by Ian T. Brown, 9 November 2025
In late August, 2025, I received a message notification on LinkedIn. It was from Major Łukasz Wójciak, the head of the Department of Territorial Defense at the General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces (AWL) in Wrocław, Poland. I remembered talking with Major Wójciak extensively at the Modern Day Marine (MDM) exposition in April.
While his AWL cadets were fighting hard in the championship rounds of the “Commandant’s Cup” wargaming tournament run by Tim Barrick (wargaming director at Marine Corps University [MCU]), Major Wójciak sat down to play my #Maneuver Warfare card game. We talked about the game of course, as well some of the wargaming work done by my employer (which also had a demonstration table at MDM), and the many applications of wargaming in general for military training and education.
Major Wójciak had done a lot of talking, and thinking, about wargaming with the folks at MDM and elsewhere in the NCR, because his LinkedIn message was an invitation to a wargaming conference organized by him that would be held at AWL in October. Would I be interested in attending? I could join a panel to share my thoughts on wargaming for training and education, and demonstrate/pass out copies of #Maneuver Warfare to boot.
Those opportunities—along with the fact that I’d never been to Poland and would love to see the country—were strong motivation to say “yes,” so I secured permission from my employer to attend as a professional development opportunity. Following a quick jaunt down to North Carolina for the 2025 Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly, I left Reagan National for Wrocław and the conference.
I’m glad I went, for a number of reasons. But first and foremost was a reason I had not anticipated, and did not fully appreciate until the conference was over. I have rarely had the chance to talk about wargaming with a group that was so utterly serious about its value in making their militaries better. And that seriousness was driven by the fact that just a few hours away, an adversary was murdering, raping, and destroying one of their neighbors—and they could be the next target.
Thus this was a conference without illusions. And I mean no disrespect to other conferences I’ve attended, or wargames I’ve run for various entities back in the States. Those conferences have been earnest about expanding the applications of wargaming because we all believe it’s a useful tool. Those entities have real responsibilities for training their own people to be ready for possible future conflicts and take that responsibility seriously.
But for all of the bullying of our “pacing threat”—the People’s Republic of China—we’re not currently at war with them, nor are they currently consuming neighboring countries (at least not yet, and, we all hope, not ever). Any future contest with them remains theoretical; our preparatory efforts are all with the aim of deterring that war from breaking out.
Russia—which borders Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, all of whom had representatives at the conference—also borders Ukraine, which as I said, it is actively murdering, raping, and destroying. Those countries that don’t border Russia are still a mere drone or missile flight away. So the European neighborhood has no illusions about what it’s like to be a Russian neighbor. They’re watching it in real time.
I’m expounding on this because it was the undercurrent in the conference, even if it was not always addressed directly. Coupled with that undercurrent was another: Russia’s neighbors were damn well going to be ready if Putin decided to turn his attention to them. Few things focus the mind like the nightmare of the kindergarten school one’s children attend being turned into rubble on the whim of a bully. Thus wargaming was one of those tools by which they would ready themselves.
This reality was, ironically, first imparted on me not at the conference but on the taxi ride from Wrocław airport to my hotel.
click images to enlarge
I’d asked the taxi driver about what I should see while in Wrocław, as well as how far away other major Polish cities were should I want to venture beyond Wrocław itself. He gave me distances to Warsaw, Krakow, and Lodz, and then mentioned almost as an afterthought: “it’s five hours to Ukraine but don’t worry, the war is very far away.” I didn’t mention that that time/distance estimate was less comforting than he thought. That was roughly the distance I’d driven just a few days before from DC to Cary, North Carolina for the Fall Assembly. If there was a major land war raging just across the Virginia border from where I lived, I’d be pretty concerned.
I also asked the driver what sites in Wrocław itself I should visit. He kindly provided me with an English-language tourist map and offered his recommendations. The answers, and the order offered, were illuminating. Number one was the Racławice Panorama, and number two was Wrocław Cathedral. I’ll go into more detail below as to why the order of these recommendations proved so interesting.
The conference on “Wargaming as an Analytical and Training Tool in Military and Civilian Environment” kicked off the morning of October 14. I walked from my hotel to AWL where cadets helpfully directed me from one checkpoint to another until I got to the main auditorium. Conference participants each got a gift bag with swag, the most impressive of which was a lavishly illustrated book of “Polish Heroes” going back a few hundred years. I found this particular swag illuminating as well, but again, more on that later.
