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Originally published in the esteemed Modern War Institute here on March 28, 2025.
By William Kuebler, Steven Lohr, and James Sterrett
Why does the US military use wargames?
As Sanu Kainikara notes, “war games designed for generic training are extremely useful in promoting a deeper understanding of the profession of arms and the art of warfare within the officer cadre.” And arguably, wargames are even more relevant given the current global strategic landscape and US military priorities: incorporating them as part of combat leader training is an invaluable tool for accomplishing the secretary of defense’s goal of improving “lethality, readiness, and warfighting” in the Department of Defense.
European militaries have used wargaming for over two hundred years to train personnel in decision-making and to test plans. However, they have a unique utility when used to prepare junior leaders, as a tool for training military personnel in tactics and operational art, as former Marine Corps Commandant General David H. Berger has noted.
Wargaming can provide inexperienced personnel with a potentially lifesaving understanding of doctrine and both friendly and enemy tactics, techniques and procedures. A DARPA study found that inexperienced troops suffered forty percent of combat losses in their first three months of a deployment. Two factors cited by the study for the increased casualty rates were lack of familiarity with the enemy tactics and general lack of experience. These factors can be mitigated through wargaming.
Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) wargames, both manual and digital, provide a low-cost, engaging, and efficient way of providing service members additional training and practice in military planning and tactics under conditions of information uncertainty. Because these games are engaging, quick to play, and inexpensive, personnel can repeatedly play them off duty. Further, the engaging element of commercial games encourages players to strive for what psychologist Ellen Winner calls the “rage to master,” the drive to develop expertise in a subject. This engagement and the low barriers to repetition encourage players to repeatedly play multiple scenarios of various games, providing General Berger’s “reps and sets” and ultimately helping them to achieve greater insight into military problems. This increased understanding imparted by gaming acts as a force multiplier to improve the effectiveness of traditional military training and exercises. Further, COTS wargames provide additional training to service members during their off-duty hours at little to no cost to the government.
Wargames on Campus
Recently, the University of Iowa’s ROTC program and Army University’s Directorate of Simulations Education illustrated the cost-effective use of commercial wargaming for improving the training of cadets and their skill sets as future Army officers. These organizations partnered with the US chapter of Fight Club International to present a one-day wargaming event for the cadets. The main objective of this wargame event was to introduce fourth-year cadets to combined arms maneuver. A separate game was featured to introduce the cadets to unit management. The ROTC curriculum primarily focuses on maneuvering single light infantry platoons, agnostic of adjacent forces. Through wargaming, cadets were forced to develop synchronized plans that reinforced the importance of communication and decision-making. To achieve this objective, the game would do the following:
Introduce the cadets to the basic Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) and apply it to a tactical problem.
Introduce the cadets to basic company-level infantry tactics and procedures and apply them to a tactical problem.
Introduce the cadets to management processes of non–combat arms units.
The team selected the commercial game Armored Brigade II, published by Matrix Games, to accomplish these goals. This game is set in the 1965–1991 time frame. It comes with various real-world 3D maps of Cold War–era West Germany and a database of over one thousand realistically modeled NATO and Soviet vehicles and squad-sized infantry units and weapons. This database, combined with the game’s strong editing features, allowed volunteers from USA Fight Club to create a company-level scenario that allowed the cadets to implement basic platoon-level infantry tactics as part of a larger company operation. Using a late–Cold War scenario, the cadets could practice the fundamentals of combined arms tactics without modern intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and standoff weapons capabilities. This also allowed the scenario to present a near-peer opponent while avoiding any discussions of classified systems capability and tactics.
