by Ian Brown, 4 November 2026
It’s curious. This conference ended weeks ago, yet my write-up has morphed at least a half dozen times in the interim—largely because events around me stubbornly refuse to stand still. As Dr. Manhattan said, nothing ever ends. Thus let’s see where round #7 takes us, and what happens between now and when I finally hit “send” to Brant’s inbox.
All opinions expressed here are the author’s alone.
So: we’re here just to talk about games, right?
The second iteration of the “International Scientific Wargaming Conference” hosted at the General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces (AWL), in Wrocław, Poland, completed something of a circle I’d started a year ago at the inaugural conference. That first iteration was a highly illuminating experience, for many reasons.
click images to enlarge
If you recall my write-up from last year, I was impressed by how it was a serious conference with serious people who faced a security environment about which they had no illusions. That theme echoed across several subsequent wargaming conferences in 2026 such as Games of War hosted by the University of Gdańsk and Connections North. Its…absence was felt in other gatherings. But the theme returned with a vengeance in this second conclave at AWL. You could feel it even before setting foot in the auditorium for the opening ceremony. How so? Let’s set the scene.
On September 13, as I was boarding the first of the flights that would take me to Wrocław, Russian drones struck a Ukrainian train carrying foreign dignitaries within a stone’s throw of the Polish border. On September 14, as I cooled my heels at a layover in Copenhagen, another stone’s throw away in the Baltic Sea a Russian corvette was firing flares into the flight path of a Danish Air Force helicopter. On the night of the 14th as I checked into my hotel in Wrocław, next door in Lithuania NATO jets from the Baltic Air Policing Mission were intercepting and shooting down a Russian drone that had penetrated deep into Lithuanian airspace. On September 15, hours before the wargaming conference kicked off, an advisor to Vladimir Putin was confidently claiming that if necessary, the Russian military would cause “the Polish state [to] cease to exist within two or three days” (insert your own joke about the rapidity of Russian special military operations here).
A serious people watches these things, and prepares. As I walked to the gates of AWL on the morning of September 15th, the security posture of the base was significantly more robust than it had been last year. Our uniformed Polish hosts were just as friendly and helpful in checking us in and getting us to the opening ceremony as they were before. But they understood that the world around them—indeed, the world on their doorstep—was not as it was a year ago. In 2025, I talked about how the conference was under the shadow of a monster spilling buckets of blood next door. In the intervening 365 days, that monster had repeatedly stuck its talons into its other neighbors’ yards, up to and including the morning of the conference. The monster wanted to see how those neighbors would respond. Nothing ever ends.
Among the European nations gathered at AWL, one thing was clear—they’d watched all this, and they were preparing. This theme also permeated the conference. It was a stark contrast to certain perspectives on reality, and preparations (or lack thereof) within that reality from the place I’d just left. We’ll revisit all these things below.
But we’re here just to talk about games, right?
Getting the Band Back Together
I don’t think the lights in the AWL auditorium had even been turned off last year before conference organizer Major Łukasz Wójciak (head of the Department of Territorial Defense at AWL) started planning the next one. We talked about it at Modern Day Marine (MDM) 2026 where once again his cadets had an impressive showing in the Commandant’s Cup wargaming tournament1. Many of the usual suspects from the educational wargaming circuit were there too—Keith Martin-Smith and his HexWar team, info operator Matt Evers and Space Marine Chris Lowe, Lex Luciak of Fight Club International, all of it tied together by Tim Barrick’s crew from the Krulak Center at Marine Corps University (MCU). Spoiler alert: lots of these names appeared again in the AWL conference agenda. Łukasz is a good recruiter.
I told Łukasz that I would definitely return to AWL for round two of the conference, but found myself surprised, and honored, that the formal invitation a month later not only asked me to come back but put me in charge of moderating a panel on “Algorithmic Warfare: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Wargaming,” along with participating in a panel on “High-Intensity Warfare and Unmanned Systems in Wargaming.” The latter I felt pretty comfortable with as unmanned systems have been a focal point in both my after-hours game designs and my day job (I’d be bringing a custom-made drone card game designed for my company to Wrocław).
When it came to AI though…talk about a challenging topic, and one to which I could claim no special insight. Yes, I’d used AI to generate a lot of the graphics for my #Maneuver Warfare card game from the Dietz Foundation. But that was a slim slice of the game’s overall development process which was very human labor-intensive. I’m not a programmer, coder, or even a regular user of engines like ChatGPT or Claude. I asked Łukasz if I was really the right guy for this given my limited scope of knowledge on the subject. He assured me I was, and that in a sense this was the panel’s purpose: to cast a wide net across the myriad use cases of AI in wargaming. The panelists would help with that given they themselves were coming at the AI question from diverse angles.
So, challenge accepted. And if I had any anxiety, I figured I could always take it out on Sebastian Bae during our panel on unmanned systems2. And with Chris Lowe also joining our panel “IRL” as the kids say, he and I agreed that if necessary we could provide a demonstration of modern combined arms fires by chucking D16s at Sebastian from both sides.
