Congratulations 2024 graduate! You have been offered a position as an entry-level engineer or scientist in a naval warfare center, where you will help develop, manage, and support programs valued in the millions of dollars. The capabilities you deliver will provide sailors and Marines with a war-fighting edge against increasingly sophisticated competitors.
You will be required to complete 80 hours of Defense Acquisition University (DAU) training every two years, covering how to draft a statement of work and calculate earned value. But little of your training will address naval warfare. What is a radar horizon? What are salvo equations? What are TacSits, and how do they affect operations? Civilian employees—who make up most of warfare centers’ technical workforce—must learn these concepts on their own or not at all.
Rather than creating PowerPoint-driven lectures to address this gap, warfare center leaders could instead use wargaming to educate employees on key operational challenges and generate innovative capabilities. Wargaming allows participants to test ideas in a low-risk environment and practice decision-making with imperfect information, a critical skill for any scientist or engineer.
Each warfare center could design and host annual wargames centered on one or more of the 11 focus areas in the Naval Science and Technology Strategy.1 For example, the Naval Air Warfare Center could run games on aerospace technologies; the Naval Undersea Warfare Center could cover undersea systems; and the Naval Information Warfare Centers could examine C5ISR/space. Games should be tabletop vice computer-based, to maximize tactile experience and player interaction. Warfare center engineers and scientists could play the role of commanders or key staff and decide how to employ forces and technologies to accomplish a mission.
Commercial wargames such as Harpoon and Littoral Commander already exist. New games could be developed to meet specialized warfare center needs. The centers have a ready pool of subject-matter experts to help with design; about 40 percent of Department of the Navy civilians are veterans.2 Board games themselves have undergone a renaissance of sorts, with about two-thirds of millennials expressing an affinity.3
This approach might not develop the next war-winning tactic, but it would offer multiple benefits, including:
• Teaching employees the “language” of naval warfare so they can discuss requirements and programs confidently with uniformed leaders.
• Bringing a much-needed operational focus to the warfare centers’ research and development projects, allowing researchers to explore how time, distance, and enemy action affect their concepts.
• Creating a venue for cross-warfare center collaboration.
• Providing a springboard to generate new technology concepts, which then could be quantified through modeling and simulation, taken into real-world experimentation, and then brought back to a wargame for refinement—what author Peter Perla termed a “cycle of research.”4
The Naval Science and Technology Strategy says wargaming “must test Focus Area assumptions and their validity. The efforts must be part of how the DON more quickly assesses [science and technology] approaches, learns from science, adjusts, and drives toward winning future conflicts.” There is no better place to start this learning than in the warfare centers.
1. The 11 areas are: autonomy/AI; naval aerospace; directed-energy and kinetic systems; C5ISR/naval space; human and biological systems; manufacturing; materials/electronics, naval engineering; ocean, atmosphere, and space; power and energy; and undersea systems. Naval Science and Technology Strategy (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2024), 6.
2. Employment of Veterans in the Federal Executive Branch, Fiscal Year 2021 (Washington, DC: Office of Personnel Management, 2021).
3. “Board Game Popularity by Generation,” 2nd quarter 2023, Statista.com.
4. Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990).