Comments from Major Wójciak, Dr. Marek Tomaszycki (rector of AWL), and cadets from AWL’s Academic Society for War Analysis opened the conference. One note from Dr. Tomaszycki’s remarks that struck me was that AWL aimed to increase enrollment fivefold from 2023-2027. Per capita this is a massive increase in the number of officers produced, and interestingly, matched anecdotal information I’d gotten from other NATO military educational systems like Swedish Defense University (SeDU). SeDU had doubled enrollment over the last few years to the point where the student population had massively outstripped the size of the facilities available to hold them. While this data point was not specifically related to wargaming, it was another indicator of the seriousness that NATO countries view the threat of Russian aggression. They are not simply talking about increasing military capability; they are rapidly expanding the recruitment of military leaders who may be called on to do something about it in the future.
The Academic Society for War Analysis is an extracurricular group which, since 2021, helped foster wargaming at AWL first as an extracurricular activity, and then used its success outside the classroom to convince AWL leadership to bring it into the classroom. The cadets who did this presentation were part of the team that participated in the “Commandant’s Cup” tournament at MDM that April; and as they outlined the history of the Academic Society’s activities, it became clear to me that their Society’s work had been deeply influenced by watching how the United States Marine Corps, and specifically the wargaming directorate at MCU, had leveraged wargames as a training and educational tool. The cadets repeatedly mentioned the Operational Wargame System and MCU’s digital wargaming cloud as examples that had shaped their approach. Major Wójciak even gave me a hearty “oohrah!” when listing my name among the invited attendees. Yes, I’m biased, but I think the Corps can take great pride in seeing how its wargaming efforts have acted as a bridge to allies and partners, in addition to the benefits it offers the Fleet Marine Force.
The morning agenda also highlighted how this conference had collected an impressive “who’s who” of professional wargaming across NATO—aside from representation from the Polish military itself, speakers and panelists came from King’s College London, the Center for Naval Analyses, French Future Combat Command, the NATO Joint Force Training Center, the Royal Danish Defence College, RAND Europe, Lithuania’s ISM University of Management and Economics, and private companies such as the UK-based Matrix Pro Sims and France’s Pytharec.
The representation from across Poland’s military and civilian government was itself a statement of how seriously they valued the tool of wargaming in enhancing the readiness of their armed forces. While my language skills were not up to the task of writing down the names of every representative, I kept track of where each representative came from: virtually every branch and speciality of the Polish Armed Forces as well as offices of the federal government, to include a panelist from the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister. Anyone who’s worked with senior government or military leaders knows that these leaders don’t have a lot of “free time.” Spending two full days at this conference was a strong signal of their view on wargaming’s utility.
In between events I got to catch up with several fellow travelers in the wargaming world, which is always a highlight of such conferences. I linked back up with Pijus Kruminas of the ISM Wargaming Lab; we’d previously met at the Circle DC mini-convention where he’d played and offered feedback on my #Maneuver Warfare game. I also finally got to meet Natalia Zwarts “IRL” as the kids say. She’s the author of two books on wargaming with NATO, and several years ago when she was working at The Hague, she got her students to play-test one of the earliest versions of my card game. We’d corresponded electronically for years, sharing thoughts and insights on applications of wargaming, and it was great to finally be able to shake her hand and have those discussions in person.
As from catching up, the “in-between” discussions also offered more data points on the security perspective of the NATO participants. I talked with folks about the recent drone incursions into the airspace of several European countries. One conference attendee mentioned how random individuals were jumping off the trains that connect Belarus with Kaliningrad through Lithuania. To date, the drones had caused flight disruptions but no damage; the individuals jumping trains were always caught, eventually. But the pattern was clear: they were being tested and probed. These sidebar conversations added to the undercurrent I mentioned above.
There were several conference panels spread across the two days, including:
- Wargaming as an Analytical and Training Tool in Military and Civilian Environments
- New Horizons of Wargaming—Competences, Practice, Future
- The Modern Process of Wargame Design
- Wargames as an Implementation Tool for Innovative Technological and Tactical Solutions for Modern Armed Forces
The panel that I was asked to speak on was scheduled for 15 October and titled “The Use of Commercial Wargames in the Training Process.” It was chaired by Anna Nettleship, PhD (King’s College London), and included myself, Piotr Bambor (Polish Ministry of National Defence — Civic Education Center, WCEO), Patrick Feng (CNA), Thomas Danger (Royal Danish Defence College), and Jordan Tordet (Pytharec). Myself and my fellow panelists discussed how we had approached using commercial games to fulfill military training and educational goals. It was a vibrant talk on contrasting playability versus realism, how to adapt games for military learning objectives that were not part of the game’s design philosophy, and what games each of us had used for our respective military audiences (my background for game application was largely U.S. military services, with the bulk of that time being supporting the Marine Corps’ educational schools at Marine Corps University).