As it happened—and to further torture the metaphor—I had a wonderful and unexpected moment with another “band” member who’d be on the AI panel. While in Copenhagen awaiting the transfer bus for the final leg to Wrocław, someone came up to me and asked “Ian?” And who should it be but Daniel Ordoñez, who’d generously agreed to hop on the panel following a last-minute cancellation. Daniel is a PhD student at the Swedish Defence University (SeDU), itself a professional military educational institution that has done much to integrate wargaming within its curricula3. Daniel’s work focuses on using wargaming as a controlled environment to examine many things, human-AI collaboration among them.
We talked for a while until snagging separate taxis after landing in Wrocław. Daniel’s framing of wargames as a controlled environment tickled something in the back of my mind. Both his own work, and how SeDU uses games with their cadets, treat wargames as serious learning mechanisms under highly specific controlled conditions. They are serious enough that student performance within them matters and is evaluated, and they are viewed as discrete training events for improving tactical acumen and military judgment.
Finally that tickle in the back of my brain jumped to the forefront. I’d spent most of my operational military career doing events under controlled conditions, serious enough that my performance was evaluated, and which not only contributed to acumen and judgment but which also counted toward the annual performance of certain standards which I was required to meet to be considered proficient in my area of specialization. It’s called a flight simulator.
I bounced stream-of-consciousness thoughts about this off Daniel, and while a puddle-jumping flight and the walk from baggage claim to the taxi line wasn’t long enough to, you know, solve all aspects of this deeply complicated problem, the seed was planted to further examine this comparison in the future. Military aviation is hazardous and challenging, and requires precision in execution from the aircrew. And yet we regularly conduct training that feeds into our annual proficiency evaluations in fake airplanes. Half our instrument minimums can be counted by flying fake airplanes. Hell, my annual NATOPS and instrument checks—two qualifications that are absolutely vital for being allowed to fly one’s chosen aircraft—can be conducted in fake airplanes. Why haven’t we looked at wargaming—where and when it can be used to build tactical proficiency, acumen, and judgment, and what skillsets it can be used to evaluate—in the same fashion that we look at flight qualifications? Maybe I’ll build a presentation or write a paper on that, once I get done with the million other little ankle-biting taskers on my plate.4
Day One—Meeting the Moment
In my after action on Connections USA 2026 I noted that the urgency of the moment in confronting our increasingly dangerous world was noticeably…lacking. I didn’t think that would be an issue at AWL given what I saw last year, and I was not disappointed. 2025 saw a robust presence from Polish governmental ministries and military entities. This iteration jumped up from “robust” to “exhaustive.” As with last year my language skills were not up the task of tracking individual names. But I could track organizations, and in 2026 over two dozen Polish governmental and military organizations were in the auditorium seats for the opening remarks. This was on top of twenty VIPs from various NATO-affiliated militaries and universities, to include not only the aforementioned Tim Barrick but the commanding general of MCU/Education Command (EDCOM). This was a signpost of the special, and serious, relationship growing between Marine Corps wargaming and wargaming across NATO.
Day one of the conference would shortly feature another of those signposts.
The conference opened with remarks from AWL’s rector, retired Lieutenant General Dr. Marek Tomaszycki, Łukasz, and the Academic Society for War Analysis, and two themes stood out. First was that AWL’s success in creating and implementing a program of educational wargaming echoed similar stories in other institutions. It required fighting against deeply entrenched academic headwinds that did not view wargaming as a serious instructional tool, and as with many military fights, success came not from the lone wolf but the combined arms power of calling all your friends to fight with you.
As in 2025, the United States Marine Corps writ large, and MCU and Tim Barrick specifically, stood out both as models for shaping AWL’s own program and as vital allies in offering a platform for Poland’s young future officers to show their mettle. The 2026 Commandant’s Cup Tournament at MDM was a case study in how wargaming, seriously applied, could level the playing field by offering more opportunities for honing military judgment. I mentioned above that the AWL cadet team came in second in the tournament; but even more impressively, they were the only cadet team in the competition. All the other teams were comprised of active-duty servicemembers with years of operational experience.
But good judgment is good judgment; as Tim Barrick noted in handing over the trophies on the winner’s podium at the end of Modern Day Marine, “excellence has no uniform.”
New Understandings
Following these opening comments came that second signpost of the burgeoning wargaming relationship between the Marine Corps and NATO partners. Brigadier General (BGen) Matthew Tracy, the aforementioned commanding general of EDCOM, wasn’t in Wrocław just to see the sights.
He was also there to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between AWL and MCU, formalizing the professional relationship between the two professional military education (PME) schools and making it easier to reinforce each other’s efforts in the future. This wasn’t MCU’s only MOU—at the tail end of my time in uniform I was pleased to watch a similar informal relationship that had grown between MCU and SeDU blossom into an MOU. There may be others that I’m not aware of, but the MOUs are sufficiently rare that when MCU opts to sign one, they mean something. MCU and AWL were rightly proud of the two years of hard work, collaboration, and personal relationships that made this new agreement possible. And given that I’ve witnessed firsthand the groundbreaking educational wargaming efforts both schools have undertaken, I’m very excited to see what outputs this new partnership bring in the future.
