Every person in the packed conference hall stands up as two French soldiers greet each other onstage with a military salute. Major General Bruno Baratz approaches the lectern and speaks into the microphones. “We are running five minutes behind schedule,” he says with a grin. “There was a queue to get in.”
On the podium from which he speaks are the words “Jeu de guerre” (Wargame), with the theme of the day written below. It is the year 2035 and France is on the brink of war.
A handful of young participants sit at a table in the middle of the stage. A map of central and eastern Europe is splayed across the top, littered with green and red markers. Sliding scales at the bottom of the map represent France’s economic, diplomatic, military power and political stability.
Then, a fictional news bulletin plays on the projector overhead, upping the stakes. Russian troops have reached the borders of Poland and the Baltic States. China is about to invade Taiwan. And while Europe holds its breath, France enters defence stage three – two steps below full-blown war.
A wargame simulation gathered more than 500 people at the École Militaire military training base in Paris on February 11. While two teams engaged in high-intensity conflict on stage, the audience took part in each step of the decision-making process.
The event – organised by Future Combat Command (CCF), a branch of the French Armed Forces tasked with responding to new military threats, alongside two youth organisations – was a hit.
Outside the four walls of the conference hall, Paris remained at peace. Yet with war on Europe’s doorstep, the scenarios explored during the day-long wargame were not entirely implausible. Organisers stressed that the exercise was not meant to predict the future but the growing use of wargames among military personnel in France and beyond underscores an increasingly sharp focus on preparedness.
Wargames in vogue
France has only recently embraced the use of wargames as a serious military tool.
“The concept of gameplay was seen as light-hearted for a long time in French culture and therefore not suited to prepare for serious situations,” explained Laurent Ferrier, who sits on the steering committee of Les Jeunes IHEDN, a youth organisation sponsored by the armed forces ministry that helped organise the February 11 event.
But wargames are now widely being used in military facilities across the country, including the École de Guerre, a training establishment for senior officers. The head of the French agency for defence innovation, Emmanuel Chiva, even created a programme called the “Red Team” – an experiment in which screenwriters and science fiction writers imagine future scenarios to anticipate strategic surprises. And the armed forces ministry has had its own wargaming service provider since May 2022.
Their popularity has been on the rise worldwide. Each year since at least 2022, Germany, Italy and France have joined forces to organise a wargaming initiative for NATO. The United States accounted for 92 percent of global spending on the gamification of defence in 2022 – approximately $25 billion, according to GlobalData.
And the advent of AI has meant that wargames have become more accessible to lower-ranking strategists and analysts.
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“Wargaming has now been woven into the overall planning of many militaries,” said David Banks, a senior lecturer in wargaming at King’s College in London. “I have two hypotheses as to why that is. First, we have a strategic international environment which is extremely complicated … There is so much uncertainty that I think [militaries] are embracing everything. Any tool for forecasting gives them some sense of the future,” he explained.
“We also have a generation of people who grew up playing games. Those people have now entered leadership positions.”
“It’s funny, because some of the people I spoke to at NATO say they often have to be careful when trying to convince their superiors of the utility of wargames because the word ‘game’ turns them off,” Banks said, underlining a similar culture shift to the one Ferrier described in France. “But everyone is getting more involved than they were five years ago.”
A tool to prepare, not predict
Wargames are undeniably becoming more ingrained in military strategy and widely accepted as tools to test strategic responses, refine decision-making and anticipate potential threats. But Banks warns that many in the defence sector requesting wargames are hoping for “a crystal ball” to be able to predict the future – certainty that they are incapable of providing.
Wargames are adversarial simulations that use rules, data and procedures to model military conflicts. The scenarios they use are often based on real-life issues or possibilities – as was the case with the arrival of Russian forces on Baltic borders for the Paris wargame, for example. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are already ramping up real-life military preparations amid fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialist ambitions will eventually extend from Ukraine elsewhere into Europe.
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“You can invent any given situation and see how your stakeholders will respond,” Ferrier said of wargames scenarios. “The results and data you gather at the end are in no way reliable. There is no way [that it] could predict [the future]. But it does provide food for thought and create plausible situations to help military staff think about how the army could react.”
The origins of wargaming stretch all the way back to ancient civilisations. Its earliest forms include the Latrones, a two-person strategy board game played throughout the Roman Empire, and Chaturanga, an Indian board game that is believed to be the precursor of chess. It was only in the 19th century that wargames gained widespread recognition as military training tools. The Prussian Army’s Kriegsspiel revolutionised military exercises, laying the groundwork for modern tactical simulations like the ones we see today.
And although wargames have predicted global events like the Covid-19 pandemic, it is also believed that they may have mislead the US Navy to draw incorrect conclusions on Japan’s intentions during World War II.
“Making a wargame is all about asking the question, ‘What if?’” said Félix Rolland, who leads crisis simulations at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University youth defence group and helped organise the Paris wargame. “Asking that question allows us to overcome any intellectual hang-ups we may have about a real-life possibility.”
For Banks, wargames are most efficient when they ask questions about the physical, material world. “Questions about whether a long-range weapon will be able to penetrate defence screens of opponents, or power through a city, for example. Our existing scientific models of things like weapons, explosives or aerodynamics are … not that difficult to convert into smaller models for a game,” he explained. “It gets much harder to do that when you start to leave the material world.”
And there is also the human element to consider. Morale and solidarity play a huge role in wartime.
“In a tactical military game, one of the key factors to determine the outcome of the war in Ukraine is its national will. You cannot make a universal model of what national will looks like and how it operates. The same goes for imagining how democracies will respond to populist challenges in the future. None of those are empirical facts. They are all conceptual,” Banks added. “Participants haven’t experienced the actual phenomenon, so they are just guessing.”
While the École Militaire returned to normal after the February 11 wargame concluded, the questions it raised lingered in the minds of participants and observers alike. Wargames may not predict the future but they offer invaluable tools to test assumptions and stimulate critical thinking. At a time when geopolitical tensions are high, perhaps the way best to prepare for the unexpected is indeed to ask, “What if?”
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