We covered a lot of ground and the 90 minutes allocated for the panel flew by. We could have gone three times as long and still not exhausted the discussion topics. For example, I would’ve loved to continue a discussion thread with a fellow panelist who seemed adamant that games used for military training and education should always be “bespoke;” that is, custom-built for intended learning/training objectives. While I agree that wargames used for formal curricula should meet desired learning objectives, I think there would be serious challenges in building bespoke games every single time, at scale, for use in different education and training environments. Not least of which is a dearth of good game designers, and especially game designers with the skills and background to develop games for military audiences. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to explore this thread.
I had another good discussion thread with Dr. Nettleship after the panel. There was a question on our list on uses of AI in wargaming but we didn’t have time to explore it; however I had some thoughts I was interested in sharing with her to get feedback. Specifically, one area of potential AI use that’s been discussed both at my company and other entities who do professional wargaming to defense audiences is in recordation. There is a tsunami of information generated by in-room discussions across wargame participants, so much that it often overwhelms the bandwidth of human rapporteurs who can’t be in all corners of the room at once. And human recorders have their own foibles beyond bandwidth; for example, the loudest person in the room might be the easiest to record, but volume doesn’t always equate to insight. AI recordation, conversely, could overcome both the bandwidth problem and the “loudest person” problem by recording everyone equally for post-game analysis. If we could solve the problem of proper security classification for the AI rapporteur, what were her thoughts on this application?
Interestingly, she told me that she had done some work on this at King’s College London and found that, far from increasing accuracy, the knowledge that a “perfect” recorder was capturing player discussion caused an inverse warping effect. Some players became more reluctant to speak frankly, concerned that thoughts shared in the heat of the moment could be misconstrued. Other players would “play to the camera,” behaving in ways they wouldn’t normally have with a human rapporteur in the room. She observed that this phenomenon was definitely worth of more formal study, because it challenged a fundamental assumption that a digital recorder would capture more and better information than a human one. Human rapporteurs still had their own shortcomings; but, ironically, human rapporteurs could “blend in” to the background without players getting distracted by them, and thus their presence was not as warping as knowing that there was a “perfect” recorder somewhere, detailing every word from the players’ mouths. This was not a problem I’d considered with AI recordation, and it certainly struck me as one worth deeper consideration before assuming that wargame analysts will get “better” data with fully digital recorders.
On the panel I also had the chance to speak a little bit on another part of my professional background: the warfighting theories of Marine Corps maneuver warfare doctrine and the contributions of American military thinker John Boyd to that doctrine. A goal of using wargames for military training and education is enhancing the players’ decision-making skills—how could wargames be used to exercise and challenge players’ OODA (observation-orientation-decisions-action) loops? I mentioned that I’d designed my #Maneuver Warfare game to integrate the OODA loop into player decisions in a very literal way, and that attendees should stop by the game exposition at the conference later that day where they could examine my game’s implementation of the OODA loop for themselves.
Writing up the highlights from every panel would exceed the scope of this article, but I’ll note some interesting trends. Many panels tried to answer the question of how to evaluate performance in a wargame; in one panelist’s words, it was hard to “measure something that cannot be measured.” When I was still in uniform, I watched MCU try to grapple with this very problem of assessment as they began to integrate wargaming more deeply in their curricula. Part of this touches on the data recordation problem I mentioned above; what’s the best way to capture player performance? What if you don’t have a digital backbone, like MCU’s wargaming cloud, to do a lot of that heavy lifting for you? And even if you can capture large volumes of data on player performance, how do you evaluate if students met your learning objectives? By winning and losing? Many professional wargamers, myself included, have noted that players often learn more about the problem presented in the game by suffering defeat rather than victory, because defeat stings and sticks with them while the victor feels no need for further reflection because, well, they won. But if winning and losing isn’t the grading rubric, what is?
Other panels noted a challenge of wargame integration that an American audience would quickly recognize, and that was getting unit commanders and training school leadership to “buy off” on the need to devote time to wargaming. School curricula and training programs of instruction all have fixed amounts of time available for students. So if you plug in wargaming, something else needs to come out. What gets removed? What incentives do commanders have to devote “white space” training time to wargaming when, as noted above, there’s not even an agreed grading rubric by which to judge whether wargaming is “working” or not?
