Make Them Fight! If You Want a More Lethal Military, Have Generals Compete in Wargames

[rangerrebew]

Make Them Fight! If You Want a More Lethal Military, Have Generals Compete in Wargames
Benjamin Jensen | 05.29.25

Make Them Fight! If You Want a More Lethal Military, Have Generals Compete in Wargames
The lights dim, and the screens flicker to life. Across the room, a dozen general officers lean over virtual terrain maps, eyes scanning for anticipated enemy movements tied to intelligence feeds as they look for candidates for possible pulse strikes. Each general is fighting another general, guided by only an AI staff assistant and a playbook with decision points and tailored options in lieu of a long operational plan. There is no staff circus churning out endless amounts of PowerPoint briefs. No legion of contractors running white cells and resurrecting their inner dungeon masters as they throw dice and debate overly complicated combat adjudication tables. It’s more Thunderdome than Title 10 and global games of old.

One general tries to pull the enemy out of position using deception. Another gambles on a high-risk, high-payoff multidomain deep strike against command-and-control nodes. There are no referees—just results. A publicly visible leaderboard ranks all officers in the room by their ability to synchronize effects and outfight a thinking opponent.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s what should happen when we talk about preparing our senior leaders for war. It describes a modern kriegsakademie built not on endless seminars, lectures, and games too big to fail, but actual competition. In this professional fight club commanders are forced to prove they can actually fight against someone trying to beat them.

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/make-them-fight-if-you-want-a-more-lethal-military-have-generals-compete-in-wargames/

[DefiantMassRINO]

There needs to be a 'Joker' element to these games to test adaptability to the enemy and the battle theater. 

Asymetric non-state actors do not follow playbooks - their weapons are fear and chaos; their battlefields are anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere simultaneously; their goal is not victory but to bleed their enemy of the will to fight; like in hockey and soccer, they still get a point for a tie.

Example - Iran and its proxies; the Axis of Evil (Iran, Russia, China, North Korea)

America's enemies will be non-state actors fighting undeclared war on undemarcated fields of battle.

Russia's invasions of Afghanistan and Ukraine, and America's occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are demonstrations that traditional industrial wars of attrition offer pyrrhic victories at best.

It's less costly for an opponent to compromise, corrupt, and influence an enemy from within than to invade it outright.  That's what China has been doing since the 1990s - tricking its future enemy to surrender its industrial, technical, and economic advantages without firing a shot.

Economics is a weapon of war.  Education is a weapon of war. Politics is a weapon of war.  Diplomacy is a weapon of war.  Statecraft is a weapon of war.  China intends to win its war(s) before the first bullet is ever fired.