The YouTube channel French Wargaming discusses how the French military conducts professional wargames with Maxime Yvelin and Antoine Bourguilleau of the Bureau Jeu de Guerre of the Commandement du combat futur (CCF).
Also, remember that the forthcoming Wargaming à Paris wargaming event will be held on June 23-24.
Image from the Guardian.
Exercise Arrcade Strike was a recent command post exercise conducted by by NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) using disused platforms of Charing Cross Underground Station in London last month. According to a report in the Guardian:
Deep in Charing Cross underground station, in the disused terminus of the Jubilee line, a secret Nato command bunker has this week been discreetly at work. Dozens of mostly British soldiers were engaged in a war game defending Estonia from a Russian invasion in 2030, unbeknownst to commuters and tourists bustling above.
The secret chambers are behind two sets of normally locked, metal double doors. A red glow at the bottom of the escalator beyond is the first sign of troops below; next are mocked up newspaper covers pasted over ageing adverts. A British Nato force has deployed to Estonia they blare, in response to a Russian massing of troops on the border.
“The scenario you are about to see is very deliberately set in 2030 because that is where we see the threat from Russia to be at its most acute,” says Lt Gen Mike Elviss, commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, in a video briefing. If the war ends in Ukraine it is the point at which, military analysts estimate, a remilitarised Russia could be ready to attack Europe again.
The aim, ostensibly, is to show Moscow that for all Donald Trump’s bluster, Nato is ready, operationally at least, to defend its most exposed members on the Baltic. But a more important audience is a mile or so down the road in Westminster, where the Ministry of Defence has been locked in a funding battle with the Treasury for months.
The “Resilience Lab” is a hands-on security research facility for the public, being constructed in Berlin. According to the website of the city of Berlin:
The laboratory is a place where civilian aid organisations and the military can work together to develop and test new solutions, said Bär. In addition, members of the public can experience realistic crisis scenarios such as war, power cuts or natural disasters in an interactive way and learn how to cope with emergencies and dangerous situations. The laboratory will offer crisis training for public authorities and aid organisations, allowing them to experience hazardous situations interactively through virtual and physical scenarios. In the event of an emergency, all agencies involved should then be able to act quickly and in a coordinated manner.
The aim is also to prepare interested members of the public for crisis scenarios through digital means, so that they can learn how to cope with emergencies and dangerous situations. The aim is to strengthen self-reliance in particular, it was said. Citizens can answer questions on how to behave correctly in crisis scenarios, prepare for a power cut in a simulator, take on various roles in an interactive blackout scenario, and pack an emergency kit containing all essential items in two minutes. All tests and trials are scientifically monitored and evaluated. At the time of the presentation, it was not yet clear when the facility would actually open or when visitor groups would be able to visit the “Resilience Lab”. Initially, the plan was for visitors to be able to visit from late 2026 or early 2027.
The “Resilience Lab” is part of the RESILIA Innovation Hub for Security and Defence, operated by the University of the German Armed Forces, the Berlin Fire Brigade, the Free University of Berlin and other research institutions.
Eleanor Ross (Creative Director at Expert Theory) discusses how she designs wargames (and hates videogames) at the Professor Game podcast.
This article looks at the ways wargaming can reflect the diversity and ambiguity of rationales of hybrid threat actors in the time of a fracturing liberal international order. Sections cover wargaming as a research method; hybrid, subthreshold, and grey zone threats, including hostilestate actors, ambiguous state actors, and hostile non-state actors; the role of the information environment in constructing hybrid threat scenarios; and constructing hybrid threat actors. In offering a more accurate representation of disruptive actors, and not assuming they have an overarching geostrategic rationale, wargaming can offer a better analytical tool for understanding and preventing peacetime disruption.
This piece explores how cyber warfare is evolving by combining professional wargaming with analysis of real‑world cyber incidents. It highlights the lessons that have emerged from iterations of wargames about actual and potential cyber conflicts. As cyber conflict lacks the rich campaign histories available for conventional war, repeated wargaming of past operations is used to understand attacker intent, capability, and effectiveness. Several consistent patterns emerge across two decades of state‑level cyber activity, including strategic signaling, integration with wider political and military campaigns, a focus on critical infrastructure, and the concentration of major cyber operations at the start of conflict. Looking ahead, the paper argues that while cyber capabilities are becoming more significant, they will take decades—and multiple major conflicts—to mature into a dominant class of weapons. A key strategic challenge is mobilizing national cyber power, particularly given the concentration of expertise in the private sector. Effective mobilization requires pre‑planned public–private integration, cyber reserves, and extensive peacetime wargaming. It concludes that despite technological advances, human expertise remains the decisive factor in cyber conflict; wargaming is an essential part of developing these people.
