moltke established the Magdeburg Wargaming Club in
1828 when he was a lieutenant. The club served as a means for
Prussian officers to play Kriegsspiel as part of their professional
development outside of formal courses.53 In this spirit, and har-
nessing Blamey’s intention for wargaming to occur in officer’s
messes, ADC will establish its own Wargaming Society. The
society is intended to connect professional and recreational
gamers within the framework of education. Recreational and
professional wargamers can provide complementary perspec-
tives on how to use wargames for education, as Sabin states,
“The two groups are highly complementary, and between
them contribute a great deal to modeling and understanding
warfare as a whole.”54
The society is intended to provide an avenue for profes-
sional interaction between students at all ADC residential
courses, particularly at the Australian Defence Force Academy
where recreational wargaming already occurs, and to provide
an entry point for beginners. The Wargaming Society will also
provide an experimental function that allows the members to
identify games for play and advice about whether they think
the game in question has a use within Australian PME. This trial
and error method to finding appropriate games for education
is part of Sabin’s approach:
So where does my own educational employment
of wargames during my 25 years as a war studies
academic fit into this overall pattern? The story is
essentially one of constant experimentation and in-
52
See Elg, “Instructor Buy-in”; and Hays, The Effectiveness of Instructional Games, 53.
53
Lewin, War Games, 44.
54
Sabin, Simulating War, 36.

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 WARGAMING IN PME
cremental growth, starting small and then building on
whatever worked until wargaming became a crucial
element within my overall teaching technique.55

The Wargaming Society can also serve an educational

function by providing beginners with an open and welcoming
environment to try wargaming outside of formal PME courses.
Through this function, the Wargaming Society has an advocacy
function by showing, through demonstrations and encourag-
ing participation, the utility of games for education. Sabin em-
phasizes this practical approach: “The most effective way of
persuading people of the value of wargames is through direct
hands-on experience.”56

Line of Effort 3. Sponsor for Educational Wargaming

The Australian Army’s efforts to formally establish wargaming
for training and education through Army Office Staff Instruc-
tion No. 17/84, “War Gaming in the Australian Army,” included
the designation of an officer with the specific responsibility for
wargaming. The staff instruction specified that the director
general of army training was responsible for:57
• Coordination and development of policy;
• Wargames used to assist in the development of exer-
cise plans;
• Training wargames; and
• Duties of the training requirements advisor for war-
game training.

The appointment of a sponsor for wargaming in education

is essential to ensuring that wargaming has an enduring con-
nection to Australian JPME and the courses delivered by ADC.
Although not formally established at the time of this writing,

55
Sabin, Simulating War, 36.
56
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 347.
57
See paragraphs 6–9 for “Responsibilities” in Army Office Staff Instruction No. 17/84,
“War Gaming in the Australian Army.”

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 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
the most appropriate sponsor for wargaming in the ADF is the
commander of the Australian Defence College, which is con-
sistent with the commander’s appointment as defense’s edu-
cation and training technical authority.

Line of Effort 4. Conduct a Defense Wargaming Seminar

As previously discussed, the Australian Army held a wargaming
conference as part of that Service’s efforts to incorporate war-
gaming into its formal training and education system during
the 1970s and 1980s. The conference provided a formal avenue
to discuss wargaming and to confirm its use as a tool for army
education and training. Similarly, the ADC should host regular
wargaming seminars and conferences to achieve two primary
goals: first, provide a forum for identifying and synchronizing
the currently disparate wargaming efforts throughout the Aus-
tralian Defence Organisation; and second, allow for an avenue
for regular, open discussion about key topics that inform the
use of games for education in the military and to introduce de-
fense audiences to academic, corporate, and defense industry
perspectives on games for adult education and the latest tools
available to assist with PME. This dedicated, ADC-hosted war-
gaming seminar will complement the annual Connections Oz
conferences that bring together recreational and professional
wargamers to share knowledge and experience and that en-
hance the use of wargaming for various purposes including
education.58 It should also serve as a repository for the confer-
ence proceedings to ensure that the insights and knowledge is
preserved for future generations.

Line of Effort 5. Wargaming Network

There is a rich international network of wargaming societies
and wargaming centers within the military forces and aca-
demia. The Georgetown University Wargaming Society, the
U.S. Naval War College Wargaming Department, and the U.S.

58
See “About,” Connections Oz, accessed 14 July 2021.

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 WARGAMING IN PME
Marine Corps University’s Brute Krulak Center for Innovation
and Future Warfare are just a few of the international societies
and centers that ADC should develop connections and part-
nerships with as it develops its own wargaming for education
capability.59 ADC can engage with these organizations to learn
from their experience and exchange ideas, including future
competitions between students and fellowships, as the ADF
develops its expertise in the use of wargames for education.

CONCLUSION

The more people who are directly exposed to serious

but accessible games, the less pervasive will be their
image as trivial and childish diversions or impossibly
complex and time-consuming pastimes for obsessive
nerds. Playing wargames more widely offers the best
chance of inspiring more use of this currently neglect-
ed approach to the study and understanding of war.
~ Philip Sabin60

Strategic competition and warfare are human endeavors that

are inherently uncertain, dynamic, and demand the best of hu-
man cognitive and physical performance. The difficulty is that
the interplay between individuals, organizations, and nations in
this environment is unforgiving and there are no opportunities
to reset decisions made in this context. There is only one op-
portunity to make a relatively good decision in this challenging,
high-pressure context. Wargames offer military personnel the
opportunity to work in a safe-to-fail environment to practice
decision making in a competitive context. Further, wargames
offer military learners with the ability to interact with history,
playing the role of commanders in battles long past, and ex-

59
“About,” GU Wargaming Society, accessed 14 July 2021; “About Wargaming,” USNWC
.edu; and “Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare,” USMCU.edu, ac-
cessed 14 July 2021.
60
Sabin, “Wargaming in Higher Education,” 347.

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 LTCOL SCOTT JENKINSON AND GROUP CAPT JO BRICK
perience first-hand through the wargaming model some of the
challenges faced by the commander in that context.
The use of games as part of PME also enhances the learn-
ing experience of students by providing them with a practical,
discovery learning approach to understanding the course
material. However, the use of wargames needs significant in-
vestment in time and resources. Most importantly, the key to
success for the use of wargames is in obtaining instructor buy-
in and developing the expertise in instructional staff so they are
confident and effective in using wargames in PME programs.
The history of wargaming in the ADF is short, primarily fo-
cused on the efforts of the Australian Army in the 1970s and
1980s. However, efforts in the ADF have led to a much greater
emphasis on computer simulation for collective training, with
the use of wargaming for education diminishing over time. The
Australian Defence College is focused on reinvigorating war-
gaming as an educational tool as part of the Joint PME c­ ourses
offered at the college. The efforts to reintroduce w ­ argaming
into PME will require significant effort in the coming years
through the incorporation of wargaming into the JPME system,
with a key focus on instructor development, to ensure that the
use of games is normalized and enduring.
The ADF cannot afford to enter another period of amnesia
about wargaming. Phil Klay stated that “Joining the military is an
act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will
use your life well.”61 The formal incorporation of wargaming into
PME will allow ADF leaders to develop the strategic thinking, in-
novative and creative approaches to problem solving, that will
enhance their ability to make sound strategic decisions that will
ensure that Australian lives and resources are used well in the
national interest.

61
Phil Klay, “The Citizen-Soldier. Moral Risk and the Modern Military,” Brookings Essay,
24 May 2016.

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 Chapter Six

Make It Stick
Institutionalizing Wargaming at EDCOM1

Major Ian T. Brown, USMC;

and Captain Benjamin M. Herbold, USMC

INTRODUCTION
In 2019, General David H. Berger’s Commandant’s Planning
Guidance (CPG) threw down the gauntlet on using wargaming
to “fill the greatest deficiency in the training and education of
our leaders: practice in decision making against a thinking ene-
my.”2 Anything the Commandant calls “the greatest deficiency”
deserves immediate and aggressive correction; and so, Educa-
tion Command (EDCOM) and Marine Corps University (MCU)
considered how to execute the unambiguous marching order.
MCU gathered individuals from the resident schools, the Brute
Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, and the op-
erations, business affairs, and academic affairs offices into a
working group to develop a “Wargaming Master Plan” to guide
MCU’s efforts during the next five years to integrate wargaming
as an educational tool across professional military education
(PME) curricula.3
So, there is plenty of churn behind the term wargaming in

1
This article was adapted from material previously published in the June 2021 issue
of the Marine Corps Gazette, and the authors are grateful for the permission of the
Gazette editorial board and Marine Corps Association and Foundation to present that
material here.
2
Gen David H. Berger, Commandant’s Planning Guidance: 38th Commandant of the Ma-
rine Corps (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2019), 19.
3
Director, Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning, to Vice President for Oper-
ations and Plans, “Academic Year 2021 Institutional Effectiveness Assessment Report,”
5 September 2021.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
the agencies of training and education. Yet, long-time observ-
ers of the Marine Corps know this is not the institution’s first
experience with the wargaming world, and might fairly won-
der: Is this more heat than light? A trail of Marine Corps Gazette
articles go back for decades, highlighting the value of war-
games as inexpensive yet invaluable tools for filling that same
decision-making deficiency. The Corps’ effort to integrate them
into training or education was haphazard at best.4 In the early
1980s, it looked like the Corps might have turned the corner—at
least in the training realm—with the development of the TACWAR
game system, with a grand vision of giving TACWAR to every rifle
company in the Fleet Marine Force (FMF).5 Only a decade later,
TACWAR suffered the usual fate of one-size-fits-all systems: “ne-
glected at all levels . . . stacked like cordwood in warehouses
. . . [and] bogged down in its own procedures . . . [as to be]
so muddled with administrative minutiae that players soon be-
come bored and their initial enthusiasm is lost.”6
When General Charles C. Krulak became Commandant
in 1995, he tried to swing the pendulum back the other way
by exploiting the proliferation of personal computers to help
simplify and automate the adjudication of that “minutiae” in
wargames. He signed Marine Corps Order (MCO) 1500.55: Mil-
itary Thinking and Decision Making Exercises, authorizing the
use of government computers for playing approved software
wargames and mandating that Marines participate in decision-

4
Col E. S. Maloney, “War Games: Key to Doctrine?,” Marine Corps Gazette 44, no. 11
(November 1990): 9–10; Col E. S. Maloney, “Modern War Gaming: State of the Art,” Ma-
rine Corps Gazette 44, no. 11 (November 1960): 10–12; Maj Frederic A. Green, “The Best
Kind of War,” Marine Corps Gazette 48, no. 11 (November 1964): 32–35; Maj Edgar F. Mus-
grove, “No Game,” Marine Corps Gazette 49, no. 8 (August 1965): 53–56; Capt Douglas
C. MacCaskill, “War Gaming: Tactical Training for Officers,” Marine Corps Gazette 57, no.
10 (October 1973): 18–23; 1stLt T. X. Hammes, “Combat Simulation for Next to Nothing,”
Marine Corps Gazette 64, no. 3 (March 1980): 64–68; and LtCol P. D. Reissner, “It’s More
than a Game,” Marine Corps Gazette 68, no. 3 (March 1984): 67–72.
5
Capt C. A. Leader, “The ‘TACWAR’ Wargame,” Marine Corps Gazette 65, no. 12 (Decem-
ber 1981): 24–26.
6
Capt Stuart W. Bracken, “Modifying TacWar for the Lean Times Ahead,” Marine Corps
Gazette 76, no. 10 (October 1992): 44.

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 MAKE IT STICK
making exercises “daily.”7 General Krulak’s tenure saw the de-
velopment of an add-on to the popular first-person shooter
computer game Doom, done in-house by a single energetic
sergeant. Marine Doom was the manifestation of Krulak’s own
CPG directive to make “our education and training processes
and institutions technologically innovative, challenging and
fun . . . [to] help us derive imaginative solutions to the chal-
lenges we face.”8 Interestingly, MCO 1500.55 is still a “current”
order—yet, there are likely few Marines today who could look
at themselves in the mirror and say they engage in challeng-
ing decision-making activities daily with their own Marines; and
heaven help the Marine who tries to install a commercial war-
game on their government computer.9
So, the Marine Corps’ historical relationship with wargam-
ing as a tool for training and education begs the question: How
will this time be any different? As we approach the two-year an-
niversary of General Berger issuing his CPG, there is still a long
road ahead for the institutionalization of wargaming across the
entire Corps, but we would like to offer the model pursued at
EDCOM in developing and executing its Wargaming Master
Plan as a possible way forward. This model, driven by the ag-
gressive mandate laid down in the CPG, and building off de-
cades of painful failure and tepid success, fuses the things that
worked in preceding years with the freedom to abandon the
things that failed. It recognizes that answering the question of
“how do we institutionalize X?” requires the use of an institu-
tion on which to ground the effort. This gives the project re-
sources, manpower, and the backstop of authority to direct
the work and make it take root. Ideally, whichever institution
provides that foundation also contains a mechanism that max-

7
MCO 1500.55, Military Thinking and Decision Making Exercises (Washington, DC: Head-
quarters Marine Corps, 12 April 1997).
8
Capt Michael J. Jernigan, “Marine Doom,” Marine Corps Gazette 81, no. 8 (August
1997): 19.
9
“MCO 1500.55,” Marine Corps Publications Electronic Library, accessed 26 March 2021.
The order remains marked as “current.”

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
imizes prospects for the project to grow and spread its impact
beyond its own walls to the wider target audience. EDCOM is a
logical foundational institution for this task, as its schools pro-
vide recurring touchpoints with Fleet Marine officers and enlist-
ed leaders. These Marines get exposed to the possibilities and
applications of wargaming in their curricula, and then return to
the FMF where they can then help drive the institutionalization
beyond the confines of the foundational organization.
EDCOM’s model also abandons the “one game to rule
them all” mentality and embraces what should be three un-
controversial themes: different levels of PME require different
games to support their learning objectives; wargame content
and execution does not need to be hopelessly complex to be
useful; and that, as in the case of Marine Doom, the greatest
promise comes from leveraging talent already extant in the
Marine Corps. This chapter will provide several case studies of
how EDCOM has woven these concepts together in executing
its master plan, and hopefully provide some grist for the men-
tal mills of other entities and commands seeking to tackle that
“greatest deficiency” in their own ways.

ACHIEVING CRITICAL MASS

Wargaming at the College of Enlisted Military Education
By sheer weight of numbers, the best way to rectify the deficien-
cy identified by General Berger would be plugging wargaming
into enlisted training and education. Enlisted Marines make up
the vast majority of the Corps’ manpower structure, and so us-
ing wargaming as a tool in enlisted PME would, simply by quan-
tity, provide a quality impact all of its own. Yet paradoxically,
the opportunity in enlisted PME for achieving a decisive effect
with wargaming also faces the greatest challenge, as enlisted
courses are structured differently than officer PME, particularly
in the number of classroom hours available to students. Officer
PME is measured in months, and enlisted PME in weeks, leaving
little wiggle room for adding new requirements like wargames,

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 MAKE IT STICK
especially those which take place across several days or even
weeks. Despite the obvious potential gain, execution would be
a difficult needle to thread.
Gunnery Sergeant Dathan Byrd was willing to thread that
needle.10 A curriculum developer and adjunct faculty at the
College of Enlisted Military Education (CEME), he had begun his
tenure there by revitalizing the Small Unit Leadership Evalua-
tion (SULE) module taught at the Sergeant’s Course, and taking
the new SULE on the road to oversee implementation at the
many enlisted academies spread across the FMF. As part of the
effort to revamp the SULE, Gunnery Sergeant Byrd realized that
enlisted courses as a whole needed a fresh look at how they
pursued their learning objectives.
The problem was multifaceted. Warfighting, Marine Corps
Doctrinal Publication 1 (MCDP 1), and the philosophy of conflict
therein was the core of each enlisted program.11 But “warfight-
ing” was often conflated with “warfighting functions,” stan-
dardized in five-paragraph orders and exercises in the Marine
Corps Planning Process (MCPP). Moreover, there was little op-
portunity for practicing the essence of Warfighting, which was
confronting a thinking human adversary and putting them on
the horns of a dilemma with which they could not cope. To act
as effective advisors to their commanders and other decision
makers, enlisted Marines needed to speak the same doctrinal
language as those officers who were immersed in Warfighting
and other doctrinal concepts from the very beginning of their
careers.
Beyond that, enlisted leaders also had to be effective de-

10
The following is taken from correspondence and informal conversations with Maj
Brown, as well as the detailed background on GySgt Byrd’s work with wargaming at
CEME found at “Introduction to a Wargame Seminar (Nov. 2019),” YouTube video, 6
January 2020, 1:35:31 min.; and “Controversy and Clarity podcast season 2, #3, Dathan
Byrd,” Spotify, posted 12 January 2021.
11
“CEME School and Course Descriptions,” College of Enlisted Military Education, Ma-
rine Corps University, accessed 2 April 2021.

143
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
cision makers in their own right, able to intuitively and rapid-
ly translate their broad base of experience into action under
pressure and against human opponents who were doing their
best to counter those actions. Yet, there were few opportuni-
ties to actually develop and practice this decision-making hab-
it in existing CEME courses. Students got exposure to tactical
decision games (TDGs), which was good but incomplete, as
a TDG’s white board did not “fight back” or offer open-ended
decision-making paths. Dynamic problems and adaptive ad-
versaries filled the worlds of deployment and combat; Marines
needed to enter those worlds with decision-making habits
practiced and honed in the educational courses intended to
prepare them for those challenges.
Looming over these considerations was the issue of time:
time to practice decision making and doctrinal application
within the course, maximizing the “reps and sets” executed
in a short window of time, and not burdening the individual
CEME courses with additional class time that simply was not
available. TDGs offered an advantage here because they were
not time intensive, but again neither were they robust enough
to meet all the required learning objectives. Gunnery Sergeant
Byrd examined the historical PME approaches taken by other
militaries when providing their enlisted leaders opportunities
for doctrinal mastery and decision making. He found one idea
repeated in these old documents, whether written by German,
French, Israeli, or other militaries: wargaming. Focusing his at-
tention on this theme, further research showed Byrd that many
past Marine Corps leaders like Generals Alfred M. Gray, Charles
Krulak, and Paul K. Van Riper had all spoken of wargaming’s
value as an educational tool, though institutionalizing it had
proved an enduring challenge. Regardless, the historical evi-
dence supporting wargaming’s utility seemed clear, and when
it was released in summer 2019, General Berger’s CPG laid out
an obvious expectation for wargaming execution. Gunnery
Sergeant Byrd drafted and received approval for a plan that,
starting with the Career School, would use wargames to teach

144
 MAKE IT STICK
doctrine and decision making without adding a new burden to
the course’s short seven-week curriculum.12
The question now turned to what type of wargame could
support the career course’s learning objectives within the time
constraints. Additional research led Gunnery Sergeant Byrd
to a “matrix” wargame as the ideal solution. Like other types
of wargames, matrix wargames included a synthetic environ-
ment—a map, tabletop game board, or some other playing
space—and units or assets that players used to execute their
decisions. But matrix games also had less-rigid rule sets, which
made them easier for facilitators to teach and students to learn,
and required less time to adjudicate the results of player deci-
sions.13 Through the Connections-Oz civilian-run wargaming
community, Byrd found a matrix game that, with some adap-
tation, suited CEME’s needs. John Curry and Tim Price from the
Connections-Oz United Kingdom branch had created a matrix
game focused on the fictional Afghan village of Lasgah Pol.14
The game supports up to six players, each one representing a
different faction seeking to influence the civilian population in
order to achieve their own objectives. With Curry and Price’s
permission, Gunnery Sergeant Byrd adapted some of the ma-
terials to American tables of organization and equipment and
then put it in front of his students.
Both students and faculty rapidly gravitated to the game.
Here, in a synthetic environment that could be set up or torn
down in a matter of minutes, and not requiring expensive
hardware or an army of facilitators, enlisted leaders could do
a practical application of tasks to execute operationally from

12
Byrd communication with authors; “Introduction to a Wargame Seminar (Nov. 2019)”;
and “Controversy and Clarity podcast season 2, #3, Dathan Byrd.”
13
See, for example, Rex Brynen, “Matrix Games at the US Army War College,” PAXsims,
2 September 2016.
14
Details on the Lasgah Pol game, as well as other matrix games developed by John
Curry and Tim Price, can be found at “Professional Wargaming,” Wargaming.co, History
of Wargaming Project, accessed 28 January 2022.

145
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
Figure 8. Lasgah Pol game board

Source: courtesy of John Curry and Tim Price, History of Wargaming Project.

Figure 9. Lasgah Pol player factions

Source: courtesy of John Curry and Tim Price, History of Wargaming Project.

146
 MAKE IT STICK
Figure 10. Lasgah Pol game pieces adapted for American tables of organiza-
tion and equipment

Source: courtesy of John Curry and Tim Price, History of Wargaming Project,
adapted by GySgt Dathan Byrd.

147
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
Figure 11. Career Course students playing Lasgah Pol

Source: courtesy of GySgt Dathan Byrd.

Warfighting.15 Here, students could hone those skills expected

from a commander’s enlisted advisor: intuitive thinking de-
veloped from long experience, combined with the doctrinal
grounding allowing one to speak the same language as offi-
cer planners and commanders, all merging so students could
rapidly assess a situation, contextualize it, decide, and act,
and always in the face of an adversary who was trying to stop
them. Students could decide, see the consequences of their
decisions in real time, make mistakes, and learn from them
without burning through ammunition and supplies or risking
lives. Gathered around a simple laminated paper game board,
looking into the eyes of their peers to figure out what they were

15
Such tasks are described in chapter 4 of Warfighting, such as orienting on the enemy,
decision making, mission tactics, commander’s intent, main effort, surfaces and gaps,
and combined arms. See Warfighting, MCDP 1 (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine
Corps, 1997), 69–96.

148
 MAKE IT STICK
thinking and how their plan could be defeated, students of the
Career School course could fix that decision-making deficiency
with continuous “reps and sets” against thinking human adver-
saries.
The successful implementation of the Lasgah Pol matrix
game at the resident Career School course in Quantico was
soon translated into implementation at the other resident
academies, with Gunnery Sergeant Byrd providing each acad-
emy with copies of the game, along with faculty development
for game facilitators. CEME is also now developing a wargame
for the Advanced School course, with a focus on maritime litto-
ral operations. Institutionalizing wargaming across the Marine
Corps makes its use vital in the schools that educate the bulk
of uniformed population. CEME and Byrd have demonstrated
how the three themes of EDCOM’s approach to wargaming—
targeting a game to unique school learning objectives, making
the simple useful, and leveraging organic talent and expertise—
will help make institutionalization stick.

GIVE US MORE
Wargaming at the Expeditionary Warfare School
The Expeditionary Warfare School (EWS) for company-grade
officers necessarily has different program outcomes than the
Career School, though there is some overlap. Both schools aim
to cultivate critical thinking, ethical decision making, and a ma-
neuver warfare mindset; but EWS also has the specific goals of
“integrating all warfighting functions across a combined arms
[Marine Air-Ground Task Force] MAGTF in Naval and Joint op-
erations,” and “demonstrating proficiency in [the students’]
respective [military occupational specialty] MOSs.”16 Different
program, different outcomes, but the same requirement levied
by the CPG: use wargaming to fill deficiencies in decision-mak-
ing opportunities against thinking adversaries.17 The challenge
16
“Expeditionary Warfare School: Course Description,” USMCU.edu/EWS, accessed 29
March 2021.
17
Berger, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 19.

149
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
lay in finding a way to game the future maritime, all-domain
environment that was rich enough to present the problem set
while accessible enough that learning and playing the game
did not become an all-consuming task in its own right.
A unique opportunity to meet this challenge presented it-
self early in 2020, when Sebastian Bae, a nonresident fellow at
the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare and
a former Marine, approached the center’s staff with a concept
pitch. Bae instructed wargame design for a number of gradu-
ate programs, including the Gray Scholars Program at MCU; so,
was there any interest in leveraging his wargaming network in
his capacity as a fellow to develop a Marine Corps-specific edu-
cational wargame? The ultimate audience for this game would
be operational units across the FMF; but as a first step toward
that goal, Bae’s team could introduce the game to a group of
MCU students to achieve a PME school’s learning objectives
while using student input to hone the game for Fleet Marines.
Following internal discussions with the MCU schools, the lead-
ership at the Expeditionary Warfare School found the proposal
offered a chance to meet both formal learning and wargam-
ing objectives and targeted the Marine Air-Ground Task Force
Operations Afloat Course module in spring 2021 for the game’s
execution.18
Approval was just the first step; Bae and his team now had
to craft a detailed game design philosophy for this unique proj-
ect. The end state was a game that was accessible and flexible
for unit-based educational wargaming, depicting a near-future
Joint, all-domain, maritime battlefield with an acceptable level
of abstraction. The game would require little to no overhead
to maintain, and everything needed to understand and play it
would be in the box. The design team ensured the game’s low
overhead by capitalizing on the many materials and mechanics
already available in commercial wargaming. These resources

18
The initial discussion of this eventual collaboration was through text messages and
phone calls with Sebastian Bae and the authors.

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 MAKE IT STICK
included using common materials like wooden blocks to cre-
ate the fog of war for the players, and design tools like Com-
ponent Studio for capability cards.19 The team also adapted
commercial game rules and player mechanics, such as visual
player aids and tutorial videos. Layered over all of this was cur-
rent and relevant topical content to maximize the game’s edu-
cational value.
Everything from General Berger’s comments shortly after
the release of his CPG in 2019 to the most recent presidential
“Interim National Security Strategic Guidance” and secretary
of defense “Message to the Force” have carried the same mes-
sage: “prioritize China as the pacing threat.”20 So Bae’s team
developed scenarios on game maps depicting key terrain in
and around the Indo-Pacific region, with the friendly blue force
modeled on the Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR) construct and
the Chinese force based on the People’s Liberation Army Navy
Marine Corps (PLANMC).21 Each side had a variety of ground
combat, long-range fires, logistics, and naval units that players
could task organize to achieve their scenario objectives. Each
side could also invest in Joint Capability Cards, which abstract-
ed different strategic and higher-echelon fires; maneuver; in-
terception of missiles and aircraft; information operations; and
command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intel-
ligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C5ISR) assets that a

19
For a short summary of block gaming pieces, see Jackwraith, “An Introduction to
Block Wargames,” ThereWillBeGames, 9 January 2021. Component Studio is a browser-
based system of game component design tools, which provides users with either the
print and play PDF files that allow game designers to make their own prototypes at
home or lets designers send the prototype files to a professional component manufac-
turer. See “Component Studio Features,” Component Studio, accessed 29 March 2021.
20
Megan Eckstein, “Berger: Marines Focused on China in Developing New Way to Fight
in the Pacific,” USNI News, 2 October 2019; President Joseph R. Biden Jr., “Interim Nation-
al Security Strategic Guidance,” WhiteHouse.gov, 3 March 2021; and “Secretary Lloyd J.
Austin III Message to the Force,” Department of Defense, 4 March 2021.
21
The game’s MLR order of battle differs slightly from that in the Tentative Manual for
Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine
Corps, 2021), as initial game design work was done several months prior to the manu-
al’s release using the information publicly available at the time.

151
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
company grade officer could reasonably expect to encounter
and employ on a future Joint all-domain battlefield.
The final—and perhaps most important—considerations
in the game’s design combined two elements to ensure the
game would indeed be practical in the sense of maximizing
opportunities for Marines to use it. The first element was keep-
ing the rule set simple and intelligible, so that players could be
reasonably expected to pick it up and play it without the aid of
a facilitator. Bae included options for more advanced rules, as
well as expansions for different geographic locations and sce-
narios using the core rule set; but a player could understand
the core game mechanics and initial scenario with 30 minutes
of study. The second element was a research plan that rigidly
hewed to public domain, open-source reference material in
developing the tables of organization and equipment and Joint
capabilities for both sides. Merge these two elements with the
design philosophy, and the end result was a wargame with a
low learning curve for execution; no requirement for special-
ized materials or equipment to maintain; and open to the wid-
est possible audience of Marines, international military, and
other potential players inside the PME continuum and across
the FMF and Joint force.
Now titled FMF: INDOPACOM, the wargame went through
an aggressive regimen of play testing in the months leading up
to its introduction to the EWS student body.22 Bae’s team, Kru-
lak Center staff, EWS faculty, and Georgetown University grad-
uate students refined the rules, gameplay mechanics, and unit
capabilities; partners at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity
on Quantico worked with open-source maps and terrain as-
sessment to ensure each scenario had realistic impacts to mo-
bility and maneuver. Once refined, Bae’s group reproduced 16
full copies of the game so that every conference group at EWS
would be able to play its own force-on-force session. By spring

22
Jack Murphy, “Former Marine Invents War Game to Cultivate Tactical Thinking in the
Corps,” Audacy, 6 December 2021.

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 MAKE IT STICK
Figure 12. Early playtesting of FMF: INDOPACOM

Source: courtesy of Maj Ian T. Brown.

Figure 13. Simultaneous gameplay of FMF: INDOPACOM by EWS students

Source: courtesy of Maj Ian T. Brown.

2021, this wargaming conglomerate was ready to put FMF:

INDOPACOM in front of EWS’ student body for the test that re-
ally mattered.
From 15–16 April 2021, almost 200 Marine Corps, Joint Ser-
vice, and international military students at EWS dedicated their
waking moments to out-planning, outthinking, and outfighting

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
their classmates as either an MLR, supported by the Joint force
and allied partners; or the PLANMC, with more limited con-
ventional forces but a broad array of asymmetric capabilities
that could deceive, inveigle, or obfuscate the blue force from
achieving its objectives. No two games were the same—some
matches became two-way, long-range strike slugging matches,
others involved aggressive and risky maneuvers to break out of
the limited mobility corridors available on the game map, and
perhaps the most unique teams attempted to achieve their vic-
tory conditions through a combination of cyberattacks, infor-
mation operations, and influencing local and global opinion,
without the crisis ever breaking out into a shooting war. But re-
gardless of how the individual games played out, for two days,
the entire student body of an MCU schoolhouse was engaged
in continuous decision making against responsive, adaptive,
and creative thinking human adversaries in the form of their
peers.
Student feedback on this two-day wargaming immersion
could best be described as “more”—more chances to play FMF:
INDOPACOM during the academic year; more copies of the
game available to get better at it and better at outthinking their
fellow students; more opportunities in general for engaging in
this type of dynamic, free-play, force-on-force decision-making
activity that forced them to plan, continuously adapt their plan
when their adversary did something unexpected, and learn in
real time how to allocate limited capabilities effectively against
a well-equipped enemy who was constantly trying to neutral-
ize them. The pick-up team of current and former Marines that
worked to make FMF: INDOPACOM a reality is looking at build-
ing on the lessons learned from the first EWS iteration to make
future educational exercises even more impactful, as well as
options—such as a digital version on Tabletop Simulator—to
make the game more widely available beyond the confines of

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 MAKE IT STICK
the classroom.23 But whatever this specific game’s future, its de-
sign, testing, and execution at a PME school within a year tes-
tify to the power and potential of the three themes within the
EDCOM model of institutionalizing wargaming.

WARGAMING THE OPERATIONAL ART OF WAR

Command and Staff College
and the School of Advanced Warfighting
As noted with CEME and EWS, the Service schoolhouses have
different learning objectives and program outcomes. Differ-
ent goals require different wargames, and MCU’s schools for
field grade officers are no exception. The Command and Staff
College (CSC) and School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW)
were designed to produce graduates who are capable of un-
derstanding complex situations, thinking critically, and apply-
ing the practice of operational art to situations spanning the
spectrum of conflict. While similarities exist in the curricula of
the two programs, these courses differ in loci. CSC’s mission
is to develop leaders with the knowledge required to serve as
commanders and staff within the MAGTF and also with “ser-
vice, joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational
organizations.” By contrast, SAW’s mission focuses specifically
on developing “lead planners and future commanders with
the will and creative intellect to design and execute joint cam-
paigns and naval expeditionary operations.” Despite differ-
ences in mission, both schools utilize planning exercises at
the operational level of war to teach and hone staff processes
and decision making.24 The authors would like to note that the
23
Tabletop Simulator is a sandbox-type online game engine that allows users to either
play virtual replications of existing tabletop or analog board games or use software
tools to create virtual versions of their own custom-designed games.
24
“Marine Corps Command and Staff College,” USMCU.edu, accessed 29 March 2021;
and “School of Advanced Warfighting,” USMCU.edu, accessed 29 March 2021.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
exercises conducted by SAW and the Training and Education
Command Warfighting Society described in the following para-
graphs are not all-inclusive of their historical wargaming efforts,
but intended to capture those efforts undertaken in the con-
text of the 2019 CPG.25
Throughout academic year 2021 (AY21), CSC and SAW con-
ducted wargames in conjunction with planning exercises to
meet learning objectives and enhance student decision mak-
ing. Executing their plans against a thinking adversary, students
and faculty received cold, hard feedback on key planning
questions: Was your plan sound and flexible? Were your de-
cision support tools developed with enough detail to support
the execution of this plan as you moved to execution? Did you
give your branch and sequel plans the attention that they de-
served? In prior exercises, these questions would be answered
by military faculty and professors based on their own expe-
rience and knowledge. Using wargames in AY21, however, let
students “explore in greater detail the rationale behind their as-
sumptions and subsequent decisions.”26 There, again, was that
“greatest deficiency” identified in the CPG, and CSC and SAW
would use wargames to correct it.27
A key requirement for using wargames was maintaining
the continuity of exercises that already exist within the schools’

25
For other wargaming efforts conducted at SAW, see Benjamin Jensen and Matthew
Van Echo, “You Can Teach a Marine Deterrence: Understanding Coercion Requires
Changing PME,” War on the Rocks, 4 June 2020. Background on the Training and
Education Warfighting Society may be found at Benjamin M. Jensen, “TECOM War-
fighting Club: Bringing Together Warfighting Communities of Interest,” Marine Corps
Gazette 103, no. 6 (June 2019): 8–10. The results of the Warfighting Society’s exercises in
2021 are outlined in Benjamin Jensen, “The Crisis: Operations in the South China Sea,”
Marine Corps Gazette 105, no. 3 (March 2021): 74–76; Benjamin Jensen, “The First Bat-
tle: Operations in the South China Sea,” Marine Corps Gazette 105, no. 3 (March 2021):
77–80; Benjamin Jensen and Maj Robert Spodarek, “The Second Battle: Operations in
the South China Sea,” Marine Corps Gazette 105, no. 4 (April 2021): 87–91; and Benjamin
Jensen, “The Third Battle: Operations in the South China Sea,” Marine Corps Gazette
105, no. 5 (May 2021): 80–83.
26
LtCol Matthew Van Echo, correspondence with author, 29 March 2021.
27
Berger, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 19.

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 MAKE IT STICK
curriculum. As few commercially available wargames were
built with field grade PME curricula in mind, meeting this re-
quirement necessitated creating custom-tailored scenarios
based on codified planning exercises. Once created, these sce-
narios could adapt to different courses of action and task or-
ganizations for students. For three of these events during AY21,
CSC and SAW partnered with the Krulak Center—specifically,
the center’s technical information officer, Captain Benjamin
Herbold—to make this a reality.
The design teams, consisting of Captain Herbold and CSC
and SAW’s military faculty, created custom scenarios within
the wargame The Operational Art of War IV (TOAW IV).28 The
creation of each scenario started with identifying the learning
objective: What do we want the students to take away from this
event? The learning objective, translated into the focal point
of the wargame scenario, influenced many aspects of game
design such as command relationships, unit size and capabili-
ties, and aspects of mobility and supply. It also influenced the
mechanism by which students would interact with the war-
game, the construction of the white cell, and overall game fa-
cilitation.29 Each schoolhouse deserves a detailed case study to
demonstrate this process from learning objective identification
through execution.

Command and Staff College’s Pacific Challenge III

CSC’s Pacific Challenge III found III Marine Expeditionary Force
(III MEF) engaging a hypothetical Combined Task Force on the
eastern side of the Malay Peninsula in a modern-day conflict.
The learning objective for the Pacific Challenge III wargame sce-
nario was concise: to develop student proficiency in the execu-
28
The Operational Art of War IV is a commercial-off-the-shelf digital wargame (Epsom,
UK: Matrix Games, 2017). This game is used primarily at the operational and strategic
levels of war.
29
The white cell is a term commonly associated with the individuals who run the war-
game and those experts who assist in adjudication. In the games referenced in this
chapter, the white cells consisted of military faculty and individuals controlling the
wargame.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
tion of staff functions at the MEF level. This objective required
that the game be designed to facilitate targeting and maneu-
ver, provide appropriate feedback, coordinate the translation
of student plans to actions in game, and game outcomes to
effects provided back to the students.
The design team took multiple steps during scenario de-
sign to meet the overall learning objective. First, units were built
out at the battalion level to support local maneuver while pre-
venting the need for too much detail in tasking. Second, TOAW
IV’s historical equipment database was updated with modern-
day capabilities, such as Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors,
­Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning IIs, Chinese YJ-62 subsonic anti-
ship cruise missiles, and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles. Last,
potential high-value targets, such as artillery, missile batteries,
and air defense systems, were created as separate units to sup-
port individual targeting. While these actions would be unre-
markable for the commercial game designer or individual user
tinkering with the game’s scenario editor, they were deliberately
taken to ensure that students could task and target appropri-
ately—a key component of the Marine Corps’ combined arms
warfare, and thus a vital learning objective that the wargame
needed to model.
CSC executed the scenario in an asynchronous fashion,
whereby students leveraged the outputs of TOAW IV without
having to devote extra classroom hours (which were not avail-
able) to learning the hundreds of menu options and game me-
chanics. Prior to each turn, student staff leaders briefed their
battle rhythm outputs, such as the Commander’s Update Brief,
to the white cell by warfighting function.30 After receiving the
briefs and discussing with the military faculty, the game con-
troller would execute each side’s course of action within TOAW
IV. The following morning, the game controller would provide
situation updates to each side that summarized intelligence

30
The white cell for CSC’s Pacific Challenge III exercises consisted of one game control-
ler and four military faculty.

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 MAKE IT STICK
Figure 14. Command and Staff College’s Pacific Challenge III wargame used
TOAW IV to develop student proficiency in staff actions at the MEF level

Source: courtesy of Capt Benjamin Herbold.

collections, battle damage assessments, and other actions that

occurred within their respective areas of operations.
Though TOAW IV’s automated adjudication was the pri-
mary means of facilitating the Pacific Challenge III exercise, the
white cell’s impact on execution was equally vital. While all
game systems, digital or analog, have shortfalls in one area or
another, its successful application is based on the ability of fa-
cilitators. For example, during Pacific Challenge III, the white cell
was required to generate effects for the intelligence collection
plan, as well as the operations in the information environment
plan, as TOAW IV was unable to produce effects in these areas.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
Figure 15. SAW used TOAW IV in the Singapore Sling exercise to test the flex-
ibility and quality of operational plans in the India/Burma theater of World
War II

Source: courtesy of Capt Benjamin Herbold.

Both these adjudication decisions and those produced within

the game had to be communicated effectively to students so
that they could continue with the exercise.
Overall, the Pacific Challenge III wargame was an effective
application of a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) digital war-
game to facilitate the CSC learning objective of developing
student proficiency in the execution of staff functions. Its asyn-
chronous nature allowed for students to plan out and execute
48 hours of actions while putting their plan to the test against
an active adversary. Though imperfect, it provided significant

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insight into how an asynchronous game of this nature may be
executed using in-house expertise.

School of Advanced Warfighting’s Singapore Sling

SAW’s Singapore Sling exercise took students back in time to
the Burma theater during World War II, tasking Southeast Asia
Command to conduct a slingshot around Singapore against
portions of the Japanese Southern Expeditionary Army Group.
While the Pacific Challenge III wargame focused on student
proficiency in a process, SAW’s Singapore Sling had multiple,
discrete learning objectives. First, the design team wanted to
reward students for their execution of the principles of mass,
maneuver, and surprise. Second, students needed to under-
stand the importance of logistics in large-scale naval maneu-
ver. Finally, students had to determine the effectiveness of
decision-support tools developed during the planning pro-
cess. The entirety of the game was executed within a four-hour
timespan.
The Singapore Sling scenario was modified from a pre-
existing World War II Pacific campaign module within TOAW IV.
The scale of exercise, level of command, and short timeframe
of the game demanded a higher-level of abstraction to support
rapid decision making in an area of operations that spanned
the Indian Ocean. Ground units were abstracted to the division
level with all attachments built within the unit’s table of equip-
ment, and naval units were divided into carriers and separate
task groups. This scale was chosen to enable operational ma-
neuver while preventing unnecessary minute manipulations of
small-scale forces.
During execution, a single game controller and military
faculty member served as the white cell to expeditiously ex-
ecute actions within TOAW IV and facilitate learning. For each
turn, students had 20 minutes to receive an update on the en-
emy, synchronize their staffs, and inform the game controller
of desired actions. This structure demanded that students use
decision support tools developed during the planning process

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
to keep pace with the agility of the game. Further, this structure
promoted the concept of rapid decision making against think-
ing adversaries while being forced to deal with consequences.
A key lesson from Singapore Sling was the effect that the
facilitator has on the students’ learning outcomes. Without the
ability to translate effects within the game to real-world opera-
tional decisions, that is all it is: a game. During Singapore Sling,
the facilitator was able to educate throughout execution, get-
ting the students to think of options and outcomes previous-
ly unthought of or unseen in their previous experiences. The
greatest demonstration of this effect came in the form of a
comment from one of SAW’s long-time faculty: “This afternoon
I sat through one of the best student-led [after action reports]
I have seen in SAW . . . adding dimensions I have not seen in
this exercise in prior years.”31 And that comment distilled the
essence of the CPG’s vision for wargaming—fixing the deci-
sion-making deficiency. As the comment also indicated, the
EDCOM model for institutionalization made the improvement
happen, in real time, with obvious positive results. Appreciat-
ing that variation in learning outcomes required variation in the
wargame selected, presenting the game to the students in a
fashion they could understand and use effectively, and allow-
ing the resident subject matter expert the freedom to leverage
their skills in service of CSC and SAW’s needs combined to give
Marine leaders something useful and unique.

BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Projects, Partners, and Tournaments
Decision making and critical thinking do not stop when a stu-
dent leaves the classroom, and so MCU students are also given
several options to continue refining those skills outside formal
curricular structures. The Krulak Center, with its mandates for
creative approaches to learning and cross-school fusion, has
provided a number of wargaming opportunities outside the

31
Gordon Rudd email to Mike Morris and Matthew Van Echo, 27 January 2021.

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 MAKE IT STICK
classroom walls. These have run the gamut from support for in-
dividual student research projects, to helping external partners
leverage the lessons learned from wargaming inside MCU, to
competitive tournament play. But whatever the case, the Kru-
lak Center’s approach aligns with the three themes discussed
throughout this chapter, with the ultimate goal of creating op-
portunities to fight thinking human adversaries.32
The Krulak Center has used the digital wargame Command
for a number of these extracurricular events.33 One external
partnership that leveraged Command was with the Training
and Education Command (TECOM) Warfighting Society, an
informal organization stood up under now retired Major Gen-
eral William F. Mullen III when he was commanding general of
TECOM. A core aspect of the Warfighting Society’s mission was
to use commercial wargames to examine aspects of future
problem sets facing the Marine Corps, and especially Expe-
ditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO).34 First reaching
out to the Krulak Center for facilitation support, the TECOM
Warfighting Society also contacted Dr. Benjamin Jensen at SAW
for scenario design assistance, as Jensen regularly used Com-
mand for his own courses. Combining this expertise, the TE-
COM Warfighting Society framed an EABO-centric scenario in
which an American Joint Task Force ( JTF) would seek to drive
back a Chinese force that had taken an airfield and port on the
island of Palawan, allowing the JTF to gain a foothold in the Sulu
Sea area and push out Chinese naval Surface Action Groups
(SAG) to allow freedom of action for follow-on operations.
The scenario also included nuances of coalition and diplo-
matic pressure—the immediate goal was physically driving off
the Chinese presence but containing the conflict and giving
32
The following is adapted from Maj Brown’s direct facilitation experience with the ac-
tivities described, as well as the detailed summary of Krulak Center wargaming activi-
ties found at “Wargaming at the Krulak Center,” YouTube, posted 13 July 2021.
33
Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations (Epsom, UK: Matrix Games, 2014).
34
As first described by Gen Robert B. Neller in Marine Corps Operating Concept: How
an Expeditionary Force Operates in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Headquarters
Marine Corps, 2016), 13.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
China the opportunity to deescalate the situation. The prefer-
ence was for a diplomatic solution rather than expanding the
crisis to all-out regional war, something neither party desired.
Framing this wargame event was a large task in and of itself,
and then the COVID-19 pandemic forced all participants into
a virtual environment before they could execute the live, in-
person event. To ensure a positive experience, the Krulak Cen-
ter developed some additional mechanics that adapted what
was functionally a single-player computer game into a multi-
player decision-making exercise that was conducted remotely
using video conferencing software.35
Similar to what Captain Herbold did at CSC and SAW, as
described above, Major Ian Brown of the Krulak Center re-
ceived the scenarios and force laydowns for red and blue from
the TECOM Warfighting Society. The force deployments were
developed in conjunction with subject matter experts lever-
aged by the society, which included experts on naval and mar-
itime operations, Marine Corps ground combat operations,
and individuals involved with the formal crafting of the EABO
concept. Major Brown then ran several iterations of the game
during several days, with the subject matter experts present via
video conferencing and able to make operational decisions in
near-real time by passing instructions to Brown, who then im-
plemented them in the game.
Aside from the valuable lessons on the challenges of EABO
generated by this event, the group also learned more about
what a COTS computer game like Command was capable of
simulating; and moreover, they had a better understanding for
how to creatively leverage what the game can do to indirect-
ly simulate those missing elements. For example, the plans for
both red and blue included deception and decoys; however,
higher-level deception capabilities are generally not modeled in
commercial wargames due to levels of classification. However,

35
“Wargaming,” Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare Quarterly News-
letter, no. 6 (June 2020), 6.

