Connections US 2026 Call for Presentations

Connections U.S. 2026 will be held at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA from June 23-25, 2026.
Updates to the planning for this year’s conference will be found at:
connections-wargaming.com.

In order to provide the widest possible range of panelists and topics to Connections 2026 attendees, the Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference is seeking proposals for presentations from all interested parties. Our conference theme for 2026 is “Wargaming Beyond Boundaries: Embracing Innovation” and we would especially welcome any presentations that touch on some aspect of this topic. However, relevance to the conference theme is in no way a requirement and we will fully consider any presentation relevant to other dimensions of the profession, especially analytic wargaming.

The Planning Comittee invites you to propose a presentation at Connections U.S. 2026:
Click here for the application form.
(Note: This is a Google form. If you cannot access Google forms from your work account, please try from your home machine. Thank you).

Further information about the Theme from the Naval Postgraduate School hosts:

Wargaming Beyond Boundaries: Embracing Innovation

Wargaming is focused on human decision making. How can innovation, whether in tools, technology, methods, or processes, be successfully leveraged in wargames to help us better focus on human decisions? In what ways does innovation impact the initiation, design, development, conduct, and analysis phases of wargame creation?

The idea of integrating models and simulations (M&S) into wargaming isn’t a new one, but there is a renewed push to do so. M&S have been integrated into wargames with varying degrees of success since M&S emerged as an analytic and training tool in the 1970s. There is often an overhead in resources that must be paid to prepare M&S for any role in terms of time and money.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is today’s current go-to technology. There are expert systems, machine learning, and generative AI in the form of Large Language Models, or LLMs. Where can AI be leveraged in wargaming, and for what purposes? Generative AI models often hallucinate – how does that impact AI’s usefulness in wargames?

Professional wargamers build a reference data set of best wargaming practices that have been learned through experience over the years. We invite wargaming professionals to bring their experiences in attempting to leverage innovation in wargames, the good, the bad and the ugly, illuminating best practices for integrating innovation into wargames, elevating awareness of practices that may have significant drawbacks to them, and identifying specific innovations that elevate and move wargames into the future.