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Ammo Dump

UK Wargaming Doctrine

Defence Concepts and Doctrine Centre: Wargaming Handbook. Dated 2017.

Defence Concepts and Doctrine Centre: Red Teaming Guide: Essential companion to the Wargaming Handbook. Dated 2021.

A Simple Handbook for Non-Traditional Red Teaming: Australian Defence Science and Technology Group. Dated 2017.

Defence Concepts and Doctrine Centre: Influence Wargaming Handbook. Dated 2023.

Useful References

US Deputy Secretary of Defence Memo: Wargaming and Innovation. Dated 09 Feb 2015. We need to do more!

Why Wargaming Works by Peter P. Perla and ED McGrady: Essential reading.

The Wargaming Guild by Sawyer Judge: Is wargaming an art or a science?

MORS Special Report on the Validity and Utility of Wargaming.

The Western Approaches Tactical Unit by Paul Strong. One of the most important wargames in history - game that ran for most of WW2, training Convoy Escort Commanders and defeating the U-Boat menace.

Wargame Pathologies. Very highly regarded essential reading for failure modes in professional military wargames.

Game theory, simulated interaction, and unaided judgement for forecasting decisions in conflicts by Kesten C. Green: Or "Why Role Play works".

Role Playing: A Method to Forecast Decisions by J Scott Armstrong, showing that Role Play can be effective in forecasting.

Digital Game-Based Learning in The Military by Marc Prensky: The case for using computer games.

A review of the effectiveness of game-based training for dismounted soldiers by Susannah J. Whitney, Philip Temby and Ashley Stephens: The case against using computer games.

An Analysis of the Top 300 Wargames from 1958 to 2008 Utilizing the Boardgame Geek Database by Herr Dr: If you are using Commercial Off-the Shelf Boardgames, this list is worth looking at.

Six Things You can do with a Bad Model by James S Hodges: Just because it doesn't work properly doesn't mean you have to ditch it.

The Complete Wargames Handbook by James F Dunnigan: Well worth reading through, even if you might not agree with all of it..

The Continuing Merits of Manual Wargaming by Prof. Phil Sabin: More Required Reading.

War Gamers Handbook. A Guide for Professional War Gamers by the US Naval War College.

Fundamentals of Wargaming. The 3rd Edition by Francis McHugh 1966 published by the US Naval War College.

Wargame Design by Jim Wallman: An extremely useful primer (especially to throw at people who want to design a game with completely inappropriate command levels).

How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. Required reading for those involved in any form of "Effects" based outcomes (A PDF presentation about the ideas is here).

The Puppet Master Brief by Dr Stephen Downes-Martin. Why the multi-criteria decision matrices you have been using all your life are utterly bogus, and what you can do exploit this and get what you want.

Wargaming - Guide to Preparation and Execution. From the General / Admiral Staff Officer Course by the Führungsakademie Der Bundeswehr, 2004.

Conversations With Wargamers. A report detailing how prominent US Wargamers dealt with the issues of play at two or more levels of the classic military trinity: strategic, operational, and tactical.

Education and Training Handbook. From the Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

The JAPCC Education and Training Model Handbook. From the Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

The JAPCC list of Commercial Simulations used for Training. From the Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

Rand Paper: Crisis Games 27 Years later, by Robert Levine, Thomas Shelling and William Jones. Originally written in 1964 then collated and released in 1991 it is an internal dialogue within Rand about the merits (or not) of crisis games. Absolutely essential reading.

Force Ratio Risk Levels. What force ratios do you need to give you a 70% chance os success? This chart will give you the answer. Based on DSTL historical analysis (proper reference to follow).

First Battle Rules: . From Ft Leavenworth Library: Manual wargaming rules from 1979. Very clear design and playable in the Open mode with the Basic Rules, a Closed mode and finally the more advance CPX mode.

Matrix Game Methodology Support to V2010 Olympic Marine Security Planners by Antony Zegers. This is a report by DRDC CORA dated 2011 about the use of Matrix Games.

International C2 Journal: . Composing Effective Environments for Concept Exploration in a Multi-Agency Context by Helen Mitchard and Simon Ng (Defence Science and Technology Organisation, AUS). This is another report on the use of Matrix Game techniques.

Revitalizing Wargaming is Necessary to Be Prepared for Future Wars. Article by Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Gen. Paul Selva.

The 4-Box Approach. A tool which can be used in a wargame to assist in the discussion of risk and critical event resolution.

The Relationship of Battle Damage to Unit Combat Performance. (there is very little!) An Institute for Defence Analysis paper 1986.

Getting the Most out of your Wargame - Practical Advice for Decision Makers. A very useful article by Ellie Bartels, RAND Graduate School.

RAND Corporation reports: Additional RAND Reports relevant to wargaming can be found here.

Matrix Game SWOT Analysis.

Doing Analysis a US Naval War College Paper by Dr Margaret Polski and Dr Jon Logel.

Virtual paradox: How digital war has reinvigorated analogue wargaming article by Prof Rex Brynen.

Australian Army Research Centre Practitioner's Annotated Bibliography on Urban Warfare (this is not about Wargaming, per se, but includes the results of several wargames as part of the research).

An Open Letter to the US Navy from Red: A quite outstanding piece from Captain Dale Rielage, US Naval Institute’s Proceedings Magazine (June 2017) about training and wargaming and what is going wrong.