Using Military Simulations to Enhance Defense Procurement: Requirements and Approaches
Summary
The article examines how the Department of Defense can leverage wargaming as a tool to drive evidence-based acquisition policy reforms, particularly focused on mobilizing industrial base capacity during national emergencies. The author, a wargaming division director, argues that while a previously published proposal to use wargames for acquisition reform pointed in the right direction, its recommendation to vest the work in a single think tank and federally funded research center is insufficient. Drawing from firsthand experience developing prototype wargames for the Marine Corps, the author demonstrates that distributed, service-level wargaming uncovers critical operational details that higher-level institutional games tend to miss due to their greater abstraction. The article proposes a structured bottom-up framework where individual services and departments conduct standardized annual wargames, feeding results upward into a larger joint game series that can serve as a benchmarking tool for both the Pentagon and Congress. Without this foundational groundwork at the service level, the author contends that senior defense leaders will lack the defensible, operationally grounded insights needed to make meaningful acquisition reforms.
Key Takeaways
- 1. Current public-private coordination for industrial mobilization planning is critically insufficient, existing largely only in rhetoric at annual defense expositions
- 2. A single centralized wargame partnership between two analytic institutions would be too narrow to capture the complexity of cross-service acquisition challenges
- 3. Distributed, service-level wargaming reveals unique operational insights that larger, higher-abstraction institutional games consistently overlook
- 4. A structured bottom-up wargaming framework with standardized methodology is essential before meaningful Department of Defense-level strategic games can be conducted
- 5. Acquisition-focused wargames must extend beyond traditional combat scenarios to encompass logistics, life-cycle management, training, and national mobilization systems