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 MAKE IT STICK
Figure 16. Screenshot from the Command scenario used for the TECOM
Warfighting Society exercise with the decoy target drone swarm (center)

Source: courtesy of Maj Ian T. Brown.

Major Brown reflected on a fictionalized scenario from his own

personal reading years ago that showed how one might use
older, conventional capabilities in new ways to deceive an en-
emy and put them at a disadvantage. This scenario was based
on the Soviet Navy’s missile attack on the USS Nimitz (CVN 68)
Carrier Strike Group (CSG) in Red Storm Rising by Tom Clan-
cy.36 In the TECOM Warfighting Society scenario, blue wanted
to implement an aerial deception scheme that would absorb
some of the Chinese SAG’s surface-to-air missile defenses. In
Red Storm Rising, the Soviet Navy reprogrammed old, obso-
lete target drones to mimic the performance characteristics
of more advanced antiship missiles (ASM) and then launched
them in a volley at the strike group. On the radar systems of
the CSG, the drones looked and acted like ASMs. The strike
group launched its own missile defense ordnance to knock the
missiles down. It was only when American fighter aircraft got
close enough to the incoming threat to visually determine that

36
See “The Dance of the Vampyres,” in Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising (New York: Berkley,
1987), 227–55.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
they were decoys that the CSG’s commander understood the
deception; at that point, it was too late to do anything about
it. The Command Strike Group had exhausted its magazines
of fleet defense ordnance, and was helpless when a follow-on
volley of actual ASMs struck the force, sinking a full embarked
Marine Expeditionary Unit and crippling the Nimitz. As it hap-
pens, Command supports U.S. Navy target drone missiles in
its game database, so Major Brown added a swarm of those
drones into the game as decoys. Those decoys flew a path
directly at one of the Chinese SAGs, whose commander then
had to make a decision. The Chinese sensor picture did not yet
have fidelity on what this cloud of flying objects actually was—it
just showed a swarm of something coming at them. This left
them with the options of either shooting surface-to-air missiles
immediately to defend the fleet and exhausting a finite supply
of missiles that they might need against a future threat or hold-
ing fire and potentially losing the entire fleet if they did not re-
spond in time.
The Krulak Center also used Command to support a
unique student research project. The captains at EWS must
complete a research project during the academic year, and
they have the choice of writing an argumentative research
paper or doing a nontraditional research fellowship. An EWS
captain, who was a Marine artillery officer by trade, wanted to
do a nontraditional fellowship studying one of the future force
design concepts that General Berger laid out in the CPG: con-
verting traditional tube artillery units to rocket artillery units.37
This captain wanted to explore some of the second-order ef-
fects of employing rocket artillery in the EABO environment,
such as where they should be deployed to be most effective,
how quickly they could be resupplied, and how rapidly they
could be repositioned to keep them from becoming targets
themselves. The captain approached the Krulak Center for as-
sistance in developing a framework to collect the data need-

37
Berger, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 11.

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 MAKE IT STICK
ed for the project; and since the center had multiple copies of
Command and the computers available to run them, they of-
fered to set up a wargame tournament as a collection vector.
The tournament would benefit all parties: it helped the center
get more students engaged in wargaming and the EWS student
would collect data for their research project. As much as one
could in an unclassified environment with COTS software, this
project could identify the gaps in the problem set laid out in
the CPG and EABO operating concept and help refine them for
more advanced wargames and analysis.
The Krulak Center set up a two-day event—one day of
training student players on the game system for planning pur-
poses and one day of actual gameplay—with four teams. Each
team would take turns playing red and blue, and the team with
the highest score won the tournament. However, regardless
of who won or lost, the EWS captain would get the wealth of
data that Command generates from each game: munitions ex-
penditures, casualties, and game logs of when various sensor
systems detected and identified different targets. The captain
rolled all of this into the project and then moved on to the
unique opportunity the project offered. The research was not
simply a school-assigned intellectual exercise, but the leader-
ship of the 12th Marine Regiment was involved in the project’s
framework from the outset, and the EWS student briefed the
outcomes and lessons from the wargame tournament to 12th
Marines leadership once it was complete.38
Even if not directly involved in the full process of a student’s
research project, the Krulak Center’s organic wargaming knowl-
edge and experience allows it to act as an informal sounding
board in these instances. For example, consider the wargame
developed by Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Troy Pierce, who
was a student at the Marine Corps War College in AY21. Lieu-
tenant Colonel Pierce created a wargame—Kingfish ACE—that
did not focus specifically on combat but gamed the challenges

38
“EWS AY19–20 12th Marines Wargame After Action Report,” 12 March 2020.

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
of executing the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE)
concept. ACE is the Air Force’s approach to the challenges of
the future battlespace, where one must relocate rapidly or run
the risk of being targeted, thus requiring the ability to set up
and tear down air bases quickly, protect the bases while they
operate, all while generating combat power. Kingfish ACE put
this concept on a game board. Krulak Center staff and warga-
ming experts from the center’s wider community of interest
met with Pierce a number of times as he developed his game,
discussing different aspects of game design as the project ma-
tured to help refine what worked and improve mechanics that
were proving challenging. The center highlighted the final proj-
ect during its annual Innovation Summit, to both raise aware-
ness of the game and help Lieutenant Colonel Pierce achieve
his broader goal: getting this game out to the Air Force to allow
fellow servicemembers the chance to grapple with the chal-
lenges of ACE before having to execute the concept in reality.39
Indeed, the AY21 Innovation Summit featured several student
projects that used wargames as their research mechanism.40
The final piece of extracurricular wargaming offered by the
Krulak Center is something that Marines enjoy: competition
with the promise of recognition for the victor. Wargaming tour-
naments provide this without the pressure of a classroom as-
sessment or project grade overshadowing the experience. The
sole aim is to win, repeatedly, against other teams aiming to do
the same; yet, while the only grade is victory, the real prize is
the experience of making decisions and outthinking an inde-
pendently acting human enemy. The center organizes an an-
nual wargaming tournament called Sea Dragon, which is open
to teams from all MCU schools. In line with the idea that there is
no “one game to rule them all,” and to expose players to differ-
ent wargaming platforms, each Sea Dragon tournament uses a

39
“Marine Corps War College’s Lieutenant Colonel Troy Pierce Presents for the AY21 In-
novation Summit,” YouTube video, 3 May 2021, 12:19 min.
40
For more on the entire event, see the “Academic Year 2021 Innovation Summit” play-
list on the Krulak Center YouTube channel, posted 3 May 2021.

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 MAKE IT STICK
Figure 17. Students plan and play on DARPA’s PROTEUS wargame software
during the AY20 Sea Dragon tournament

Source: courtesy of Maj Ian T. Brown.

different game type. Sea Dragon’s first iteration used a tabletop

game from GMT’s NextWar series.41 In AY20, the center part-
nered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) to use their PROTEUS (Prototype Resilient Operations
Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Scenarios) software, which
was a real-time tactical game that modeled DARPA’s “mosaic
warfare” concept in an urban environment.42
This past academic year, given the uncertainty around
in-person gaming caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the
center ran Sea Dragon 2021 in an entirely virtual fashion—the
players used the Naval Postgraduate School’s InfoChess web-
based game, with Google Meet conferencing software provid-
ing virtual rooms where the teams could conduct planning,
41
There are currently eight Next War games on the market, including Korea, India-
Pakistan, multiple supplements, Poland, Taiwan, and Vietnam (Hanford, CA: GMT
Games, multiple dates).
42
“PROTEUS Transitions to Marine Corps Warfighting Lab,” DARPA.mil, 22 June 2021. For
a longer discussion of the mosaic warfare concept, see “DARPA Tiles Together a Vision
of Mosaic Warfare,” DARPA.mil, accessed 28 January 2022.

169
 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
Figure 18. Improvised setup for the execution of InfoChess during the AY21
Sea Dragon tournament with the students playing from home, using their
own computing devices, and coordinating via Google Meet

Source: courtesy of Maj Ian T. Brown.

in-game strategizing, and battle tracking.43 InfoChess combines

basic chess rules with many of the challenges discussed at the
highest level of the Marine Corps in the CPG and Force Design
2030, and within MCU’s curricula: incomplete and hidden in-
formation, designing a force based on limited resources and
uncertain knowledge of adversary capabilities, and balancing
investments in nontraditional domains like information and cy-
ber.44 Despite InfoChess’ deceptive simplicity, and the challeng-
es of team players trying to coordinate their actions through
the relatively narrow aperture of video conferencing, the dis-
cussions on planning and strategizing that developed in each
tournament game showed just how deeply the players were
engaged with the themes modeled in the game, and were easi-
ly the equal of discussions conducted in formal classroom set-
tings during weeks-long exercises.
Despite the volume of ink spilled above, these activities
43
InfoChess (Monterey, CA: Global ECCO, 2010).
44
Force Design 2030 (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2020).

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 MAKE IT STICK
are not an exhaustive list of the extracurricular wargaming op-
portunities promoted by the Krulak Center under the MCU
umbrella. But a comprehensive list would only reinforce the
narrative laid out here, which is that one can provide myriad
decision-making touchpoints through wargames when they
are targeted to the learning objective; leverage games simple
enough to be rapidly taught to players while still presenting
them with complex challenges; and allow the talent extant in
servicemembers to manifest itself.

CONCLUSION: LIGHT, NOT HEAT

Despite being two years into the execution of General Berger’s
CPG and the institutionalization of wargaming, it is likely still too
early to tell whether the EDCOM model will, contrary to past
efforts, make wargaming “stick,” but the early signs are prom-
ising. Institutionalizing wargaming means that a culture of war-
gaming must first grow where it was planted and then expand
outward—and that, indeed, is happening. This chapter high-
lights how Gunnery Sergeant Byrd’s efforts at CEME were im-
plemented in academies across the FMF. Sebastian Bae’s FMF:
INDOPACOM game has been played by the 11th Marine Expedi-
tionary Unit at Camp Pendleton, the 10th Marine Regiment at
Camp Lejeune, the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis,
and the University of Kansas in Lawrence among Naval Reserve
Officer Training Corps instructors. Additionally, the individual
experiences of the hundreds of students who have passed
through MCU this academic year had touchpoints with edu-
cational wargaming and will export those experiences to their
new units after graduation.
Certainly, EDCOM cannot achieve the institutionalization
of wargaming on its own, but the model for cultivating a war-
gaming culture within its walls has proved successful enough
that it can be unreservedly recommended to other training
and educational entities, as well as the operational FMF. Such
efforts would still need to be harmonized under the Comman-
dant’s overarching vision, but at least planting the model in a

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 MAJ IAN T. BROWN AND CAPT BENJAMIN M. HERBOLD
multitude of places increases the opportunity for successful
growth and linkage. This point also links back to what the au-
thors said at the outset: given that EDCOM annually receives
Marine officer and enlisted from the Fleet Marine Force, and
then send them back armed with new knowledge, EDCOM is
a natural foundation on which to build an institutional culture
of wargaming. Foster the culture in PME, and every student
who completes a course becomes an ambassador for getting
EDCOM’s model out to the operating forces—to the distance
PME programs, the planning staffs, and the frontline units
who will be the first ones to confront a thinking human adver-
sary. And as stated earlier, the elements of the EDCOM model
should not be surprising or controversial. Accept that no “one
game to rule them all” exists, nor is such a game necessary, be-
cause different training and educational objectives will require
different types of wargames to support them. Do not conflate a
wargame’s complexity with its utility—a simple game, properly
framed to its target audience and well-executed by qualified
facilitators, achieves depth of learning because the students do
not spend time fighting with the rules, but rather getting the
needed “reps and sets” of execution.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, use the talent of in-
dividual Marines to drive institutionalization. Good wargaming
is not the rare purview of a few grognards sequestered in a dark
room. Marine wargamers are out there, which should surprise
no one because wargames are simply another form of com-
petition, and Marines are nothing if not competitive. All of the
case studies above were successful because they leveraged
current and former Marines who jumped at the chance to put
their passion for wargaming to work, and poured themselves
into the effort because they believed in the potential wargam-
ing offered to turn Marines into better critical thinkers and de-
cision makers. Capitalizing on that energy is what will make the
Commandant’s lamented “greatest deficiency” a distant mem-
ory, and what will ensure that the Marine Corps finally makes
wargaming stick.

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 Chapter Seven

Wargaming
Sponsor Education

Jeff Appleget, PhD; and Robert Burks, PhD

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

To understand a perspective on sponsors, the authors first
share their experiences upon which they have based their ob-
servations. Each organization in the Department of Defense
(DOD), or those that work with the DOD, that does wargaming
has a unique approach. Just as no two wargames are alike, no
two wargaming sponsors are alike. The authors first provide the
context from which they have built their shared vision of spon-
sors. They then describe the challenges they see with today’s
DOD wargaming sponsors. After outlining the key tenets of
the sponsor education process they developed during the last
decade for the sponsors of wargames, the authors then pro-
vide their recommendations on educating DOD wargaming
sponsors writ large, building on experiences with wargaming
sponsors and also leveraging experience teaching wargaming
throughout the DOD and around the world with defense allies
and partners.

NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL WARGAMING PROGRAM

The wargaming program at the Naval Postgraduate School
(NPS) in Monterey, California, is fairly unique when compared
to other organizations that teach and conduct wargaming. For
example, the staffing of the wargaming enterprise differs great-
ly from that of its larger cousin, the Naval War College (NWC) in
Newport, Rhode Island. While NWC has no less than four differ-

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
ent wargaming organizations (Wargaming Department, Halsey
Alpha and Bravo Research Groups, and CIPI Gravely Program)
with wargaming staff, faculty, and contractors that number
more than 100 personnel, the NPS Wargaming Center consists
of two faculty and a research associate. Despite the small size,
NPS conducts 5–15 sponsored wargames annually, predomi-
nantly for DOD or defense partner organizations. The Wargam-
ing Center has conducted more than 80 sponsored wargames
in the last 12 years for 65 different organizations.
The pool of talent largely responsible for the design, con-
duct, and documentation of the wargames are the NPS grad-
uate students predominantly from the Operations Research
and Defense Analysis curricula. Most of these students are
midgrade military officers who have been on active duty any-
where from 6 to 12 years and come from all U.S. Services and
defense allies and partners. Before they set foot in the class to
take the Wargaming Applications course, they may not have
seen or participated in a wargame or, if they do have wargam-
ing experience, that experience can vary greatly.1
The genesis of a typical NPS wargame begins with the 11-
week Wargaming Applications course that is designed to teach
wargaming using a learn-by-doing model. The faculty organize
the students into teams of 4–6 students, each working for a
real-world sponsor. The first six weeks consist of the formal ed-
ucation process that includes reading papers, viewing record-
ed lectures, and completing a series of assessments to track
their progress. On week one, the students are introduced to
wargaming. On week two, each team has their first sponsor
engagement, where they learn about the wargame they will
design, conduct, and analyze for their sponsor. During weeks
two through six, the teams initiate and engage with their spon-
sor, developing the foundational products for the construction
of the sponsor’s wargame. Once they pass their Wargaming

1
“Operations Analysis (OA)—Curriculum 360,” NPS.edu, accessed 31 January 2022; and
“Operations Research (OR) Curricula,” NPS.edu, accessed 31 January 2022.

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 WARGAMING
Apprentice Certification Exam on week six, and the wargam-
ing teams’ foundational products are refined and finalized,
they devote the next four weeks to completing the design and
development of the wargame. Sometime during week 11, the
wargame is conducted for the sponsor. After analyzing the
wargame’s data, the students then brief results back to the
sponsor, and write an executive summary and wargame report
to document their wargame.
NPS also supports wargame development through week-
long wargaming courses and workshops conducted by the
NPS Mobile Education Team (MET). The team travels to the
sponsoring organization’s location and mentors a group of
16–20 students from Monday’s sponsor in-brief to Friday’s war-
games, designed and conducted by teams of students who
have created a wargame as they are learning wargaming, just as
the resident course students would. The goals of these courses
and workshops are twofold. First, NPS helps the organization
build a cadre of wargamers who, after the weeklong engage-
ment, have experienced the initiation, design, development,
execution, and analysis of a wargame in 40 hours of instruc-
tion and hands-on practical exercises. Second, if the organiza-
tion has wisely chosen the wargaming topic that the students
work on throughout the week, the organization will already
have the foundation of a wargame created and demonstrat-
ed that they can build on to address wargaming needs in the
months ahead. Just as with the resident course, the sponsor-
ing organization of the MET provides the wargaming topic that
the students work on throughout the week, with the students
engaging the sponsor on Monday, reengaging on Wednesday,
and then conducting the wargame for the sponsor on Friday.

NPS WARGAME SPONSORS

Introduction
DOD wargaming sponsors come from a variety of organi-
zations. The Joint Staff, Service components, combatant
commands, and other flag-level major commands all use war-

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
gaming as well as other tools to better understand the threats
the nation faces today and to better prepare for the threats of
the future. The background and wargaming experience of the
sponsors can vary greatly, ranging from active duty to defense
civilians and midgrade to flag rank equivalent. They may have
had little to no experience with wargaming; however, most be-
lieve that a wargame is a simulation of some aspects of military
and/or government endeavor.
Since NPS students are destined to return to their respec-
tive Services as defense analysts, the faculty want them to ex-
perience as close to a real-life sponsor encounter as possible
during the wargaming course to prepare them for the future.
It has been the authors’ experience that many defense spon-
sors only have a vague idea of what a wargame is, and if you
asked them the difference between a wargame and a closed-
loop combat simulation, some would struggle to distinguish
between the two. A few may even offer that a closed-loop
combat simulation is simply a computerized wargame. While
the 2015 U.S. DOD reinvigoration of wargaming by then Dep-
uty Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work has served to help
educate many senior leaders about wargaming, the notion
that “wargaming would be better if we just automated it all”
is still found in the Pentagon, in combatant commands, and
throughout the Services.2

CHALLENGES WITH TODAY’S DOD WARGAMING SPONSORS

Many senior leaders today do not have a good understanding
of what wargaming can contribute to their organization. There
are several reasons for this.
First, wargaming has been all but abandoned as a profes-
sional development tool for warfighters. Commanders used to
devote time to wargames that allowed senior leaders to pass
on war planning and warfighting lessons to their subordinates.

2
Robert O. Work memorandum, “Wargaming and Innovation,” Deputy Secretary of
Defense, 9 February 2015.

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 WARGAMING
Much like the Prussians’ Free Kriegsspiel, good leaders would
test their junior officers and noncommissioned officers by
having them wargame plans before field exercises and deploy-
ments, assessing and updating their subordinate’s professional
knowledge through mentoring.3 Today, that rarely occurs.
Second, wargaming has been given short shrift as a plan-
ning tool. The Cold War offered two fairly static major areas of
operation (AOR) for nearly 40 years, where the nation planned
to fight: Korea and Europe. From the mid-1950s until the Berlin
Wall fell, not much changed in these areas, so war plans did
not need extensive updating, hence little wargaming of these
AORs occurred.
Third, with the rise of the computer-based combat sim-
ulations championed by the analysis and training communi-
ties, wargaming was seen as an outdated tool whose time had
come and gone. Operations research analysts embraced and
oversold the combat simulation as their flagship analytic tool,
and many became advocates for purely quantitative analysis
tools, neglecting the need for warfighters to leverage warga-
ming to develop robust concepts of operations that ensured
operationally relevant scenarios were instantiated in combat
simulations.4 This, coupled with the ever-increasing digitization
of day-to-day lives, has led many senior leaders to believe that
digitization makes everything better.
Often wargaming sponsors do not know that there are dif-
ferent purposes for conducting wargames, and these sponsors
struggle to communicate what the objective of the wargame is,
to include the primary target (players or sponsor) of the warga-
ming effort they wish the NPS team to address.

EDUCATING WARGAMING SPONSORS

NPS then works to educate the sponsors on the basics of war-

3
Verdy du Vernois, A Simplified War Game, trans. Eben Swift (Kansas City, MO: Hudson
and Kimberly, 1897).
4
Jeff Appleget and Fred Cameron, “Analytic Wargaming on the Rise,” Phalanx 48, no. 1
(March 2015): 28–32.

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
gaming much as with new wargaming students. They need to
understand the strengths and weaknesses of wargaming and
combat simulations as analytic tools, the different purposes of
wargames, and the sponsor engagement process that allows
the sponsor and the wargaming team to develop a shared vi-
sion of the problem that the wargame will be designed to ad-
dress.

WARGAMES AND COMBAT SIMULATIONS

NPS educates sponsors six weeks to six months before they en-
gage the students by sending them three pages of guidance.
First, NPS wants to ensure they know the difference between
wargaming and what the authors call “simulation studies.”
Wargames focus on human decision making and produce
largely qualitative results, such as concepts of operations or
risk assessment of courses of action. Wargames are very useful
in understanding how commanders may fight different force
structures with different concepts of operations. Quantify-
ing how well each force structure may fight is better suited to
simulation studies. Simulation studies use closed-loop, com-
puter-based combat simulations to produce large amounts
of quantitative data. This data is then used to statistically com-
pare the attributes of different force alternatives. In the context
of a campaign analysis, wargaming and simulation studies are
used together. Wargaming is used to determine how each
force alternative fights (i.e., concepts of operations and em-
ployment or courses of action), and then the simulation, after
instantiating how each alternative fights in the simulation, is
used to determine how well each force fights, comparing the
alternatives’ force effectiveness using quantitative measures of
effectiveness and performance.

WARGAMING PURPOSES
NPS then educates the sponsor to the different purposes of
defense wargaming. This is vital for them to understand so
they can better communicate to the students their wargaming

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 WARGAMING
needs. The authors see three primary purposes for wargaming
used in defense: analytical, educational, and experiential.
The purpose of an educational wargame is to educate the
players. It may introduce them to new concepts or technolo-
gies, new doctrine or tactics, or a new region of interest’s geog-
raphy and adversary. The series of War Plan Orange wargames
at the Naval War College from 1919 to 1940 immediately comes
to mind as an example of educational wargaming.5
The purpose of an experiential wargame is to provide the
players with experience. While that sounds similar to an edu-
cational wargame, an experiential wargame is crafted to allow
the players to experience a specific role in a simulated environ-
ment to improve their ability to function in that same role in
a similar real-world environment. Think of having a command
and staff plan and execute simulated combat missions prior to
a real-world deployment. The U.S. Army’s Mission Command
Training Program conducts wargaming to prepare commands
and staffs for overseas deployment.6
The purpose of educational and experiential wargames
is closely related in that the primary focus of the wargame is
to impart something to the players—education or experience.
The analytical wargame differs from these two purposes be-
cause the analytical wargame is focused on imparting some-
thing to the sponsor of the wargame. Most of the wargames
conducted at NPS are analytical wargames.
An analytical wargame is designed to produce the infor-
mation that allows the wargaming team to provide insights or
findings from the wargame to the wargame’s sponsor. To begin
the wargaming process, the sponsor provides the wargame’s
objective and specifies several key issues that the wargame
must address. The wargame is then constructed to allow its
players to produce the information that the wargaming team
5
Michael Vlahos, “Wargaming, an Enforcer of Strategic Realism: 1919–1942,” Naval War
College Review 39, no. 2 (1986): 7–22.
6
“Mission Command Training Program (MCTP) Overview Brief” (brief, Col John M.
McHugh Training Center Leavenworth, KS, 28 July 2020).