A few months ago, I attended a panel discussion for a wargame simulating rapid industrial mobilization for armed conflict. Conducted by a leading university, with teams composed of former senior defense officials, the game probed how government and industry collaboration would play out given minimal coordination before the onset of a crisis. On the panel, the defense leaders confessed how infrequently they engaged with industry in real life to plan for a national emergency. This declared lack of public-private planning for large-scale conflict matches what I’ve experienced as a defense planner and wargame developer: Outside of rhetorical claims atannualexpositions, or the efforts of formal and informaldefense advisory organizations, there is no persistent effort to put the Pentagon and industry on the same page about mobilization for national emergency.
Wargaming can be used by the Department of Defense to deliver evidence-based acquisition policy reforms focused on mobilizing industrial base capacity and capability in a crisis. Yet resolving this coordination deficit will require a concerted effort to link policy, law, and budgets to operational outcomes.
A recent article in these in these pages argued for the Department of Defense and Congress to conduct wargaming foracquisitionreform. The author recommended a strategic game series to quantify and predict how particular acquisition decisions might influence military effectiveness across a variety of metrics. The article called for legislation directing a partnership between a private think tank and a federally funded research and development center to merge their analytic expertise and lead these wargames.
While that article suggested the right institutional trajectory for using wargames in acquisition policy, the author’s solution is too modest. It would be a mistake to vest this important work in only one private think tank and one federally funded research center executing a lone joint wargame series. A strategic game would help senior leaders rank broad priorities, but a monolithic effort executed by a merger of two analytic houses is bound to miss key details that can only emerge from a distributed effort across the services, agencies, and departments. Balanced investment choices emerge when services capture the details for which they are responsible and are subjected to a joint game that evaluates complementary capabilities and trade-offs between forces.
The College of William & Mary has established the Statecraft Simulations Group, an “applied research and education initiative focused on the design and facilitation of policy simulations and wargames centered on modern statecraft.”
SSG focuses on the tools of modern statecraft, including economic policy, industrial strategy, sanctions, technology governance, alliance coordination, and information dynamics, rather than kinetic military conflict. Our simulations are built to reflect the realities of policymaking: incomplete information, competing priorities, domestic and international constraints, and the cumulative effects of decisions over time.
We develop multi-move, seminar-style simulations that place participants in the roles of real-world actors across governments, alliances, and strategic competitors. These simulations are designed not to produce “right answers,” but to surface tradeoffs, test assumptions, and explore how policy choices interact across political, economic, and institutional domains. Outcomes evolve based on participant decisions, reinforcing the interconnected and path-dependent nature of statecraft.
We also treat simulations as a form of applied research. Games are structured to generate insight into how individuals and teams interpret information, coordinate across institutions, manage risk, and adapt to strategic pressure. This approach allows SSG to contribute to broader conversations about policy design, decision-making, and experiential learning.
Can games be used to teach trade unionists about the challenges of labour relations under capitalism? An article in Morning Star looks at the work of Class Wargames, including a game being developed for TUC Wales:
IN the basement of a community hall, somewhere in Walworth, London, the CEO of RenewBlades is fixing me with a cold, hard stare.
“On your head be it,” he says, dismissively.
“On my head be it.”
The negotiations are over. I’ve just declared strike action. I stand up and leave without a handshake. If there were a door to his office, I’d have slammed it. Instead, I leave the table, the two chairs, and a jesting Pilate, pretending to busy himself with papers on his desk.
I worry I’ve made a miscalculation. RenewBlades, a producer of wind turbines and an anchor company in the Welsh town of Trefhywl, is apparently in financial distress. Gig workers have been fired, wages have been withheld, and pay cuts are about to be announced. But I’m suspicious. I don’t believe the numbers. Bosses can make their profit and loss sheets do anything. I’ve seen it before, and this time, I’ve called it.
In a vegan cafe, I check in with an official from another union, handling logistics for RenewBlades. If they’ll stand with us, it’s possible we could end things quickly. The company relies on its overseas shipments. Solidarity here might give us extra leverage. Yet, would that be against the rules? Thatcher criminalised sympathy strikes, but if two unions share the same employer, is it still illegal?
There’s a slow clapping of hands and I’m back in a room full of strangers. The effect’s probably similar to waking up after being hypnotised at a party. But even if I’m feeling sheepish, no-one’s noticed. Everyone’s too focused on reading the next chapter of the narrative — what the designers at Class Wargames call “injections.” Across from me, the CEO, actually a young woman, playing her part spectacularly, is laughing, momentarily breaking character.
