The Political Economy of Wargaming

ABSTRACT

Modeling conflict through wargaming is the only option outside of high-cost real conflict for militaries to train their forces and attempt to reveal information about their own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of their foes. This is the function wargaming serves in theory, but in reality, the process of wargaming is undermined by information and incentive problems that cause the real-world performance of wargames to deviate sharply from their performance in theory. These problems resolve the conflicting professional views on wargaming between those who want to use them for predictive purposes and those who want to use them for training purposes in favor of the latter.

KEYWORDS:

• Wargaming
• national defense
• information problems
• incentive problems

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D83
• F50
• H56

Disclosure statement

No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript