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A number of major themes arose in interviews at wargaming centers

• Centers support wargaming for a variety of purposes and employ a wide range of tools, approaches, adjudication methods, and skill sets.
• Centers employ a mixture of wargame designers, military operators, analysts, social scientists, programmers, and information technology support.
• There is continual exploration of new commercial software and tools and further development of government off-the-shelf or custom-built software.

Facilities and their configurability were a key aspect of discussions at wargaming centers

• Some centers do not own any facilities aside from shared conference rooms or classrooms, while others possess elaborate infrastructure (such as a dedicated building or auditorium, configurable gaming rooms, server rooms, or video studios).
• Adaptability and flexibility are paramount, and all of the centers emphasized the importance of the configurability of facilities.

Several characteristics define the state of the art of wargaming

• The adoption of technology in defense wargaming is considerably lower than in the commercial gaming world, in part because government security issues pose significant barriers to the use of commercial games.
• In a drive toward systemization, centers are paying more attention to methodical, transparent approaches to gaming in the hope of generating more-credible insights.
• Innovations to support positive player experience, such as video, touch panels, or three-dimensional projections, are a hallmark of state-of-the-art games.
• Wargaming center members stressed that games had the most impact when embedded in a series of games, a cycle of research, or other broader processes.

The U.S. Marine Corps has an opportunity not only to adopt wargaming best practices, tools, and approaches from other sources but also to adapt and develop them further to suit its own needs. This report is designed to help the Marine Corps understand the utility of different wargaming tools as the service invests in its wargaming capability and in building its next-generation wargaming concept. The authors have collected information on wargaming processes, facilities, and skill sets through research and interviews at various wargaming centers. They identify tasks by wargaming type in order to provide information on when in the wargaming process certain tools might be useful.

The authors make recommendations for low-, medium-, and high-resourced courses of action (COAs), with the COAs meant to build on each other rather than representing choices between discrete options. The low-resourced COA involves actions that can be implemented with minimal resources and relatively quickly, focusing on improving processes and the wargaming skills of staff already engaged. The medium-resourced COA builds on the previous one, featuring recommendations that require more resources, time, and research and that involve a greater degree of uncertainty, focusing on acquiring additional skill sets, personnel, and equipment. The high-resourced COA builds on the two previous COAs and requires major reorganization or changes in policy or actions of inherent high complexity and financial commitment, focusing on the construction of new and specialized wargaming facilities.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Defining Wargaming

• Chapter Three

  The Current Environment for Wargaming

• Chapter Four

  The Marine Corps' Vision for Next-Generation Wargaming

• Chapter Five

  Wargaming Centers

• Chapter Six

  The Framework of Wargaming Capabilities

• Chapter Seven

  Courses of Action

• Appendix A

  Wargame Center Write-Ups

• Appendix B

  Catalog of Wargaming Tools and Approaches

• Appendix C

  Tables of Wargaming Tasks