“Form a picket line, then!” shouts the group’s co-founder, Richard Barbrook. It’s obvious he’s enjoying the playtest every bit as much as the participants around him.
“This is something you only get with analogue games,” he explains. “People coming together. Learning together. We prefer not to do videogames, we spend far too much time in front of screens as it is.”
Comments Off on The Chinese Institution for Command and Control on “wargaming”
Posted by Rex Brynen on 11/06/2026
Kevin Williamsonis a senior ORSA (operations researcher and systems analyst) at Metrea. He provided this material for PAXsims.
One of my passions is searching for RED Wargaming literature and products ever since USNI Proceedings wrote about China’s “Blue Team”. At the time, I was working as a Wargaming SME for Matrix Pro Sims supporting Marine Corps University’s wargaming program under Tim Barrick and some of what the article covered struck close to what we had been wargaming.
Since then, I have become accustomed to several sources of information hosted on .cn websites or social media accounts of mainland Chinese wargame designers, academics and even going so far as to look at Google patents associated with known PLA supporting organizations. I do not assume everything I come across in these research efforts are true, the goal is to simply acquire the materials and analyze them later. The wargaming field is a community of practice and when I come across something that feels significant, I try to make people aware of it to do with it as they please.
This particular file was sourced from China’s Command and Control Society (CICC – Chinese Institution for Command and Control) [1] and I believe is their first real attempt at standardization of the “Wargaming” topic. It appears this is in relation to the National Wargaming Competition they hold annually, which serves as a perspective into what associated PLA Wargaming standards may look like in actuality.
[1] The Chinese Institute of Command and Control (CICC) is China’s sole national-level society in the field of command and control science and technology, founded on September 16, 2012, and officially registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. Bridging academia, the military, and the tech industry, it focuses on academic exchanges, disciplinary development, and technological advancement in command systems, communications, and national defense automation. As a formal group member of the China Association for Science and Technology, it operates under CAST’s direct leadership and holds the qualification to nominate candidates for both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Its annual conference covers topics spanning military command theory, multi-domain operations, cyberspace situational awareness, unmanned systems, and swarm intelligence, and the CICC also co-sponsors major international events such as the IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Systems through dedicated technical committees.
Four possible points of failure are suggested in the NYT analysis:
President Trump may have expected Iran’s government to collapse quickly before it could act on the strait, partly based on Netanyahu’s assurances that regime change was achievable, and buoyed by the recent capture of Venezuela’s Maduro.
Senior officials (including Secretary of State Rubio) believed closing the strait would be “economic suicide” for Iran since it depended on oil exports through it. However, this assumed Iran couldn’t block other traffic while keeping its own tankers moving, which proved wrong.
US planning focused heavily on Iran mining the waterway, but Iran instead used shore-based missiles and cheap drones to menace shipping — a tactic that caught planners off guard despite clear warnings from Houthi drone attacks in the Red Sea.
Trump officials counted on allies joining a coalition to reopen the strait, but no major non-regional allies volunteered, and those willing to help said they would only act after a formal U.S.-Iran agreement was in place.
The strategic failures described in the article were likely compounded by a range of well-documented cognitive biases. Optimism bias may have led officials to overweight best-case scenarios (a swift regime collapse, allied support, Iranian self-restraint ) while discounting wargame findings that consistently pointed the other way. Confirmation bias could have meant that signals supporting the administration’s preferred narrative were amplified, while contrary evidence was sidelined. The Administration may have also fallen into mirror imaging — assuming Iran would behave out of naked economic self-interest, rather than appreciating that a government fighting for its survival operates on entirely different logic.
Critically, these biases would almost been certainly aggravated by the institutional and political culture surrounding President Trump, who has consistently rewarded sycophancy and punished dissent. When staff fear that raising inconvenient assessments will be met with ridicule or career consequences, strategic warnings naturally get softened, buried, or never voiced. The result is a feedback loop in which the leader’s assumptions go unchallenged, worst-case scenarios are stripped from briefings, and decisions are made on the basis of what people wanted to hear rather than what the intelligence assessments and wargames kept suggesting.
All-in-all, it’s a useful case study on the frequent gap between analytical war games and the policies and decision-makers they are supposed to inform.
In the meantime, we are in Day 95 (and counting) of a war that has killed thousands, depleted billions of dollars of US military assets, resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars to civilian infrastructure in Iran, the Gulf States, and Lebanon, and triggered trillions of dollars of global economic damage.
