by Aaron Danis, 27 August 2026
“[T]he symposium marked a significant milestone: an opportunity for practitioners, researchers, and educators from across the international PME (Professional Military Education) community to gather, share methods, and build the kind of collaborative infrastructure that the discipline has long needed.”
– Dr. Nicholas Murray, symposium sponsor and co-organizer1
click images to enlarge
The thought and discussion of PME is not one that excites wargamers. As laid out in 10 USC Ch 107, it is often dry, filled with military jargon and acronyms2, and is opaque to most civilians, even those who work for the U.S. military. As a graduate of the U.S. Army Command & General staff college distance program oh-so-many-years-ago and having taught at National Defense University for several years (and visited some of the others like the Army and Navy War Colleges), I have seen the good, the bad, and the head scratching in PME.
However, when I saw an invite to this 2.5-day symposium focusing on wargaming and education pop up in my inbox, I knew I had to attend. First, I am retired Army (hooah!). Second, I run national security simulations and wargames for a DC-based graduate school, the Institute of World Politics, which is at the same level as many of the PME students I taught previously. Third, I missed Connections 2026 this year for a variety of reasons and needed to scratch my professional wargaming itch (thanks to fellow ACD author Ian Brown for his thought-provoking writeup of this year’s conference).
This symposium was different than Connections. It was more military-focused in its make-up and attendees, which was not surprising. It was a much smaller group of attendees (it was held in the same spaces as Connections 2024 and 2019, which packed the rooms from wall-to-wall). Finally, the focus was on using wargames for military education, and I really liked the discussions on how to assess learning, which is a universal theme for any educators trying to use wargames as learning tools. As such, the panels and discussions might not hold a lot of interest for commercial gamers, but I will highlight a few areas and games of note. Be aware that I missed some sections of the conference because I was doing some research at AHEC while there, but I will give you the highlights.
Day 1
The symposium opened with a keynote address from the one person you want to hear from on this professional wargaming: Sebastian Bae, a wargamer with the Center for Naval Analysis, former Marine, and the designer of the popular educational wargame series Littoral Commander.
Bae started by talking about military wargaming’s current educational successes, notably pushing gaming out to the “fleet,” but implying the broader military community to include the Army’s Functional Area 57 (FA57) Simulation Operations and FA 59 (Strategist) functional areas in the officer corps. He noted that games must meet the demand of warfighters and be tailored to their needs. Efforts like the international Fight Clubs and their country chapters represent a grass roots effort to reach all levels of the military. He also stated that the two areas that must be addressed are Artificial Intelligence, which can speed wargaming learning but must keep humans in the loop, and trying to prove what wargames actually teach, and if they are better than other learning methods. He paraphrased noted Johns Hopkins wargame researcher Yuna Wong by stating that “We haven’t done the scholarly research to prove that educational wargaming “works.” Some day soon, Bae stated, military budgeteers will demand proof it does.
Bae also noted that the professional wargaming community is “fragile;” in other words, who is going to replace you (to the audience) when you retire? How many junior officers are needed in the wargaming field today in order to produce one master wargamer in the future? No one knows the attrition rate. He wrapped his keynote by asking rhetorically “what wargame success stories do we want to tell in the future?” The community needs to continue to prepare for the “next hard day,” and in in the words of senior wargame analyst Matt Caffrey, demonstrate that “wargaming saves lives.”
Bae’s keynote was followed by a three-person panel presenting and discussing “Successful Wargaming Programs in PME.” This was an excellent panel with Tim Barrick from the Marine Corps University/Krulack Center, Scott Chambers from the National Defense University/ National Defense Wargaming Center (NDWC), and Mike Dunn from the Army Command and General Staff College/Integrated Decision Advantage Center (IDAC). I will only touch on a couple of highlights here. Barrick set the tone by outlining the 5 things needed for a successful PME wargaming program. His point about finding faculty champions who want to use wargaming in their courses was echoed by the other speakers, as was having a variety of manual and digital wargaming tools that can be adapted to the classroom. As we will see, Barrick is also a proponent of wargaming tournaments so students can sharpen their wargaming skills.
