Wargaming for the Reserves

Last night I gave a lecture on wargaming and professional military education to personnel at HMCS Donnaconna—a “stone frigate” and Canada’s oldest naval reserve unit. For those of you who are interested, a version of those slides is below (minus the clever WATU animations and sound effects).

We do far too little wargaming in the Reserve component of the Canadian Armed Forces—indeed, we typically do none at all in most units. I think this is a mistake, for several reasons.

• Wargaming can be an effective method for professional education and training.
• Wargaming can be a great way of building unit cohesion and sprit de corps, which is important when your personnel are generally only seeing each other one or two evenings per week and one weekend per month.
• Wargaming can be a very cheap form of experiential learning—which is especially important when one considers how poorly-resourced the Reserves are.
• Wargaming can be done across multiple Reserve units at the same time, whether to further reduce per capita costs, develop coordination skills, or support joint operational thinking.
• Encouraging (hobby) wargaming (in the way that Fight Club does, for example) is a great way of having your personnel develop their tactical and strategic decision-making and military knowledge outside of unit training time.

Are you in a Reserve unit that would like to integrate wargaming into its training cycle? Feel free to drop me a line and I’ll be happy to offer some ideas.

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