179
 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
needs to then analyze, ultimately concluding in the formula-
tion of the findings and insights for each of the sponsor’s key
issues. While choosing the players with the proper background
is vital to the success of the wargame, there is no expectation
that the wargame needs to be constructed to impart any expe-
rience or knowledge to the players.
Planning wargames are a particular type of analytical war-
game where the objective is to test several courses of action
in order to select the best one from which to develop a plan.
Joint Planning, Joint Publication 5-0, outlines wargaming’s role in
the seven-step planning process and prescribes a wargaming
methodology called action-reaction-counteraction for con-
structing the wargame’s moves.7 While NPS faculty have some
pedagogical reservations about the robustness of the meth-
odology, at least the combatant commands are applying ANY
rigor to wargaming as they complete the planning process. The
authors strongly suspect many planning wargames are nothing
more than hastily organized check-the-box events (or BOPSATs,
bunch of people sitting around talking) that confirm the com-
mander’s favorite course of action is indeed brilliant.

SPONSOR ENGAGEMENT PROCESS

The authors advocate for a series of sponsor engagements be-
tween the sponsor and the wargaming team to come to an un-
derstanding of the amount of effort required. The ultimate goal
of this engagement is the production of the sponsor proposal
agreement, which can also be thought of as a sponsor con-
tract, although NPS shies away from using the word contract as
sponsors would then want to get their organization’s legal team
involved in reviewing contracts.
The authors encourage the sponsors not to scope the war-
game to something they believe the students can accomplish.
Their experience with real-life sponsors (both authors served
as operations research analysts on active duty for many years)

7
Joint Planning, Joint Publication 5-0 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020), V-31.

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 WARGAMING
Table 11. Wargaming purpose
Purpose Focus Product Example
Analytical Sponsor Insights and find- Develop a concept of op-
(general) ings for sponsor’s erations for a force fight-
objective and key ing with new technologies
issues
Analytical Commander Multiple courses of Develop a plan to re-
(planning) action (COAs) each spond to an adversary’s
wargamed against aggression against an al-
the enemy’s most lied nation in a combatant
likely and most dan- command’s AOR
gerous COAs
Educational Player Produce better ed- Introduce players to a new
ucated players geographic area, concept,
or technology
Experiential Player Provide better ex- Allow players to practice
perienced players decision making in their
actual positions in a con-
flict scenario

Source: compiled by the authors.

is that sponsors often have no idea what is involved in creat-

ing and conducting a wargame. When the sponsor states their
wargame’s objective and key issues, they may not know if they
are asking for weeks, months, or even years of effort. NPS wants
the students to experience this firsthand. The challenge many
military officers face is that they have worked for military lead-
ers their entire career. Those leaders typically understand what
resources their subordinates have at their disposal, and thus
they give them tasks that can be addressed with the resources
on hand. DOD sponsors of analytical efforts typically do not
understand the resources required or the resources on hand
and may have little knowledge of other analytical requirements
competing for the same resources. Unless the wargaming team
provides some boundaries on what can be achieved, the team
will agree to six months of wargaming that must be completed

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
in 11 weeks, setting the stage for disappointment and frustration
on the part of all involved.

THREE SPONSOR INTERACTIONS

The sponsor proposal agreement is informed by a minimum of
three sponsor engagements. The initial engagement on week
two is where the sponsor describes the wargame they want
the student team to design, conduct, and analyze. The briefing
also may include information about the sponsor’s organization
and indicate why the organization needs the wargame to be
conducted.
After this first engagement, the NPS wargaming team
meets with the goal of understanding the sponsor’s objective
and issues. They may rewrite the objective and issues so that
they are more easily understood by the team. The team will
also identify any constraints and assumptions they heard from
the sponsor and record those. They may begin development
of a lexicon to ensure that DOD buzzwords that are currently in
vogue are clearly understood by the sponsor and team. Finally,
the team identifies the requests for information (RFIs) that will
go back to the sponsor for action. Once all this is completed,
the team will schedule the second sponsor interaction.
The purpose of the second interaction is clarification—did
the team understand what the sponsor wants? The sponsor
and team need to agree on the objective and issues so there
is no misunderstanding about what the team is tasked to do.
Terms that need clarification should be agreed to as well. If the
sponsor and team have not worked together, the authors dis-
courage any attempt by the team to scope the wargame at this
point. At most, the team may offer a prioritized set of issues to
the sponsor to see if the team’s assessment matches that of the
sponsor. This prioritization would then be used by the team for
the third, scoping engagement if necessary.
The third engagement can be the most difficult as it is like-
ly that the team will tell the sponsor that some of their issues
may need to be treated less rigorously than others, or per-

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 WARGAMING
haps even dropped from the wargame. The wargaming team
is obligated to prepare for this organization by taking each of
the sponsor’s key issues and determining the amount of effort
the wargame will require to address each issue, which is made
when the team drafts the initial Data Collection and Manage-
ment Plan (DCMP). The DCMP forms the foundation on which
the wargame will be constructed. Each of the sponsor’s issues
will be decomposed into its constituent essential questions
(EQs). Each of these EQs need to be answered if that partic-
ular sponsor issue is to be fully addressed in the wargame.
Some of these EQs may be answered through preliminary
research, and some will be answered by the wargame itself.
Scoping the wargame cannot take place until the amount of
effort each issue will take to address has been estimated by this
process.

Scoping Techniques
NPS teaches the students two techniques that can be used
to bring the sponsor to an understanding of the amount of
effort the wargaming team may exert on the sponsored war-
game. The first is what we call the analyst business model,
which presents the three attributes: good, fast, and cheap.
The sponsor can have any two at the expense of the third. For
example, if the sponsor wants a quality wargame (good), de-
signed and conducted in a short amount of time (fast), then a
large quantity of resources will need to be expended (expen-
sive). For the student teams, there is usually no option to throw
additional resources at the problem, so the analyst business
model is something that will be more useful later in their career.
The faculty require students to create a list of constraints,
limitations, and assumptions (CLAs) for the wargame. These
CLAs are a formalized method of communicating the quality of
the wargame the team can produce for the sponsor.
The constraints originate from and are imposed by the
sponsor. Time is a universal constraint, where the game must
be completed and results documented before a given date.

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
Academically, the time is also a function of the end of the NPS
academic quarter. Other constraints a sponsor may impose in-
clude the use of a specific scenario or certain players.
Limitations represent an inability of the wargaming team
to completely address the sponsor’s issues. They may in-
clude a lack of subject matter expertise to design the game
or the lack of experience the pool of players they have re-
cruited can bring to the table. Wargames across the DOD
typically struggle to ensure the adversary is well played.
Constraints may impose limitations, such as the constraint of
time minimizing the amount of key issues that the team’s war-
game can address. Limitations need to be revealed to the spon-
sor so they understand the limitations’ effect on the quality of
the wargame’s outputs. The sponsor may be able to mitigate
some limitations by providing the team additional resources,
such as access to subject matter experts, players with the right
pedigree from their organization, and perhaps funding to re-
cruit experienced adversary players to the wargame.
Assumptions are statements that are taken as true in
the absence of facts. Some assumptions originate from
the sponsor, usually describing the environment with-
in which the wargame is to be conducted. The wargam-
ing team may need to make additional assumptions. Often
these assumptions are made to better focus players on the
wargame’s primary issues. Cold War studies focused on
analyzing future force structure requirements usually as-
sumed that nuclear weapons would not be used, as this
would unnecessarily complicate and obfuscate the analysis.
Most study team limitations need to be accommodated by
assumptions. For example, a limitation for a wargame focusing
on new technology may be a lack of operational performance
data. The accompanying assumption may be that operation-
al test data is a reasonable surrogate for operational perfor-
mance data.
The CLAs included in the sponsor proposal agreement are

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 WARGAMING
only the initial draft. The CLAs will mature during the course of
the wargame’s development, and they must be revisited with
the sponsor periodically. The final version of the CLAs needs
to be accepted by the sponsor to ensure that both sponsor
and team agree and to ensure that the wargaming team has
not “assumed away” a key aspect of the wargame the sponsor
wants examined.
The authors do manage the sponsors’ expectations about
the length of the actual wargame that their student teams will
conduct for them. As the NPS students are taking the War-
gaming Applications Course, they will also be taking between
two and four other courses and they also may be working on
their theses, so producing a wargame for the sponsor is not
the only task they have to complete in 11 weeks. NPS wargames
are small, usually fewer than 20 participants. The typical NPS
wargame will take 8–12 hours of actual game time, and is usu-
ally executed during a three-day period, which also includes in
briefs, game socialization, and postgame analysis.

SPONSOR PROPOSAL AGREEMENT

The sponsor proposal agreement is between the sponsor
and the NPS student team. The agreement is signed by both
parties by the end of week four. The agreement includes the
wargame’s objective and the sponsor’s key issues. The war-
gaming team provides the sponsor with the initial draft of the
constraints, limitations, and assumptions as an appendix to the
agreement. The agreement also indicates who has accepted
the responsibility to provide the scenario of the wargame and
who is responsible for recruiting the players.
The sponsor proposal agreement, once completed, ensures
that the development of the wargame will be properly focused
and will have a reasonable chance of adequately addressing
the sponsor’s key issues. While no agreement can prevent what
in the DOD is affectionately known as mission creep—adding
tasks to be completed after the end of the problem definition

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
phase—the agreement does provide a point of departure that
the wargaming team can use to negotiate with the sponsor in
an attempt to keep the wargame on track if the sponsor needs
to add tasks after the agreement has been signed. The general
idea is that the agreement has specified the amount of effort
that the wargaming team can expend within the allotted time
frame on behalf of the sponsor. If another task is added, then
a task needs to be removed from the original agreement. A
reasonable sponsor will appreciate this and will work with the
team. In the larger DOD world, not all sponsors are reasonable.

Sponsor Wargaming Proposal Agreement Example

The following wargame proposal is agreed to by the under-
signed.

Sponsor objective and issues:

Wargame objective: Analyze Atlantic Fleet operations in sup-
port of NATO
Wargame issues to be examined:
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to safeguard
convoys
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to conduct anti-
surface warfare
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to conduct
antisubmarine warfare
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to engage select-
ed operational targets ashore
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to engage select-
ed strategic targets ashore
• Assess the ability of the Atlantic Fleet to conduct
amphibious operations

Wargame details:
• Wargame scenario provided by sponsor (Baltic Sce-
nario)

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 WARGAMING
• Players recruited/provided by sponsor (representa-
tives from Atlantic Fleet command group and princi-
pal staff elements

Time line:
• Date of sponsor/wargaming team interim progress re-
view (IPR): 1 May 2022
• Dates the wargame will be executed: 6–8 June 2022
• Date the analysis brief will be provided to sponsor by
wargaming team: 14 June 2022
• Date the executive summary, final, report and all war-
game materials provided to sponsor: 17 June 2022

Draft key constraints, limitations, and assumptions (CLAs):

Constraints: wargaming team will have 10 weeks to design,
develop, conduct, analyze and document
the wargame
Limitations: the team does not have a subject matter ex-
pert on the NATO adversary to advise on war-
game design
Assumptions: an adversary subject matter expert will be
provided by Atlantic Fleet

Sponsor representative signature

Wargaming team lead signature

EDUCATING DOD WARGAMING SPONSORS

Introduction
Since many of the NPS wargaming sponsors come from the
DOD, the authors believe their sponsor engagement protocols
are useful for any wargaming team working for a DOD spon-
sor. Several years ago, when the authors were teaching one of
their first MET courses, a student, who was a DOD civilian and
former military, was incredulous that the faculty thought spon-

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
sors did not clearly define the problem. With more than 15–20
years working as uniformed operations research analysts, the
authors have had many firsthand encounters with DOD analy-
sis sponsors. DOD sponsors typically are not analysts, so they
often have little to no appreciation for the amount of time re-
quired to perform analytic studies, including wargames. A for-
mer director of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command
Analysis Center was routinely called on a Friday night by their
boss, the four-star officer of the command, and asked to “do
some runs” of a simulation over the weekend and brief them
on Monday. The analysis effort the commander was asking for
during a weekend actually represents weeks if not months of
preparation and analytic effort.
The authors realize that the NPS wargaming program does
not provide a venue that can answer every wargaming require-
ment across the DOD. Large and lengthy wargames are not
something that can easily be accomplished with the current
NPS wargaming model that relies on students with an 11-week
time line. However, the authors are confident that the spon-
sor education and engagement processes outlined here will
serve any DOD wargaming enterprise well. As they have taught
wargaming across DOD organizations through the Mobile Ed-
ucation Team courses and workshops, the authors have had a
chance to engage those organizations to learn of their unique
wargaming requirements, their current wargaming models
and practices, and the wargaming challenges that they face.
NPS graduates often reach back to NPS when they encounter
wargaming challenges in their assignments, so the authors find
themselves involved in many DOD organizations’ wargaming
enterprises either as ad hoc advisors or under more formal
arrangements, such as bringing a MET to a DOD organization
to build a resident cadre of wargaming expertise. The authors’
observations and recommendations that follow are based on
their interactions with DOD sponsors outside of the NPS war-
gaming activities.

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 WARGAMING
WARGAMING IMPROVEMENT REQUIREMENTS
One area that needs improvement is the availability of educat-
ed wargamers. Unfortunately, because of the Cold War and
other factors, there are very few wargamers to be found in the
DOD today, so senior leaders cannot rely on their subordinates
to provide the command with wargaming expertise. Some
combatant commands have hired a few contractors, typical-
ly retired officers, as the command’s sole wargaming expert. It
has been the authors’ experience that the wargaming knowl-
edge of these contractors can vary greatly. Even if they are ex-
pert wargamers, there are too few of them to ensure a robust,
relevant wargame is developed and conducted. Until the DOD
professional military education system educates officers on
wargaming creation, commands will need to bring in wargam-
ing education teams to educate a cadre of wargamers for the
command. This may well be a recurring requirement as active
duty wargamers will rotate in and out of the command. Every
major staff element in a combatant command should have
at least two wargamers who can represent the staff section in
the design and execution of a major wargame. Senior leaders
need to inventory their current cadre of wargamers and act to
ensure their organization has a sufficient number of proficient
wargamers and a resourced wargaming education plan to en-
sure wargaming proficiency is maintained.
Because of this lack of resident wargaming expertise,
many commands have outsourced some of their wargaming
requirements to external organizations. Several of these or-
ganizations do conduct quality wargames; however, they are
also expensive, and these wargames take time and planning.
Relying on outsiders for an organization’s routine wargaming
requirements should really be seen as a stop-gap measure until
an organization can develop a robust and responsive in-house
wargaming capability.
During times when DOD combatant commands were
flush with contingency funds, it was common practice to hire
outside organizations to design and conduct wargames on be-

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
half of the command. However, if senior leaders lack the knowl-
edge to design and conduct relevant wargames, it is difficult
if not impossible for those leaders to supervise the design of
quality wargames by others, whether outside organizations or
internal ad hoc wargaming teams formed for specific wargam-
ing requirements. Senior leaders need to be able to conduct
quality control supervision of outside organizations that are
designing wargames for the command.
Wargaming sponsors sometimes have no idea what re-
sources are required to produce a quality wargame. This can
be especially problematic when sponsors task their staff to pro-
duce wargaming results within a week of a wargaming tasking
because that is all the time they had been given. The old phrase,
“if you want it bad, you will get it bad,” comes to mind here.
Senior leaders need to understand what they need from a
wargame, and how much time a wargame will take to produce
what they need.
Often sponsors have a clear understanding of the prob-
lem, but they struggle to clearly communicate it to others.
Sometimes they do not have a clear understanding of the
problem, and need others to help them converge on a clearly
defined problem statement. Staff officers and integrated prod-
uct team (IPT) leads can be their own worst enemies in that
they sometimes hear a vague or poorly communicated prob-
lem from a sponsor and instead of reengaging the sponsor to
clarify the problem definition, they reimagine the problem into
something that they know how to address and rush off to be-
gin a staff effort that, in the end, will not address the problem
the sponsor really needed help with. The sponsor engagement
process outlined in The Craft of Wargaming needs to be used
here, and the senior leaders need to embrace, encourage, and
plan for this sponsor engagement process instead of forcing
the staff officers or IPT leads to beg for more senior leader guid-
ance.
The above-mentioned challenges all impact the planning
process of major commands, such as combatant commands.

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 WARGAMING
Today’s senior leaders need to heed the advice of general
of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but
planning is everything.” Eisenhower understood that winning
battles required warfighters to engage each other and build a
shared vision and knowledge of the battlespace, not blow the
dust off of a sheaf of papers and hope that the planners who
produced the documents were able to anticipate the risks and
the contingencies the leaders would need to execute once the
battle began. Today, combatant commands focus on finishing
contingency plans as quickly and as painlessly as possible, and
the authors’ experience has been that the wargaming portion
of COA development is often accomplished hurriedly and with
little rigor if it is even done at all.
Risks to courses of action are not revealed, and con-
tingency plans are not developed for friction points identi-
fied in COA wargaming (assuming the wargaming is done
at all). One of the authors’ students who graduated and
served in a combatant command recommended that the
planning process would be much improved by conducting
wargaming throughout the planning process, not just in the
fourth step where prescribed by Joint Planning (see below).
Senior leaders need to ensure that, as a minimum, COA warga-
ming is done and the risks to the selected COA are document-
ed and contingency plans are developed.

CONCLUSION
The utilization of wargaming across the DOD to gain insights
to complex problems and issues has grown over the last sev-
eral years. Wargaming will continue to be a critical asset for the
DOD to address many of the future challenges associated with
the growing uncertainty of the future. The authors discussed
many of the current difficulties senior leaders have with war-
gaming and believe that today’s leaders, both civilian and uni-
formed, need an executive course on wargaming to educate
them on how to supervise the design, development, execu-
tion, and analysis of wargames. They need to understand what

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 JEFF APPLEGET AND ROBERT BURKS
wargames can do for them and when wargames are not an ap-
propriate tool. They also need to understand what the current
challenges are to designing and executing useful wargames,
and how they can respond to these challenges.
Sponsor education will always be required, and organi-
zations that do wargaming must take on this responsibility to
produce successful, relevant wargames for their sponsors. The
techniques the authors have discussed above can be used to
outline a sponsor education syllabus to develop a sponsor en-
gagement protocol or program for a wargaming organization.

192
 Chapter Eight

Wargaming for Social Science

Brandon Valeriano, PhD; and Benjamin Jensen, PhD

INTRODUCTION
There has been a recent explosion in interest and research on
wargames as methods of social science research.1 Recreating
hypothetical domains of practice often devoid of unclassified,
reliable data and evidence (i.e., future wars and covert oper-
ations), wargames can provide researchers with a method to
gather evidence and observations on events that might oth-
erwise be unobservable or difficult to measure. In short, war-
games provide for a method to tackle “wicked” problems or
examine what otherwise might be unknown. Like historical
case reconstructions, they are reenactments, albeit future-
oriented, that recreate key moments of interdependent deci-
sion making in fluid environments subject to high degrees of
uncertainty and friction.2
A wargame, as defined by Peter P. Perla is a “model or sim-
ulation whose operation does not involve the activities of ac-
tual military forces, and whose sequence of events affects and
is, in turn, affected by the decision made by players presenting

1
Erik Lin-Greenberg, Reid B. C. Pauly, and Jacquelyn G. Schneider, “Wargaming for In-
ternational Relations Research,” European Journal of International Relations (2021),
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211064090; Reid B. C. Pauly, “Would US Leaders Push the
Button?: Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security 43,
no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00333; and Andrew W. Reddie et al., “Next-
generation Wargames,” Science 362, no. 6421 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/science
.aav2135.
2
Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992).

193
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
opposing sides.”3 Wargames have a long history of use in mili-
tary communities. The authors’ purpose here is to not review
this history but to examine the nature of experimentation and
hypothesis testing in gaming settings. From the application of
“military chess” in eighteenth century Germany to the modern
equivalent advanced by the U.S. military, wargames provide
a means to explore outcomes and win conditions in various
scenarios. This situates wargames as a theory of practice and
theory of decision making that uses reconstructions to under-
stand how actors approach the complex system that is war.
The focus here is mainly on analytic wargames, “distinct in
that the purpose of play is not to improve player ability or gen-
erate an enjoyable experience, but to help further the under-
standing of a phenomenon by observers and analysts, and to
generate data that can be subsequently analyzed to improve
and refine future planning.”4 The goal is to gain more from a
game than just experience; data can be extracted and analyzed
after multiple iterations transforming the purpose and utility of
a wargame.
Seen as a social science method, wargames illuminate a
pathway toward both novel methods of experimentation and
as a means of investigating plausible alternative futures that
have yet to occur in the real world. The use of wargames to
evaluate interdependent decision making has a long tradition
in the military profession and strategic studies communities.5
Wargames, as a form of simulation, are a useful method for
evaluating competing hypotheses, focusing data investiga-
tions, and delineating patterns otherwise unobserved though
massive online interactions. They can provide inputs to future-

3
Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapo-
lis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 276.
4
Benjamin Jensen and David Banks, Cyber Operations in Conflict: Lessons from Analytic
Wargaming, CLTC Occasional White Paper Series (Berkeley: Center for Long-Term Cy-
bersercurity, University of California, 2018), 8.
5
Perla, The Art of Wargaming; and Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to
Gigabytes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1017
/CBO9781139579872.

194
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
oriented counterfactual scenarios that form the core of de-
fense planning. This chapter explores how wargames can lever-
age social science techniques and how social science research
can leverage wargames to investigate novel topics.
Yet, utilizing wargames as a method does not come
without controversy and intense pushback from some in the
wargaming community who see wargames as an art, not a
science. For many, wargames are subjective events that defy
replication and generalizability that are core functions of
social science.6 This chapter will review both the utility and
potential drawbacks of wargames for social science, situat-
ing the issue as a novel method not without criticism. As with
all methods of social science analysis, knowledge of the pos-
sibilities and limitations of the research method is critical to
understanding how progress can be made on questions that
have no obvious answers. War is a core social problem and
therefore sometimes requires tried and tested methods of
social science investigation to uncover otherwise unknown
patterns and connections.
Analytic wargames remain a viable method of exploring
contingent outcomes that apply untested technological inno-
vations, a research process that can be enhanced by utilizing
social science methods. At the same time, the wargame com-
munity can bring much to the social science community by al-
lowing for exploration of novel hypotheses that lack empirical
information providing fertile grounds for research. This chapter
proceeds with an exploration of what social science research
is, how wargames currently employ social science research,
and finally, the potential downsides of applying social science
to wargaming.