Wargame Execution
Fight Club member Staff Sergeant Richard Firth, an infantryman assigned to the 198th Infantry Brigade, designed a scenario involving a reinforced infantry company attack in wooded terrain near Hof, West Germany. In preparation for the event, cadets were provided an operations order and annexes appropriate for their level of military education. To instruct the cadets on using combined arms, they were given a reinforced infantry company with attached armor, artillery, and infantry units. Opposing them was a Soviet infantry company with armor and artillery attachments. The scenario required the cadets to seize two small urban areas. It was also designed to present various tactical problems, including the coordination of armor and infantry in closed terrain, the coordination of artillery fires, and the clearing of obstacles under fire. Two weeks before running the wargame with the ROTC students, Fight Club volunteers did a dry run of the scenario online to ensure it was balanced and met the training objectives. To ensure the cadets were ready for the challenge, Hawkeye Battalion leaders modified the ROTC curriculum to include training on the first three steps of MDMP, emphasizing mission analysis and course of action development. Cadets utilized YouTube videos produced by the Combined Arms Center and the United States Military Academy to familiarize themselves with MDMP. The output was mission analysis and course of action briefs, enabling cadets to arrive with a plan.
The cadets had 210 minutes to play the scenario. Two iterations of the scenario were run, with eight cadets in each iteration. This allowed a cadet to control a platoon of scouts, armor, infantry, or engineers, ensuring that all cadets were equally involved. One of the cadets functioned as the company commander, guiding the platoon leaders and controlling the mortar sections and the off-map 155-millimeter fires. A volunteer from Fight Club who was familiar with Armored Brigade II functioned as the “puckster,” entering orders to the units in the game based on the cadet’s verbal orders. This was important because it mitigated cadets’ having to be familiar with game controls, thereby allowing them to concentrate on the battle problem. The remaining eight cadets who were not part of the current Armored Brigade II iteration went to a separate classroom to play a game about managing a field hospital (described later in this article). After the initial setup, the company commander could not look at the map but would have to rely on the players’ communications to understand how the battle was developing. To provide time stress, the game was run in continuous-clock mode for ninety seconds before it was paused to allow cadets a ten-second window to issue orders.
The cadets were largely allowed to formulate and execute their plans without any instructor correction. This highlights one of the significant advantages of using commercial games for professional development: because the cost, time, and personnel requirements are low, junior personnel can be given a chance to practice commanding forces while making and learning from their mistakes. While Staff Sergeant Firth was on hand to function as the company’s first sergeant and provide guidance to ensure training objectives were met, the cadets were largely unsupervised in executing their plans. This allowed them to make mistakes and learn from them. The cadets discovered that impatiently advancing unsupported armor through woods resulted in heavy losses; that allowing their Infantry to be channeled into kill boxes left them vulnerable to Soviet artillery; and that engineers have difficulty clearing obstacles until the area is secured. The cadets learned and internalized these lessons—which have life-and-death consequences in the real world—in only 210 minutes of training at no cost in life or limb.
The student evaluations were uniformly enthusiastic about the training. All the cadets found it to be helpful and engaging. In their evaluations, several cadets noted that the game either taught or reinforced the following lessons:
the importance of improving communications and coordination
the importance of proper planning
the Importance of leaders patiently executing a plan against an enemy
While these lessons are not earth-shattering to experienced officers, the fact that the cadets experientially learned them in less than four hours of training time demonstrates the power of such games.
Death Can Wait: Managing a Field Service Hospital
For the day’s second exercise, cadets paired up to play Death Can Wait, a game of managing a field service hospital. Designed by Lieutenant Colonel Caitlin Smith (then Major Caitlin Ebbets) as a master of military art and science Wargame Design track thesis, Death Can Wait has players prepare the hospital during the year before a deployment, after which they must deploy the hospital, operate it while deployed, and then redeploy the hospital while continuing to operate it in both locations. Players will better understand the challenges a field service hospital faces in each of these tasks and how each of its subordinate elements contributes to the success of the whole organization. The players’ objective is to minimize the number of deaths at the hospital. To drive home its lessons, the model is deliberately tuned to be lethal, and suffering fewer than 150 deaths in thirty days of deployed operations is considered success.
During the Prepare phase, turns are quarters of a year. Players must try to maximize the hospital’s manning, equipping, training, and morale. The game is structured to ensure that trade-offs must be made between these, but penalties will be exacted later for the shortfalls.