Comments Off on Build Britain’s defence on £750bn (simulator)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 29/05/2026
Shashank Joshi—the outgoing defence editor and incoming Washington bureau chief for The Economist—has constructed a UK defence expenditure simulator, in which YOU the PLAYER, CHOOSE YOUR OWN defence investment plan ADVENTURE.
Give it a try here. The comments the simulation makes your proposal—including who in the services, Whitehall or the Cabinet hates your investment plan and leaks criticism to the press—are worth the price (£0) of playing.
Comments Off on NASAGA 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 29/05/2026
The 2026 conference of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA) will take place in Rochester, New York on 14-17 October. This year’s conference theme is “Sustaining Human Connection through Play in the Digital Age.”
As our lives rely more and more on digital tools, we end up spending a lot more time interacting with our phones, tablets, smartwatches, and computers on our own. Most of our time with technology is individual and asynchronous, meaning we are spending less time having meaningful interactions with other people.
This is where play comes in.
Play is not frivolous. Games have been an integral part of the human experience for thousands of years for educational, entertainment, and cultural purposes. They help us think through hard questions together. They provide moments of shared joy and alignment. They allow us to build new skills and learn crucial information in memorable ways.
This year’s conference will explore how play can be a major ingredient in ensuring that we can still have rich social lives in our digital world.
The Central Structural Paradox: Russian General Staff wargaming integrates command-staff games, strategic exercises, mathematical modeling, and political-military signaling to make war intellectually manageable. However, it operates under a severe institutional constraint: it successfully disciplines tactical and operational assumptions but inherently prevents objective strategic feedback from challenging top-down political authority.
A Deep Historical Inheritance: This tension is structurally and historically rooted. From pre-1914 strategic games to the January 1941 map exercises, Russian wargaming has consistently structured operational directions while remaining blind to decisive vulnerabilities. Late-Soviet military-scientific innovations, such as Vitaly Tsygichko’s nuclear-war modeling, successfully produced analytical truths (e.g., that Soviet strikes would contaminate Warsaw Pact rear areas), but these findings were suppressed rather than institutionalized.
The Mirror of the Ukraine War: Contemporary exercises like Zapad effectively rehearsed complex, real-world operational problems—including aerospace defense, electronic warfare, counter-UAV measures, and river crossings. Yet, Russia’s governing “theory of victory” failed because the system could not test its assumptions against the structural realities of Ukrainian resistance, Western strategic support, ISR transparency, drone saturation, and the grueling endurance demands of a large-scale war.
As the summary above suggests, the analysis is as much about field and command post exercises as it is true wargames—indeed, the study notes that the Russian conception tends to emphasis C3I rehersal more than imaginative “play” against an agile and adaptive foe:
The Russian term komandno-shtabnaya voennaya igra KShVI (command-staff military game) captures the institutional logic more accurately than the English word “wargame.” In Russian usage, the command-staff game is not merely a contest between two sides; it is a form of operational preparation in which command organs are placed inside a developing military situation and required to perform their assigned functions. Russian sources describe KShVI as a means of preparing operational personnel, checking the professional level of generals and officers, and training command bodies to plan and organize military action under crisis conditions. The emphasis falls less on game play than on staff functioning: how headquarters receive information, produce estimates, generate decisions, issue orders, coordinate arms and services, and react to disruption. [4]
This makes Russian wargaming fundamentally bureaucratic in the military sense. Participants are not primarily “players” but commanders, chiefs of staff, operations officers, intelligence officers, artillery planners, air-defense officers, logistics officers, mobilization specialists, and communications personnel. The game’s object is not victory in the abstract but the functioning of the command collective. A Russian KShVI asks whether a staff can form a plan, absorb new information, modify the decision, maintain control, and synchronize combat power in the face of an enemy who disrupts communications, imposes losses, and compresses time. The real unit of analysis is therefore not the battalion, army, or theater, but the command system that must direct them. [5]
On a side note, the image on the cover of the report appears to be AI generated and doesn’t depict actual Russian wargaming. If this is indeed the case, the use of such images as cover illustrations for serious analytical reports is a growing problem. When a synthetic image is attached to an otherwise credible publication, it enters circulation with an implied documentary authority. It is soon indexed by search engines and AI systems, thereby becoming a misleading part of the retrievable visual record—potentially surfacing as apparent confirmation for researchers, journalists, and other AI models. Any disclaimer, moreover, is typically lost as the image propagates beyond its original context.
Comments Off on Gaming for humanitarianism (June 2)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 27/05/2026
On Tuesday 2 June 2026, the Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC) is offering an online demonstration and reflective discussion on Gaming for Humanitarianism at the York Festival of Ideas, from 1200-1300 BST.