WHAT IS SOCIAL SCIENCE AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Defining social science can be tricky. The subject matter is so

6
Peter P. Perla, “Now Hear This—Improving War-gaming Is Worthwhile—and Smart,”
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 142, no. 1 (2016).

195
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
broad, and many analysts go directly to explaining the research
methodologies, following Emile Durkheim’s early entry in 1895,
without diving into social science as an epistemology.7 The
United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council de-
fines social science as “the study of society and the manner in
which people behave and influence the world around us.”8 The
broader field is made up of many different disciplines including
sociology, political science, and economics. The tradition gen-
erally invokes quantitative or qualitative research methods that
follow the scientific method.
The basic premise for the social sciences is that scholars
can seek to build knowledge to understand and explain the
functions of society. Alvin Goldman and Cailin O’Connor be-
lieve that “epistemology in general is concerned with how peo-
ple should go about the business of trying to determine what
is true, or what are the facts of the matter, on selected topics.”9
What are the social facts inherent in society and what methods
allow scholars to understand what makes up fact and obser-
vation?
Centered directly as part of scholarship after the enlight-
enment, the social sciences seek to explain how the world
and society works in order to achieve some form of prog-
ress or at least understanding.10 The social sciences are often
seen as an outgrowth of the positivist tradition to determine
what might be the core of knowledge, as opposed to the de-
construction in the post-modern project. This connection
became so great that during the 1950s, “the term behavioral

7
Emile Durkheim, Les Règles de la méthode sociologique [The Rules of Sociological
Method] (Paris: Alcan, 1895).
8
“What Is Social Science?,” Economic and Social Research Council, accessed 31 January
2022.
9
Alvin Goldman and Cailin O’Connor, “Social Epistemology,” in The Stanford Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab,
Stanford University, 2021).
10
Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Social Science and Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlight-
enment and Today,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2009): 29–46, https://doi
.org/10.3366/E1479665108000316.

196
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
sciences was often applied to the disciplines designated as
the social sciences.”11
The core challenge of social science methods is judgment
aggregation, or how we understand that the decisions of indi-
viduals feed into the behavior of groups that make up social
units.12 The goal is to understand the wisdom of the crowd, and
how groups collectively come up with solutions to problems.13
This leads directly to the issue of wargames; applying social sci-
ence methods to wargames allows researchers to understand
the wisdom of the crowd by exploring outcomes among many,
not the just the select few, over multiple iterations.
The central idea is the larger the sample, the more likely
one is to see a central tendency and convergence to a future
mode. The countervailing wisdom is that the interdependent
decision making defining high politics and war are not repro-
ducible due to contingency, the small sample of the popula-
tion that in their life will find themselves “at the table,” and the
unique character of those moments (i.e., fog, friction, chance).14
The analytical question is how best to approximate these mo-
ments: single, large-scale wargames with experienced players
or through multiple iterations mixing experienced and novice
players confronting a choice horizon.
Critically, the social sciences differ from the hard sciences in
that methods of observation and experimentation are difficult
when they involve social functions and human beings. Hold-
ing a treatment sterile is impossible in the social world. Another
challenge for the community is that war is a rare event and the

11
R. A. Nisbet and Liah Greenfeld, “Social Science,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 October
2021.
12
Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of
Corporate Agents (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093
/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001.
13
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, an imprint of Random
House, 2005).
14
Jonathan Bendor and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Historical Contingencies in the Evolution of
States and Their Militaries,” World Politics 71, no. 1 (2019): 126–61, https://doi.org/10.1017
/S0043887118000229.

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 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
most unsterile and contaminated environment known to hu-
manity.15 This makes observation difficult and statistical analysis
even more complicated because of the rarity of the event and
impossibility of creating control and treatment groups. War
and conflict are not events that can be created or induced.
Wargames can then provide a service as a methodologi-
cal innovation allowing observers to seek to understand how
social agents behave during the chaotic and complicated stra-
tegic conditions presented during battle. The goal is to explore
how the social world works with either qualitative or quantita-
tive methods. As a method of social science, wargames allow
for experimentation and simulation of rare events to observe
how individuals function in social units during adverse condi-
tions unlikely to be replicated without enormous costs. Extract-
ing data from these interactions is the natural next step and a
core function of social science methodologies.

WARGAMES AS SOCIAL SCIENCE

With a rising concern about the impact of emergent technol-
ogies (such as cyber, artificial intelligence, and unmanned ve-
hicles) on the battlefield, there is a corresponding renaissance
in the use of wargames to evaluate interdependent decision
making in a strategic setting. As Benjamin Jensen and David
Banks note, “analytic wargames represent a proven approach
for assessing the potential outcomes of uncertain future events
like cyber war.”16 Bethany L. Goldblum, Andrew W. Reddie, and
Jason C. Reinhardt echo that “empirical data on the impact of
emerging technologies such as cyber weaponry, advanced
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tools, and
precision-guided munitions are lacking.”17
15
Gary King and Langche Zeng, “Explaining Rare Events in International Rela-
tions,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001): 693–715, https://doi.org/10.1162
/00208180152507597.
16
Jensen and Banks, “Cyber Operations in Conflict,” 7.
17
Bethany L. Goldblum, Andrew W. Reddie, and Jason C. Reinhardt, “Wargames as Ex-
periments: The Project on Nuclear Gaming’s SIGNAL Framework,” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, 29 May 2019.

198
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
Wargames can provide a unique service helping the re-
search community understand the impact of new innovations
in disruptive technology when they are lacking empirical ob-
servations. Useful examples include military investments in ar-
tificial intelligence, evaluating competitive strategies, and state
use of cyber operations during a militarized dispute.
The goal is understanding how future applications of
technology might impact decision making and doctrine. By
repeating play and designing scenarios that apply different
treatments, researchers can explore the contingent nature of
outcomes. As Benjamin Schechter, Jacquelyn Schneider, and
Rachael Shaffer note that “recent work on the integration of
experiments within wargaming suggests wargames can utilize
social scientific methods, and prioritizing iteration, control, and
generalizability within experimental design can provide new
opportunities for wargames.”18
First, the different types of social science research that can
incorporate wargames must be explored. Not all social science
methods are created alike, and the wargame community has
undertaken experimental wargames, computational simula-
tions, and alternative reality/counterfactual thought experi-
ments to understand how novel technologies can impact the
battlefield.

Experimental Methods
Experimental methods used for research in political science
and international relations scholarship is not new. What is new
is connecting wargames with traditional social science meth-
odologies leveraged at scale through computational technolo-
gies. Others have explored the nature of experimental research

18
Benjamin Schechter, Jacquelyn Schneider, and Rachael Shaffer, “Wargaming as a
Methodology: The International Crisis Wargame and Experimental Wargaming,” Sim-
ulation and Gaming 52, no. 4 (2021): 513–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120987581.

199
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
design in greater depth.19 For the purposes of this chapter, the
core idea is that experiments hold treatment conditions and
randomization at the heart of the research design to explore
varying hypotheses.
Peter P. Perla, Michael Markowitz, and Christopher Weuve
argue that “games provide a wealth of flexibility for explor-
ing, testing, and demonstrating a host of variables and issues
associated with decision making.”20 Thus, the core of the ex-
perimental method as applied to wargaming is to allow for flex-
ibility in altering treatments and variables to explore decision
making. Through multiple iterations reproduced at enormous
scale, researchers can examine the statistical support for the
various hypotheses proposed.
Schechter, Schneider, and Shaffer note that experimental
applications within wargames are not a new development,
with many in the past exploring similar ground.21 They argue
that some conditions can be relaxed in experimental warga-

19
Thad Dunning, Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-based Ap-
proach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1017
/CBO9781139084444; Thad Dunning, “Transparency, Replication, and Cumulative
Learning: What Experiments Alone Cannot Achieve,” Annual Review of Political Science
19 (2016): 541–63; Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins, and Teppei Yamamoto, “Caus-
al Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated
Preference Experiments,” Political Analysis 22, no. 1 (2014): 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1093
/pan/mpt024; Susan D. Hyde, “Experiments in International Relations: Lab, Survey,
and Field,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 403–24, https://doi.org/10.1146
/annurev-polisci-020614-094854; and Rose McDermott, “Experimental Methods in
Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 5, no. 1 (2002): 31–61, https://doi
.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.5.091001.170657.
20
Peter P. Perla, Michael Markowitz, and Christopher Weuve, Game-Based Experimen-
tation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness (Alex-
andria, VA: CNA, 2005), 3.
21
Lincoln P. Bloomfield and Barton Whaley, The Political-military Exercise: A Progress
Report (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology, 1963); John A. Kringen, “Utility of Political Gaming: An Evaluation,” Simulation
& Games 11, no. 2 (1980): 139–48, https://doi.org/10.1177/0037550080112001; Robert
Mandel, “Political Gaming and Foreign Policy Making during Crises,” World Politics: A
Quarterly Journal of International Relations 29, no. 4 (1977): 610–25, https://doi.org
/10.2307/2010041; and Schechter, Schneider, and Shaffer, “Wargaming as a Method-
ology.”

200
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
mes in favor of greater external validity if the sample allows
building on the idea that experiments within wargames offer a
great amount of flexibility to the researcher.22
The focus of recent wargame scholarship is on emergent
technologies and exploring their impact on outcomes utilizing
recent advances in the field including online experiment meth-
odologies enabled by services such as Amazon’s crowdsourc-
ing platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk).23 But there are many
questions that are yet unanswered; for example, what are the
consequences of running online versus in-person wargames
and what is the proper process of building out surveys to sup-
port wargame experiments?

Computational Simulations
There is a long and ancient history of computer simulations
being used to understand global politics, with the movie War-
games (1983) being a prime example.24 We use the term com-
putational simulations to distinguish between role-playing
simulations where students are often encouraged to act as
specific decision makers to understand different components
of international security, particularly diplomacy.25
Computational simulations differ from experiments in two
core ways. First, they primarily are computer based to quickly

22
Schechter, Schneider, and Shaffer, “Wargaming as a Methodology.”
23
Nicholas C. Hunt and Andrea M Scheetz, “Using MTurk to Distribute a Survey or Ex-
periment: Methodological Considerations,” Journal of Information Systems 33, no. 1
(2019): 43–65, https://doi.org/10.2308/isys-52021.
24
Wargames, directed by John Badham (Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1983), 1:54
min.; and Harold Steere Guetzkow, Simulation in International Relations (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
25
Victor Asal and Elizabeth L. Blake, “Creating Simulations for Political Science Ed-
ucation,” Journal of Political Science Education 2, no. 1 (2006): 1–18, https://doi.org
/10.1080/15512160500484119; Dave Bridge and Simon Radford, “Teaching Diplomacy
by Other Means: Using an Outside-of-class Simulation to Teach International Rela-
tions Theory,” International Studies Perspectives 15, no. 4 (2014), https://doi.org/10.2139
/ssrn.2203120; and Pamela S. Chasek, “Power Politics, Diplomacy and Role Playing: Sim-
ulating the UN Security Council’s Response to Terrorism,” International Studies Perspec-
tives 6, no. 1 (2005): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1528-3577.2005.00190.x.

201
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
ease replication and recreating abstract conditions of play at
scale. Like bootstrapping methodologies, computational sim-
ulations often feature random treatments with replacements
(alternating independent variables). Simulations seek to ex-
plore complex system dynamics with the aid computational
power. A useful example is using a simulation to explore sys-
temic politics and the impact of anarchy on world politics.26
Second, simulations often cannot hold the conditions of
experiments standard since it might be impossible to random-
ize treatments or to recreate the same conditions each play be-
cause of the massive scale of the simulation and its evolution
over time. There is a long history of simulation in international
relations research and the recent interest in wargames often
excludes these early developments.27 This is done to focus on
the new and novel but forgetting the path that was blazed by
others.
Computational simulations generally fell out of favor as
research methodologies with the advent of massive datasets
and the statistical tools used to analyze the data like IBM’s SPSS
Statistics and Stata. These statistical programs leveled the play-
ing field and ushered in a new era of international relations re-
search in the mid-1990s that sought the examine the behavior
of systems and complex units in relation to interstate war, ter-
rorism, and intrastate war. With the coming of new technolo-
gies that seek to transform the battlefield in the 2020s, a new
utility for simulations emerged bringing the issue full circle.
26
Mary M. McCarthy, “The Role of Games and Simulations to Teach Abstract Concepts
of Anarchy, Cooperation, and Conflict in World Politics,” Journal of Political Science Ed-
ucation 10, no. 4 (2014): 400–13.
27
Stuart A. Bremer, “Computer Modeling in Global and International Relations: The
State of the Art,” Social Science Computer Review 7, no. 4 (1989): 459–78, https://doi
.org/10.1177/089443938900700406; Stuart A. Bremer, Simulated Worlds: A Computer
Model of National Decision-making (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015);
Robert Mandel, “An Evaluation of the ‘Balance of Power’ Simulation,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 31, no. 2 (1987): 333–45, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002787031002006; and
Michael D. Ward and Alex Mintz, “Dynamics of Military Spending in Israel: A Computer
Simulation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31, no. 1 (1987): 86–105, https://doi.org/10.1177
/0022002787031001006.

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 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
Alternative Reality and Counterfactuals
Most work in political science and history involves counter-
factual thought experiments presented as exploring compet-
ing hypotheses without the researcher generally knowing that
this is the process of investigation. As Paul W. Schroeder notes,
historians use and propose counterfactuals to analyze what
might come to pass.28 Military scholars do the same to explore
alternative realities, researchers thus propose counterfactuals
that take the form of alternative novel hypotheses. Introduc-
ing condition X might lead to outcome Y, but how does one
evaluate the probabilities and realities involved with alternative
futures?
John S. Odell notes that a counterfactual argumentation,
and thus futures projections, is speculation by definition, mak-
ing these forms of thought exploration dubious without a
tether to an identifiable method.29 Some researchers propose
necessary condition case studies as a method to explore coun-
terfactual outcomes.30 Yet, the entire purpose of a wargame
can be thought of as a rules-based exploration of a counter-
factual condition inherent in most social science.
A wargame is a way to reduce complexity and explore
differing catalysts that might impact outcomes. As William R.
Thompson notes, exploring catalysts and contingent causation
is a tricky proposition that demands a careful examination of
what options are plausible and realistic, avoiding the grander
projections often offered by fiction.31 Wargames offer the re-
searcher a methodology to explore these processes while also

28
Paul W. Schroeder, “Necessary Conditions and World War I as an Unavoidable War,”
in Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals,
ed. Jack Levy and Gary Goertz (London: Routledge, 2007).
29
John S. Odell, “Case Study Methods in International Political Economy,” International
Studies Perspectives 2, no. 2 (2001): 161–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.00047.
30
Gary Goertz and Jack S. Levy, “Causal Explanation, Necessary Conditions, and Case
Studies,” in Explaining War and Peace, 9–45.
31
William R. Thompson, “A Streetcar Named Sarajevo: Catalysts, Multiple Causation
Chains, and Rivalry Structures,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2003): 453–74,
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2478.4703008.

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 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
tethering them to the possible in the avoidance of the spectac-
ular.32

Recent Examples
There are many recent examples using wargames combined
with experimental methodologies to explore the impact of
emergent technology. Nuclear warfare has been a particular-
ly active question in the research space with Reid B. C. Pauly
leveraging a sample of archival wargames with strategic elites
to examine attitudes toward nuclear weapons, finding restraint
based on reputational and practical risks dominates.33 What
is most interesting about Pauly’s article is the use of “records
from the golden age of political-military gaming” to understand
the behavior of nuclear capable actors during a crisis.34 By fo-
cusing on strategic elites from archived games 1958 to 1972, it is
possible to review how actors behaved when the context was
most appropriate.
The University of California-Berkeley’s Project on Nuclear
Gaming (PoNG) explores decision making during conflict esca-
lation with controlled experiments, enabling a massive online
wargame simulation that explores nuclear war.35 The results
from the PoNG game have yet to be published, but the group
has certainly raised awareness on the possibility of large-scale,
decision-making games and won awards on game design.36
Likely this game design will highlight the utility of computa-
tional simulations since the focus on the large systems at play
during nuclear warfare.
32
Although this might not always be true, and wargame designers are just as suscep-
tible to the ridiculous as fiction writers. Professional military wargames typically try to
avoid exploring implausible conditions such as two- or three-front nuclear wars, but
this view is not universal in the community such as in James Lacey, “How Does the
Next Great Power Conflict Play Out?: Lessons from a Wargame,” War on the Rocks, 22
April 2019.
33
Pauly, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button?”
34
Pauly, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button?,” 157.
35
Goldblum, Reddie, and Reinhardt, “Wargames as Experiments”; and Reddie et al.,
“Next-generation Wargames.”
36
“What Is PoNG?,” PoNGBerkeley.edu, accessed 31 January 2022.

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 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
Erik Lin-Greenberg leverages wargame experiments to
explore the nature of conflict, proposing that downing an un-
manned vehicle instead of a manned vehicle would lead to
less conflict escalation. He finds support for the “remote con-
trolled restraint” theory by blending experimental treatments
with case study explorations, noting the limitations of survey
methodologies in this setting.37 Bartels et al. also demonstrate
the novelty of the wargame experiment methodology, explor-
ing the impact of briefing materials on decision making.38 The
team found, counterintuitively, that player experience was a
bigger factor than the actual briefing materials.
There is a special interest in using games to uncover the dy-
namics of interdependent decision making in cyber exchang-
es. Jacquelyn G. Schneider also used a longitudinal analysis
of wargames between 2011 and 2016 to study crisis dynamics.
Her work revealed that government officials were reluctant to
use high-end cyber offensive capabilities.39 Of note, Schneider
found that participants only used offensive cyber capabilities
after conventional military strikes and they expressed concerns
that using offensive cyber would increase the risk of nuclear
escalation. Jensen and Banks found similar patterns in a series
of wargames analyzing how decision makers integrated cyber
operations into crises with both great power competitors and
nonstate actors.40 Escalation was the exception, not the rule.
Benjamin Jensen, Scott Cuomo, and Chris Whyte’s work
builds on this continuum to explore the nature of cyber esca-
lation through wargames and controlled experiments.41 Jensen
37
Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Wargame of Drones: Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Crisis Escala-
tion,” SSRN (2020), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3288988.
38
Elizabeth Bartels et al., Do Differing Analyses Change the Decision?: Using a Game to
Assess Whether Differing Analytic Approaches Improve Decisionmaking (Santa Monica,
CA: Rand, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7249/RR2735.
39
Jacquelyn G. Schneider, “Cyber and Crisis Escalation: Insights from Wargaming” (pa-
per presented at the USASOC Futures Forum, Fayetteville, NC, 21 March 2017).
40
Jensen and Banks, “Cyber Operations in Conflict.”
41
Benjamin Jensen, Scott Cuomo, and Chris Whyte, “Wargaming with Athena: How to
Make Militaries Smarter, Faster, and More Efficient with Artificial Intelligence,” War on
the Rocks, 5 June 2018.

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 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
and Valeriano designed the wargame to ensure the right con-
text and players and that it replicated the crisis atmosphere as
much as possible during the national security decision-making
process. The scenario pitted green state versus purple state,
two nuclear-armed rival states with power parity. Using hypo-
thetical states helped filter the participants from preexisting
biases about current international relations. The wargame in-
volved 400 international participants, including graduate and
undergraduate students, government officials, military officers,
and private sector employees.42
The team then expanded the study to a controlled ex-
periment testing hypotheses on cyber escalation among a
population of U.S., Israeli, and Russian survey respondents
to understand wider social patterns. Using a population mix
avoids the external validity questions raised by only using col-
lege students and examines the potential uniformity in respon-
dents globally.43 We find some evidence that cyber operations
can provide an offramp from conflict, deescalating tensions.44
The experiment also revealed vast differences in how various
populations responded to the treatment scenarios with the
Russians being the most prone to escalation.
To summarize, there are many different methods of social
science research that can be leveraged by the wargaming com-
munity. Experimental methods are useful to explore multiple
hypotheses in a statistically valid manner while also relying on
internal validity to ensure consistency across the experimental

42
Benjamin Jensen and Brandon Valeriano, What Do We Know about Cyber Escalation?:
Observations from Simulations and Surveys (Washington, DC: Scowcroft Center for
Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council, 2019).
43
Alex Mintz, Steven B. Redd, and Arnold Vedlitz, “Can We Generalize from Student
Experiments to the Real World in Political Science, Military Affairs, and Internation-
al Relations?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 5 (2006): 757–76, https://doi.org
/10.1177/0022002706291052.
44
Brandon G. Valeriano and Benjamin Jensen, “De-escalation Pathways and Disruptive
Technology: Cyber Operations as Off-Ramps to War,” in Cyber Peace: Charting a Path
Towards a Sustainable, Stable, and Secure Cyberspace, ed. Scott Shackelford, Frederick
Douzet, and Chris Ankersen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

206
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
conditions. Computational simulations are useful to explore
large systemic structures and engage many players over mul-
tiple iterations at scale. Finally, alternative reality or counter-
factual simulations can help explore future scenarios if they
are plausible explorations of specific catalysts. The recent ex-
plosion of interest in social science wargames provides many
examples that will become the exemplars moving forward as
others join the practice.

MORE METHODS, MORE PROBLEMS

After the challenge introduced by former Deputy Secretary of
Defense Robert O. Work to the community, wargames once
again became relevant to the core functions of national securi-
ty.45 The main inflection point comes not from those that reject
the idea of learning from wargames, but rather differing visions
of the purpose of the wargame itself. In some ways, applying
social science methodology places the wargame at the center
of knowledge construction, whereas for many the purpose of
the wargame is to examine the process of decision making it-
self. This divergence in perspective demonstrates that while so-
cial science methods can add to the wargame community, the
practice is not to be undertaken without care.
Is someone encouraged to learn from the wargame or
learn during the wargame? The goal for some is not to test a
hypothesis, but rather to induce the participant to follow the
rules of order to get to the proper decision without examining
the nature of decision making. This central tension makes up
the core of the dispute between the wargaming community
and the social science community. We further explore these
tensions by examining core criticisms of the social science en-
terprise as leveraged by wargamers. These criticisms challenge
social scientists by noting the difficulty in replication, issues
with the player pool, and the concern of peer review and classi-

45
Bob Work and Gen Paul Selva, “Revitalizing Wargaming Is Necessary to Be Prepared
for Future Wars,” War on the Rocks, 8 December 2015.

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 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
fication can all pose central restrictions on how social scientists
leverage wargames.