After the signing ceremony BGen Tracy provided additional commentary on the integration of wargaming into Marine Corps training and education. Many of his comments bluntly captured the reality that despite the very real strides forward taken to integrate wargaming with training and educational requirements, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. We talk about the modern necessity to master all-domain warfare and that wargames are a way to do that—but have we matched the proliferation of wargaming to all schoolhouses, of all ranks, to that necessity? We talk about using wargames to strengthen our minds the same way we use PT to strengthen our bodies—but while our fitness reports have evaluation blocks for PT tests, they lack evaluation blocks for our operational acumen, application of all-domain knowledge, or demonstrated ability to apply those things, repeatedly, against a thinking adversary.
A brief-but-necessary digression
Frankly this touches on a part of the promotion process (in the Marine Corps at least) that’s been a hobby horse of mine for many years. Some of you readers with a military background might know the saying “what we evaluate shows what we value.” Rarely is this saying used as a compliment. Having sat on a couple of promotion boards myself, I’ve experienced the frustration of trying to parse the dense undergrowth of “mandatory” comments and statistics to get to the actual evaluation of the Marine whose profile was in my hands. Once you account for mandatory filler, you might have enough room left for 2-3 sentences on how good a Marine the individual is, how well they did their job, and what distinguishes them from other Marines. 2-3 sentences to evaluate a year’s work, and God help that Marine if their evaluating officer doesn’t have the writing skills to use those sentences to make that year’s work really pop. As a result, the more easily quantifiable stuff, like rifle or PT scores, rises to the top. But the stuff that really matters—acumen, professional knowledge, application of more nuanced skills and leadership—gets rolled in below the fold at the end of evaluation. If you’ve been around long enough you’ve seen the result. A lazy board promotes the Marine with a 300 PFT/CFT who’s dumb as a bag of rocks, barely knows their job, and not only doesn’t train their Marines but treats them like shit in the process of failing to train them. But damn, they run fast, so they must be a good Marine, right?
Digression over
So we need a new methodology for educating our minds using wargames, and evaluating the results of that training. But here BGen Tracy identified another gap. The present educational methodology where wargaming isn’t integrated often boils down to reading a book, and then someone who’s read lots of books talks about the book, and then students do their best to write about the book but then get graded by instructors who gained their positions by…reading lots of books and writing about them.
I’m oversimplifying a bit, but the point remains that the present methodology doesn’t really evaluate much beyond a student’s ability to read a book and write about it. But war is not defined by the highly competitive reading of and writing about books by the various belligerents involved. It is defined by the application of the knowledge contained in those books—and that application is not sufficiently tested in military education, nor is there a large body of available instructors skilled not just in large quantities of reading and writing but large quantities of themselves being tested and evaluated in the application of all that written knowledge.
If we believe that wargaming is valuable both as an application and test of military knowledge (and planning, and judgment, and decision-making, and adaptability…) then we need a body of instructors skilled in applying and testing military knowledge in wargaming, and we need an evaluation system in which students are tested in such application within a wargame. It goes back to evaluating what we value. But as BGen Tracy noted, we lack sufficient instructors of this stripe. Worse, the institutional Marine Corps functionally doesn’t value applied military knowledge because it doesn’t evaluate it.
So the Corps can do one of two things.
- Its leaders—if they truly believe that wargaming is a more useful educational methodology in which students can learn richer things about themselves, learn about friction, get used to making decisions with incomplete information, balance risk with strategy, and gain insights on the million other things we claim wargaming can teach us—need to incentivize its use, provide access to it, build the instructor cadre, and weight its evaluation just as we weight evaluation of run times or marksmanship.
- Or its leaders can tacitly admit that they really don’t care about the application of professional knowledge, close their eyes, and pretend that doing a lot of pull-ups and running around a track are sufficient for the challenges of modern all-domain warfare.
What you evaluate is what you value. The MOU between MCU and AWL is a clear indicator that those two educational institutions, at least, value wargames as a teaching tool and value the application of military knowledge demonstrated by their students on those virtual battlefields.
Lest I be accused of intellectual Luddism, military students should absolutely continue to read, and write, and be evaluated on both as well. But those requirements are the foundations of the end state—knowledge applied—not the end state itself. Reading, writing, wargaming: it all has a role to play in forming the professional military mind. Does that add more to the workload of the military student, or for that matter, the military faculty member? Yes. Too f***ing bad. War is hard and its failures are final. So read extra books, write extra papers, and show what you’ve learned in wargames. It’s more likely to make a difference to your success in modern war than an extra pull-up or two.
Rant over. Because we’re here to talk about games, right?
There were more “beginnings” on day one. After BGen Tracy’s remarks came another signing ceremony, this one of a Letter of Intent between AWL and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. It would increase cooperation on design and graphical communication, especially in military planning and map work. Any wargame designer who’s been around knows the importance of well-designed visualizations, clean graphics, and overall user interface that allow players to quickly and intuitively understand what they’re looking at.
Day one also kicked off the Second AWL Rector’s Cup Tournament, in which AWL cadets and cadets from other European military schools would compete in a tabletop game homegrown at AWL, and then a digital round with one of HexWar’s games (HexWar itself a commercial game company that has become a backbone for PME games, to include within the MCU digital wargaming cloud. Yes, it’s all connected, because if you know anything about professional wargamers it’s that they reinforce each other with the vigor of a Rohirrim cavalry charge).
