The Craft of Wargaming

The Craft of Wargaming is designed to support supervisors, planners, and analysts who use wargames to support their organizations' missions. The authors focus on providing analysts and planners with a clear methodology that allows them to initiate, design, develop, conduct and analyze wargames. Although the methodology is built around the analytic wargaming construct, organizations or individuals can easily adapt this methodology to construct educational and experiential wargames. The book breaks the wargame creation process into five distinct phases: Initiate, Design, Develop, Conduct, and Analyze. For each phase, the book discusses the key tasks that a wargaming team must address if it is to have a reasonable chance at designing, developing, conducting, and analyzing a successful wargame. While these five phases are critical in the process of constructing any wargame, it should be understood that wargaming is a craft that is learned through active participation, not by reading or watching. The craft of wargaming must be practiced as part of the learning process and the included practical exercises provide an opportunity to experience the construction of an analytical wargame.