Published 06/05/2025
By Captain Aleksandrs (Aleks) V. Schuler
War-gaming needs a return to form in the U.S. Army. At the battalion and brigade levels, field grade officers might currently be the only authorities on how to properly analyze courses of action (COAs) before execution, or “war-gaming.” Further, of all the steps in the military decision-making process, COA analysis is the least understood. It is seldom exercised across the Army, forfeiting developmental opportunities for officers and noncommissioned officers alike. This article presents a vision for a standardized war game designed for the operational force and the supporting professional military education (PME) framework that would be used to develop and cultivate Army leaders.
Purpose of War-Gaming
From step drills on a soccer field to combined arms rehearsals, we seek low-threat, easily resourced training opportunities that give units a chance to practice. While useful for discrete training outcomes, one weakness of these approaches is the reliance on predetermined outcomes, in which reacting a certain way in a certain situation is always correct. War-gaming, on the other hand, stresses and tests leaders and their plans through the inclusion of chance and thinking players.
Chance is manifested through possibilities that—ideally—are based on historical observations. It’s important to explore even bad outcomes, including sprained ankles, Class III oil leaks, weapons jams, misunderstood orders, or anything else that may hamper the execution of an operation. Chance introduces situations that the plan may not have considered and forces us to answer questions that otherwise would not have been asked.
Whereas chance sets unanticipated conditions, thinking players generate the important reactions. Thinking players provide an initial logic check for proposed COAs and situation templates from steps of the previous military decision-making process. This is especially important for “red hat” players who act as the enemy and seek to exploit weaknesses. While we most commonly think of the red-hat battalion or brigade intelligence staff officer opponents to our blue forces, we can also use thinking players to experiment with the reactions of civilian populations, local governments, allies, and even adjacent units.
History of Military War-Gaming
Military war-gaming has endured centuries of evolution. Chess and Go were two popular early strategic games played against an adversary, but they lacked combat-related mechanics. Kriegsspiel, the first game to consider terrain and unit composition, was adopted by the Prussian Army in the 19th century, and it became the educational tool of choice for officers responsible for decision making using terrain, formations, and casualty rates based on conflicts occurring at that time in history.1
War-gaming continued to progress in the United States, with war games taught in the Command and General Staff College in 1939 and the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941.2 Even after additional advancements during the Cold War, however, a 1991 RAND Corporation study posited that the Department of Defense had “little interest in the substance of the models and validity of the lessons learned from using them” heading into the Gulf War.3
Today, digital warfighter exercises and live war games conducted at combat training centers provide additional opportunities to test staff systems, decision making, and warfighting. While these modern systems are significant, they are either aimed at training levels of command much higher than the battalion and brigade, or they are prohibitively resource intensive to repeat them multiple times a quarter needed to train a staff.
The Current Gap in COA Analysis
War-gaming has become a niche interest for Army leaders, with few touchpoints in PME. There is no standardized war game taught across the centers of excellence, although the U.S. Army Maneuver Center Captain’s Career Course has introduced its students to the Force-on-Force system. War-gaming is taught at Intermediate-Level Education, but only as an elective focused on educational gaming—not as it applies to COA analysis. As a result, military decision-making process war-gaming has led to ad-hoc systems and rules that are based on the hope that some staff member has an interest in war-gaming or has been lucky enough to have a good experience with it.
The Center for Army Lessons Learned published the How to Master Wargaming handbook in 2020,4 but CTC Trends bulletins since then still mention COA analysis as a skill set that needs improvement.
These critiques are about more than war-gaming in adherence to doctrine. These gaps also cause us to miss out on key analyses and important conversations such as degraded combat power, trickle-down impacts of changing supply demands, available casualty/medical evacuation assets, losses of unique skills or qualifications (such as those of trained small, unmanned aircraft system operators), or the risk of compromised communications security.
