#Wargaming strategic war professional#

While wargaming experts such as Margaret McCown at the Pentagon have admitted that no simulation could prevent deadly viruses from growing into pandemics, they nonetheless argue for the benefits of creating spaces for people to think through such problems. For example, the simulation exercise ‘Event 201’, named after studies that had indicated that nearly 200 epidemic events occurred each year was held only two months prior to the start of the current pandemic. Their popularity rose in the 2000s when biosecurity and public-health specialists sought to stress-test health systems, and on the back of these exercises urged policymakers to address systemic shortcomings. In the context of global health, leaders and professionals have also found value in such exercises. In a survey of players who participated in wargames at MIT between 19, 56% of people holding policy positions agreed that the experience of such simulations had practical value in their work. Put differently, the simulated reality is sufficiently ‘real’ to shape actual action. Such simulations, whatever purpose they are put to, share a committed belief in their power to train the human body’s responses and emotions. Recreating existing systems (and their human components) within a controlled setting, and then subjecting them to various unexpected and potential events, allows managers to visualize strategies that they can deploy if and when such events actually occur. Of course, simulation exercises are not restricted to military purposes alone.Ĭrisis simulations are used in business and finance, both for the development of crisis response strategies, and as entertainment and job application screening. The present-day renaissance in the use of wargames within governments, the military, and academia reflects a growing consensus about their effectiveness as well as the broadening interest in the study and practice of strategy.

#Wargaming strategic war professional#

In professional military training, wargames first appeared in 19th century Prussia, and then in the United States military in the US Naval War College where officers engaged in tactical and operational naval wargames in the 1920s and 1930s. The history of wargaming dates back millennia. While an understanding of strategic theory provides the intellectual framework for decision makers, wargames and simulations can help strengthen their capacity to visualise their strategy and train to adapt it to the evolving circumstances. Strategy in practice therefore needs to embrace constant change and unpredictability. That is to say, a policy cannot itself be a strategy, but represents the set of objectives with which a strategy is then made and implemented. Strategy is not to be confused with policy. In military terms, strategy relates military power to political purpose. Wargames and crisis simulation exercises speak directly to the aims of strategy, defined here as the harmonisation of dialogue, however unequal, between the politician and the soldier. Wargames are the means by which the military envisions its actions they are also how civilians play at soldiery.

Since then, the blurring of war and wargames, whether, inter alia, in the case of drone warfare, first person shooter-games, cinematic predictions and recreations of battlefields, or variations of costumed play, has only become clearer. Rather, what Baudrillard was merely suggesting was that what we perceive as the first Gulf War was a copy of a copy of a war, a simulacrum borne of military simulation exercises and media portrayals. Contrary to the book’s controversial title, he did not claim that no military action took place. In 1995, Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.