Join Rebecca Sutton (University of Glasgow), Marc Linning (Center for Civilians in Conflict) and Daisy Abbott (The Glasgow School of Art), to learn about and see a demo of the BEYOND training tool, a serious game supporting individuals and organisations who work to address harm and need in war. This 2D training tool provides an interactive experience to cement learning on how interventions can best address ‘harm + need’ generated in conflict. The session will be chaired by Ioana Cismas (University of York).
Through a demonstration and guided discussion, discover how interactive experiences can have practical, real-world impact in humanitarian, human rights, and peacebuilding practice and research, and how game-based tools can be useful in other contexts, such as education.
Additional details and a registration link can be found here.
Comments Off on CNN Academy 2026 simulation at Georgia Tech
Posted by Rex Brynen on 23/05/2026
This past week I’ve been busy with the CNN Academy bootcamp and simulation, in partnership with Georgia Tech. This brought together student journalists from across the United States (Clark Atlanta University, the University of Florida, the University of Tennessee, Penn State, LSU, the University of Georgia, and Georgia Tech itself) for an intensive five-day programme of simulation, workshops, and masterclasses. This year’s program focused on sports journalism.
The centrepiece of the week was a journalism simulation set around the fictional Cyberia Cup 2026 — a regional football (soccer) championship final and World Cup qualifier between host nation Brynania and defending champions Ruritania, to be played in the Brynanian capital of Hamraville. Students took on the roles of reporters for GNN Sports, the sports division of the Global News Network, and were tasked with covering the build-up to the match.
The simulation was designed to replicate the full complexity of covering a major international sporting event. The story was never purely about football. Brynania’s post-civil-war recovery, political tensions with Ruritania, debates over public spending on a major tournament in a country marked by widespread poverty, and questions of national identity and reconciliation all ran through the scenario — as did breaking news developments that required students to pivot their coverage mid-week and report responsibly under pressure.
The information and reporting environment was deliberately challenging. Students attended multiple press conferences, conducted one-on-one interviews, took part in media scrums, and were presented with an OSINT challenge. They also had to navigate more than a thousand scripted and live social media posts on our bespoke social media platform, CyberiApp.
A key structural feature of the simulation was that the official broadcast rights to the tournament were held by a rival network, Horizon Sports — meaning GNN reporters had to compete for access and find creative ways to tell the story. This replicated a real-world dynamic that sports journalists regularly encounter and rewarded enterprise and persistence over passive attendance.
Alongside the simulation, students attended a programme of professional masterclasses and practical workshops delivered by CNN talent and journalists. Jennifer Bernstein (Vice President, CNN Sports) set the scene. Don Riddell led sessions on the power of sports storytelling and writing for insight, context and voice. Coy Wire and Dan Moriarty covered interview techniques for sports journalism. Jacque Smith examined social storytelling and the creator journalism playbook. Andy Scholes and David Close led a session on covering breaking sports news — which proved particularly timely given the simulation’s mid-week developments. On the technical side, Mike Castellucci delivered hands-on mobile journalism workshops covering field shooting and editing on phone using LumaFusion, giving students practical production skills they could apply immediately in their simulation work. Luke Henderson, the senior CNN Academy trainer, organized it all and kept it all running.
The scenario itself was developed, and the simulation executed, in conjunction with a terrific team of students from Georgia Tech—most of whom had previously participated in other CNN Academy simulations elsewhere. I couldn’t have done it without them!
The next CNN Academy simulation will take place at University College Dublin in early July, focusing on humanitarian crisis reporting.
Comments Off on CGSA conference 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 15/05/2026
The Canadian Games Studies Association 2026 conference will be held on June 11-14 at Concordia University in Montreal.
[T]his year’s chosen theme is “On Repeat”. Beyond the Montreal “threepeat,” this theme also references the many ways games, players, and game studies are shaped by returns, loops, cycles, respawns, and replays. We particularly invite submissions that explore repetition in its many resonances: as game mechanics, as experienced by players, as nostalgic returns or reboots, as found in historical and cultural cycles, and in revisiting as scholarly practice, to name just a few possibilities.
The conference programme can be found here, and additional information (and a registration link) can be found here.
Comments Off on Simulation & Gaming (June 2026)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 15/05/2026
Simulation & Gaming 57, 3 (June 2026) is now available.
