Wargaming Has a Place, But Is No Panacea for Professional Military Education

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Wargaming Has a Place, But Is No Panacea for Professional Military Education
Carrie Lee and Bill Lewis
August 5, 2019
Special Series - Educating the Force

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
-Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

The school year is about to start, and not just for the kids. Senior-level professional military education is about to begin a new academic year, with new classes of students from across the services preparing to embark upon ten months of education that is meant to elevate their thinking from the operational and tactical to the strategic level. In the two years since the release of the National Defense Strategy (and the now-infamous paragraph that declared professional military education to be “stagnant”), a heated debate has emerged on the pages of this website about the best ways to accomplish the mission of professional military education. Suggestions for improvement have spanned the gamut, from teaching students to be good staffers to introducing diversity — both in the faculty and the curriculum — to improving the ways in which we assess strategic competency. Others have pushed back, pointing out that professional military education already is highly responsive to change and warning about the dangers of the “good idea fairy.” In April, James Lacy of the Marine War College proposed another solution: All professional military education institutions should include board game wargaming as a part of their curriculum.

https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/wargaming-has-a-place-but-is-no-panacea-for-professional-military-education/