Not So Obvious
Ceremonies aside, we’d also congregated at AWL to talk about and share knowledge about stuff, and we got into that on day one as well.
The first panel event focused on “Advancing Wargaming in Military and Non-Military Domains.” Chaired by Tess Butler5, (and note/pic on student wargaming tournament; observe at end that non-Polish cadets won showing again that “excellence wears no uniform”) it included GEN Sławomir Wojciechowski6, the Rector of AWL, BGen Tracy, BG (Ret.) Errico De Gaetano7, BG Damian Matysiak8, and COL Gábor Boldizsar, Phd9 .
One of the panelist’s opening comments shaped the panel’s theme: “we’ve moved from ‘is wargaming important?’ to ‘Why is it important?’”
One of the panelist’s opening comments shaped the panel’s theme: “we’ve moved from ‘is wargaming important?’ to ‘Why is it important?’” Turns out that cognitive shift—one many of us wargaming proponents have desired for years—has many knock-on effects, some of which BGen Tracy had already echoed. Wargames can improve military knowledge and decision-making; great, what knowledge do we want to impart via wargames and decisions do we want the players to practice? Who has the vision to wargame scenarios that don’t get the attention they deserve?
Two panelists described events that don’t normally get wargamed. One was disaster response for a typhoon overseas, which illuminated the limits of a US-only planning process and the benefits of using multi-national planning to get unique, and necessary, cultural buy-in for certain response actions. The other was how the Warsaw garrison—known largely for ceremonial roles—would support defense of the capital. This is a pretty important national security issues, encompassing not only the military aspect but social morale, public panic, disinformation, trust in the state, resilience of infrastructure, and a host of other considerations.
In other words, it’s a whole-of-government problem; but apparently it’s only recently been noted as something requiring a whole-of-government wargame.
One would think that multi-national disaster relief or the defense of a key city would be obvious subjects for wargaming (and wargaming frequently). But one cannot assume that the “obvious” subjects—for example, say, missile and air defense requirements needed to protect critical installations in the Middle East from an adversary whose unmanned systems have been employed with regularity against Ukraine for years (more on this shortly…)—someone needs the intellectual curiosity to ask the question, and the testicular fortitude to point out the answers regardless of how uncomfortable they make some.
Day Two—Robots and Algorithms
If day one of the conference was packed, then day two was saturated—or maybe it just felt that way because I’d actually have to take the stage for some of the events on day two, and I was frantically making revisions to things I planned to say and questions I planned to ask basically up to the moment a microphone was handed to me.
My first event was as a participant in a panel on “The Modern Battlespace—High-Intensity Warfare and Unmanned Systems in Wargaming.” Moderated by Lt. Col. Artur Zielichowski, PhD, of AWL, I had the unique pleasure of being joined on stage by two of my long-time Marine Corps wargaming fellow travelers, the aforementioned Sebastian Bae (representing the Center for Naval Analyses), and Chris “Pink Sheets” Lowe on loan to us from Marine Forces Europe/Africa. Our panel also included Lt. Col. Lukas Popow (Head of the Plans and Programmes Branch, JFTC Bydgoszcz) and James Buckley (Director, Sapper Studio Ltd).
I was excited about this panel because I’ve been staring at the wargaming angles of high-intensity conflict and unmanned systems since 2022 and the sheer volume of emergent lessons is a) overwhelming and b) in my opinion, still not satisfactorily integrated into many US-based professional wargame events. So this was a chance to get on my various soapboxes.
The first question Lt. Col. Zielichowski directed to me was about how wargame designers should keep up emergent trends when battlefield technology evolves much faster than game development. This is indeed a significant challenge because the cycle of adaptation in modern war—and especially in the world of unmanned warfare—is now measured in weeks. Anyone who’s read reports on the war in Ukraine or listened to interviews with Ukrainian drone operators knows that within 4-6 weeks of a new unmanned system being deployed on the front lines there’s a counter-adaptation by the Russians, which then requires a counter-counter-adaptation by Ukraine, and that cycle simply never ends.
Staying current on these developments to keep our wargames relevant to our players certainly puts a higher burden and responsibility on us as game designers. But as I said above about wargames requiring extra work at school: too f***ing bad. It’s a burden we designers must shoulder because if we don’t, we set up our players for operational failure, asset loss, and dead Americans. We must shift our research and assessment cycles for generating game data to match the real-world cycles of unmanned adaptation going on in war right now, which means being prepared to change our data and data implementation on weekly cycles. Personally I think even that is too slow—maybe this is a spicy take, but frankly if you’re not waking up every morning and screening information about what Ukraine and Russia are doing with drones, what Iran is doing with drones, what drug cartels and terrorist organizations are doing with drones, you’re not doing your damn job.
No Excuses
But if that was a spicy take, I’ll admit I may have clicked off “safe” and turned on a blowtorch in answering the next question. I was asked about what I saw as the biggest shortfalls in how Western militaries adopt unmanned systems, and how that should shape what wargames focus on. Oh boy, did I have some thoughts on where the American defense enterprise is in all this.