Scale and Replication

The first proper challenge to wargames as methods of social
science comes due to issues with scale and replication. Logisti-
cal difficulties are also said to inhibit the nature of wargame ex-
periments, with cost-inhibiting multiple treatments.46 Yet, this
challenge has been mitigated through time with the scalabili-
ty and portability of computation technology. The pandemic
(2019–present) has also enabled more interactions at distance
and at scale, minimizing the difficulty of reproducing experi-
mental settings with some having even moved to Zoom war-
games (games via video conferencing applications). Overall,
though, the researcher needs to be aware of the logistical chal-
lenges introduced by wargame experiments and be prepared
to adjust as needed as challenges and conditions demand.
This leads to a core central challenge to the wargaming
community. By making the wargame more than about the
experience of any specific game, the community can move
beyond the common refrain that wargames are just BOPSAT
(bunch of people sitting around talking).47 With technological
improvements, wargames can serve a higher order purpose
than just an experience; we can learn about collective experi-
ences and hold the conditions of the scientific method at the
core of research by leveraging social science methods.
Replication becomes possible through a focus on repeat-
ing gaming interactions to reach proper statistical samples that
will generate statistical significance.48 While statistics on signifi-

46
Perla, Markowitz, and Weuve, Game-Based Experimentation for Research in Com-
mand and Control and Shared Situational Awareness.
47
Jon Compton, “The Obstacles on the Road to Better Analytical Wargaming,” War on
the Rocks, 9 October 2019.
48
Generally, a sample near 1,000 will generate statistical significance. This number can
increase or decrease based on the number of treatments or scenarios offered in a war-
game. While statistical significance has long been an overwrought statistic, at its most
basic sense, it helps the observer understand if the sample is more than random.

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 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
cance are of course overwrought in the scientific community,
it remains important to gather as wide and diverse a sample as
possible to ensure the study is generalizable.49

The Player Pool

Jenny Oberholtzer et al. introduce a prime criticism of warga-
mes as experiments. They argue “observations of players who
do not resemble actual decision-makers can produce statisti-
cally significant results, they are likely to be irrelevant to real-
world policy decisions about escalation and nuclear use.”50
The clear conjecture is that by selecting the right sample in a
seminar style game without repeated play, researchers can bet-
ter understand decision making at the elite level.
The dependence on Western student populations (or
WEIRD in the literature for Western, educated, industrialized,
rich, and democratic) for traditional surveys is problematic, es-
pecially in a military context.51 Yet, it is not clear that elite deci-
sion making is at all better or different from the general public at
large.52 In fact, elite decision makers introduce their own forms
of bias into the analysis, and it is the compositional dynamics
(income, education, and race) that distinguish the groups.53
The challenges of including elite respondents are exten-
sive. Elite respondents often are overconfident and fall into
confirmation bias tropes, making their judgment overall just

49
Blakeley B. McShane et al., “Abandon Statistical Significance,” American Statistician 73,
sup. no. 1 (2019): 235–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2018.1527253.
50
Jenny Oberholtzer et al., “Applying Wargames to Real-world Policies,” Science 363, no.
6434 (2019): 1406, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw6278.
51
Dan Jones, “A WEIRD View of Human Nature Skews Psychologists’ Studies,” Science
328, no. 5986 (2010): 1627, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.328.5986.1627; and Mintz,
Redd, and Vedlitz, “Can We Generalize from Student Experiments to the Real World in
Political Science, Military Affairs, and International Relations?”
52
Joshua D. Kertzer, “Re-assessing Elite Public Gaps in Political Behavior,” American Jour-
nal of Political Science (2020), https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12583.
53
Kertzer, “Re-assessing Elite Public Gaps in Political Behavior”; and Lior Sheffer et al.,
“Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of
Elected Politicians,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 2 (2018): 302–21, https://
doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000569.

209
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
as suspect as the student.54 Elite and nonelite populations also
can raise internal validity concerns by playing the game the
way an observer or supervisor might want them to play it rath-
er than behaving as an independent actor. As Reid B. C. Pauly
notes, the player might behave as they think they ought to rath-
er than how “what I would do.”55
As Bethany Goldblum, Andrew Reddie, and Jason Re-
inhardt note, “particular subject pools may introduce bias,
based on their age, gender, education level, income, or other
socio-demographic characteristics. . . . Game design and rule
set may influence the experimental outcomes.”56 There are
potential forms of bias introduced at all levels, so it is the job
of the scholar to control for these issues by extracting relevant
data from the respondents to study the impact of gender, ex-
perience, and other demographics, exploring these factors
influence on outcomes. This should be done for all studies,
regardless of sample size, yet the larger sample sizes demand-
ed by experimental designs generally are able to control these
issues better than seminar style games.
Overall, it would be useful to remember Perla’s warn-
ing that “real wargaming is about the conflict of human wills
confronting each other in a dynamic decision making and
story-living environment. There is a place for technology in sup-
porting the clash of wills, but electrons are not always the most
useful technology to apply.”57 Despite the various goals of study
for different wargame designs, the importance of designing a
solid game for human players will always trump other concerns.

Peer Review and Classification

As Ivanka Barzashka notes, another core challenge is the peer

54
Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
55
Pauly, “Would US Leaders Push the Button?,” 160.
56
Goldblum, Reddie, and Reinhardt, “Wargames as Experiments.”
57
Peter P. Perla, “Now Hear This—Improving Wargaming Is Worthwhile—and Smart,”
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 142, no. 1 (January 2016).

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 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
review of wargames.58 The specific tendency for overclassifica-
tion of wargame products in the U.S. system leads to problems
of evaluation and replication. Scholars and researchers cannot
know what has been done in the past or even during current
wargame efforts if they are placed behind the wall of top secret
classification. The solution is to ensure that peer review is still
conducted by the appropriate researchers with the ability to
evaluate classified products.
The challenge is that there are more fundamental ques-
tions that need to be asked about the requirement of classified
games. Is the goal to educate and evaluate or is the goal to in-
novate? If the goal is to deter and affect the decision-making
calculus of the adversary, the advice is to make the wargame
part of the strategic communications plan rather than classi-
fied.59 While decisions on innovation and specific adjustments
that need to be made to meet future threats might require
classified evaluations, the goal of education and understand-
ing should seek to avoid using classified wargames since it
becomes impossible to truly disseminate the findings to the
wider research community.
Pauly’s work with archival wargames introduces a viable
method of exploring decision making based on past action
and contexts, though new challenges are introduced by the
practice.60 The question might be what games exactly were de-
classified? Is there a comprehensive sample or are the games
examined a selection of available cases? Not insurmountable
problems, but the research and audience need to be aware of
the limitations.

58
Ivanka Barzashka, “Wargaming: How to Turn Vogue into Science,” Bulletin of the Atom-
ic Scientists, 15 March 2019.
59
Jeffrey Appleget, Jeffrey Kline, and James J. Wirtz, “Do Wargames Impact Deterrence?,”
in Military Exercises: Political Messaging and Strategic Impact, ed. Beatrice Heuser, Tor-
mod Heier, and Guillaume Lasconjarias Forum Paper 26 (Rome, Italy: NATO Defense
College, 2018), 27–44.
60
Pauly, “Would US Leaders Push the Button?”

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 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
Finding Common Ground
When one examines the field of emergent technology, it be-
comes clear rather quickly that many researchers are just push-
ing forward conjecture without evidence. This leads to a fairly
prominent study of cyber security suggesting escalation will
take the form of a wormhole, a finding developed not through
evidence but fiction.61 The recent focus on “useful fiction,” or
the more popular concept of FICINT (fiction intelligence), be-
trays the field of emergent technology’s general inability to
examine the impact of technology without reaching toward
absurd analogy.62
There is a clear need for wargames leveraged as experi-
ments and simulations to move beyond analogy and fiction.
While a wargame might be based on fiction, it explores the be-
havior of individuals acting as social units if a researcher lever-
ages social science methodologies.63 The impact of technology
will reshape our views on war and conflict, but understanding
just what changes is the core task of the research program.
Guessing cannot be an option when the questions are so criti-
cal for national security.
The other core purpose is to explore the nature of assess-
ments and victory conditions during the course of games.64
One reason that conflict in the post-11 September 2001 (9/11)
world remains so intractable is because planners shape vic-
tory conditions during the event, not before. A clear exam-
ination of what victory means in the future and how it can
be achieved can come through proper experimentation and

61
Rebecca Hersman, “Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age,” Texas National
Security Review 3 (Summer 2020), http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/10220.
62
August Cole and P. W. Singer, “Thinking the Unthinkable with Useful Fiction,” Journal
of Future Conflict, no. 2 (Fall 2020).
63
J. Furman Daniel III and Paul Musgrave, “Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture
Matters for Images of International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 3
(2017): 503–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx053.
64
Scott Sigmund Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1997).

212
 WARGAMING FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
hypothesis evaluation that is enabled through social science
methodologies.
Anyone suggesting that one method has more value than
another is missing the point of the current revolution in warga-
mes. It is not that the old methods and play styles need to be
discarded, but rather that scholars are now aware of the pos-
sibilities and opportunities that wargames provide. Emergent
turf battles have no place in the proper conduct of research.
Methods utilized vary according to the research problem,
goals, and abilities of the researcher running the wargame.

PATH FORWARD
The traditional wargame community might see a threat from
the social science community. The idea that wargames are an
art and not a science is pervasive, but this simple dichotomy
has no place in research. Wargames can be both an art and a
science just as many variations of artistic expression are based
on science and math. It is up to the researcher or planner run-
ning a wargame to determine the purpose of the game, not the
community at large.
Thomas J. Culora notes that for many, the wargame is seen
as a “regency game” whose objective is to educate and influ-
ence senior decision makers.65 This imperious view of the role
of wargaming betrays the central problem of the perspective.
There is no interrogation if this ascendancy of wargaming is
warranted. What evidence is there that a wargame should be
used to influence rather than communicate or explore?
The core utility of a wargame might not be to educate, but
rather to investigate the nature of strategy and its applications
leveraging near future technologies. Moving beyond fiction
and toward explorations of the possible through counterfac-
tual scenarios and experimental settings is a useful way to ex-

65
Thomas J. Culora, “A Wargaming Renaissance,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 142
(2016).

213
 BRANDON VALERIANO AND BENJAMIN JENSEN
amine the process of innovation and how humans will react to
new scenarios that are difficult to recreate.
The utility of wargames is clear; they allow for investigators
to explore the dynamics of emergent technology and coun-
terfactual thought conditions in a rigorous way. If the goal is
understanding and exploration, wargames provide a novel
method to explore human decision making. Games might be
much less useful in communicating ideas and teaching pat-
terns to the players without a clear nod toward a strategic com-
munication strategy. Likely more of a science than an art, the
rise of wargaming research pushes the community to become
clearer about the intended effects they wish to witness, and
the conditions under which these outcomes might be seen as
patterns rather than induced outliers.
Just as we will not experience nuclear war anytime soon,
hopefully, we also seem to be a long way off from the cyberwar
that many portended.66 Wargames that seek to explore various
hypotheses will continue to rise as a prime method of social
science investigation engaging emergent technology. The tide
is rising, the remaining question is how to ensure that commu-
nity standards are communicated without creating improper
divisions between wargamers and social scientists.

66
Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Secu-
rity and What to Do about It (New York: Ecco, 2012).

214
 Chapter Nine

Whole-of-Government
Collaboration
Educational Nuclear Wargaming
and Policy Makers

Brooke Taylor, DSL

INTRODUCTION

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many

people see the weapons themselves as the common en-
emy of humanity.
~ Herman Kahn1

Educational wargaming is not a novel construct to the Depart-

ment of Defense (DOD). To include members of the United
States Congress as participants in educational wargaming is a
progressive concept that must rapidly catch speed, or it could
be game over when ideas meet reality. When such a construct
is met with hesitancy for policymakers to attend educational
wargames, it demonstrates an example of status quo bureau-
cratic conventionalism that, in the pursuit of working toward
national security solutions, abides in the comfort of fragmen-
tation and results in an overall atrophying solution set that is
important to both the legislative and executive branches of
government. Within the halls of military installations or school-
1
Herman Kahn was the founder of the Hudson Institute, a military strategist and futur-
ist. Quote adapted from Thinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1984).

215
 BROOKE TAYLOR
houses, the rooms of which have never seen sunlight due to
security requirements, are the brightest minds in the country
tasked with solving increasingly complicated war-preventive
and war-responsive problem sets. Gaming counters, thumb-
tacks, boards, and maps are surrounded by personnel who
maneuver the game, mobile on their rolling chair as they work
around the table, some engaged, and others distracted by the
mounting to-do list piling up in the office as a function of their
involvement in the game. The stage is set, the rules are defined,
the players are identified, and the challenge accepted for this
handful of participants to begin their work through the game
play.
Expand the perspective and then begin to take a roll call of
the participants around the table: What is their professional af-
filiation? What is their duty title? What is the experience brought
to the table allowing them to speak to this particular solution set
for national strategy and international security? Begin to iden-
tify and evaluate: Is there diversity of perspective represented or
is there insular, department-derived attendance from the partic-
ipants? Then, critically evaluate that if the purpose of such an
educational wargame is to prepare for implementation (mov-
ing toward or moving away) from the outcome and ponder if
the challenge can be met under such tight restrictions of the
participants selected to play.
More specifically, educational nuclear wargames, tabletop
exercises, and simulations are opportunities for Congress to
collaborate with the U.S. Department of Defense.2 When the
risk of failure is existential, the opportunity of diverse partici-
pation across the framework of the whole of government war-
rants representation from across the government, to include
policymakers. Presently, such experiences provide a small
number of DOD civilians with a clear understanding of both
the value of strategic deterrence and the existential threat that
proliferation poses among nation-states and nonstate actors.
2
Mike Gallagher, “Bringing Congress to the (Wargaming) Table for a Bigger and Better
Navy,” War on the Rocks, 19 October 2020.

216
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
National security, however, is a shared interest uniquely dele-
gated between the branches of government according to spe-
cific roles and responsibilities mandated by law.3 This chapter
accomplishes two main goals: first, it articulates the value of
including Congress in educational nuclear wargames, tabletop
exercises, and simulations by describing—and thereby high-
lighting—legislative boundaries that must remain intact when
DOD leaders and members of Congress are seated at the ed-
ucational nuclear wargaming table; and second, it provides
practical examples of how the first step allows for achieving a
whole-of-government approach to collaboration between the
executive and legislative branches by altering the prevailing
mindset, which is discovered within strategic thinking.4

EDUCATIONAL NUCLEAR WARGAMING

The terms wargame, simulation, and tabletop exercise are not
synonyms for and also differ from training exercises. The use
of simulations virtually immerses an individual into intense
maneuvers to prepare for wartime operations. Simulations are
helpful for training. Within the creation and context of the game
is when ideas of active duty servicemembers, civilian person-
nel, or military educators actively participating in war strategy,
maneuvers, and planning is experienced. For example, Global
Thunder is a “nine-day command and control exercise [that]
focuses on realistic training scenarios for nuclear readiness
of United States forces around the world, allied nations and
partner organizations” conducted by more than 150,000 U.S.
Strategic Command personnel annually.5 This type of military
training exercise does not necessitate congressional participa-

3
“Intro.7.2.2. The Constitution’s Basic Principles: Separation of Powers,” Constitution
Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, accessed 2 May 2021.
4
This chapter does not advocate congressional participation within Title 10, U.S.C.
Armed Forces, Committee on Armed Services, 112th Cong., 1st Sess. (July 2011), wargam-
ing, training, or exercises as an extension of DOD activities and combatant command
requirements.
5
Ed Adamczyk, “U.S. Strategic Command Completes Global Joint Operations, Readi-
ness Exercise,” United Press International, 28 October 2020.

217
 BROOKE TAYLOR
tion and illustrates the separation of powers and scope of le-
gality within constitutionally sound cross-branch participation
between the executive branches.6
In addition, during the height of the Cold War, President
Ronald W. Reagan participated in 1983’s Proud Prophet war-
game, which was referred to as the “most realistic exercise in-
volving nuclear weapons ever played by the U.S. government.”7
Played in real time at the secret facility of the Nation-
al War College, the simulation went around the clock
lasting for two weeks and had hundreds of military
officers participating in Washington as well as com-
municating over top-secret links with all the major U.S.
military commands around the world. The game sim-
ulated conflict in a myriad of regions, from East Asia to
Europe and in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Also, security had to be protected, so the fact that the
secretary and the chairman were playing in the game
was concealed from all the players except a tiny hand-
ful with the need to know.8

In reflection, 1983 was described as a more dangerous peri-

od than anyone realized and events after the wargame demon-
strated this. What the participants did not realize at the time is
how “obsessed” Soviet leaders were becoming, a fact clearly
demonstrated after the civilian airliner, Korean Air 007, was shot
down by the Soviets in September of that year as they were
6
Should a member of Congress be interested in Title 10 wargames, such as Exercise
Global Thunder, then the member and/or their personal staff (with appropriate secu-
rity clearance classifications) or professional staff can reach out to the legislative affairs
office to schedule a readout of the game or event that can be provided in a sensitive
compartmentalized information facility (SCIF). In fact, it is recommended and encour-
aged that members and staff maintain an active awareness of the outcomes of such
wargames. This is another strategic approach to shape national security policy and
ensure proper oversight.
7
Proud Prophet was designed by Thomas C. Schelling, who was a professor at Harvard
University at the time. Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the
New Power Politics (New York: Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, 2012), 85.
8
Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age, 85–86.

218
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
“virtually expecting an American attack.”9 Erring on the side of
caution regarding congressional overreach and wargaming the
“Second Nuclear Age” is increasingly prudent as such actions
could very well be interpreted as planning for war and preempt
an unintended adversarial response.
Additionally, wargaming is also used among the Depart-
ment of Defense and supporting agencies for educational
purposes. In this context, wargames are “analytical games that
simulate aspects of warfare at the tactical, operational, or stra-
tegic level. They are used to examine warfighting concepts,
train and educate commanders and analysts, explore scenar-
ios, and assess how force planning and posture choices affect
campaign outcomes.”10 These types of wargames are executed
in a tabletop fashion where players gather to maneuver, strate-
gize, and work through a series of challenges to a problem set.
Wargaming, in this context, can also occur in simulated envi-
ronments that virtually demonstrate capabilities using aug-
mented and virtual realities.
Educational wargaming, tabletop exercises, or simulations
provide the most benefit for Congress to engage with the de-
partment as part of the educational process. In this context, the
Department of Defense commonly uses an evaluative instru-
ment based on four key variables in its scenario assessments:
diplomacy, information, military, and economic (DIME).11 Often,
to avoid a predisposition or assumption of conditions that
measure courses of action along the DIME without inclusion of
policymakers, military participants and researchers will consult
members to script out policymaker actions. In such instances,
the DOD benefits from understanding the role of legislators,
while legislators miss valuable insights into experiencing the
decision-making apparatus of the Department of Defense,
which vis-á-vis the firsthand knowledge transfer of such educa-

9
Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age, 86.
10
“Wargaming,” Rand, accessed 4 May 2021.
11
Donald Bishop, “DIME, Not DiME: Time to Align the Instruments of U.S. Informational
Power,” Strategy Bridge, 20 June 2018.

219
 BROOKE TAYLOR
tional wargaming may shift or pivot policymakers predisposed
ideas that are “scripted” into the game. This undermines the
very premise the wargame or tabletop exercise is meant to con-
vey to participants. Including and giving policymakers a seat at
the wargaming table provides valuable perspective to enhance
the overall learning experience and derived outcomes.

CROSS-BRANCH COLLABORATION

I will offer a choice, not an echo.

~ Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)12

Enacted as law during the Cold War, the Goldwater-Nichols

Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 was estab-
lished by the United States Congress:
To reorganize the Department of Defense and
strengthen civilian authority in the Department of De-
fense, to improve the military advice provided to the
President, the National Security Council, and the Sec-
retary of Defense, to place clear responsibility on the
commanders of the unified and specified combatant
commands for the accomplishment of missions as-
signed to those commands and ensure that the au-
thority of those commanders is fully commensurate
with that responsibility, to increase attention to the for-
mulation of strategy and to contingency planning, to
provide for more efficient use of defense resources, to
improve joint officer management policies, otherwise
to enhance the effectiveness of military operations
and improve the management and administration of
the Department of Defense, and for other purposes.13

As a result of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the high-­level

12
Goldwater for President Committee Brochure, 3 January 1964.
13
Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, Pub. L. No.
99-433 (1986), 992.

220
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
participation between the Joint Chiefs of Staff, combatant
commanders, combatant commands, and the National Secu-
rity Council provides access to and ongoing collaboration with
the executive branch of government and is also designated to
maximize the president’s access to the Department of Defense.
In the post-Cold War Era and 35+ years since Goldwater-
Nichols, the United States now finds itself in an era of strate-
gic competition against two nuclear peer competitors—Russia
and China.14 Cycles of failed procurement, slow acquisition
processes, and a defense department that now emphasizes
all-domain operations and cross-Service collaboration beg the
question of where and how Congress can be most effective in
twenty-first century nuclear security legislation.15 Beyond the
arguments of massive bureaucratic restructuring—many of
which may not necessitate review, educational wargames, ta-
bletop exercises, and simulations—are immediate and practical
ways for legislators to be part of a cross-branch collaboration.

STRATEGIC THINKING
AND EDUCATIONAL NUCLEAR WARGAMES
The conditions to include Congress as participants, wheth-
er players or observers, around the nuclear wargaming table
can be met with resistance or bias those contributing to the
game. The siloed strategies that prevailed during the Cold War
and lessons learned do not transfer in a one-to-one parity in
the modern nuclear age. The annual defense spending that is
14
Christopher A. Ford, Competitive Strategy vis-à-vis China and Russia: A View from the
“T Suite,” Arms Control and International Security Papers, vol. 1, no. 6 (Washington, DC:
Department of State, 2020), 2.
15
Kathleen J. McInnis, The 2018 National Defense Strategy, CRS Insight (Washington,
DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018), 6–10. Note that a primary focus of the
Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 was to increase
jointness and overcome inoperability among the Services. A review of Goldwater-­
Nichols, which is in ongoing discussions among Congress, should be considered in
view of such legislative limitations. Congressional participation in wargames, tabletop
exercises, and simulations is another practical example for members to see these con-
cerns and issues up close in review of best practices and strategy if/when restructuring
Goldwater-Nichols.

221
 BROOKE TAYLOR
funded by appropriations and the National Defense Authoriza-
tion Act ebbs and flows according to national priorities.16 The
strategic advantage for Department of Defense leaders and
policymakers to collaborate and engage, to better understand
adversarial threats and assurance to allies, is in part a guiding
framework for deterrence toward these great powers.
For legislators, the focus and need for inclusion in warga-
ming and simulations is prescriptive. Congress, and specifically
the House of Representatives, holds the power of the purse.
Federal spending (both mandatory and discretionary) is des-
ignated, or prescribed, annually according to national interests
and priorities. In August 2020, Michèle Flournoy, who was then
viewed as a top contender for secretary of defense in a poten-
tial Joseph R. Biden administration, was asked about securing
and prioritizing command and control in contested domains:
Sometimes when the department is trying to  make
those trade-offs to move money from one program to
another, if they don’t do a good job explaining that to
Congress they sort of get the hand from Congress. We
really have to make Congress much more of a strategic
partner in this exercise. They need to understand why,
we know what we’re facing, the urgency. They need to
be invited into the wargames and to the simulations
and to the experimentation and understand why
these trade-offs are being made . . . to try to get bet-
ter buy-in and frankly leadership from some of the key
champions on the Hill.17

For the Department of Defense to provide Congress with a

seat at the wargaming table creates a pathway that focuses not
on what Congress should be thinking about national security,
but instead hones into how Congress should be thinking about

16
See, for example, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, 117th Cong.
(2021–22).
17
Aaron Mehta, “Flournoy: Next Defense Secretary Needs ‘Big Bets’ to Boost ‘Eroding’
Deterrence,” Defense News, 10 August 2020.