These may not seem like new arguments to an audience familiar with wargaming trends in the U.S. national security establishment; I recall having them 5 years ago at MCU, and places like the Army’s Command and General Staff College or Naval War College have been dealing with these problems even longer. But I had to keep one thing in mind during the conference’s two days, and that was while these problems might not sound new to my ears, they were new to many of the NATO attendees in the audience whose militaries were moving out on the early steps of integrating wargaming themselves. In Poland, AWL had started experimenting with wargaming in 2021 but as an extracurricular activity, and it had taken the intervening years to get it to the point where it was hosting conferences on the topic and sending its cadets to compete in international wargaming competitions. I spoke with one representative from Finland’s National Defence University who was in a wargaming billet created just one week before this conference.
For many of these militaries, this is a relatively new tool, or their efforts at formal integration are new. This was not a conference like Connections, where many of the presentations essentially preach to the converted. This conference was aimed at making new converts across the NATO alliance, by bringing those who had already walked a few steps down the path together and putting them in front of those who were just starting the journey. And the robust NATO representation—to beat this drum again—made it clear that the countries in the alliance took this message seriously, and were serious in seeking insights and assistance on how wargaming could be effectively utilized in their own nations.
I spent the last couple of hours of the conference at the game exposition, where I had a chance to show how #Maneuver Warfare was made to literally “gamify” maneuver warfare doctrine and put a tactile OODA loop on the game table. I had great conversations with members of Polish, British, French, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Finnish, and German defense forces on my game. Moreover, I was very proud to be able to have the global premier of the commercial edition of #Maneuver Warfare occur at the conference.
When I accepted the invitation, I promised to have copies of the game ready to hand out. It seemed an easy promise at the time, but then life started getting in the way. Some things I could control, such as final editing and proofing of all the cards. Some things I couldn’t control, like how unexpected tariffs would impact the factory’s delivery timeline. Then there was the government shutdown, which I thought wouldn’t affect my travel since it was funded through my company, not directly through the government, but who knew how it might have secondary impacts trying to cross international borders. It definitely affected U.S. attendance at the conference; many luminaries in American military wargaming are government employees, and so the shutdown shredded their travel plans at the last minute. To say this caused problems for the conference organizers was an understatement. But since I was still able to go, I wanted to be damn sure that one American, at least, upheld the promise he made, and have copies of the game available for conference attendees.
That almost fell apart too, since the package with the games got held up in Polish customs for two days with the very real possibility that they would only be delivered two days after the conference ended, and when I was literally getting on a plane to come back home. I could write a novel about the many new things I learned about EU customs laws, regulations, and value-added taxes, in those 48 hours. Long story short: I got the games in time, and was pleased to present Major Wójciak with the very first commercial copy of #Maneuver Warfare to see the light of day:
Allow me a brief digression on how my game was received by those Polish, British, French, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Finnish, and German attendees who I provided copies to. Anyone who’s followed the development of #Maneuver Warfare knows I used generative AI imagery in the game. Many in the commercial gaming world also know that using AI in game development has generated strong emotions in some corners. I’m quite cognizant of the concerns, which is why in various forums I have tried to explain my effort to use, without abusing, generative AI.
But there is definitely a small but vocal set of critics for whom even the whiff of AI renders a game unacceptable, and the designer only a few degrees removed from a felon. For a few it’s little more than an opportunity to virtue signal in front of an audience—earlier this summer at the Military Operations Research Society Symposium, one attendee apparently decided that the not insubstantial price tag of a Symposium ticket was worth it simply so that she could hijack the limited Q&A time during my presentation on the subject to harangue me for being a thief.
So I’ve encountered these attitudes a fair bit with North American audiences; I wasn’t sure what to expect at the conference.
Several people asked about the artwork; I told them how I’d incorporated generative AI. They nodded, then accepted their copies of the game. But I got far more questions about how the game modeled the military planning process, all-domain conflict, the differences between Blue (modeled on the U.S.) and Red (modeled on Russia and China), how it forced players to consider the impacts of war on civilian populations in different ways. They wanted to know how it could make their respective soldiers and sailors better and readier.
I’ve used this term a lot, but these questions—and the perspective they implied—were illuminating. These conference attendees were not concerned about whether the game was 1% AI, or 0.0001% AI, or if I’d taken a job away from a graphic designer (I hadn’t, my graphic designer’s name is on the box), or if I’d “dehumanized” the creative process. They wanted to know if the game could contribute, in however small a way, to helping their militaries hold the line should they be called to.
