BACK TO THE BASICS IN WARGAMING – WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM AI
Tom Spahr , Layton Mandle , Mike Stinchfield September 11, 2025
The United States Army War College is on a multi-year endeavor to develop a wargame that reinforces our curriculum and provides students with repetitions building campaigns in crisis and conflict—education that includes practice and performance.
In 1914, a Scientific American correspondent recorded his impressions of a wargame at the United States Army War College (USAWC):. “The officers studying the map … are not playing. The very title of the game is misleading. It is most decidedly not a game … And it is not played as a game, to see who will win, but to get results and experience, to profit by the very mistakes made.” Even a century ago, the Army War College understood the educational value of wargaming.
The USAWC is on a multi-year endeavor to develop a wargame that reinforces our curriculum and provides students with repetitions building campaigns in crisis and conflict—education that includes practice and performance. Pedagogical wargames are typically rigid in nature, adhering to a strict ruleset, order of events, and timeline to simplify a complex combat environment within a compressed period. This inevitably presents two challenges: one, the game abstracts concepts to such a level that the scenario becomes detached from reality; and two, the “overhead” of the game and its rules become the focus, overwhelming the learning opportunities for both students and instructors.
In February 2024, Derek Martin and John Nagl described early efforts to use wargaming in the War College’s China Integrated Course (CIC). These rigid wargames with strict rules and onerous adjudication processes produced mixed results. During Academic Year 2026, a few seminars experimented with a simpler, tabletop-style exercise using large language models (LLMs) to speed adjudication. While looking back to the early 19th-century Prussian free-adjudication-style wargames, the team also looked forward by using artificial intelligence (AI) to help build detailed responses to student inputs. The result was a game that allowed students to focus on building operational plans and achieving learning outcomes rather than mastering artificial game rules. While not without its challenges, the results were universally positive, and the participating faculty deemed the game a success!
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/back-to-the-basics/