222
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
national security. Educational wargaming and tabletop exercis-
es extend the direct value of strategic thinking within the role of
Congress in nuclear security decision making. For the practical
value of such strategic partnering to transfer, the first step is un-
derstanding the importance of such participation for the DOD
to include Congress and, frankly, for Congress to have time to
devote its attention to such a cause.
Most policymakers do not view national security as a top
priority because of the misnomer, albeit a popular viewpoint,
highlighted by David Trachtenberg that “there is not a constit-
uency for national security.”18 For the politician whose survival
hinges on a majority vote, national security decreases in pop-
ularity as a talking point. Combined with a nuclear frame, this
topic becomes even more highly underrated among the popu-
lace at-large unless used as a media scare tactic, and thus man-
ifests itself as being underrated on Capitol Hill. In short, when
national security topics combine within a nuclear frame, the
job at hand becomes even harder to accomplish.
The overarching conclusion is that members of Con-
gress and Department of Defense officials share perspectives,
amidst each branch of government’s unique roles, on nuclear
security, but exposes missed opportunities to unpack relevant
solutions. Across the congressional aisles and the branches of
government, solutions often result from solving unproductive
and arguably outdated questions. This is where nuclear educa-
tional wargaming or tabletop exercises may enhance strategic
thinking and present value.
Academics often focus on two schools of strategic
thought: divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent think-
ing looks at the big picture and generates ideas, while conver-
gent thinking examines and arranges those ideas rationally.19 In
fact, some experts believe that the best strategic thinkers are

18
David J. Trachtenberg, The Lawgivers’ Struggle: How Congress Wields Power in Nation-
al Security Decision Making (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2020).
19
Phil Charron, “Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Creative Environments,” Think
(blog), Think Company, 26 October 2011.

223
 BROOKE TAYLOR

T
Figure 19. Strategic thinking T

  
  

Source: Brooke Taylor, “Nuclear Planning in an Uncertain World,” Space and

Defense 12, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 58–66, adapted by MCUP.

T-shaped. The bar on the top of the T represents the breadth

of their knowledge, while the stem represents a deep under-
standing of their own area of expertise (figure 19).20
Knowingly or not, this paradigm of thinking permeates our
government, yet is inverted between both branches. Within the
executive branch, the Department of Defense is equipped to
bring a deep, singular level of expertise to national security that
20
“What Is Strategic Thinking?,” Center for Management and Organization Effective-
ness, accessed 10 November 2021.

224
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
is tactical and operational within the warfighting domain and
spectrum of conflict. In this analogy of strategic thinking, the
DOD is the stem of the T.
By comparison, the legislative branch and policymakers
grapple with social, economic, partisan, ideological, and de-
mographic considerations with knowledge that demands
knowing something about everything. In some cases, this mile-
wide level of expertise may only be an inch deep because of
the nature of a policymaker’s job. For legislators, more specific
areas and depth of expertise come into play through commit-
tee and subcommittee assignments that intersect along their
breadth of knowledge.21
The ultimate outcome of strategic thinking is execution
and implementation. This is the point of intersection between
the stem and the bar of the strategic thinking T. Consider the
T as a representation of knowledge and information among
both depth and breadth of the bar and stem. Then visualize
the minute point of intersection that must be perfectly cen-
tered and anchored to connect big ideas with practical logic.
If the breadth of knowledge exceeds the depth, the T loses
balance. Depth of knowledge along the stem is what centers
the entire formation. However, shift the stem to the left or the
right and the stem’s focus becomes about partisanship and
dooms the entire formation to lose shape and/or balance. The
center focus of the Department of Defense should not pivot
to partisanship, but rather embrace the shared educational
value to experience firsthand policymakers’ decision-making
processes. That being recognized, Congress must connect to
the depth of expertise, in addition to hearings, to understand
present nuclear security challenges. This is where tabletop ex-
ercises, wargames, and simulations provide practical value for
Congress.

21
Congress members themselves do not have to be experts, but rather they cultivate
and retain wargaming knowledge within their staffs, such as their defense aides. The
Congress members would then stand as the horizontal portion of T and the staff pro-
vide the vertical section of the T.

225
 BROOKE TAYLOR
The firsthand impact that is transferred to a member who
participates in an educational nuclear wargame, tabletop exer-
cise, or simulation magnifies the national security dilemma and
challenge under review. This is a prime example of connecting
the depth (tactical and operational duties of the DOD) to the
breadth of knowledge and congressional oversight obligations
of the legislative branch.
There are also issues that collaboration around the war-
gaming table can remedy so Department of Defense officials
and members of Congress do not speak past each other as
they champion for the same cause, making it an ineffective
means to understand each other’s language or concerns.22
Interpreting this information does fall on staff but at the same
time, military leaders at the highest chain of command meet-
ing with members of the most powerful committees could
gain so much from each other by spending a few hours en-
gaged and immersed in an educational table-top exercise or
wargame.23
Scenarios are one of several ways to connect the points
of focus (depth and breadth of knowledge) for policymakers
and uniformed leaders. First credited with using the word sce-
nario, and ultimately, changing the nature of military planning
and tabletop exercises altogether, the questions Herman Kahn
posited for nuclear security remain in effect within the profes-
sional military education system and are questions members
of Congress still wrestle with in terms of policy and funding nu-
clear modernization:
• How likely is accidental war? How can one make it less
likely?
• How dangerous is the arms race today?
• What will it be like in the future? What would condi-

22
Sebastian Bae and Paul Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical Edge,” Rand
(blog), 8 March 2021.
23
Congressional and staff delegations are ways to invite members into existing war-
games or activities. See, for example, Ed Mcgrady, “Getting the Story Right about War-
gaming,” War on the Rocks, 8 November 2019.

226
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
tions be if a nuclear attack leveled 50 of America’s larg-
est cities? Would the survivors envy the dead?
• How many millions of American lives would an Ameri-
can president risk by standing firm in differing types of
crises? By starting a nuclear war? By continuing a nu-
clear war with the hope of avoiding surrender? How
many European, Russian, and other lives would they
risk?24

The value of strategic thinking within the role of Congress

in nuclear security decision making and the points of intersec-
tion between the depth of the challenges the Department of
Defense is addressing presently, and the breadth of consider-
ation Congress must understand, begs the questions neces-
sary for the DOD and Congress to work together to resolve and
could include:
• With such an emphasis on all-domain operations,
where does nuclear command and control fit into this
integration?
• What if China does not enter into any arms control
agreement and Russia decides to follow suit post-New
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) circa 2026
based on a “they don’t have to, so why do I” philos-
ophy?25 Is the United States prepared for this shifting
norm?

RECOMMENDATION AND CONCLUSION

We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.

~ Bernard Kouchner 26

In order for Congress to participate in educational nuclear war-

24
Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s.
25
“New START Treaty,” Department of State, updated 3 February 2022.
26
French minister of foreign and European affairs (2007–10) and cofounder of Doctors
without Borders.

227
 BROOKE TAYLOR
games and for the benefits of crosstalk and cross-collaboration
to occur with the Department of Defense, there must be con-
siderations that create the space for implementation. Rather
than rely on the taxing scheduling and limited time availabil-
ity of Congress to participate in preexisting professional mili-
tary education nuclear wargames, the DOD should attempt a
unique approach. By working with think tanks and academia,
the Department of Defense could create an educational nu-
clear wargame as part of freshman members congressional
orientation. Federally Funded Research and Development
Centers and University Affiliated Research Centers, such as the
United States Strategic Command and the Nebraska Strategic
Research Institute, provide a viable means of such educational
nuclear wargames.27
Adult learners retain 90 percent of auditory, visual, and kin-
esthetic information, so this early form of experiential learning
imprints a foundational pathway as members find their way to
committee assignments throughout their tenure and reelec-
tion of service.28 The Congressional Management Foundation
is tasked with coordination and access for members and staff
to be prepared for the challenges and demands of the call to
service.29 By including a national security emphasis or focus on
existential risks, members’ purview would be expanded to bet-
ter see, hear, and work through strategies to nuclear policy.
After entering service in the U.S. Congress, these leaders,
elected from across the country to represent national interests
from all walks of life, are endowed with oversight responsibility.
The Department of Defense can hope new members grapple
with and come to their same conclusions in identifying spend-
ing priorities and fulfilling defense requests. Hope is not a strat-

27
“35.017. Federally Funded Research and Development Centers,” Acquisition.gov, 30
January 2022.
28
Jennifer Weichel, “What’s Their Learning Style?: Part 1. Auditory Learners,” Michigan
State University Extension, 15 August 2016.
29
“Congressional Crisis Preparation & Response Center: Managing during the COVID-19
Crisis and Beyond,” Congressional Management Foundation, accessed 13 June 2021.

228
 WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION
egy in which the nuclear enterprise should be placed. Rather, it
is time for Congress to be brought to the educational nuclear
table to further strategic collaboration and strategic conversa-
tion discovered through active participation in nuclear warga-
ming, simulations, and tabletop exercises.

229
 Conclusion
The Die Is Cast

How does one become a wargamer whether as a player, spon-

sor, analyst, or designer?
This volume strives to shift the discourse in wargaming
away from perpetual questions about the utility and nature
of wargames to new examinations of the professionalization
and evolution of wargaming as a field. Each of the authors ap-
proaches this question from a unique perspective, whether as
a researcher, military officer, analyst, or educator.
In chapter 1, Wojtowicz explored the core competencies
and professionalization of the wargaming field, while high-
lighting the systemic gaps in the wargaming talent pipeline.
This chapter is unique in seeking to codify the necessary skills
and aptitudes for wargamers from novice to expert, and the
various roles involved in the wargaming process. This bold ap-
proach to quantify the wargamer into its atomic components
is the reason it opens this edited volume. However, this chapter
will undoubtedly inspire intense debate amid the wargaming
community, ranging from disagreements about the specified
roles and associated competencies to a general aversion to
standardization in a field that historically viewed itself as an
art. Nevertheless, if we are to forge better wargamers, we must
strive to answer the elusive question: What makes a good war-
gamer?
In chapter 2, Hunter argues wargaming in precommis-
sioning education can lay the groundwork for “intellectual
overmatch” by developing mental agility and interdisciplinary
thinking early in an officer’s career. Fundamentally, the argu-

231
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
ment is persuasive as wargames, and games more broadly,
have consistently demonstrated their educational value in
both PME and civilian education. This is reflected in the growing
use of wargames at other precommissioning institutions such
as NROTC and other Service academies. For instance, in 2020,
the U.S. Naval Academy established its own Naval History War-
gaming Lab and student-run wargaming club, called the Com-
bat Action Lab.1 Likewise, the U.S. Military Academy also boasts
a wargaming club.2 Nevertheless, a stark difference exists be-
tween demonstrating the value of wargaming and systemical-
ly institutionalizing its use. Like all educational wargaming, the
overarching challenges of sustained funding, faculty buy-in, res-
ident wargaming expertise, and the ever-present constraint of
resistant curricula will be consistent and considerable barriers.3
In chapter 3, Smith outlines the pedagogical approach of
the Office of Naval Intelligence’s (ONI) SimBAT program, where
junior analysts leverage wargames to explore a variety of mili-
tary issues. The SimBAT program strives to provide profession-
al development to intelligence analysts through the social and
experiential model of learning offered in wargames. Similarly, in
“Wargaming: A Tool for Naval Intelligence Analysis,” Sundstrom,
another analyst at ONI, argues intelligence analysts should em-
brace wargaming as a critical tool.4 Yet, as mentioned above
with precommissioning programs, educational wargames con-
sistently face several challenges in implementation and contin-
uation, as reflected with the discontinuation of SimBAT in 2011
and its truncated form in 2014. Moreover, like tactical units, the
intelligence community suffers from the tyranny of the now,
with professional development often sacrificed in the dizzying

1
“USNA Museum, History Department Establish Naval History Wargaming Laboratory,”
USNA News Center, 5 August 2020.
2
“Wargames Committee,” U.S. Military Academy, accessed 18 April 2022.
3
Eric Walters, “Wargaming in Professional Military Education: Challenges and Solu-
tions,” Journal of Advanced Military Studies 12, no. 2 (2021): 81-114, https://doi.org/10.21140
/mcuj.20211202003.
4
Ian Sundstrom, “Wargaming: A Tool for Naval Intelligence Analysis,” CIMSEC, 14 Sep-
tember 2021.

232
 CONCLUSION
jumps from crisis to crisis. Although not insurmountable, war-
gaming for professional development will have to offer a more
persuasive argument for continued existence and growth.5
In chapter 4, Kearney outlines best practices for develop-
ing on-the-job training for aspiring wargame designers, such
as using commercial wargames and using professional war-
gaming organizations. This builds on the longstanding master-
apprentice structure of teaching wargame design within the
field.6 Although expedient in forging designers, the master-
apprentice structure is limited in its volume and inherently pos-
sesses an outsized risk in passing on biases in one’s learning,
stemming either from the master or the institution. Further-
more, on-the-job training for designers presumes an aspiring
designer can qualify for said position in the first place. This may
be the case for uniformed servicemembers who can fill such
wargaming billets (often at the capricious whims of the Ser-
vice), but this is not true for their civilian counterparts. Thus,
this begs the question: How does one get experience to get a
wargaming job where you can learn how to be a wargamer?
This vexing conundrum faces most aspiring wargamers who
did not serve in uniform, which may contribute to the severe
lack of diversity in the field.7
In chapter 5, Jenkinson and Brick outline their experiences
when instituting wargaming for PME at the Australian Defence
College, including specific obstacles and lessons learned. The
authors highlight the importance of concurrent and overlap-
ping lines of effort to push their wargaming initiative forward.
Additionally, echoing Hunter, Brown, and Herbold, they em-
phasize the importance of faculty support and the various
constraints of time and effort required. These are hard-won les-

5
Sebastian J. Bae and Major Paul Kearney, “Use Wargaming to Sharpen the Tactical
Edge,” War Room, 8 March 2021.
6
Sawyer Judge, “The Wargaming Guild: An Art or Science?” (presentation, Connections
2021, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 21–25 June 2021).
7
Caitlyn Leong, “How to Raise a Wargamer,” PAXsims, 21 May 2020; and “No Playing
Around When It Comes to Wargaming,” IDA Insights, March 2022, 2–5.

233
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
sons repeated by other institutions, such as the Marine Corps
University and Georgetown University.8 Although this chapter
provides one of the two non-American perspectives on edu-
cational wargaming in this volume, it is important to highlight
the largely Anglo-American perspective in this volume.9 The
absence of other regional perspectives on educational warga-
ming is a critical shortcoming. It is our collective hope that our
counterparts in Asia, South America, and elsewhere will add
their voices to this growing literature with their own experienc-
es and perspectives. As wargamers, we are keenly aware of the
importance of context.
In chapter 6, Brown and Herbold discuss the ongoing pro-
cess of institutionalizing educational wargaming in the U.S.
Marine Corps through wargames such as Fleet Marine Force:
INDOPACOM, TOAW IV, and Command.10 This chapter marks the
latest renaissance in educational wargaming in the history of
the U.S. Marine Corps, tracing its origins to the TACWAR family
of educational wargames in the 1960s and 1970s.11 Yet, this revi-
talization of educational wargaming is not limited to the Marine
Corps, as reflected by the increased demand for games in the
classroom across the Joint enterprise.12 Whether this trend of

8
“#7B—Tim Barrick,” Controversy & Clarity, podcast, 11 March 2021, 2:14:38 min.; and
Sebastian J. Bae, “Establishing a Wargaming Insurgency at the University,” Forge, 14 De-
cember 2020.
9
Wojtowicz provides the other non-American perspective in the volume. She teaches
at the Hague University of Applied Sciences.
10
Fleet Marine Force: INDOPACOM is the original title for the educational wargame de-
signed by Sebastian J. Bae. However, due to issues with the U.S. Marine Corps trade-
mark office, the title was changed to Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific for its eventual
commercial release by the Dietz Foundation.
11
Sebastian J. Bae and Maj Ian T. Brown, “Promise Unfulfilled: A Brief History of Educa-
tional Wargaming in the Marine Corps,” Journal of Advanced Military Studies 12, no. 2
(2021): 45–80, https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj.20211202002.
12
Col Christopher Hossfeld, “Getting War(Gaming) Back into the War College,” War
Room, 11 September 2020; Javier Chagoya, “Game On! NPS’ Wargaming Week Ties
Tactics, Strategy to Improve Defense Planning,” Office of University Communications,
Naval Postgraduate School, 23 June 2021; and James Sterrett, “Practical Lessons from
Teaching Online with Wargames at CGSC,” PAXsims, 7 September 2020.

234
 CONCLUSION
educational wargaming will continue or if it will be relegated
again to the shadows of analytical wargaming remains to be
seen. For now, the demand for educational wargaming contin-
ues to rise, but the resources and tools to meet the demand
remain elusive.
In chapter 7, Appleget and Burks highlight how to better
educate wargame sponsors on the value and limitations of
wargames, based on their experiences designing and teach-
ing wargames at NPS. This chapter is a wonderful extension of
their recent book, The Craft of Wargaming, which provides a
clear introduction and guide to the methodology of wargam-
ing.13 Unsurprisingly, both their chapter and the book aim to in-
crease wargaming literacy across the DOD and Joint enterprise.
Echoing Elizabeth Bartels in her article, “Building a Pipeline of
Wargaming: A Two Track Solution,” the authors aim their edu-
cational efforts beyond just wargamers and designers, but to
the consumers and sponsors of wargames.14 Admittedly, much
of the wargaming discourse can be insular and self-directed,
wargamers speaking to other wargamers. However, this chap-
ter examines the consumer perspective of wargames, building
on similar works by Jon Compton, a senior analyst in the Office
of the Secretary of Defense.15
In chapter 8, Valeriano and Jensen argue that wargames
can serve as powerful research tools for social science by high-
lighting both recent successful cases of its implementation
in academia and its remaining challenges to wide-scale use.
As mentioned in the chapter, the authors build on a grow-
ing literature of wargaming applications in social science and

13
Jeff Appleget, Robert Burks, and Fred Cameron, The Craft of Wargaming: A Detailed
Planning Guide for Defense Planners and Analysts (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
2020).
14
Ellie Bartels, “Building a Pipeline of Wargaming: A Two Track Solution,” War on the
Rocks, 14 November 2018.
15
Jon Compton, “The Obstacles on the Road to Better Analytical Wargaming,” War on
the Rocks, 9 October 2019; and Jon Compton, “What Is Analytical Wargaming,” George-
town University Wargaming Society, YouTube video, 25 September 2020, 1:36:11 min.

235
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
academic research.16 This includes the pioneering works by
Lin-Greenberg, Pauly, and Schneider, exploring the applica-
tions of wargaming for international relations research, such
as the International Crisis Game.17 Likewise, Goldblum, Reddie,
and Reinhardt utilized SIGNAL, an experimental wargame, to
explore nuclear conflict escalation.18 Barzashka of King’s College
London similarly raises questions about wargaming as an aca-
demic discipline and the associated obstacles to achieving this
vision.19 This chapter adds to the rapidly expanding literature
on the topic, challenging the long-held norms of wargaming as
the exclusive domain of the profession of arms and defense
policy.
In chapter 9, Taylor argues that educational wargaming can
bridge the gap between the DOD and Congress, particularly in
the case of nuclear policy. As mentioned in the chapter, in 2020,
Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) argued for greater partic-
ipation by Congress in DOD wargaming, particularly in relation
to the Navy’s Battle Force 2045. Both Taylor and Gallagher argue
that wargames can serve as powerful mediums to engender
cross-organizational collaboration, understanding, and policy.
Fundamentally, this stems from the same value proposition in

16
Ellie Bartels, “The Science of Wargames: A Discussion of Philosophies of Science for
Research Games” (paper presented at War Gaming and Implications for International
Relations Research, MIT, CIS, and U.S. Naval War College Workshop, Endicott House,
MA, 2019).
17
Erik Lin-Greenberg, Reid B.C. Pauly, and Jacquelyn G. Schneider, “Wargaming for In-
ternational Relations Research,” European Journal of International Relations 28, no. 1
(March 2022): 83–109; and Reid B. C. Pauly, “Would US Leaders Push the Button?: War-
games and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security 43, no. 2 (2018).
18
Bethany L. Goldblum, Andrew W. Reddie, and Jason C. Reinhardt, “Wargames as Ex-
periments: The Project on Nuclear Gaming’s SIGNAL Framework,” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, 29 May 2019; and “SIGNAL,” Project on Nuclear Gaming, Berkeley.edu, ac-
cessed 18 April 2022.
19
Ivanka Barzashka, “Realizing a Vision of Wargaming as an Academic Discipline,”
Georgetown University Wargaming Society, YouTube video, 15 December 2020, 1:28:33
min.

236
 CONCLUSION
terms of Joint or cross-Service wargaming.20 However, there are
serious concerns about the involvement of Congress in war-
games. Chief among them being the powerful temptation to
bias the wargame to advance a specific Service or organiza-
tional agenda. This pathology of wargaming, where advocacy
masquerades as objective wargaming, is especially dangerous
when millions, if not billions, of funding may hang in the bal-
ance. Furthermore, in a wargaming ecosystem where most of
the expertise exists within the DOD enterprise, this model of
congressional wargaming risks producing myopic perspectives
of policy challenges overly focused on the military dimension
of national power.21 Nevertheless, this chapter reiterates the
challenge to the broader wargaming community—How can
Congress be an active participant in the wargaming process or
at the very least, be a better consumer of wargames?
In the end, nine chapters comprise this edited volume,
each offering their own insights and recommendations for the
way forward. Some of the chapters converge in their conclu-
sions, despite markedly different starting points. Meanwhile,
other chapters forge their own path into the wargaming litera-
ture. Yet, all the authors recognize there is still much to be done
in the process of forging a wargaming pipeline, connecting the
disparate islands across the wargaming ecosystem. This in-
cludes, but is not limited to, producing a wargaming continu-
um from precommissioning education to PME, crafting a more
persuasive argument for resources and time for educational
wargaming, and better integrating the design process with the
consumers of wargames. As a result, like wargames, this edited
volume does not provide unassailable, validated solutions but
highlights better questions to improve understanding.22
20
Mike Gallagher, “Bringing Congress to the (Wargaming) Table for a Bigger and Better
Navy,” War on the Rocks, 19 October 2020.
21
“Congress Should Be Wargaming (but Not Battle Force 2045),” PAXsims, 21 October
2020; and Rex Brynen, “Gaming for Congress?,” PAXsims, 19 October 2020.
22
Peter P. Perla et al., “Rolling the Iron Dice: From Analytical Wargaming to the Cycle of
Research,” War on the Rocks, 21 October 2019.

