Playing wargames to shape real-life military strategyBy Siobhan DoylePublished Monday, February 17, 2020Commercial wargames may be a crowd-pleaser for gaming enthusiasts, but what if these strategy-based tools could be used to support real-life military tactics? We speak to experts at the UK’s first dedicated wargaming centre who are setting this in motion.Tucked away in a little town near Portsmouth, on the south coast of the UK, lies a facility. Here, those who serve our country are likely currently battling each other in games similar to those you may have come across in a store or in the comfort of your own home. Indeed, it may sound like a computer game, but they are so much more than that.These are, in fact, wargames – a scenario-based warfare model in which the outcome and sequence of events affect, and are affected by, the decisions made by players, as described by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). It is a decision-making technique that provides structured but intellectually liberating safe-to-fail environments to help explore what works during warfare and what does not.In fact, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has a long history of delivering these successful wargames on behalf of the MoD alongside other government departments. To take this one step further, Dstl has now opened the UK’s first dedicated wargaming centre.The Defence Wargaming Centre (DWC), located on Dstl’s Portsdown West site near Portsmouth, was created to host wargames for all three UK services, responding to the increasing demand for wargaming as a tool both to support decisions and to develop insight into complex issues faced by defence and security.Mike Larner, head of the DWC, says: “Wargaming enables commanders to anticipate and rehearse future conflicts which, ultimately, increases the UK’s capability to deter aggression and protect its interests.“What’s quite different about this centre is that we’ve drawn together all of the people that are involved in wargames from different areas,” Larner adds, “so we now have a single team supporting wargames across all of the services, head office and all other departments at Dstl and the MoD.”Currently, DWC covers around 600m2 with two large areas and one smaller open-plan area that can be subdivided further into smaller cells as required. Gaming tables, some of which have short-throw HD projectors to visualise wargame scenarios, reconfigure to the necessary shape and size. Dstl says that future upgrades are being planned to the physical space, computing, and communications, as well as further expansion to the wargaming teams and the range of tools available to them.Beyond the wargames themselves, the centre intends to focus on research for wargaming methods, tools and techniques. “At the heart of a wargame there is some sort of simulation, and that can be anything from a board game or a map with characters being moved around,” says Larner, “or it could be a really sophisticated computer model that you’re putting all of this into and that is simulating a lot of the lower-level activities, and then it gives you results.”