The IT²EC wargaming experiment kicked off with a selection of presentations from dynamic speakers, including Major Tom Mouat MBE and Major Theo Bossom, who overviewed the pivotal role wargaming held in military education and land warfare strategies.
The action then began as our two teams, captained by representatives from the Land Warfare Centre, took their positions. The experiment fused a wargaming scenario and narrative with a commercial off-the-shelf simulator using ‘out of the box’ real-world terrain and high-fidelity computer-generated entities with associated properties and behaviors. Players, ideal for non-wargaming communities including Training Designers, were grouped into two teams (or battlestaffs), provided with a range of tactical military capabilities and an objective. Over several turns, each team collectively decided how to achieve the objective and had their decisions injected into the simulation. Each team was blind to the other, and each turn was played out by the simulation.
As the team's capabilities maneuvered and interacted with each other, the simulation adjudicated and reconciled outcomes. As such, teams necessarily lived with the consequences of their decisions and actions as each turn progressed the scenario. Representatives of the UK Land Warfare Centre and other key stakeholders observed using a God’s Eye view of the wargame and provided after-action review and critique of the teams’ actions and decisions to facilitate and promote subject matter expert learning outcomes.