Ed note: take a moment and a big swig of something strong, and then put on a fireproof suit before continuing
The biggest shortfalls I’ve seen are complacency and a refusal to make the cognitive leap necessary to adapt our force structures and tactics to the world of unmanned and autonomous systems in which we now live. We have no excuse for that complacency and cognitive stagnation. Absolutely none. Because the present world of drones didn’t magically spring into existence in recent months, or the last year or two. The world of drones has been evolving and accelerating for many years now. It evolved in full view of anyone who wanted to look, and we have not kept pace with either the opportunity or the threat.
In 2020, we watched Azerbaijan leverage drones to achieve victory in 44 days during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. We didn’t change. For four years in Ukraine, we’ve watched rapid cycles of drone innovation, adaptation, and counter-adaption by both Russia and Ukraine on a high-intensity battlefield where adaptation cycles are measured in weeks. We didn’t change. In 2025, we saw Ukraine in Operation Spiderweb and Israel in Operation Rising Lion both use swarms of small drones to achieve asymmetric strategic effects against Russian and Iranian targets. We didn’t change.
Let’s take a look at the American military, time now in 2026. In the 24 hours before I sat on this particular panel, an inspector general report released to Congress and several other news stories outlined how the American defense enterprise performed against Iranian unmanned strikes against our facilities and assets during Operation Epic Fury. From the Inspector General’s report: Iran damaged or destroyed “hundreds” of buildings and structures at US installations across the Middle East. We had a half dozen high-value aerial refueling tankers and airborne early warning aircraft destroyed on the f***ing ground just like the Russians in Spiderweb10.
We had Americans killed and hundreds more wounded. And from the news reports, one deployed service member described our level of preparation against these unmanned attacks: “We’re not defending these bases. We’re just watching them get destroyed…we’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
Jesus. F***ing. Christ. We had years watching how others both employed and defended themselves against drones, to include Ukraine defending itself against exactly the same types of drones Iran launched against us. We watched how relatively inexpensive unmanned munitions could nevertheless achieve strategic battlefield effects. What happened when those weapons were finally turned against us? “Standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
As I said above, there are obvious questions suitable for wargaming but only if there’s the intellectual curiosity to ask. There’s having the f***ing balls to use wargames to point out uncomfortable answers. “Standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” means neither were in operation.
We have paid for our complacency and we are out of excuses for refusing to change. And so I think any wargame conducted for any part of the American defense enterprise—regardless of scale or audience—needs to incorporate the unmanned threat and ruthlessly employ it against the Blue players, again and again and again, until the point that this is the world we live in finally penetrates.
We need our wargames to highlight the massive gaps we have in drone acquisition, fielding, operational deployment, and counter-drone defense until our Blue players get tired of being pummeled and finally drive forward the necessary changes that we are years behind in implementing. I would have preferred that the people in positions to affect change had spent the last few years watching the evolution of the drone world around them and been proactive in joining it, but we didn’t. So we got punched in the face.
I concluded with a promise (threat?) that so long as I live in the world of professional wargaming, I never again want to hear that phrase about how US forces performed against the unmanned threat. It’s incumbent on me, and on all of us who provide wargames for American policy makers and military leaders, to have every wargame integrate the drone threat until our audience feels the consequences in their bones and make the cognitive leap we should have made years ago.
Where was I—right, we’re just here to talk about games.
Yeah I’m Not Calling It Super Intelligence11
So having delivered uncontentious comments on complacency and lack of imagination in the American defense enterprise I then switched to chairing a panel on another completely uncontentious topic: “AI in Wargaming.” My panelists for this endeavor were Keith Martin-Smith12, the aforementioned Daniel Ordoñez, Tomasz Michalak, PhD, DSc13, Baptiste Alloui-Cros14 and Andy Hodgson, PhD15.
We first looked at the different AI use cases each panelist has applied in their own work.
- Keith—as might be expected from a PME-oriented software developer—has used AI both as a digital opponent for human players and an aid in coding the games themselves.
- Daniel’s doctoral work assessed how large language models (LLMs) performed as “advisors” in wargaming, how their use affected players (especially their situational awareness), and in what circumstances players developed trust (or distrust) and reliance on the models.
- Tomasz’s organization has used AI to assist in building “digital twins” of real-world locations to support training, and he had done previous work for NATO using AI algorithms for threat prediction.
- Baptiste had performed extensive work using well-known war games like “Diplomacy” to assess the ability of LLMs to execute complex strategic behavior such as forming alliances, negotiating agreements, planning multiple moves ahead, and even anticipating betrayals.
- Andy’s company leverages AI for a multitude of analytical and decision-support use cases, including its CIRSIUM digital wargame.
As many different use cases as we had panelists—this was a microcosm of both the modern AI landscape and its applications to wargaming.
