Comments Off on CNN Academy UCD humanitarian simulation 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 12/07/2026
This past week, CNN Academy and the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin once again held a week-long journalism simulation, combining social media, press conferences, interviews, field reporting, and OSINT challenges with workshops and masterclasses.
The scenario was a version of the humanitarian health simulation we held last year in Abu Dhabi. Some 22 students took part, divided into six competing journalism teams, while a dozen others (drawn from UCD students as well as members of the NGOs GOAL and Frontline Defenders) played the role of humanitarian communications officers.
It all went very well—you can see a short recap video below.
Comments Off on Duffer’s Drift goes digital
Posted by Rex Brynen on 02/07/2026
The Defence of Duffer’s Drift is a short 1904 book by the British Army officer Ernest Swinton, writing under the pseudonym “Lieutenant Backsight Forethought.” In it, a young officer is tasked with defending a river crossing during the Boer War, and the scenario is played out across six dreams, with early defeats giving way to lessons learned and eventual success in the final dream. The book has been widely used as a staple of small-unit tactics instruction, read by young officers around the world, and its dream-sequence format has inspired numerous later adaptations.
Adriano Pantaleo has recently developed a browser-based interactive educational adaptation, Duffer’s Drift. Designed for professional military education and game-based learning, it focuses on tactical decision-making, reconnaissance, concealment, defensive positioning, and learning through repeated failure. The game is available on itch.io. A short post-game feedback form is included to collect player reflections and feedback after play.
(Players should keep in mind the Boer War colonial context in which Defence of Duffer’s Drift was first written, with British tactics in particular involving the destruction of homes and food supplies and forced displacement into concentration camps. Some of the options in the book regarding local population would be considered serious violations of the laws of armed conflict today.)
Comments Off on Penseyres: Towards a wargaming culture in Switzerland
Posted by Rex Brynen on 01/07/2026
Nicolas Penseyres has just published a piece on wargaming in Switzerland at Stratos (the Swiss Armed Forces Scientific Review), in which he notes that Switzerland has lost much of its past wargaming tradition. He also makes some suggestions on how to rebuild this.
Comments Off on Connections UK 2026 tickets now live
Posted by Rex Brynen on 30/06/2026
Tickets are now live for Connections UK 2026. The conference will take place on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 September 2026 at Brunel University of London, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge.
This year’s conference will be a smaller, shorter and more focused event, limited to 100 attendees, while continuing our core purpose: bringing together professional wargame practitioners to share experience, develop practice and advance the art, science and application of wargaming.
The 2026 programme is being shaped around current practice and emerging challenges in professional wargaming and serious games. Including:
AI-assisted design and delivery of community resilience wargames.
The Low Overhead Integrated Wargaming Model.
Mixed methods in analytical wargaming.
Use of AI assistants and LLM tools across wargame development, visualisation, analysis and education.
Multi Domain Operations planning tool.
Non-kinetic wargaming for local authority emergency response training.
The intersection of national defence and civil resilience.
Data-to-model-to-game-mechanic approaches in analytical wargaming.
Strategic games for deterrence training.
Scenario development methodology.
Cognitive and social biases in wargaming practice.
There will also be opportunities to explore practitioner case studies, current research, international perspectives and practical approaches to improving professional wargame design, delivery and use.
As ever, Connections UK is intended for practitioners, designers, analysts, academics, educators, government personnel and all those with a serious interest in professional wargaming and serious games.
With attendance limited to 100 places, we expect demand to be strong.
Comments Off on Wargaming à Paris 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 28/06/2026
Last week was a very busy week for professional wargaming. On June 23-25, the Connections US conference was held in Monterey. Those very same days, DSET was underway in the UK. And on June 23-24, Wargaming à Paris was underway at the École Militaire, organized by the Académie de défense de l’École militaire (ACADEM) and the Centre interarmées de concepts, de doctrines et d’expérimentations (CICDE).
As you might have guessed from the first image above, I attended the latter—and it was a terrific experience. Despite the hottest few days in the history of Paris, more than 700 participants attended over the two days. There were lectures, roundtables, demonstrations (with more than one hundred games from thirty organizations), a game jam, and more.
