Comments Off on Simulation and gaming miscellany, 26 January 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 26/01/2026
PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers. Many thanks to Catherine Philippe and Andrew Spearin for suggesting material for this latest edition.
In October 2024, the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania ran a tabletop exercise on how political violence in the United States might escalate. According to an article in The Guardian, the simulation eerily resembled the current situation in Minnesota.
In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.
While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation. First, none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.
Second, we concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved. This is why Judge Menendez’s ruling is so critical: it may be the last opportunity a federal judge has to intervene before matters spiral completely out of control.
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders. Any domestic deployment of federal troops must comply with the Department of Defense’s Rules for the Use of Force and with the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops may not lawfully shoot protesters unless they are literally defending their lives against an imminent threat – yet such conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.
Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.
That obligation is now under pressure. Senator Mark Kelly is under investigation by the Pentagon for publicly reminding service members in a video he made with five other members of Congress that they may – and in some cases must – refuse illegal orders. But they were essentially correct: troops must refuse to carry out patently illegal orders.
For members of the 11th Airborne Division, this may soon cease to be a theoretical question. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.
Wargaming has grown as a tool of practice for the modern military professional. New and more frequent wargames explore myriad areas of warfare at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The purposes vary, but wargaming generally focuses on improving the players’ ability to fight a future conflict.
But practitioners also may use wargaming for purposes beyond the battlefield—for example, to help modernize a military occupational field. In creating a game tailored to the Marine Corps’ communications occupational field (06XX), figuring out an approach was the first challenge. Designers had to ensure the wargame’s results, evaluations, and recommendations were rigorous, sound, and useful to the service.
The approaches the authors discovered can inform the development of wargames that go beyond the standard analytical focus on battles, operations, and campaigns.
TIDALWAVE identifies gaps and deficiencies and corresponding solutions to resolve anticipated shortfalls in our ability to project and sustain the joint force and to exploit adversary vulnerabilities in order to deplete their ability to conduct military operations. The project examines both U.S. and PRC systems anticipated to have the greatest impact on the conflict: fuel and ammunition. Our ultimate aim is to guide national deliberations on how best to deter a war, and project and sustain U.S. and allied forces in a protracted conflict if required, resolve existing deficiencies, and exploit adversary weaknesses.
Want sharper future forces? This piece argues wargaming is the human engine of operational art in force design—stress-testing concepts, exposing assumptions, and shaping better decisions. From chalk-on-bedsheet ‘Wrens’ to AI-aided adjudication, it shows when simple, rapid runs beat complex sims, and where deep dives matter. Expect strengths, candid limits, and practical tips to fuse wargames with analysis for credible capability development. Plus: a Dutch–JAPCC initiative accelerating a rigorous, repeatable approach for NATO and nations. Start here to design smarter, sooner.
Led by Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), the hybrid wargaming activity brought together more than 200 attendees at DSTG Edinburgh in South Australia.
DSTG drew on expertise from the Joint Experimentation Directorate to assist in designing and delivering the event with custom wargaming tools.
Participants from across Defence and international partners were immersed in a realistic scenario set in 2035. They were able to employ a wide range of innovation, science and technology (IS&T) interventions, combining novel concepts and potentially asymmetric capabilities.
The Joint Operational Understanding and Scrutiny Tool was used to record the wargame and allow participants to step forward and back between turns to explore alternative outcomes.
Data and insights gathered during the activity will be used to reduce risk and inform decision-making across the Defence IS&T ecosystem.
“The operational-level wargame allowed participants to leverage the power of experimentation to explore future capabilities and their potential to deliver an asymmetric advantage for Australia,” said Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro.
“This is the capstone event in DSTG’s campaign of experimentation that provides the foundation of our effort to accelerate the most promising technologies into capabilities, giving the Australian Defence Force an edge.”
The focus of the first Innovation and Asymmetry Wargame was to create an environment for Defence to experiment with IS&T options that could mitigate the most significant strategic challenges.
The Military Operations Research Society will be offering a Certificate in Homeland Security Gaming course on 3-5 February 2026.