Other themes from our discussion highlighted that microcosm. The panelists spent a good chunk of time on the intertwined questions of where to trust AI outputs and where those outputs fall short. Keith noted that there’s been an explosion in using AI for game coding, and that HexWar has leveraged that as much as any software developer. It’s helped HexWar cut development times from months to week in some cases, which is great for customer delivery timelines as well as easing the burden on what is a modest-sized development team. But Keith also observed that AI has in no way replaced humans in the development process, or magically turned adequate coders into elite coders. Having the right people with strong skills and judgment still matters because the quality of AI outputs is invariably linked to the quality of the inputs. An average coder using AI still only creates average coding.
Andy approached the question of military judgment from another angle in the context of the CIRSIUM wargame. While there’s an element of AI assistance in analyzing sensor data within the game to predict enemy dispositions based on doctrinal templates, the AI is allowed to be ‘wrong,’ and Andy observed that humans have proven much better at the deductive reasoning process for estimating an adversary’s unknown locations than an algorithm.
One side of the ‘trust’ coin is reliance on AI and this is something Daniel’s work has centered on. As with any enabling tool, there’s the risk that reliance becomes dependency and the tool becomes a crutch. Daniel’s approach has given players some form of AI or LLM, allowed them to run through multiple iterations of a game with it, and then switched the LLM off to see how players do without it.
The subject of trust in AI is one that we could easily have spent hours on by itself. As it was, we still had time to examine the question of: trust AI to do what? Keith believed that AI had proven itself quite good at performing micro-tasks. Conversely, when it came to larger tasks like, you know, grand strategy, Baptiste said that LLMs had a distinct tendency to choose escalatory strategic decisions more often than human players—and it’s not at all clear why. Figuring out that ‘why’ seems rather important before we put algorithms in places where their strategic decisions could affect the fate of nations. Andy linked this to the machine learning concept of “explainability”—when an AI is assisting and advising a human player, trust is increased when the machine’s decision thread is transparent and traceable. This is a problem when so many AI models are black boxes, impenetrable either for proprietary reasons or because the complexities of deep learning include so many parameters that even the human engineers who train them don’t always know why an algorithm makes the decision it does.
While we only had about an hour to cover the near-infinite topics on AI and wargaming, I was deeply impressed with the many perspectives our panelists brought to bear, as well as one other thing: their humility. “I don’t know” was their answer to many questions, not as a cop-out but as professionals who realize that all which their expertise has shown them is just how much work in the field is left to do.
I wish I could’ve taken the small but loud Very Online game design crowd that sees AI usage as equivalent to committing war crimes, plopped them down into the AWL auditorium during this panel, and forced them to listen. The professional wargamers who actually use AI on a daily basis are conservative in its application, keenly aware of its limitations, and the first to acknowledge that nobody can predict the trajectory AI will take in the future. Moreover in both discussing AI and wargaming, and AI and war, all panelists kept humans front and center. War remains a human endeavor and no one in our discussion claimed that AI would change that equation, either in how war is fought or how nations prepare for it by using things like wargames.
It was a serious discussion and vastly more insightful than the “I’m boycotting your game and hope you die and your kids get Ebola because you used Claude in your workflow” diatribes found on BlueSky.
Day two had been a long one and I looked forward to a lowkey dinner planned with…loud and belligerent Marines like Sebastian and Pink Sheets. We piled into our rideshares along with some of our fellow conference attendees and went to the “Konspira” restaurant downtown. We had some great food, lots of shots that went down way too easily, but even in our relaxation the restaurant itself served as a reminder that in Poland, the harsh lessons of the past hadn’t been forgotten. “Konspira” included a hidden room remodeled as a late Cold War apartment and adorned with newspaper clippings and banners from the anti-communist Solidarity movement and riot gear used by the communist government against its own people. It was a stark reminder of how one of Poland’s neighbors behaved—and still does.
Day Three—On The Gaming Floor
But we’re just here to talk about games and on day three I wanted to focus my attention on the many wargame platforms on display in the expo tent (as well as show off some wares of my own). There were almost four dozen different vendors in attendance, from the United States and across Europe, so it’d be hard to drill down into all of them (while hawking my own wares). These were the ones that stood out from the crowd, and not because they came with huge budgets or someone had sprinkled AI on them, but because they were refreshing, relevant, or both.
The HexWar table was literally right next to my own, though they did ask me—very politely—if I wouldn’t mind shifting my table a bit so that tournament competitors could get briefed on the tournament’s outcomes and observed trends (I’m the blob of blue shirt and, shall we say, ‘wizened’ hair at the left of the picture). Day three was the culmination of HexWar’s critical supporting role across the whole conference, which was shipping out a full ad hoc gaming network from England to Poland, running the tournament and providing analytics, and then shipping the whole thing back a few days later.
Yet there’s much more to HexWar than expeditionary wargame tournaments (though I’d note this in and of itself is no mean feat). Over the last several years their digital PME game development has become perhaps the ideal model of industry partnering with government to quickly deliver capabilities to the warfighter (yes, I feel dirty for the number of Pentagon buzzwords I just used in that sentence). But this is not overstating the case. Since 2023 they have functionally helped solve—for the Marine Corps, at least—the military wargaming problem of “oh you want me to wargame, then give me some resources.
Working with the Krulak Center, HexWar has developed a suite of digital games that include both historical and contemporary/future battlefields; that are accessible enough for use by junior military leaders and the subordinates whom they need to train; that are platform-agnostic to account for the many different devices and networks military personnel deployed globally might use; and which includes back-end analytics and a player management system that provides comparative tracking of player performance so that the wargames can actually be assessed over time and across iterations.
So: the Commandant of the Marine Corps said, “go forth and do more wargaming.” Through HexWar, Marines can now—anywhere—access a variety of games (Company Commander as a wonderful entry-level tactical game and—because we can’t do anything without name-checking Sebastian Bae—Littoral Commander, among others games), play them using devices they already have, and be graded using the back-end analytics framework. The only resource a unit now needs to provide a Marine to wargame is time (which, if your unit is doing things right, should already be a provided professional development resource. Yes, you also need electricity. HexWar can’t give you everything).
So go forth and do more wargaming, Marines. You’re officially out of excuses.
While we’re on the topic of Littoral Commander, one game I’d done some pre-conference planning to check out was Joint Commander: Poland, developed by Konrad Idzik and Piotr Bambot. Joint Commander is not an official Littoral Commander expansion as The Baltic and Australia are. It’s more a ‘cousin’ that Konrad and Piotr evolved out of the original game framework to capture defense problems unique to Poland, and at the operational scale appropriate to those problems.
The question of scale was part of why I specifically wanted to check out this game. The developers had contacted me prior to the conference because they’d seen (hat-tip to Brant and Armchair Dragoons here) the prototype Littoral Commander module I was building focused on Ukraine from pics I’d taken at the Origins convention this summer. They knew I’d made significant modifications to the baseline rules and mechanics to better represent the large-scale combat operations seen in Ukraine. A potential Russian invasion of Poland presented similar scale challenges, so they wanted to compare and see where we could learn from each other’s designs.
What I saw in Joint Commander was a much more ambitious modification than I was undertaking with Ukraine. While both of us had upsized the core maneuver units in the game, Konrad and Piotr had gone several steps further. They introduced headquarters units as a conduit for ordering multiple formations, new classes of Joint Capability Cards, a much larger map, a different time scale, and more. All told, it was a game that would be recognizable to anyone who’d played Littoral Commander but which contained a wide array of challenging operational decisions that none of the previous games attempted to address.
Joint Commander: Poland was big and crunchy—at a different end of the design spectrum was a truly unique miniatures ruleset demonstrated by Claus Raasted of the Danish Wargaming Academy. The ruleset was called Real Time Wargaming, and as a sign on Claus’ table promised, it had no turns and no pauses, “just stress and decisions.”
Now I’ve loved real-time games from the first moment I played WarCraft—the original WarCraft, kids, not that MMORPG—and I played that OG sh*t on a Compaq desktop with a 486 processor and 4MB of RAM. And as a professional wargamer I’ve always felt that real-time games get you closest to the decision-making framework of real war. Your adversary doesn’t stop and wait for you to move, so shouldn’t the games you use to train for real war include that rather important temporal factor?
Of course it’s not that simple. Real-time games need computers; real-time games are inherently mouse-click-heavy; real-time games often have a steep learning curve; and real-time games are, well, ‘real time’—great for tactical scenarios measured in minutes or hours, not so great for simulating days or weeks of war. But it’s the computer requirement that defines ‘real-time strategy’ and that’s not a bad thing. The computer handles the timing of movement and adjudication so that players can focus on their decisions. The things that computers automate in real-time strategy games have always seemed so obvious to me that it never crossed my mind to think “could this be done on a tabletop?”16
Well, Claus has done it and the solution is elegant in its simplicity. Each unit’s temporal window for action is defined by: hourglasses. Once a unit completes an action, you flip its hourglass and then it can’t move again until all the sand runs out. The quality of different commanders on the field is defined by how long their hourglass runs—better commanders have faster hourglasses, the plodders have longer ones. Combat is a simple dice adjudication that players resolve immediately. Distances for movement and ranged combat are resolved with measuring sticks, similar to most miniatures games.
The stress comes from the fact that both sides are monitoring their hourglasses, doing their actions, and also trying to maintain cognizance of what the opponent is doing across all parts of the battlefield because the opponent is under no obligation to tell you—it’s on you to pay attention to what’s unfolding. Get too fixated on one part of the table and you may find your forces getting annihilated on another—which honestly reflects the challenges of command and control for armies across millennia up to the age of the radio (and which, if we’re being honest with ourselves, remains a problem despite advancing from radio to computer and satellite communications. Don’t ever think you’ve got perfect situational awareness, or seamless span of control, no matter what Maven Smart System tells you).
And two of the best things about Claus’ ruleset are 1) it’s simple enough that it can be adapted to virtually any scale and historical epoch of miniatures, and 2) the rules are free.
Finally, I did come to hawk my own wares, and I’d brought not one but two different card games to show off. Last year’s conference was the global debut of my #Maneuver Warfare card game from the Dietz Foundation, and I was proud of the chance to show the game off again this year (as well as not have to spend a rainy day shuttling back and forth from the warehouse district in Wrocław to pay customs on my game box, and then carrying that 20-pound cardboard box the last tactical mile to AWL in the rain praying that the box held together long enough for me to make it to the expo area. Long story for another time).