Editorial
How to Use Games and Simulations to Help Our World Become More Resilient in Times of Crisis
Marlies P. Schijven and Toshiko Kikkawa
Review
Effect of Virtual Patient (VP) Software on Pharmaceutical Education: A Systematic Review
Rafaella de Oliveira Santos Silva, Vanessa Alves-Conceição, Sabrina Cerqueira-Santos, Dyego Carlos Souza Anacleto de Araújo, Kérilin Stancine Santos Rocha, Fernanda Oliveira Prado, Mayara de Almeida Lima Ribeiro, Luana Andrade Macêdo and Divaldo Pereira de Lyra, Jr.
Research Article
Perceived Impact of High-Fidelity Simulation-Based Learning on Engagement and Motivation Among Undergraduate Nursing Students in Qatar
Comments Off on Simulation and gaming miscellany, 9 May 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 09/05/2026
PAXsims is pleased to present some items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers.
If you enjoy our content, consider becoming one of our Patreon supporters. All contributions go to supporting the website and related projects.
At War on the Rocks, Stephen Bittner argues that Acquisition Reform Needs Its Own Wargame—or, more specifically, “an operationally grounded comparison of how specific, congressionally-controlled acquisition policy decisions shape battlefield outcomes under a realistic adversary scenario.”
The design requirements are specific. The game should model at least two acquisition scenarios against a common starting point, with results expressed in terms a staffer or appropriator can use — how many days of combat operations remaining stockpiles could sustain, how many missiles are loaded and ready to fire at the start of a conflict, and how quickly a needed weapon can actually be delivered to the field. The variables should be the levers Congress actually controls: multi-year purchasing commitments, contract competition thresholds, flexibility in how money moves between accounts mid-cycle, and investments in specific industrial chokepoints under the Defense Production Act’s industrial capacity expansion provisions.
For example, raising the head of contracting activity’s sole-source authority from $500 million to $1 billion, for instance, is exactly the kind of statutory change the game could model: a contract that previously required higher-level review now stays at the service level and reaches award faster. How many additional Tomahawks does that faster timeline put in the field by the first day of a conflict? The answers are what Congress needs to move proposals that currently die without numbers. While munitions deliveries are the most legible link between acquisition decisions and battlefield outcomes, the methodology applies to every aspect of warfighting affected by acquisition decisions and policies, from satellites to base infrastructure to next-generation weaponry.
The most direct path runs through the next defense authorization bill, directing the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Center for Naval Analyses to design and execute a joint acquisition-reform wargame series. Findings would be delivered to the armed services committees alongside the president’s annual budget request, providing a structured, adversarial-tested comparison of what specific acquisition reforms would have put in the magazine before the shooting started. As someone who has watched reform proposals stall in committee, not because they were wrong but because they arrived without numbers, I can say with some confidence that a wargame product formatted to answer that question would move proposals that currently do not move.
A five-phase wargaming framework for force planning adopted across the Department of Defense will eliminate incoherence in the application of wargaming for future force design and improve outcomes for the capability development process. The sequence of games in this framework are a logical guide for every component of force planning, from establishing the nature of future problems to selecting the most likely form factor for solutions. When these phases are collapsed or skipped, force design efforts risk validating solutions before problems are understood, deriving requirements from incomplete concepts, or allowing technology availability to substitute for operational logic. The framework does not claim predictive authority or deterministic validity: It provides a disciplined structure for inquiry, traceability, and institutional learning within a broader cycle of research. It will improve how wargames are implemented within a campaign of learning. It also benefits sponsors, game designers, and players since a clear process prevents the misapplication of their talents and expertise and ameliorates misunderstanding of the purpose of a game.
The five game types they describe are:
Problem Discovery. A strategic-level game asking whether a fundamentally different military problem will exist in 10–20 years. The goal isn’t to solve anything yet — just to determine whether the current force will be adequate for the future environment.
Operational Concept. Once a problem is identified, this game tests whether an existing operational concept can address it or whether a new one is needed. It runs two comparative games — one with existing means, one with a proposed new concept — to see which holds up.
Gap Analysis. This game deliberately sets up the current force to fail, stress-testing the new concept with existing capabilities to expose what’s missing. Crucially, the authors warn against injecting new equipment too early, since doing so masks gaps rather than revealing them.
Capabilities Identification. Having revealed the gaps, this game measures them with enough precision to generate actual requirements — the performance parameters a future solution would need to meet. It shifts from operational to tactical focus and brings analysts and technology developers into the room alongside warfighters.
Solutions Testing. The final game presents candidate material and non-material solutions to users — ideally younger players who will actually operate the systems — and tests whether they work in practice. It applies design thinking rather than systems thinking, and serves as a final check before major acquisition investments are made.
The Canadian Army has been using a series of wargames to support force modernization.
