In 2019, Gen. David Berger, the 38th commandant of the Marine Corps, issued his Commandant’s Planning Guidance, which announced the service’s force planning initiative to prepare for conflict in the modern era. Berger identified wargaming as critical to the Marine Corps’ efforts and direction was issued to improve games in both quality and quantity. Twenty major wargames and several smaller games were executed in the first two years to support what became Force Design 2030. This drew deep lessons from the wargames of the inter-war years of the 20th century, used to develop opposed amphibious assault capability. Yet a formal process for how force planning games should be organized or sequenced to guide and inform institutional changes has never been codified by the Marine Corps or the Department of Defense writ large. This is a problem, given that wargames often inform requirements that frame the selection of material and non-material solutions. Capacious investments in manpower and matériel are made in no small part based on the reasoning derived from wargames.
Berger noted that the Marine Corps historically has inadequately used wargaming for “proofing” future concepts. Proofing was defined as wargaming coupled with experimentation and other forms of analysis. Berger’s observation can be equally applied to the rest of the Department of Defense, as rapid shifts in concepts with limited wargaming or testing occurred in the development of the Joint Warfighting Concept, too. Wargames in and of themselves are an insufficient basis alone to design an entire force and are bound to leave something incomplete. When wargaming for force planning uses a defined process, it brings discipline to thinking, traceability to the ideas informed by games, and better integration with other forms of analysis.
The Cycle of Research in a Campaign of Learning
Peter Perla, the late sage of modern wargaming, explained how wargames facilitate proofing through what he called the “cycle of research.” The cycle is the sum of wargaming, exercises, and analysis, coupled with real-world operations and history, working together to help the national security community understand present realities and facilitate future evolutions of strategic thinking. He posited that wargames pull insights from the cycle’s other components and that insights from wargames feed those other components in return. Knowledge synthesized from each element of the cycle of learning helps to ensure that wargaming has a proper place within force design, commencing with problem discovery and ending with solution identification.
Most non-wargamers are unfamiliar with Perla’s cycle but are familiar with campaigns of learning that services use to guide the development of a future force. These campaigns feature wargaming as a part of the institutional learning process. They inherently apply the principles of the cycle of research as wargames for discovery and analysis, aligned with other forms of qualitative and quantitative analysis, to deliver a whole picture of challenges and potential solutions.
The Case for Sequenced Wargames in Force Planning
Force design takes years to evolve since it is a process of learning from myriad sources. That doesn’t prevent early adoption of elements of the design if, on their face, there is evidence of their value. It is simply a recognition that organizational change takes time to fully mature and capture all its implications. It is an activity that will be repeated for as long as a service exists and has a mission to fulfill. A wargaming framework based on iterative learning prevents unnecessary re-examination of validated elements of a force design, while ensuring that issues that must be reconsidered use the right wargaming model at the right point in the cycle of research. This facilitates the ability to trace any inconsistencies or fallacies that may have emerged during initial wargaming before they embed too deeply in the establishment of requirements used to define future experiments and testing.
The role of service leadership in force planning was amplified when the Department of Defense abolished the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. New guidance directed the services to validate their requirements in alignment with Joint-designated Key Operational Problems. This reform also stipulated the use of a mission engineering approach to support the effort.
Wargaming is integral to mission engineering. It embeds military utility into the development of solutions and informs the technology options through a laser focus on operational purpose.. Collaborative wargames with potential users and technology developers explore that purpose in desired capabilities, balanced by expert advice on technical feasibility. Mission engineering is built upon a clear model of the future operating environment and a concept for employing military force in the future. Technology does not define the future: Future needs define the focus of technology. Wargames reveal how to address a future problem and preempt selection of a potential solution solely based on technological interest.
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.
Wargame 1 — Problem: Is There a problem?
Before any organization embarks on change to a future force, there must be a defined reason for the transition. Services must conduct a strategic scan and identify how a future operating environment may impact their ability to fulfill their mission as well as their role in a future Joint Force. Wargame 1 is a tool of foresight to answer one essential question: Will there be a fundamentally different strategic and operational problem in x years that will require a change to the design of today’s force?
At this point, the service is not trying to solve a problem, just determine if one will likely exist in the future. Here systems thinking plays a key role in the design of a wargame. Systems thinking focuses on interconnectedness of things to spot patterns and identify areas of focus that may be a future challenge. The system highlights the space where an intervention can facilitate a solution to those challenges. No amount of resources can solve a problem that is not properly understood. What form that problem will take is something the wargame helps to capture as humans play through the scenario. Nothing about a wargame of this type is path determinant: It just clarifies the space for future study and analysis.