237
 SEBASTIAN J. BAE
The way forward for the wargaming community is dimly lit
and fraught with obstacles, both known and unknown. None-
theless, we must press forward, armed with better questions
and greater understanding, to forge a new generation of war-
gamers.
As befits wargamers, the die is cast, and now tumbles
across the table—but the result is yet to be determined.

Sebastian J. Bae
Editor and Working Group Chair

238
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 Index
active mode learning, 19 116, 122, 124–27, 130, 132–38, 233
adult education, 52n4, 101, 103–7, 109, Australian Defence College Wargam-
113, 133, 136 ing Society, 116, 134–35
adult learning, 104–7, 113 Australian Defence Force (ADF), 116–
after action review/report (AAR), 19, 18, 121, 125, 127–29, 131–34, 136–38
89, 99, 162 Australian Defence Force Warfare
Agile Combat Employment (ACE), Training Centre (ADFWTC), 127
168 Australian Joint Professional Military
aircraft Education Continuum, 121–22
Boeing B-29 Superfortress, 93
Grumman F6F Hellcat, 93 Bartels, Elizabeth, 6, 102, 205, 235
Junkers Ju-88, 93 Berger, Gen David H. (USMC), 30, 139,
Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, 141–42, 166
158 Brown, Gen Charles Q. (USAF), 30–31
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Brute Krulak Center for Innovation
II, 38, 93, 158 and Future Warfare, 137, 139–
Mitsubishi A6M Zeroes, 93 40, 144, 150, 152, 157, 162–64,
North American P-51 Mustang, 166–68, 171
93 Byrd, GySgt Dathan (USMC), 143–45,
Air Force Institute of Technology, 149
U.S., 5
analysis of competing hypotheses Career Course, 145, 148
(ACH), 60, 70n21, 77–81, 194, 203 Carrier Strike Group (CSG), 165–66
analytic methodology, 53–54, 59, 70, Center for Army Analysis, 101, 110–11
76 Central Command (CENTCOM), 34
analytic standards, 67–68, 75–76, China, 151, 163–64, 221, 227
78–79 Clancy, Tom, 165
Army Battle Simulation Group, Aus- cognitive collaboration, 60, 76
tralia (ABSG), 127 cognitive diversity, 68–74
Army Command and General Staff Cold War, 177, 184, 189, 218, 220–21
College, U.S., 5, 103, 119 College of Enlisted Military Educa-
Assassin’s Mace, 121–22 tion (CEME), 142–49
augmented reality, 127, 219 Combat Simulation Lab, West Point,
Australian Defence College (ADC), 48

255
 INDEX
combat snow globe, 42–43, 46–47, 49 30–31, 35–40, 42, 44, 49, 53–54,
Command, 163–67, 234 61, 72, 101–2, 173–76, 181–82, 184–
Command and Staff College (CSC), 89, 191, 217, 224–28, 235–37
MCU, 107, 155–56 design(er), wargame, 4, 27, 29, 101,
command, control, c­ ommunications, 158, 231, 233
computers, cyber, intelligence, diplomacy, information, military,
surveillance, and reconnais- and economic (DIME), 219
sance (C5ISR), 81, 151 DOD Board on Diversity and Inclu-
Commandant’s Planning Guidance sion, 39
(CPG), 30, 139, 141, 144, 149, 151,
156, 166–67, 170–71 Education Command (EDCOM), 139,
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), 83, 141–42, 155, 162, 171–72
110, 160, 164, 167 end-of-course exercises (EOCX), 48
competence model, 28 Expeditionary Advanced Base Oper-
competencies, wargaming, 15–16, 20, ations (EABO), 163–64, 166–67
22–29, 231 Expeditionary Warfare School (EWS),
computational collaboration, 59–63, MCU, 149–55, 166–67
76 experiential learning theory (ELT),
computational simulation, 199, 201– 40, 63, 67, 69–72, 104–7, 109,
2, 204, 207 111n58, 113, 129, 132, 179, 181, 228,
Connections Wargaming Confer- 232. See also Kolb, David A.
ence, 6–7, 9, 10n3, 13–14, 112, experimental methods, 200
113n45, 136, 145 experimental testing, 62
constraints, limitations, and as-
sumptions (CLA), 183–85, 187 federally funded research and de-
counterfactual, 68, 107, 195, 199, 203, velopment center (FFRDC), 6,
207, 213–14 101, 228
COVID-19, 113n45, 164, 169 fiction intelligence (FICINT), 212
Critical Thinking and Structured fight clubs, 17
Analysis (CTSA), 54, 57, 60, 62– Five-Factor Model, 69. See also Myers-
63, 74–75, 77, 80–81, 86–87 Briggs.
culture, Service, 16–20, 33–34, 38, Fleet Marine Force (FMF), 140, 142–
40, 43, 46, 49, 61, 66, 118, 128, 43, 150, 152, 171–72
133, 171–72 FMF: INDOPACOM, 152–54, 171
Curry, John, 36, 145 fog, 64–66, 151, 197
Force Design 2030, 170
Data Collection and Management friction, 64–65, 191, 193, 197
Plan (DCMP), 183
Defense Advanced Research Proj- general military intelligence (GMI),
ects Agency (DARPA), 169 61, 74
Department of Defense (DOD), 6–8, Gray, Gen Alfred M. (USMC), 144, 150

256
 INDEX
Georgetown University, 5, 18, 107, 112, Joint Planning, Joint Publication 5-0,
152, 234 85, 180, 191
Georgetown University Wargaming Joint Professional Military Education
Society, 113, 137 (JPME), 136, 138
Gibbs, Graham, 104 Joint Professional Military Education
Global Thunder, 217, 218n6 and Training (JPMET), 121
Goldwater-Nichols Department of Joint Task Force (JTF), 66, 163
Defense Reorganization Act of
1986, 220–21 key assumptions checks (KAC), 60,
great power conflict (GPC), 53, 205 77–79, 81
Kingfish ACE, 167–68
historical wargaming, 107–8, 156 King’s College London Wargaming
hobby wargames, 62–63, 83, 100, Network, 113, 236
110–13 Kolb, David A., 69–70, 104–5, 109, 111
human centered approach, 44, 47– Kolb model, 109
49 Kriegsspiel, 4, 100, 115, 117–18, 134, 177
human domain, 47–49 Krulak, Gen Charles C. (USMC), 140,
hypotheses, 53–54, 59–64, 70n21, 144
77–78, 80–81, 86, 88, 194–95,
200, 203, 206, 214 Lasgah Pol, 146–49
learning objectives, 19, 53, 64, 71, 75,
inclusive education, 114, 133 79–89, 120–21, 129, 133–34, 142–
indications and warnings (I&W), 59, 45, 149–50, 155–56, 161
80, 96 learning spiral, 54–55
indoctrination, 43, 67 learning styles, 70n22
Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), live-virtual-constructive (LVC), 128
34
InfoChess, 169–70 Mabus, Raymond E., 30
Innovation Summit, 168 Magdeburg Wargaming Club, 134
Intelligence Community (IC), 53, 74, Marine Air-Ground Task Force
76–77, 232 (MAGTF), 149–50, 155
Intelligence Community Advanced Marine Corps Gazette, 140
Analysis Program (ICAAP), 74 Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, 152
Intelligence Community Directive Marine Corps Order 1500.55, 140–41
(ICD) 203, “Analytic Standards,” Marine Corps Planning Process
76, 78–79 (MCPP), 143, 161, 180, 190–91
Marine Corps University (MCU), 5,
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 16, 31, 35, 45, 49, 139, 150, 154, 162–63, 168, 171, 234
85, 221 Marine Doom, 141–42
Joint Military Intelligence Training Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF),
Center, DIA (JMITC), 60 157–59

257
 INDEX
Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization
166, 171 (NATO), 119, 126, 186–87
Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR), 151, NPS Mobile Education Team (MET),
154 175, 187–88
matrix game, 145, 149 NPS Wargaming Center, 174
Mechanical Turk (MTurk), 201 nuclear wargaming, 215–29
methodology, 53–56, 59–61, 70,
72–73, 76, 82, 87, 180, 203, 205, Office of the Director of National In-
207, 235 telligence (ODNI), 75, 79
Military Operations Research Society Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), 51,
(MORS), 103, 112 59, 67, 74–75, 83, 232. See also
missiles SimBAT.
antiship missile (ASM), 158, 165 on-the-job training, 10, 100–14, 233
Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, Operation Northern Eclipse, 46
158 operational plan (OPLAN), 64
YJ-62 antiship cruise missile, 158 operations order (OPORD), 62, 64, 81
modeling, 25, 37, 53–56, 61–62, 82, operations research (OR), 12, 13n6,
87 54n7, 61, 127, 174, 177, 180–81, 188
modeling and simulation (M&S), 53,
56, 61–63 Pacific Challenge III, 157–61
Mullen III, MajGen William F. (USMC), Pedagogy, 12, 40, 51–52, 63, 65–74,
163 123, 125, 130, 180, 232
multidomain operations, 43–46 People’s Liberation Army Navy Ma-
multiple intelligences, 70–71 rine Corps (PLANMC), 151, 154
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Perla, Peter P., 3, 193, 200
69 Piaget, Jean, 68–70
Pierce, LtCol Troy (USAF), 167–68
National Defense Authorization Act, pipeline, precommissioning, 30–50
272 precommissioning education, war-
National Defense University, 5 gaming in, 30–50, 231, 237
Naval Academy, U.S. (USNA), 47, 107, Price, Tim, 145
171, 232 professional military education (PME),
Naval Historical Wargaming Labora- 5, 8, 16–17, 31–35, 37, 39, 41, 44–
tory (NHWL), 47 45, 109, 115, 117, 120–39, 142, 144,
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), 5, 150, 152, 155, 157, 172, 189, 226,
108, 169, 173–88, 235 228, 232–33, 237
Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps Project on Nuclear Gaming (PoNG),
(NROTC), 171 204
Naval War College, U.S. (NWC), 5, 51, PROTEUS (Prototype Resilient Opera-
62, 64–67, 85, 119, 137, 173, 179 tions Testbed for Expeditionary
neurodevelopmental systems, 70–71 Urban Operations), 169
NextWar wargame series, 169 Proud Prophet, 218

258
 INDEX
Rapid Prototyping Game, 110 Tabletop Simulator, 10, 154, 155n23
Reagan, Ronald W., 218 tactical decision games (TDGs), 5,
Red Storm Rising, 165. See also Clan- 144
cy, Tom. TACWAR, 140, 234
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps TECOM Warfighting Society, 163–65
(ROTC), 32 The Operational Art of War IV (TOAW
Retention, 66–67 IV), 157–61, 234
roles, wargame, 20–29, 38, 80, 87– Torstendahl, Rolf, 14
89, 94, 98–99, 231 Training and Education Command
Russia, 65, 221, 227 (TECOM), 156, 163–65
Training Information Bulletin 52, 126
School of Advanced Warfighting Twilight Struggle, 122, 130
(SAW), MCU, 155–57, 160, 162–64
scientific and technical intelligence USS Nimitz (CVN 68), 165–66
(S&TI), 61
Sea Dragon wargaming tournament, Van Riper, LtGen Paul K. (USMC), 144
168–70 virtual reality, 203, 219
Simulation-Based Analysis and Train- von Reisswitz, Georg Leopold, 115.
ing (SimBAT), 51–100 See also Kriegsspiel.
SimBAT Analysis (SimBAT-A), 53, 56
SimBAT Training (SimBAT-T), 53–57 Wargaming Community of Practice,
simulation, 40n23, 52–54, 56, 61–63, 103, 112–13
65–68, 73–75, 79 wargaming conferences, 6, 9, 13, 136
simulation studies, 178 Wargaming Incentive Fund, 101
Singapore Sling, 160–62 Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctri-
Small Unit Leadership Evaluation nal Publication 1 (MCDP 1), 143,
(SULE), 143 147–48
social science, 193–214, 236 Wargaming Master Plan, 139, 141–42
Soviet Union, 90, 165, 218 Wei-Hai, 100
sponsor proposal agreement, 180, Wells, H. G., 4
182, 184–87 Western Approaches Tactical Unit
sponsor, wargame, 4, 135–36, 173–92, (UK), 4
231 Western, educated, industrialized,
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty rich, and democratic (WEIRD),
(START), 227 209
strategic thinking T, 224–25 Wilensky, Harold L., 10, 13
structured analytic techniques (SATs), Work, Robert O., 176, 207
60, 74–79
Surface Action Group (SAG), 163

259
 About the Editor and Authors
Editor
Sebastian J. Bae, a research analyst and game designer at the Center
for Naval Analyses (CNA), works in wargaming, emerging technolo-
gies, the future of warfare, and strategy and doctrine for the U.S. Navy
and Marine Corps. He also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at
the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, where he
teaches a graduate course on designing educational wargames. He
teaches similar courses at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff
College and U.S. Naval Academy. He is also the faculty advisor to the
Georgetown University Wargaming Society, the cochair of the Military
Operations Research Society’s (MORS) Wargaming Community of
Practice, a fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future
Warfare, and serves on the executive committee for the Educational
Wargaming Cooperative. Previously, he served six years in the Marine
Corps infantry, leaving as a sergeant. He deployed to Iraq in 2009.

Authors
Dr. Jeff Appleget is a retired Army colonel who served as an artillery-
man and operations research analyst in his 30-year Army career. He
teaches the Wargaming Applications, Introduction to Joint Combat
Modeling, and Advanced Wargaming Applications courses at Naval
Postgraduate School (NPS). He also teaches week-long Basic Analytic
Wargaming Mobile Education Team (MET) courses and workshops
for U.S. and international sponsors around the world. Along with Dr.
Robert Burks from the NPS Defense Analysis Department, Appleget
directs the activities of the NPS Wargaming Center, part of the NPS
Naval Warfare Studies Institute. He is the Joint Warfare Analysis Cen-
ter (JWAC) Chair of Applied Operations Research at NPS. His research
interests include irregular warfare and stability operations modeling,

261
 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND AUTHORS
amphibious operations modeling, wargaming, combat modeling,
and integer programming. Appleget served on the MORS Board of
Directors from 2000 to 2004.

Group Captain Jo Brick is a legal officer in the Royal Australian Air

Force. She is currently the chief of staff at the Australian Defence Col-
lege. She has held various posts throughout the Australian Defence
Force including Legal Advisor to the Chief of Defence Force, and Legal
Advisor to the Chief of Air Force. Group Captain Brick is a graduate of
the Australian Command and Staff College, and was also directing
staff at the Australian War College. Her primary interests are strategy
and civil-military relations, the ethical aspects of the laws of war, com-
mand decision making, and wargaming. She is a member of the Mili-
tary Writers Guild and is an editor for Strategy Bridge and The Central
Blue (blog). In June 2021, she was appointed as a nonresident fellow
of the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, Marine
Corps University.

Major Ian T. Brown is a Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion pilot and cur-
rently serves as the operations officer for the Brute Krulak Center for
Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University. He has writ-
ten for the Marine Corps Gazette, Strategy Bridge, War on the Rocks,
the Australian Defence College’s Forge website, the Center for Inter-
national Maritime Security, the Krulak Center’s Destination Unknown
graphic novel series, and the Journal of Advanced Military Studies. He
is also the author of A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Ma-
rines, and Maneuver Warfare, published with Marine Corps University
Press in 2018, which was added to the most recent iteration of the
Commandant’s Professional Reading List.

Colonel Robert E. Burks Jr. (Ret), PhD, is an associate professor in

the Defense Analysis Department at NPS and the director of NPS’s
Wargaming Center. He holds a PhD in operations research form the
Air Force Institute of Technology, an MS in operations research from
the Florida Institute of Technology and a BS in aerospace engineering
from the United States Military Academy. He is a retired logistics Army

262
 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND AUTHORS
colonel with more than 30 years of military experience in leadership,
advanced analytics, decision modeling, and logistics operations who
served as an Army operations research analyst at NPS, the TRADOC
Analysis Center, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Army Recruit-
ing Command. He has led multiple analytical study teams responsi-
ble for Army transformation (organizational change) issues and his
work includes applying analytical methods to develop solutions for
complex problems in support of the Combined Arms Support Com-
mand, the Army’s sustainment think tank and premier sustainment
learning institution. In addition, he has served as the technical expert
on studies involving deployment, equipping, manning, training, and
logistics operations of military forces in multiple theaters of opera-
tion. He currently teaches the Modeling for Decision Making and Sta-
tistics Courses at NPS. His research interests include irregular warfare
and stability operations modeling, information operations modeling,
wargaming, and agent-based modeling and simulation. His recent
major awards include the Military Leadership Award, Joint Service
Warfare Faculty Award, Military Operations Research Journal Award
for developing analytical methods for solving the theater distribution
problem, and the Omar N. Bradley Officer Research Fellowships in
Mathematics.

Captain Benjamin M. Herbold is an infantry officer and held the bil-

let of 8834 technical information operations officer at the Brute Kru-
lak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare when the first version
of this article was written. He currently serves as the aide-de-camp
for the commanding general, Education Command, at Marine Corps
University.

Dr. Kyleanne Hunter is the director of the Strategy and Warfare Cen-
ter and an assistant professor of military and strategic studies at the
U.S. Air Force Academy. She is a nonresident fellow at the Brute Krulak
Center for Innovation and Future Warfare and a senior adjunct fellow
at the Center for a New American Security.

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Jenkinson is an Australian Army offi-

263
 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND AUTHORS
cer with a passion for military education. He has previously served
with the British Army Headquarters, with the U.S. Army’s 3d Infantry
Division in Afghanistan and as directing staff at the Canadian Forces
College. Lieutenant Colonel Jenkinson is a graduate of the Australian
Command and Staff College.

Dr. Benjamin Jensen a professor at the School of Advanced War-

fighting, Marine Corps University, and also serves as a senior fellow for
future war, gaming, and strategy in the International Security Program
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Jensen has
spent the last decade researching the changing character of political
violence, technology, and strategy. He has worked with the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Marine Corps War-
fighting Lab, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the U.S. Army, and a
range of government agencies and foundations to develop warga-
mes and scenario-driven exercises exploring strategy, defense anal-
ysis, crisis response, military planning, and complex emergencies. He
is the author of four books including the forthcoming Information at
War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial
Intelligence (2022),  Military Strategy in the 21st Century: People, Con-
nectivity, and Competition (2018), Cyber Strategy: The Evolving Char-
acter of Power and Coercion (2018), and Forging the Sword: Doctrinal
Change in the U.S. Army (2016). Most recently, he served as the senior
research director and lead author for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium
Commission.

Paul M. Kearney is an active duty Army strategist and wargame an-

alyst at the Center for Army Analysis, the U.S. Army’s proponent for
wargaming. He holds degrees from the U.S. Military Academy, King’s
College London, and most recently, Georgetown University’s School
of Foreign Service, where he wrote his thesis using wargaming meth-
odology to measure deterrence. Kearney writes on strategy, military
effectiveness, and wargaming. His work has been published in the
Journal of Terrorism and Security Analysis, the Georgetown Security
Studies Review, Strategic Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Military and
Strategic Studies, and the Army War College’s War Room.

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 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND AUTHORS
Timothy J. Smith is a senior multiwarfare analyst, analytic methodol-
ogist, and trainer in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) who current-
ly leads model validation in the Integrated Modeling and Simulation
(M&S) Department in the Farragut Technical Analysis Center (TAC).
A lifelong wargamer, Smith has led analytic reform efforts within ONI
designed to reduce the likelihood of strategic surprise, taking the
form today of ONI’s Simulation-Based Analysis and Training (SimBAT)
program. The SimBAT-Training component (SimBAT-T) has included a
dozen courses run numerous times. The analysis component (Sim-
BAT-A) features M&S-based analyses of foreign naval capabilities and
operations. SimBAT-A has grown into a full department at TAC, and
SimBAT-T continues in ONI’s Cornerstone training course and TAC’s
Scientific and Technical Intelligence Analysis professionalization pro-
gram. At home, Smith runs the Annapolis-Area Strategy Gaming Club,
an academic enrichment program that teaches high schoolers histo-
ry, planning, and decision making through board wargaming.

Dr. James Sterrett is the chief of the Simulation Education Division

in the Directorate of Simulation Education at the U.S. Army Com-
mand and General Staff College. Since 2004, he has taught the use
and design of simulations and wargames and supported their use in
education. He earned a PhD in war studies from King’s College Lon-
don, and he has participated in beta test and design teams for many
games, notably including Steel Beasts (2000) and Attack Vector: Tacti-
cal (2004).

Dr. Brooke Taylor is the chief academic officer for the Small Business
Consulting Corporation. Dr. Taylor is the creator and principal investi-
gator for Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) National Nuclear
Strategy and Global Security Workshop for Practitioners. Prior to this,
Dr. Taylor managed AFGSC’s near-peer competition program where
she developed and facilitated scenario planning table-top exercises.
She designed a novel top-secret Nuclear Command, Control, and
Communications environmental scan table-top exercise utilized in
executive education for senior military leaders. Dr. Taylor was a U.S.
Congressional Nuclear Security Fellow, where she managed appro-

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 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND AUTHORS
priation portfolios for Defense, Energy and Water, and Military Con-
struction and Veterans Affairs. In addition, she was the manager for
the Congressional Nuclear Working Group. Dr. Taylor is a former con-
gressional candidate for Virginia’s 10th district.

Dr. Brandon Valeriano serves as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute

in the Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Department. He was most
recently the Donald Bren Chair of Military Innovation at the Brute Kru-
lak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare and a senior advisor for
the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Dr. Valeriano has pub-
lished six books and dozens of articles for such outlets as the Journal
of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Peace
Research. His two most recent books include coauthoring Cyber War
versus Cyber Reality: Cyber Conflict in the International System (2015)
and Cyber Strategy: The Evolving Character of Power and Coercion
(2018). Dr. Valeriano has written opinion and popular media pieces
for such outlets as the Washington Post, Slate, Foreign Affairs, and
Lawfare. He has provided testimony on cyber conflict in front of both
the United States Senate and the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
His ongoing research explores conflict escalation, big data in cyber se-
curity, and repression in cyberspace. Dr. Valeriano is the area editor in
international relations for the Journal of Cybersecurity and the series
editor of Disruptive Technology and International Security.

Natalia Wojtowicz is a lecturer in Safety and Security Management

Studies Department at the Hague University. She has worked at
NATO Headquarters, Brussels, in the Defence Investment Division.
Thereafter, she moved to The Hague to join the NATO Civil-Military
Cooperation Center of Excellence where she initiated the wargaming,
modeling, and simulation project and led it from 2017 to 2020. She
focused on the introduction of the civilian population to wargaming
to create new formats representative of modern war. As a lecturer at
the Hague University of Applied Sciences, she teaches about game
design for international security and industrial safety.

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