If you were planning to modernize an army, to change its structures, reposition units and commands, identify gaps in capabilities, introduce new equipment, and bolster its reserve force, where would you start?
Over the past year, an Army Modernization Team has conducted over 400 surveys with soldiers at every level, held working groups, developed some 3,000 documents, and created around 17,000 data points, all with an aim to informing a modernization plan.
Central to that activity has been an ongoing series of war games, exercises designed to challenge conventional thinking and broaden the range of ideas as the Army strives to align its resources with the demands of the current and future force.
…
Lessons from the war in Ukraine have exposed many of the Army’s capability shortfalls, but the exercise forced discussions on structure rather than equipment, explained Major Ed Farren, project officer with the Modernization Team, “because new kit and old structures are not going to get you the best right result.”
Ed highlights both the problems of many past wargames (and not just in Canada):
The Army has been conducting war games of various types for decades. But without a digital repository for the reasons and results, “there’s often a lot of repeating the same questions,” said Farren. “Every couple of years, someone wants to look at the same thing, [but can’t] check the back history to see what was done or how it was done, and therefore build on it.”
Farren was part of a 2024 unclassified tactical war game exploring infantry optimization. The contest of a battlegroup versus a peer foe in the Baltics generated valuable data about capabilities the Army requires, but it did not represent the “large sea-change that the Army wants to bring in.”
The top line of the postgame report could have read, “the Royal Canadian Infantry Corps requires the Royal Canadian Artillery to have more guns with longer range and more mobility,” he said.
“One of the lessons was that it doesn’t really matter… Yes, a platoon with a drone is better than platoon without a drone, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the adversary’s sense and strike complex was pretty much unassailable, and no one else was able to deconstruct that through either jamming, counter uncrewed aircraft systems, or counter battery. It’s teaching us a lesson that we already know — combined arms is the answer.”
In this series of games:
To produce the imaginative thinking modernization requires, the modernization team applied an approach to wargaming based on John Boyd’s 1976 methodology of destruction and creation – gaining strategic advantage in complex, uncertain, and ever-changing environments by continuously breaking down and rebuilding mental models. The approach provided the foundation for his decision-making cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, known as the OODA Loop.
In January, a working group of six teams, representing all components of the Army, tackled the difficulties of structural change, using a gamification approach to force interactive discussions as participants worked through questions about where a unit or capability should reside, train, operate, and fight — in major combat operations and what Farren called “left of war scenarios.”
“It became obvious during the conversations that the fight discussion lacked a bit of granularity,” Farren observed. “How well does this thing fight? There was a lot of disagreement about what should and shouldn’t be in a brigade, other than the fact that people were referring to the brigade structure that we currently have.”
Three months later, in April, the modernization team hosted a tactical war game in Valcartier, Que., in which the current structure was compared with an alternative. “It wasn’t an ideal structure; it was just materially different,” he said. “We removed a light infantry battalion and we added more tanks, and we added different equipment based on the planned equipment program.”
The players were comprised of the command team of 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group and other members from the brigade, split into blue and red teams. They executed four runs through the game, one set in 2027 and employing equipment and capabilities the Army expects to have by then, and the other three in 2033, “which is where the planned equipment program stops,” said Farren.
Both sides received enhanced capabilities in line with 2027 and 2033, but where blue received much of what the Army will acquire between now and 2027 just to reach a state it should already be at — think ground-based air defence — the red side was able to employ elements of machine learning, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
“One thing that game really helped show is the sense of urgency,” Farren noted. “In 2027, not only were the results not good, the option space for the brigade wasn’t good — it could only really fight in one way. In 2033, the brigade commander had more options on what to do. In 2027, he had to be defensive. In 2033, he felt more empowered with capabilities to be offensive, which meant red felt less assured of winning, and was a bit more hesitant.”
This fall, following the release of Inflection Point 2025, the Army’s action plan for modernization, the modernization team led a war game on mobilization, set during the first five months of the next global war, when the Army and the nation were still in a transition period from peacetime structures and processes to a wartime footing — mandatory military service and nationalization of industry were not included.
In April, NATO SAS Panel has launchd Research Task Group (RTG) SAS–219 High North Scenarios for Wargaming and Analysis (Winter Storm 2030)—details below.
It was a bitter victory. After occupying a chunk of NATO territory in the Baltics, my team successfully converted the land grab into a diplomatic coup, winning major concessions from the United States that would refashion Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor. I was President Vladimir Putin, and I had just secured a big win for my project of Russian aggrandizement.
