The First US Army War College Wargaming & Professional Military Education Symposium: A New Home for a Growing Community

Small Wars Journal | Nicholas Murray

The inaugural US Army War College Wargaming & Professional Military Education Symposium convened at the US Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from August 11 to 13, 2026. The landmark gathering established the first dedicated international forum to standardize wargaming methodology across service education institutions. Historically, service practitioners designed and executed educational wargames in relative isolation, leaving professional military education without shared evaluative metrics or unified curricular standards.

Keynotes from Dr. Sebastian Bae and institutional panels addressed this operational gap by examining methods for assessing student military judgment under uncertainty and integrating innovative simulation technologies. Across the event, participants demonstrated and evaluated eighteen distinct wargame models during structured afternoon interactive sessions. Institutional representation from the U.S. Army War College, National Defense University, and Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare confirmed strong demand for joint wargaming synchronization. Organizers intend for the symposium to become an annual fixture for advancing professional military education standards.

Comment

Institutionalising wargaming within U.S. Army War College curricula addresses a persistent friction between rigid service doctrine and adaptive command decision-making. At Carlisle Barracks, integrating open-ended tabletop scenarios forces senior officers to confront friction points in joint operational concepts before field deployment. This pedagogical shift challenges the U.S. Joint Staff's traditional reliance on prescriptive staff exercises, embedding iterative risk assessment directly into higher-level officer development.

The reliance on qualitative evaluation within exercises at the Brute Krulak Center highlights the difficulty of translating simulated tactical judgment into formal military doctrine. Standardising these assessment frameworks across Marine Corps University and the National Defense University risks over-constraining the dynamic decision-making that open-ended wargames cultivate. Consequently, the formalisation of wargaming metrics at Carlisle Barracks will determine whether simulation methodology truly shapes Joint Doctrine or merely reproduces existing staff routines.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which factor presents a greater barrier to integrating wargaming into Joint Doctrine — the difficulty of measuring student military judgment at Carlisle Barracks, or the structural friction between standardized evaluation metrics and open-ended scenario design at the Brute Krulak Center?

The available evidence points toward metric standardization as the primary structural barrier, as formal assessment criteria tend to incentivize predictable student decisions rather than creative operational thinking. Exercises observed across the Brute Krulak Center suggest that rigid scoring frameworks often conflict with the friction and ambiguity inherent to high-level staff planning. Consequently, formalizing evaluation at Carlisle Barracks risks prioritizing administrative uniformity over genuine doctrinal innovation.

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