But I had something else to show off this year, and that was a poker-deck-sized game called Shape Seize Secure that I’d developed for my employer as a promotional item. The development story itself is something I’m rather proud of, and I’ve pointed to it many times this year as an example of how to do rapid game design when time’s not on your side. My wargaming compatriots and I made a pitch to our company leadership to design a mini-game to hand out to attendees at MDM 2026 as a sample of the wargaming skills we offered to prospective clients. Our leadership said “yes,” more readily, I think, than we all expected; and then we thought, sh*t, now we have to actually make the game, and was this a smart idea on our part because MDM is only a few months away?
Can you make a game in a few months? Sure. But we had to make it, test it, and get it printed by Game Crafter in time for MDM. There was the rub: Game Crafter can have long production lead times. So really, we had maybe a week to make, test, and upload the game, because the rest of the time was the game sitting in Game Crafter’s queue.
Well, we did it. I spent a weekend doing initial game design, prototyping, and refining rules and mechanics. My colleague Anya Bolden took the prototypes and did all the graphic design in a few more days. We did final internal play-testing with our wargaming team, were satisfied with our work, and briefed company leadership that we were ready for production. In one week, we’d built our ‘promotional item.’
It’s much more than a promotional item though. Remember how I said I wanted all future wargames to force players to feel the consequences of failing to think about drones in their bones? Shape Seize Secure aims to do just that. Both players have to construct a force combining human and robotic formations, think about how to use both on the battlefield, and have a plan to ensure that at least one of their human formations is alive to hold the objective terrain at the end of the game (if you want a deeper dive, Shape Seize Secure is included in a design presentation I did on wargaming Ukraine, starting at 28:55). And it’s a very simple game, with only 5 turns and playable in 30 minutes or less.
So I wasn’t kidding about focusing wargames on drones; whenever people came by my table, I tried to get their attention primarily on Shape Seize Secure, and it seemed to work because I wound up having to hold a raffle for the few copies I’d brought with me to share.
ENDEX
While Dr. Manhattan might be right in the cosmic temporal sense, for us mere mortals things do end. After 72 jam-packed hours, the second International Scientific Wargaming Conference closed out—still ending on a high note, with the victors of the Rector’s Cup wargaming tournament announced. Echoing the irony of BGen Tracy, United States Marine Corps, handing trophies to Polish cadets and Army troopers at MDM, others besides AWL cadets stood on the final podium. Spanish cadets took second place, their performance also echoing Tim Barrick’s observation that “excellence has no uniform.”
And then it was all over except for the photographs. Sebastian and I managed to grab Łukasz for a selfie, though we had to wait in line because of the throng gathered around him congratulating him on a conference well done.
He deserved all the accolades, because for the second year running I bore witness to a conclave of wargaming professionals all deeply invested in their discipline, all desiring to share and learn from the rest, and all taking that knowledge back to their homelands cognizant that with the world’s uncertainties, such knowledge might be put to the test sooner rather than later. Wargaming offers few other professional gatherings with that same level of richness, which is why, for as long as it’s offered, the International Scientific Wargaming Conference will be at the top of my conference circuit rotation.
Because we weren’t there just to talk about games. We were there to talk about why wargames are important; why asking the right questions—even the “obvious” ones—matters; why they should be part of the pantheon of military professional development alongside reading, training, and PT; why we need to integrate emerging technologies and battlefield lessons in game design; and why we must be judicious in how we use new tools, even as those tools offer opportunities for better wargames.
At this conference, everyone knew the “why.”
Especially our Polish hosts. It’s early November now and I’m finally kicking this to Brant. As of this writing, Poland just conducted a security operation along the border of Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave based on concerns Putin was preparing sabotage operations against NATO countries.
For the monster, nothing ever ends.
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Footnotes
- they actually won the final round, but the U.S. Army team won the tournament on cumulative points from rounds played digitally over the previous nine months
- Talk about getting the band back together—Sebastian lives minutes up I-95 from me but spends so much time wargaming overseas that I have to fly to Poland just to be in the same room with him.
- I’ve been fortunate to have numerous opportunities to talk with SeDU staff about their wargaming work, and during my time at MCU we developed a unique relationship with SeDU; more on that below
- ed note: we’re already putting this paper on our publication schedule for 2 weeks out
- CEO of Ruddy Nice Ltd & DSET Ltd in the UK
- NATO and EU Military Representative of Poland
- Head Wargaming Deputy Branch, Innovation Management NATO SHAPE
- Deputy Commander of the Warsaw Garrison
- Vice Rector for Academic Affairs at Ludovika University of Public Service
- oh, and also not unlike the Taliban attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan in 2012. I had a front-row seat to that sh*t-show. Fourteen years later and our forward-deployed airfields are still ripe for the smashing
- ed note: give that man a medal
- founder of HexWar
- IDEAS Research Institute
- PhD student at University of Oxford
- RED Scientific Reply
- ed note: we gotta get Ian out more, as there’s at least 2 commercial games out there running in real time, one of which was at Origins and the other of which uses the exact physical tool he’s Ian’s about to introduce
