What Are Military Wargames? From Kriegsspiel to Today

What are military wargames? They are structured simulations of conflict — from a tactical skirmish to a global geopolitical crisis — that use rules, dice or mathematical models together with human players to explore decisions, test doctrines and anticipate how a real confrontation might unfold. They are not entertainment video games, though they share some mechanics; rather, they are analytical instruments that general staffs, military academies and think tanks have used systematically for two centuries.

The origins: the Prussian Kriegsspiel

Modern wargaming was born in Prussia. In 1824, Lieutenant Georg von Reisswitz presented the Prussian General Staff with a refined version of the Kriegsspiel his father had devised years earlier: a board with real topographic maps, tokens representing units to scale, and a system of rules and dice that introduced the randomness and friction inherent to combat. Unlike earlier parlour war games played on abstract, chess-like boards, Reisswitz's Kriegsspiel aimed for operational realism — measured distances, march times, artillery range and an umpire who interpreted outcomes.

The Prussian General Staff itself, under the influence of figures such as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, adopted the Kriegsspiel as a tool for officer training. Legend — often repeated, though it simplifies matters — credits part of Prussia's success in 1866 against Austria and in 1870-71 against France to this culture of trial and error over the map, which trained officers' tactical judgement before real lives were staked on the ground.

From Prussia to twentieth-century general staffs

The Prussian model spread to other European armies and, later, to the United States and Japan. The Naval War College in Newport, founded in 1884, made wargaming a central part of training for American naval officers; it is estimated that much of the planning the US Navy used in the Pacific during the Second World War had been rehearsed years earlier in war games built around the so-called War Plan Orange against Japan. Admiral Chester Nimitz went so far as to state that nothing that happened in the Pacific came as a total surprise to him, except the use of the kamikaze, precisely because of that prior simulation work.

During the Cold War, wargaming became increasingly professionalised and intertwined with operations research. RAND Corporation, founded in 1948, developed political-military games to analyse scenarios of nuclear deterrence and crises over Berlin or Taiwan, combining human players with quantitative models. The Pentagon and its Soviet counterparts used these exercises to study conflict escalation, crisis management and decision-making under uncertainty without firing a single shot.

Types of wargames and their uses today

Several families of wargames coexist today, each serving a different purpose:

• General-staff wargames: closed exercises used by armed forces to test specific operational plans, such as NATO's Table-Top Exercises (TTX).
• Analytical think-tank wargames: used by institutions such as RAND, IISS or the Center for Strategic and International Studies to explore foreign-policy scenarios and compare military capabilities.
• Constructive or computer-assisted simulation wargames, which integrate attrition, logistics and sensor models to train large units.
• Commercial wargames, whether board-based or digital, aimed at military-history enthusiasts, with considerable educational value despite their recreational origins.

The educational value of commercial wargames

Series produced by Avalon Hill or SPI in the 1970s and 1980s, dedicated to recreating specific campaigns — Stalingrad, the Normandy campaign, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War — forced players to manage logistics, communication range and troop morale with considerable historical rigour. Many military historians credit their professional interest to playing this kind of simulation which, without replacing academic research, helps internalise real constraints such as the relationship between space, time and force.

Limits and biases of the method

Wargaming has clear boundaries. No game reproduces the fear, sensory chaos or real human cost of combat, and that gap can lead to overly optimistic conclusions about a plan's feasibility. Moreover, the design of the rules inevitably embeds the assumptions and biases of those who create them: if a game underestimates an adversary's capability or overrates a friendly technology, the exercise's outcome will confirm that bias rather than correct it. Analysts such as Peter Perla, a leading authority on the history of professional wargaming, have insisted that these simulations are useful for generating hypotheses and training judgement, but dangerous if treated as reliable predictions.