After the panel, there were 4 overlapping breakout presentations of 30 minutes each up to lunchtime (it was a full morning!) There were presentations on DIGICAT [the virtual manifestation of the Operational Wargame System (OWS) originated by Tim Barrick], a Pacific strategy game, a Joint All-Domain Operations Wargame, and do’s and don’ts of PME wargaming. I caught a little bit of each, but not enough to elaborate in detail.
After a pizza lunch (it is wargaming after all!), there were 4 rooms of game demos from the various agencies present. Here is a sample below:
The “CJTF Commander: The Baltics”, as noted, is based on Littoral Commander. The designer, LTC Dan Brooks, USA, from the Army War College is seen briefing the prototype to Sebastian Bae, who in an Instagram post noted that he liked that special operations are highlighted. Again, this is a prototype that is still in development, but it looks impressive.
These two Army War College Matrix games (L) and (C), are geared towards regional conflicts and incorporating Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (DIME)-level tools, commonly taught in U.S. military colleges.
(L) Another DIME-level matrix game, this one part of a series of games produced by NDU NDWC. (R) A Kriegspiel-type game with effective terrain representation.
This game, showcased by Chris (LAN) Nelson from the Krulak Center, uses the center’s Operational Wargame System but applied to a World War II scenario, in this case the 1940 Campaign for Norway. The rules are stripped down to the bare minimum for ease of play. Again, this game is not available commercially.
Day 2
The second day’s schedule mirrored the first, minus the keynote address. We went right into the highly-anticipated panel discussion titled “Evaluation and Assessments in PME Wargaming.” This got to the heart of the PME problem of how to assess if students are learning from the wargames they play or design in class. Moderated by Krulack Center wargame analyst Eric Walters, the panel consisted of organizer Dr. Nick Murray, concepts developer Dr. Greg Hospodor from the U.S. Army Futures and Concepts Command, and wargame analyst Christopher (LAN) Nelson from the Krulack Center. Nelson discussed what student characteristics educators are trying to measure in class: judgement, adaptation, critical thinking under pressure, and evidence of learning.
The big (as yet unproven) assumption here is that performance in a wargame somehow equals performance in war. Hospodor discussed course learning objectives and translating them into rubrics that are “rich, defensible, and provide evidence of knowledge.” Murray pointed out that every individual student in a course usually has different job in their unit. With this in mind, what student decisions are we trying to measure, and to what end? I found this panel to be useful to any educator looking to incorporate and assess wargames in the classroom, not just for PME.
There were 5 pre-lunch breakout sessions on Day 2, and I again tried to capture a bit of each. One of the two most interesting things I saw were LTC Dan Brooks’ “History Education and Wargaming,” where he has applied to wargaming the military career of Napoleon. The most fascinating tidbit here was the calculation he showed about Napoleon’s “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR) value, a baseball metric created to show the value of any player above the average value of a player in his position (say, second baseman). Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time by this metric. Read the slide below and marvel at Nappy’s prowess and check out the methodology on the original website and see if you agree.
In a similar vein, the other tidbit came from Tim Barrick, and it involved calculating individual student wargamer profiles to rate military gamer skills. This involves using 360-degree rating surveys to collect opponent data and incorporates faculty input (see slide below left). I can see a commercial adjunct to this in places like the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC), where gamers play many wargames over and over through round after round. Data collection would be difficult but not impossible, and I have no doubt gamers would like to see their ratings and how they stack up and where they can improve.
Speaking of tournaments, Barrick announced an online tournament coming in September using historical scenarios from 1943 (see below right). Please note that this is open only to U.S. and Allied military members, Department of War (DoW) civilians, contractors, and PME faculty.
Day 2 also saw more games being demonstrated in addition to the Day 1 games.
I missed the half-day on Day 3 that had an opening panel on “Innovation and the Future of PME,” and the short presentations section included two on AI. I thought that overall the conference had great utility not only for the PME field, but for educators in general. Perhaps future runnings (this was touted as the first Army PME wargaming conference, implying more to follow) will bring in not just DoW military and employees but select civilians as well (like myself, as my school is providing support to a military program that includes wargaming). I liked the conference program mix of panels, short presentations, and game demos. The key will be continuing to push the envelope and prove that wargaming works in the classroom.
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Footnotes
- See Dr. Murray’s official writeup of the symposium here
- Just read §2151. Definitions at the above link to see what I mean
