Midway to Milliseconds: Wargaming the Next Technology Revolution

Between the world wars, military establishments confronted a technological revolution. Sonar. Radar. Aviation. Submarines. Wireless communications. Each represented a fundamental reordering of how countries would fight. Back in the United States, through countless exercises, officers explored how these nascent technologies would reshape combat.

The payoff came at Midway. Naval aviators had spent years gaming carrier operations in basement war rooms, discovering that aircraft carriers could operate independently from the battle line, rather than serving solely as fleet battle aids. During the Pacific war, three U.S. carriers ambushed Japanese Admiral Yamamoto Nagumo forces. Nagumo lost four carriers. The Americans only lost one. The Battle of Midway halted the Imperial Japanese Navy’s march across the Pacific, losing momentum they never regained.

The historical record is clear. U.S. wargaming shaped the Victory Program that won WWII. It produced War Plan Orange, helping U.S. forces avoid an unworkable “through ticket” strategy in the Pacific. Fleet Admiral Nimitz later observed that nearly every aspect of the war with Japan had been anticipated through wargaming, with few surprises.

Today, the world faces a similar inflection point as emerging technologies reshape the battlefield. Washington and Beijing are entering a new age of great power competition and introducing new AI-enabled military technologies. The risk of new flashpoints requiring U.S. military readiness only grows.

The remedy exists. Wargaming remains the most effective tool for preparing U.S. leaders to navigate technological uncertainty. The problem? The Department of War’s (DOW) wargaming machine stands unprepared to ready its leaders.

Machine learning already shapes targeting decisions in modern combat. Autonomous systems already operate on battlefields. Simultaneously, global militaries are racing to field new AI applications. The question, therefore, isn’t whether AI will compress warfare timelines; it’s when.

Now, AI-enabled systems threaten to accelerate conflict through operational accidents and misadvised decisions. Competitive pressures will incentivize greater machine autonomy, increasing the likelihood that operational errors spiral into irreversible conflicts.

These failures won’t just cause accidents. They will trigger conflicts. They can send escalatory signals leaders never intended. They can turn operational errors into strategic crises. And they can do this faster than humans, compressing warfare timelines from seconds to milliseconds.

For the DOW, wargaming isn’t just theory, it’s survival insurance. It is how leaders learn to make life-or-death decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, in novel scenarios. Done right, it delivers what no briefing can: the muscle memory of command in AI-enabled scenarios.

But here’s the catch: Wargaming only works when it is frequent, well-designed, iterated, and when lessons learned actually inform doctrine. Today’s wargaming enterprise fails on every count.

Following the Cold War, U.S. wargaming succumbed to bureaucratic capture, growing more siloed across the services and involving fewer high-ranking officials. There is still no department-wide framework for designing, executing, iterating, developing expertise, or adopting lessons learned into policy. Wargaming resource allocation has become a political exercise for reinforcing comfortable assumptions about future wars. Simultaneously, bureaucratic procedures block the very leaders who need these exercises most.

The lack of effectiveness metrics prevents continuous improvement and increases redundancy. Despite a high demand for wargaming across the Department, current designs are difficult to replicate, limiting their ability to scale or explore novel AI-enabled warfare scenarios. Simultaneously, the Department’s centralized wargaming data repository is a desert of half-documented exercises stripped of their analytical value. The result? DOW leaders themselves admit that wargames suffer from limited scenario creativity, insufficient research, and unsound adjudication methods.

The workforce problem is worse. The Department lacks standardized training pipelines. Civilian degree programs in wargaming remain scarce. The hobbyist gamers who built U.S. defense wargaming are retiring, taking their institutional knowledge with them. Their replacements want digital systems, but the DOW’s infrastructure remains stubbornly analog.

Meanwhile, leadership has no idea how dependent the DOW is on contractors because the Department doesn’t track this. The federal institutional culture remains risk-averse and self-reinforcing, treating interoperability as a threat to core missions. Reform is stymied by bureaucratic rigidity. Wargaming remains siloed, inaccessible, irrelevant.

To save wargaming’s unique value, Congress should establish and fund a stand-alone, joint crisis simulation center of excellence within the DOW to oversee department-wide wargaming practices. This center should be housed within the Office of the Secretary of War (OSW) to ensure civilian-military collaboration and help break through bureaucratic silos.

The core mandate of this new center should be to:

Through these measures, the Secretary of War can ensure that when the next Midway moment arrives, U.S. leaders will have the muscle memory and institutional preparedness to navigate it successfully.

Absent immediate reform, the broken wargaming enterprise will remain a strategic liability for the U.S. military as it enters future, AI-enabled wars.