These gaps are exacerbated by a lack of extant U.S. experience with fighting in large-scale combat operations. Where historically a veteran of a type of conflict would adjust or completely override game outcomes from experience, that authoritative perspective may be hard to find today. Where our doctrinal instruction on COA analysis is concerned, we have few references outside of the belt/avenue-in-depth/box methods described in Field Manual (FM) 5-0, Planning and Orders Production,5 to consult about how to approach the analysis. Further, I am unable to identify any casualty tables that have been designated as the baseline standard reference for staffs, and the Correlation of Forces and Means model circulating
within the Command and General Staff College environs lacks a dedicated proponent to ensure that its updates align with evolving formations, advancements in technology, and
insights from ongoing conflicts.6
The Vision
In its barest form, the standardized war game should, in an hour, be capable of running a maneuver phase under tent and red lens and with minimal resources. At its most complex, the war game could consist of a day-long event in which warfighting functions across multiple domains are considered (with computer support, if needed). The recommended criteria for judging such a solution are speed, understandable results, and minimal resources.
Speed
Understandable Results
Minimal Resources
War-Gaming in PME
Participant Role
Umpire Role
Umpires would be responsible for knowing how to navigate the rules of the war game and making (to the best of their ability) impartial decisions. Furthermore, modular war-game umpires would need to be trained to understand the level of detail supported based on the time and appetite available for execution. If there is only enough time to game one phase of a maneuver fight, then the game should be simplified. If outpacing logistics trains is the commander’s primary concern, then logistics modules should be added. Intermediate-Level Education and the Senior Leader Course are PME opportunities for teaching war-gaming from the perspective of an umpire. In both environments, students could build on an extant understanding of the war game and be taught to make adjustments to the game, address operational requirements, and adjust adjudication tables to better estimate the impact of a new technique or technology. Articles like “Revisiting RAND’s Russia Wargames After the Invasion of Ukraine,” which presents a comparison of Russian offensive war games before and after its invasion of Ukraine, can also serve as salient teaching tools.13
Other Perspectives
Despite feedback from the Center for Army Lessons Learned,14 operational units may be satisfactorily executing COA analysis for their commanders—even if in flawed forms. I’ve observed little call to action for war-gaming from senior leaders, and the absence of a standardized game may allow staffs to create the rules and considerations they believe to be important without the need for additional training (perhaps in ways that may simply be difficult to capture in a rulebook). The injection of a new prescribed war game may just be too cumbersome for the staff.
Automation may also begin to play a bigger part in COA analysis and the military decision-making process. An article entitled “Artificial Intelligence for Wargaming and Modeling” explores the use of artificial intelligence in war-gaming and explains that it may provide support tools for commanders, offer insight into the decisions of other players, and reduce the difficulty of integrating separate “modules” that account for complex systems, resulting in more complete analyses.15
Conclusion
Flexible, intellectually agile leaders are needed to navigate the uncertainty of the large-scale combat operations fight. War-gaming has historically been an important, accessible, low-cost training tool that Army leaders could use to practice making better decisions faster, and it should play a more important role in COA analysis. A structured, widely adopted war game that is practiced in PME—but can be streamlined for use by the operational force in the military decision-making process—is a key opportunity for maintaining mentally agile and capable leaders for tomorrow’s Army.
Endnotes:
1Matthew B. Caffrey, Jr, On Wargaming, Naval War College Press, Newport, Rhode Island, January 2019.
2Ibid.
3Paul K. Davis and Don Blumenthal, “The Base of Sand Problem: A White Paper on the State of Military Combat Modeling,” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, January 1991.
4How to Master Wargaming, Center for Army Lessons Learned, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2020.
5FM 5-0, Planning and Orders Production, 4 November 2024.
6How to Master Wargaming.
7Sebastian J. Bae, Forging Wargamers, Marine Corps University Press, Quantico, Virginia, 2022.
8Ralph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, O’Reilly Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 6 November 2004.
9ATP 3-21.18, Foot Marches, 13 April 2022.
10Koster.
11Caffrey.
12Bae.
13Gian Gentile et al., “Revisiting RAND’s Russia Wargames After the Invasion of Ukraine,” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, 21 November 2023.
14How to Master Wargaming.
15Paul K. Davis and Paul Bracken, “Artificial Intelligence for Wargaming and Modeling,” Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Application, Methodology, Technology, 8 February 2022, pp. 1–16, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358453111_Artificial_intelligence_for_wargaming_and_modeling>, accessed on 15 May 2025.
Captain Schuler is a Regular Army space operations officer for the U.S. Space Command, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. He was an instructor for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Proponent Office–Protection, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, when this article was written. He is a casual war-gamer on commercial and government digital and tabletop systems. Captain Schuler holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and a master’s degree in graphic information systems from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.