The MORS Certificate in Homeland Security Gaming examines the challenges of gaming homeland security incidents. The course will introduce homeland security operations and how games and exercises can be used for planning, training, and analysis. Lectures will focus on games and game design with their application to homeland security incidents. The instructors will employ a series of case studies and practical exercises to explain how to design and facilitate these games. At the end of the course, the students will be able to evaluate a natural or human-caused disaster and employ design techniques to model and produce a game.
Our expert instructors will introduce participants to various ways game designs can be used to evaluate and model various types of disasters and emergencies. Participants will:
Learn how to evaluate a specific type of disaster by employing Homeland Security priorities and applying game design techniques
Be familiar with the game and exercises systems of the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program (HSEEP)
Understand how to model the contingencies of specific disasters using wargame design methods
Develop an awareness of gaming tools to develop realistic disaster-based wargames
MORS also has a forthcoming wargaming course in the UK, and other forthcoming courses which you will find here.
Integrating Nonlethal Weapons into Professional Wargames (Sydney Litterer)
The Contribution of Cyber Simulations to Cyber wargaming (Ambrose Kam)
Matrix Games’ has produced videos of Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War being played by professional wargamers.
David Burden’s Matrix Game Simulation (MGS) system “lets you run a matrix game where the [AI] bot plays all of the roles – both umpire and all the players.” You will find out more about it at his website.
Mixed-media simulation blends multiple modalities into a single experience. This often includes physical components such as boards, cards, tokens, or role placards; digital dashboards, models, and data feeds; and narrative elements that guide player decision-making. The physical layer promotes collaboration and embodied reasoning, while the digital layer enables computation, tracking, and visualization. Traditionally, the connective tissue between these layers has been a human facilitator. In Space Boss, our team is exploring whether this role is increasingly shared or augmented by an AI GameMaster.
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An AI GameMaster is not simply enforcing rules or rolling virtual dice. It functions as a dynamic host that observes player actions, interprets intent, and responds in context. In our collaborative work with AFRL and RIT, we are exploring how to fuse large language models (LLMs), simulation engines, and domain-specific knowledge into a single “thinking” GameMaster. In practice, this enables the AI to:
Introduce emergent events based on player behavior rather than scripted triggers
Inject realistic disruptions
Adapt scenario difficulty and pacing in real time
Role-play non-player actors, including coalition partners, adversaries, or civilian stakeholders
Adjudicate outcomes using underlying models while explaining why those outcomes occurred
Because modern AI systems can reason across text, rules, models, and historical context simultaneously, the GameMaster becomes a living system rather than a static referee.
Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, are learning to play Dungeons & Dragons. The reason? Simulating and playing the popular tabletop role-playing game provides a good testing ground for AI agents that need to function independently for long stretches of time.
Indeed, D&D’s complex rules, extended campaigns and need for teamwork are an ideal environment to evaluate the long-term performance of AI agents powered by Large Language Models, according to a team of computer scientists led by researchers at the University of California San Diego. For example, while playing D&D as AI agents, the models need to follow specific game rules and coordinate teams of players, comprising both AI agents and humans.
The work aims to solve one of the main challenges that arise when trying to evaluate LLM performance: the lack of benchmarks for long-term tasks. Most benchmarks for these models still target short-term operation, while LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that have to function more or less independently over long periods of time.
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The models played against each other, and against over 2,000 experienced D&D players recruited by the researchers. The LLMs modeled and played 27 different scenarios selected from well-known D&D battle set ups named Goblin Ambush, Kennel in Cragmaw Hideout and Klarg’s Cave.
In the process, the models exhibited some quirky behaviors. Goblins started developing a personality mid-fight, taunting adversaries with colorful and somewhat nonsensical expressions, like “Heh—shiny man’s gonna bleed!” Paladins started making heroic speeches for no reason while stepping into the line of fire or being hit by a counterattack. Warlocks got particularly dramatic, even in mundane situations.
The results sound rather realistic, if my own local D&D group is anything to go by.
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