Hold the line against what? I said it before: against a neighbor who is currently murdering, raping, and destroying its way through another neighbor. That is why they were at this conference, hearing from the subject matter experts and seeing what wargame options were available for their forces.
I don’t dismiss all critiques of generative AI; as I say in the video I linked to a few paragraphs above, there are some serious, valid issues raised by generative AI, that both AI companies and AI users need to address.
But some of the critiques are the luxury of the protected. Our military, our nation, doesn’t have a monster spilling buckets of blood next door to it. The people to whom I gave game copies must face that monster; it’s only an afternoon’s drive away. That perspective can’t afford the luxuries we enjoy.
Okay, “brief” digression over. There were several other game designers and companies at the exposition. Established companies like the Center for Naval Analyses and Matrix Pro Games had their wares on display, but unique European companies were there as well. One was Pytharec, which I mentioned above—this is a French private game company but they exclusively support the French government and military through bespoke game production. Pytharec makes extensive use of additive manufacturing and generative AI in creating their game products, and their titles cover air combat, double-blind naval combat, and a fascinating game on interagency roles in noncombatant evacuation operations based on real-world evacuations from Afghanistan and Sudan. It’d be great to see some of Pytharec’s designs available on this side of the Atlantic.
The conference ended after the exposition. I still had a day left to explore Wrocław, so following my taxi driver’s advice I walked to the city center to look around.
My first stop was the recommended Racławice Panorama. This is a cyclorama-style painting (if you’ve seen the Gettysburg Cyclorama, you’ll know what I mean) depicting the Battle of Racławice, fought by Polish soldiers and peasants against a Russian army in 1794. Poland won the battle, though the rebellion it was part of failed and Poland—not for the first, or last, time—came under the control of others. Yet the battle, and the painting, remained a point of national unity and resistance for Poles under a variety of invading and occupying powers, with Russia a repeat offender.
Speaking of Russia, just outside the museum housing the Racławice Panorama was a somber monument to Russia’s definition of “neighborliness.” It commemorates the 1940 execution of over 22,000 Polish army officers and policemen captured by the Soviet Union when Hitler and Stalin carved the country up between them. If you look closely at the second picture, you can see a hole in the skull of the corpse. This is because Stalin explicitly ordered the executions be carried out by a bullet to the back of each prisoner’s head.
Also note the ribbons, flowers, and candles left on the memorial. Poland has not forgotten.
I also stopped by Wrocław Cathedral, which offered a beautiful view of the city; and then my time in Poland was over.
I left the conference deeply impressed by the scope and scale of applied wargaming across our NATO partners. But something else left a deep impression on me. Remember that undercurrent I talked about? It started with the taxi ride and the driver’s recommendation that the first thing I see was the Racławice Panorama. It continued with the book of Polish military heroes, the heavy presence of Polish military and civilian leadership at the conference, the increased enrollment in Polish and European military schools, the presence of virtually every NATO country on the panels, the accepted premise across attendees that wargaming was valuable and their nations all needed more of it, and quickly. It endured in the sidebar conversations about drone incursions and men jumping off of trains. It stayed with me through one of the last things I saw in Wrocław: a memorial to a dead man with a bullet hole in the back of his head.
Our NATO allies, and especially Poland, are serious people—serious about wargaming, yes, but they are serious about wargaming because they’re serious about the threat they face. They have no illusions about whether Russia can be accommodated, and they have no illusions about what will happen to their people should they fall under Russian occupation; or in the case of Poland, the Baltics, and others, fall under Russian occupation again. Among those who have tasted Russian “life,” the choice is clear: never, ever again.
For us back in the United States, yes, we see wargaming as a useful tool for military training and education and want more of it to make our forces more ready and more capable overall. But against “who” is an open question, and one which the luxury of our strength potentially allows us to deter indefinitely.
For those at the conference, there are no doubts about “who” they need to defend themselves against. For them, a wargaming culture deeply integrated into their national security enterprises could spell the difference between two futures. In one, men, women, and children spend sunny days walking the streets of places like Wrocław. In the other, men are ground up in the meat grinder of combat, women and children raped and murdered in their own homes or kidnapped to the land of the enemy, and once-vibrant cities turned into piles of rubble.
How I wish I could have bottled up some of that seriousness and brought it back to share at home.
It was a great honor to be invited to represent our country on the presentation stage at AWL among our partners and allies, and I’m excited about sharing and sharing alike with the new connections that came out of this conference. I hope Major Wójciak and AWL keep things rolling for an even bigger conference next year. There’s a lot they want to learn from us; there’s arguably much more we can learn from them.
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