Thankfully, this was not reality. It was a war game organized by the German newspaper Die Welt and the German armed forces, designed to test Berlin’s readiness for a security crisis brought about by Russian aggression and American indifference. I’d been invited to represent my home country of Russia; there was a certain piquancy in playing the man whose invasion of Ukraine pushed me, as well as many of my friends and colleagues, into exile.
The results were chilling. The game, which took place last December, made plain how plausible a new Russian attack is — and how vulnerable NATO would be to one. The war in Iran, handing Russia a fresh advantage and fracturing the West further, has only worsened the situation. The exercise made me worry that unless NATO countries get their act together, another invasion could be coming.
MINDSPACE is a browser-based wargame built on the DISARM Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures framework — the structured taxonomy used by NATO, the EU, and national disinformation units to catalogue and analyse influence operations.
You play Red Team or Blue Team across four scenarios: election interference, military deception, health disinformation, cyber attribution warfare.
Red’s job is to capture population nodes by driving belief in a target narrative above 60%. Blue’s job is to hold the information environment until the clock runs out.
The mechanics encode real cognitive science. Each node tracks Belief, Resilience, Polarisation, Saturation, Emotional State, and Source Trust. Flood a node to trigger the illusory truth effect. Provoke anger before amplifying — emotional priming drops Resilience and the narrative spreads faster. Try to debunk a high-salience community and watch the backfire roll.
Every action maps to a DISARM TTP code. The post-game debrief annotates everything you did against the framework and gives you a performance grade. The game is the training.
Red starts with a budget advantage in most scenarios. Attacking the information environment is cheaper than defending it. That asymmetry is a design feature.
Free in any browser. No install.
Registration is now open for the Professional Gaming Society 2026 Wargaming Emerging Technologies Workshop, a unique forum dedicated to advancing the art and science of wargaming in an era of rapid change. This will take place on 21–24 September 2026 in Alexandria, Virginia. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 31.
Tanks and Bridges is a civil-military disaster wargame simulation designed to test NATO convoy management during infrastructure emergencies, often featuring scenarios like the Via Baltica. It focuses on navigating tactical challenges, including accidents, road closures, and civilian-military cooperation on critical transport routes.
U.S. Strategic Command and the Naval War College have conducted their annual Deterrence and Escalation Game and Review (DEGRE), a multi-day wargame held in Newport, Rhode Island that brought together senior military leaders, strategists, and allied partners to stress-test American deterrence strategy in simulated global crises. You can read more about it here.
In April, CAPTRS ran its C3C outbreak simulation with nearly 200 scientists and public health officials at the CDC’s Insight Net annual meeting in North Carolina, walking participants through a fictional escalating respiratory illness spreading through World Cup host cities. The exercise was designed to fill a gap in conventional tabletop drills by replicating the cognitive pressure of a real crisis rather than staying at the level of theoretical discussion. The simulation also had players first assess the scenario individually, then reconcile their assumptions with the rest of the group, surfacing the kind of hidden misalignments in data and priorities that tend to derail coordination when an actual outbreak hits.
This course introduces analog serious games (e.g. board and card games, narrative games) as tools to explore and foster food system transformation and challenges the participants to design new and/or adapt existing games and test them in a final event where they can showcase their prototypes.
Participants will design, facilitate and test serious games using real food system case studies provided by us.
Participants will learn about existing serious games, design, play and facilitate and assess game sessions using multiple approaches, including Q-methodology, visual research methods, and thematic analysis, applying multiple frameworks such as the Nature Futures Framework, multispecies, post growth and boundary crossing frameworks.
The course brings together researchers and practitioners working on analog serious games for food systems, covering (co-)design, facilitation, assessment and impact in food system contexts.
Want to hear about the games featured at the 2026 Serious Games Arcade? Then listen to Scott De Jong’s Serious Game Arcade podcast.
At his Substack, Kenneth Payne uses AI to create a think-tank simulator. Choose a political leaning (or real-world counterpart), ask for policy advice, and presto!
Comments Off on Wargaming à Paris (23-24 June 2026)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 06/05/2026
The Académie de défense de l’École militaire (ACADEM), in partnership with the Centre Interarmées de Concepts, de Doctrines et d’Expérimentations (CICDE), is hosting the inaugural Wargaming in Paris (WàP) event at the École Militaire, Paris, on 23-24 June 2026.
In a strategic landscape defined by the return of great-power competition, wargaming is emerging as an essential tool for analysis, anticipation, and decision-making support. The programme includes immersive sessions and live game demonstrations, plenary talks and short presentations, and direct exchanges with practitioners, researchers, military personnel, and institutional stakeholders. The aim is to bring together different perspectives, share lessons learned, and build a shared strategic culture around a tool that remains underutilized.
PAXsims 