Rather than summarize the event panel by panel, I think it is more useful to put it all in perspective. WàP highlighted the enormous strides that French wargaming has made over the past decade. Lacking the resources of the US defence community, they have offset this with innovation, community, and camaraderie—mobilizing resources and ideas across government, academia, and the private sector, and the hobby. Moreover, France’s longstanding independence of strategic thought increases their willingness to address some difficult topics and raise some difficult questions—ones that might receive a more cautious reception elsewhere in NATO.
I recognize that because of limited resources there is only so much they can do in outreach. But I do think the French wargaming community is especially well placed to foster wargaming capacities in smaller NATO countries—countries that, like France a decade ago, may lack the budget and institutional infrastructure of the larger allies but have no shortage of talent or motivation. The model France has built, one that leans on collaboration and creativity rather than scale, may in fact be more transferable than more resource-intensive approaches
I was also very pleased to see that the conference went beyond wargaming, to address other alternative analytical techniques, like red teaming. I think we can get a little too preoccupied with our own favourite tool at times, and instead should treat serious gaming as just one tool in a much larger methodological toolbox.
In the meantime, I’m doing my best to contribute to expanding the cadre of French wargamers—no less than three of my former McGill POLI 452 students were there, while I also demonstrated We Are Coming, Nineveh (co-designed by another one of my former French students).
All in all, it was a terrific few days (despite the obvious effects of global warming), and I very much hope there will be a Wargaming à Paris 2027.
Comments Off on Connections US 2026 Proceedings
Posted by Stephen Downes-Martin on 28/06/2026
The slides from most of the presentations given at the 2026 Connections US wargaming conference have been loaded onto the Proceedings site. Missing files might be added later, so check in occasionally.
If you gave a presentation and it’s not included, or you want your presentation edited for any reason, please use the Upload Form on the front page of the Proceedings Site, thank you.
Comments Off on Reasonable Worst Case: A UK outbreak preparedness and response simulation
Posted by Rex Brynen on 27/06/2026
Last week I had an opportunity to playtest Reasonable Worst Case, a UK pandemic preparedness and response simulation, in my “complexity seminar” on alternative analytical methods at the Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University. The simulation has been developed by PAXsims research associate Zinzi Sibanda, who is also part of the simulation team at CNN Academy (where she has been working, appropriately enough, on public health simulations).
The simulation is played out over two hours or so, with participants representing ten UK government agencies:
Prime Minister’s Office — provides overall political leadership and decides when to spend political capital to enable or constrain policy choices across government
Cabinet Office — coordinates cross-departmental policy and manages crisis governance processes to ensure coherence between ministers, departments, and agencies
Chief Scientific Adviser / SAGE — coordinates scientific advice, modelling, and evidence synthesis, helping ministers understand uncertainty and trade-offs
HM Treasury — controls fiscal resources and determines how quickly money can be mobilised for emergency spending
Department of Health & Social Care — leads national health policy and sponsors both NHS England and UKHSA, which operate as distinct agencies under DHSC’s broader policy authority
UK Health Security Agency — provides surveillance, epidemiological analysis, and technical public health capability; accountable to DHSC
NHS England — manages hospital surge capacity, workforce deployment, and vaccination delivery; accountable to DHSC
Home Office — oversees borders, enforcement, public order, and emergency powers
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — manages international cooperation and global health security diplomacy
Other government departments — the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the Department for Education (DfE), and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Among other things, DBT works to keep PPE, medicines, and other critical goods moving through supply chains under pressure. DEFRA manages the animal-human interface central to zoonotic disease, including livestock surveillance and outbreak control on farms. DfE balances the public health case for school closures against the cost to children’s education and welfare. DSIT funds the research base that underpins the country’s ability to understand and respond to an outbreak.
In the Preparedness Phase, players choose what programmes and investments they would like to put in place in order to best prepare for the next serious disease outbreak in the UK. They are not told what the outbreak will be: it could be a variant emerging overseas and arriving via international travel, something emerging locally within the UK itself, a vector-borne disease spreading to the UK on the back of a changing climate, or even an act of deliberate biological warfare — and in several of these cases there may be a zoonotic component, with the pathogen originating in an animal reservoir before spilling over into the human population. Their options are laid out on Preparedness Cards, each of which lists an initiative, what it does, and its cost. There are three types of cost: finance, expertise, and political capital. Each card also has an implementation risk attached to it, representing the likelihood that it can be implemented in a timely and effective manner without delay, cost overrun, or political controversy.