Wargame 1 is inherently strategic since it helps set the course over the next 10 to 20 years. This relies on players, facilitators, game designers, and adjudicators to have a mastery of existing facts about the world, the current system in which it operates, and future projections of how the world may evolve. The wargame provides the ability to consider these facts and projections within the model of a future operating environment and potential conflict. Wargame 1 helps to discover the form of a nebulous or unstructured problem.
Wargame 1 benefits from creative thinking rigorously challenged by a learned opposition.. Optimally these games use arguments and counterargument presented as courses of action by the players.. Game adjudicators assess the validity of those arguments and model the conflict based on those courses of action. The game is proofed with other forms of analysis in the cycle of research, which are used to establish the theory of a future problem. The theory is presented to senior leaders to accept or modify as they set the campaign of learning to develop a solution to the accepted problem.
Wargame 2 — Operational Concept: Is There a Concept to Deal with this Problem?
Once the problem is accepted, it must be determined if an operational concept to overcome the problem exists or must be developed. Using the Marine Corps example, Berger’s Commandant’s Planning Guidance focused on the Indo-Pacific as directed in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. A series of wargames and workshops were conducted to examine whether the Marine Corps could use existing operational concepts to challenge the adversary across the “competition continuum.” The service identified a requirement for a new operating concept called the Stand-in Force. It was also decided that this requirement augmented existing operational concepts for the current era.
Due diligence must be exercised to determine if an existing operational concept can address the new problem by conducting two wargames in a comparative effort. The first must take the new problem and see if it can be addressed using existing means. Means can also include those that are planned to be available in the timeframe under study. The second must be conducted applying the proposed operational concept with the same force limits as the first wargame but must include the features of the concept that distinguish it from current approaches. Future concepts must be grounded in both operational and technological plausibility.
Wargame 2 has a limited objective of determining if a proposed concept is suitable to be considered or if an existing concept can be adapted to a future challenge. Wargame 2 outcomes will likely be inconclusive in terms of whether the concept will absolutely contribute to the defeat of an adversary. It will just refine a concept sufficiently for subsequent wargaming and testing in the cycle of research. These are not issues for novice players or an inexperienced wargaming team. The game identifies what the force must potentially do to gain advantage over an adversary, and the adversary must be assessed to be impacted in a way that shows the viability of the concept.
Wargame 3 — Gaps: Can the Current Force be Used for the Future Concept?
Wargame 3 is used to determine how the future operating concept can be implemented. It transforms from a suitable hypothesis to a refined theory of victory. It retests the concept from the prior wargame and illuminates the way that a service must change to implement the concept.. This is the quintessential wargame for discovery: Can a promising approach be feasibly implemented with existing means, and if it can’t, what gaps must be filled to enable the concept?
The challenge in designing a wargame to discover gaps is that it must allow players space to examine the boundaries of the concept and still have some rigidity in the model of adjudication. This is because a game for gap analysis uses military means as they are designed for the real world, which is an inherent constraint. Simultaneously, the players must have the freedom to maneuver the force in novel ways as they discover new layers and context in the operational concept.
It is tempting in a game to inject material solutions to succeed against the future adversary. The insights in a game like this are in discovering the places that current means are deficient to implement the concept, causing the force to fail. Introducing a solution too early in force planning games diverts attention from measuring gaps and warps the game around the tool before mapping out all the potential areas where a tool must be applied. It also inserts an anchoring bias into how a problem may be solved. Just because a problem once required a type of capability does not mean that the problem in the future will require similar means.
Wargame 3 is also an analytical wargame. Its goal is to logically reason through the consequences of human decision-making as the operational concept is tested. Wargames capture how humans will try best to outwit an adversary. Gaps emerge as the players struggle to apply military means and find they can’t overcome the circumstances to solve the problem. Wargame 3 clarifies the scale of institutional change that will need to occur if a service is going to be successful against a future adversary.
Wargame 4 — Capabilities Identification: What are the Requirements for New Capabilities?
Wargame 3 is about inducing failure with as is capabilities to reveal gaps. Wargame 4 is about measuring those gaps so that potential material or non-material solutions have the right form, function, and purpose to enable success. Quantitative analysis becomes an integral part of the wargaming effort since researchers will inherit data from a wargame for follow-on analyses and measurement. Analysts and technology developers benefit from participating in wargames with potential users of a capability. They see firsthand how a capability must fulfill a function to support the logic of the approach used to implement the operational concept. This enables researchers to work with wargame designers to construct the right data collection plan and capture the details necessary to convert gaps into requirements for the development of capabilities. Wargame 4 also shifts from operational to tactical and becomes more mission focused.
