You’ve been invited to an exclusive wargame, held in the hardest-to-access pentagonal-shaped building in the world. You enter an LED-lit room, wrapped in a floor-to-ceiling map dotted with multicolored cardboard chits signifying military units.
The initial RSVPs were sent to four-star generals and undersecretaries, but the room today is filled with substitutes, as bureaucratic duties whisked the intended, needed players away to box-ticking meetings. You spend hours practicing and sharpening your decision-making, finding novel maneuvers against capable adversaries. At the conclusion, you pass by fellow players, who remark on how much they learned and express confidence that the exercise will certainly reshape U.S. military planning.
An analytical report is written, only to be buried in stacks of documents for the Secretary of War’s review. Over time, your day of revelatory wargaming becomes a distant memory and ultimately makes no change to the day-to-day operations of U.S. forces pre-positioned throughout the globe.
This scenario isn’t history or fiction. This is wargaming today: invaluable, but minimally impactful and divorced from doctrine.
What would it take to fix this? Institutional reform and AI integration offer a path to make wargaming repeatable, scalable, and actionable.
AI Tools As Future (War)Game-Changers
Not all AI applications are created equal, and the wargaming enterprise cannot afford to treat them as interchangeable. AI-wargaming integration varies dramatically in feasibility and cost-effectiveness depending on the model’s capabilities and the specific wargaming function it supports. Some applications are already within reach, while others require significant research and development before they can reliably enhance, rather than distort, the exercise. The lesson is surgical precision. AI tools deliver the most value when deliberately matched to compatible wargaming systems, not layered on indiscriminately.
However, the potential is significant. At the near end, large language models can expand the possibility space of wargame design by generating diverse initial scenarios through emulating adversary decision making to expose participants to divergent strategic viewpoints. These models can provide real-time support (e.g., translations, policy-informed advice, enhanced visualizations) that lowers barriers to participation.
At the far end, revolutionary applications could transform the analytical backbone of wargaming itself through course-of-action analysis aids, automated adjudication assistance, and the capture of behavioral data in digital games to enable genuine meta-analyses across exercises. Cognitive AI models could even factor in human variables like fear, overconfidence, and misperception, which help participants understand why and how adversaries may escalate.
None of this happens automatically. The technology exists, and is still emerging. The bottleneck to transformative and informative wargaming is the institutional capacity to adopt.
A Long Way to Go
Even if the right AI tools existed tomorrow, the wargaming enterprise is not built to adopt them. The barriers are structural, not technological.
Despite a decade-long push to reinvigorate wargaming, the Department of War (DoW) still relies overwhelmingly on analog, time-intensive exercises defined by physical architectures, pre-determined scenarios, and rigid adjudication structures. Wargame data sits in stovepiped systems, and the results go unrecorded or unshared. While analog and tactile features can help capture attention and make the game engaging, a lack of digital tools means that insights generated in any given exercise tend to stay with the narrow set of participants rather than reaching planners, operators, or policymakers, let alone reshaping doctrine.
Proclaiming the New Wargaming Czar
Military innovation spreads not because a capability is useful but because states possess the organizational capital to absorb the required changes. Compelling innovations routinely fail to diffuse when institutions lack the capacity or sustained interest to implement them. AI-enabled wargaming fits this pattern precisely. Even though the technology is available or emerging, the organizational prerequisites are not. Breaking that pattern requires a structural intervention, not just another memorandum.
The Department of War should establish a Crisis Simulation Center of Excellence, led by a senior official, a “Wargaming Czar.” Reporting directly to the Secretary of War, the Czar would:
Digitize infrastructure and data, developing processes for classified systems.
Standardize AI adoption and build talent pipelines.
Create an AI-wargaming R&D ecosystem.
Establish effectiveness metrics.
Mandate unified data submission so lessons inform U.S. strategy.
Facilitate National Security Council participation in high-level exercises.
Produce an annual joint wargaming report on lessons learned for military and policy leaders.
As a policy office accountable to the Secretary, the Center would possess the cross-service authority that no individual service wargaming shop currently holds. This would ensure the Center’s ability to standardize data protocols, mandate senior decisionmaker participation, and institute AI-focused training requirements.
More importantly, this structure creates the positive feedback loop that the enterprise currently lacks. Each wargaming cycle feeds standardized data into a mandatory cross-service repository, which informs the next iteration. Effectiveness metrics calculate improvement over time. After-action reviews integrate lessons into doctrine.
Conclusion
DOW’s wargaming enterprise remains trapped in analog processes, siloed operations, and institutional inertia. These all prevent AI adoption and integration, as well as decisionmakers experiencing novel lessons, let alone adopting them into doctrine.
Only a Crisis Simulation Center of Excellence, empowered with Secretary-level authority, cross-service mandate, and standardized data protocols, can overcome decades of bureaucratic resistance to transform wargaming from isolated exercises into a continuous engine of military innovation and learning.