The game then shifts to one-day turns for the Deploy phase. Behind the scenes, the game assumes the hospital is in central Europe and is deploying to the Baltics. A field service hospital only has 25 percent of the transportation it needs to move all of its people and equipment, immediately creating the dilemma of what equipment and personnel to bring in the first wave and what will be left behind, dependent on outside support for its movement in subsequent days. Personnel and equipment are assumed to be operational on the second day after they begin movement.
As soon as the hospital has any capacity to accept patients, they begin to arrive. During the week allocated to deployment, the influx of patients is relatively small. Nonetheless, each day provides a random event, testing some aspect of the hospital’s available functions and their readiness, or enabling critical mass-casualty training.
On Day 8, major operations begin at the front. Casualty arrival rates spike, bed space gets short, fatigue grows, and mass-casualty events not only flood the hospital that gets the event but also spike the arrival rates at every other hospital.
Run out of beds? Patients sleeping on the ground die. Medical staff are too tired? They make mistakes and patients die. Don’t have all of your capabilities in place? Patients die. Death Can Wait relentlessly drives home its lessons on the interdependence of your preparation and of the hospital’s various functions. The cadets’ engagement was clear from their cheers on turns without a mass-casualty event and their groans when multiple such events threatened to overwhelm their hospitals.
Nearly half of the participating cadets will be entering branches in the Army Medical Department, so Death Can Wait provided them with a window into some of their future challenges. Nearly half are going into combat arms, and the game provided them with the rare opportunity to understand the challenges facing their support services. Commentary in our after-action reviews frequently noted the importance of ensuring that support services are themselves supported well enough to fulfill their support requirements.
Improving the Next Iteration
The primary deficiency in this exercise was insufficient time to conduct a thorough after-action review with the students immediately after the Armored Brigade II portion of the exercise. While the scenario selected only required three and a half hours of game time, the briefing and instructional activities took longer than anticipated. Based on this evolution, eight hours of training should be allotted for future iterations to allow sufficient time for both games. This would provide ample time for briefing, breaks, and, most importantly, for a thorough after-action review. This last piece piece is critical, as one of the purposes of using commercial wargames is to encourage students to do additional playthroughs on their own time. Knowing how to perform an after-action review to critique and learn from their gaming experience becomes a critical element in students performing the purposeful practice that will maximize learning from wargames.
Notwithstanding this failure, the cadets’ evaluations demonstrate that using commercial, off-the-shelf wargames is a training force multiplier and should be encouraged as part of formal and informal military training and professional development.
US military leaders must develop an intuitive understanding of the battlespace to win at as low a human cost as possible on the complex, multidomain battlefields of the twenty-first century. Deep knowledge of friendly and enemy tactics, techniques, and procedures is the starting point for developing this understanding. As new technologies are making this battlespace increasingly fluid, leaders must also have insight into current and potential future threats. Like a chess grandmaster who must think ten moves ahead, military leaders must understand not just how the battlespace is now, but how it might change. This requires a level of experience and training that time- and budget-strapped organizations are unlikely to have. However, using commercial, off-the-shelf wargames, played during off-duty time, will help close this knowledge gap, resulting in battlefield success while minimizing casualties.
About the Authors
Lieutenant Colonel William Kuebler is the professor of military science for the University of Iowa’s Mighty Hawkeye Battalion Army ROTC program. His goal is to enable his cadets to be better prepared second lieutenants than he was through fostering personal and professional growth.
Steven Lohr is a board member of USA Fight Club and Fight Club International. He served on active duty in the US Navy as a surface warfare and intelligence officer, retiring in 2010 as a commander. He is a graduate of the Naval War College and the Joint Military Intelligence College and has a JD from the University of Florida and a BS from the University of Iowa.
James Sterrett is the chief of the Simulation Education Division in the Directorate of Simulation Education of US Army University / Command and General Staff College. Since 2004, he has taught the use and design of simulations and wargames and has supported their use in education. He also earned a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London and has participated in beta test and design teams for many games, notably including Steel Beasts and Attack Vector: Tactical.