Wargame 4 is also where high institutional risk can emerge because now concepts are converted into parameters for development of future means. Wargames of the inter-war years informed the role of aircraft in future naval combat. In 1935, Rear Adm. Ernest King — then-chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics — commented on the rules governing aircraft operations in wargames, stipulating that since naval aviation had not been tested in war, the rules reflected opinion as much as experience. Modern physics-based wargaming tools, coupled with modeling and simulation, provide a valuable means to overcome that challenge. Wargame 4 provides initial insights into the performance parameters a solution must fill to be effective. However, the subjective nature of opinions substituting for experience that are instantiated in the wargame will have to be validated when those requirements are converted into proposed solutions.
Wargame 5 — Potential Solutions: What Form Factors and Systems Best Match Needed Capabilities?
Wargame 5 is the time to explore potential solutions and to mitigate the impact of opinions that were applied in Wargame 4. Players are presented with various material and non-material options to meet the requirements established in Wargame 4. Future users of the proposed capabilities leverage the insights from the preceding games to design the test of representative solutions. This game also benefits from having younger and less experienced players, since they will likely be the users of the solutions under consideration. To some degree, risks of transition from the current force to the future force are mitigated by having players who test the solutions in conceptual environments before employing them later in their careers.
Wargame 5 also shifts to design thinking from the systems thinking of Wargames 1–4. Design thinking focuses on understanding users’ needs and relies on user insights to guide how capabilities will ultimately be employed to execute the operational concept. This is where an mission engineering approach comes to the fore, since it is inherently design thinking focused and uses play and interactive engagement with users to further refine requirements and update technical designs.
Wargame 5 is tactical and emphasizes either the mission or engineering level. A mission level game is one where a discrete capability is used to determine how it will affect the outcome of the mission. This type of wargame is usually a precursor to experimentation with real-world prototypes. An engineering level wargame is one where the game is optimized to assess the features or functions in a proposed solution that gives it utility for the mission. If at any point a problem in operational logic or technical conception is discovered in trying to apply the proposed solutions, the five-phase framework can support retracing steps to find error or fault. The capacity to use Wargame 5 to discover these issues before extensive investments are made in prototype or production solutions is invaluable.
Conclusion
Contemporary criticism of the quality and function of wargames used for force planning across the Department of Defense speaks to a need to formalize everything from taxonomy to techniques of wargaming. It also reinforces that wargaming must be viewed as integral to institutional reasoning if the department continues to rely on the application of wargames to inform force planning in balance with experimentation, operations research, test and evaluation, and modeling and simulation. Wargaming needs professional standards of training and education if it is to be more than a craft practice. Wargaming for force design requires trained practitioners applying a methodologically sound process if it is to inform the design of a future force and ameliorate concerns over its utility.
The five-phase framework is a logical way for discovery and analysis to take place, ensuring that ill-defined problems do not result in ill-considered and wasteful acquisitions or reorganizations. A referenceable standard in the Department of Defense will further help to refine what works and doesn’t work in wargaming for force design. Currently the Joint Staff J8 directorate has been tasked with leading the development of the alternative to the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. Several years ago, the J8 also led the Defense Wargaming Alignment Group which was largely a forum to exchange information on wargaming activities among the services and various Defense agencies. The department should consider convening the alignment group again with the charter of considering this five-phase framework and formalizing the methodology for wargaming in support of force design.
Nathaniel Ambler, Ph.D. (systems engineering), retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2024. He is currently a senior researcher and engineer with Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation, where his work focuses on mission engineering, decision science, and wargaming in support of national security and operational decision-making. Throughout his career, he has supported complex policy, intelligence, and force design efforts across interagency and international contexts.
Maegen Nix, Ph.D. (government and politics), is the director of the Decision Science Division at Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation. Nix is a veteran and a former intelligence officer with 25 years of experience in the national security community and academia.
Travis Reese retired from the Marine Corps in 2016 and is now the director of Wargaming and Net Assessment Division for Troika Solutions in Fredericksburg, VA. Throughout his career he has supported institutional strategy development, operational planning, capability development, wargaming, and force design efforts.
Image: Flux 2