Sample Preparedness cards.
No card may be considered unless the agency or department that holds it puts it forward for consideration. Resources are unevenly distributed too: Treasury controls much of the available finance, most political capital resides in the Prime Minister’s Office, and expertise is distributed across frontline and technical agencies. Some actors — notably the Cabinet Office and Treasury — also hold special Policy Support Cards that affect the cost or risk of Preparedness Cards they are attached to.
Sample Policy cards.
When the first phase is finished, the Outbreak Phase begins. A random card is drawn from a deck of potential infectious disease outbreaks, and a die is rolled. A roll of 6 or more means the outbreak is quickly detected and contained; 4–5 means it is contained, but only after significant effort; and 3 or less — or an unmodified roll of 1, regardless of any bonuses — means it has progressed to a major outbreak. Depending on what Preparedness initiatives were successfully put in place during the previous phase, players receive a bonus to the die roll.
Sample Outbreak card.
When one of the cards triggers a major outbreak, the game moves on to the third and final phase: the Response Phase. Here the simulation becomes much more free-form, with players free to propose whatever measures they judge appropriate, rather than choosing from a fixed menu. Successful implementation isn’t automatic, however: players must make a matrix-game-style argument as to why their proposal would succeed. Preparedness initiatives successfully implemented in the first phase can be cited as part of that argument. Proposals also gain bonuses or penalties depending on the resources committed to them, and can gain a further bonus by successfully red-teaming their own proposal — identifying in advance what might go wrong.
The Response Phase also includes occasional injects, many of which require a player or players to make a quick decision on a specific dilemma — often one with no clearly correct answer.
Although we were all pressed for time, overall it went extremely well. There was considerable debate as to which initial Preparedness investments to make. The discussion tended to fall victim to organisational silos, however, with each agency arguing for its own initiative rather than taking a holistic view of the threats. In particular, there was underinvestment in surveillance capability and international partnerships. However, NHS investments in expanded ICU capacity, PPE stockpiles, and a reserve healthcare workforce (drawing on retired personnel and others) would prove very helpful when an outbreak did occur. Participants also initially focused a bit too much on the cost and risk of programmes rather than on what each programme would actually deliver, so in future iterations it would be wise to put more emphasis on capability and impact, not just cost.
We then moved on to the Outbreak Phase. The card-deck approach worked very well indeed, generating a real sense of impending but unknown danger, and underlining that outbreak threats can take many forms and arrive by many different routes. The UK successfully contained several challenges in turn — an H5N1 avian influenza scare, a deliberately engineered orthopoxvirus release, and a novel variant of Oropouche virus newly detected in midges in the UK, raising the prospect of local vector-borne transmission during the summer months — sometimes thanks to good investments, sometimes through sheer luck, before a major outbreak finally hit. This was, perhaps, the most dangerous card in the deck: Disease X, an entirely novel and unknown pathogen. As a novel pathogen, Disease X posed severe challenges for testing and clinical response. (Disease X is indeed a scenario the WHO worries about — it sits on the WHO’s priority list precisely to represent the possibility that the next pandemic will be caused by a pathogen not yet known to cause human disease.)
This brought us to the final Response Phase of the simulation. The government struggled to maintain consistent messaging: on the one hand suspending most international travel and enforcing quarantine on suspected cases, while at the same time initially suggesting it would let a major sporting event go ahead. NHS England was quick to declare a national High Consequence Infectious Disease alert, which helped — although the UK had not invested in the adaptive clinical research platforms that would have allowed it to identify appropriate treatments more quickly. When we had to bring the session to a close, death rates were still rising, with initial epidemiological modelling suggesting that tens of thousands might die within the next two months.
Taken all together, this went extremely well indeed — participants both enjoyed themselves a great deal and clearly learned something along the way, with the discussion engaged and substantive right through to the end. A few of the Preparedness and Outbreak cards need further refinement, and more potential injects should be developed, particularly ones tied to specific outbreak scenarios. Zinzi has also developed an “Innovative Policy” card for the first phase, which allows players to design a preparedness programme not represented in the existing deck, and this looks like a promising addition for future iterations.
I look forward to further playtesting, and perhaps a demonstration at a conference or workshop before too long!
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.
PAXsims 
