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TEACHING THE TRYZUB

IAN T. BROWN

PRESENTED TO CONNECTIONS 2026

LESSONS FROM UKRAINE IN MILITARY EDUCATIONAL GAMES

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OVERVIEW

Introduction
#Maneuver Warfare: The Card Game
Lessons Into Cards
Littoral Commander
Questions

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INTRODUCTION

Ian T. Brown: Wargame Analyst at Group W, an SPA Company

Retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot

Tours as forward air controller, requirements officer
Deployed to Iraq, INDOPACOM, and Afghanistan
Last billet as operations officer for the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare—extensive educational wargaming work

Independent author/media creator

40+ articles, book reviews, short stories, podcasts, 2 books:

A New Conception of War (2018) on USMC Commandant’s Professional Reading List
Snowmobiles [and] Grand Ideals (2025) - “definitive John Boyd”

Neophyte game designer

Popeye in the Goo micro-game released in spring 2024 as part of INDOPACOM micro-game collection
#Maneuver Warfare: The Card Game - my first commercial design, now available from the Dietz Foundation
Contributions to Littoral Commander series of games
Shape Seize Secure – promotional drone-focused card game developed for SPA

The most pertinent part of my bio here is the time I spent on my final tour of duty in the Marine Corps – part of the Krulak Center at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Part of my job here was to use wargames as an enhanced learning tool for our military students. Initially I was just taking games out of the box or on the computer and putting them in front of students. But as my time there continued, I started learning how to modify game mechanics for specific educational objectives, develop new scenarios for current events based on requests from students and instructors, and ultimately gained enough experience to build entirely new game designs.

These experiences and the ruthlessness of history came together in 2022 when Russia undertook its latest and largest invasion of Ukraine. Watching this unfold, I believed it part of my mandate at the Krulak Center, as well as an inherent responsibility of anyone at Marine Corps University responsible for instructing students, to find ways to incorporate the lessons we were watching in real time into wargame frameworks. This would allow our Marine, joint force, and international military students to grapple with the implications of these lessons through wargaming and then carry them back to their operational units after graduating, where it was entirely possible they could be called to put those lessons into practice in the near future.

In this presentation I’m going to briefly review two game engines that I used both during my final years on active duty, and in the years after I retired, to capture lessons from the Ukrainian battlefield in a way that military students could interact with.

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INTRODUCTIONS

Disclaimer: my opinions and views are mine alone and do not represent the policies or views of my employer, the United States Government, or any other entities with which I may be affiliated.

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#MANEUVER WARFARE: THE CARD GAME

The first wargame engine I’m going to talk about is one I created myself. Early in the year 2021, I began thinking about a way that I could potentially translate Marine Corps doctrine and concepts like maneuver warfare, the OODA loop, task organization and force design, emerging trends in modern warfare, and other things into a relatively simple wargame framework. I also wanted the game design to be something Marines would be naturally inclined to play anyway based on their own gaming preferences.

So I decided to design a deck construction-style wargame because I knew, from long professional experience, that no matter where Marines were deployed to, they always brought decks of cards with them. [click slide] Card decks have the advantage of only having one game component to keep track of, they’re small and portable, and so a Marine could easily shove a deck of cards into their cargo pocket and take it anywhere.

Since Marines were playing cards anyway, I figured why not give them a card game that incorporated Marine Corps concepts, could test their planning and decision-making skills, [click slide] and be easily portable to whatever expeditionary and austere environment those Marines might wind up in?

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LESSONS INTO CARDS

In February of 2022, I was still in the proto-typing and play-testing stage of game design. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. It quickly became apparent to me that the battlefield in Ukraine was at a scale and level of violence that Marines hadn’t experienced in decades. Like most of my generation of Marines, I’d done deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan; but what was happening in Ukraine was entirely different. Ukraine wasn’t fighting a relatively small group of irregulars only capable of sporadic violence in the land domain – Ukraine was fighting vast conventional formations and every domain – land, air, sea, space, and information – was aggressively contested. For decades the U.S. military had prepared to fight the Russian military but never done so. Ukraine was now fighting that fight and we were seeing in real time what modern large-scale combat operations looked like. As both a military professional and someone with responsibility for educating our military students for precisely this kind of warfare, I felt an obligation to pull the lessons I was seeing in Ukraine into the educational wargame framework I was already working on.

Given the complexity of the battlefield in and around Ukraine, there would be challenges in trying to translate this complexity into what I intended as a simple game design. Fortunately, one of the benefits of deck construction-style games is that they leverage a simple ruleset but then new rules, or exceptions to rules, can be written plainly on each individual card without having to change the entire game framework. So there were many opportunities to incorporate the wide array of diverse trends from the Ukrainian battlefield into #Maneuver Warfare without breaking the game.

And there were many trends to consider. On the Ukrainian side, there were the civilians who turned ordinary farm equipment into recovery vehicles so that the Ukrainian military could turn Russia’s own tanks back against them. [5:00] There was also the drone battle of constant innovation, adaptation, reaction, and new innovation.

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LESSONS INTO CARDS CONT.

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LESSONS INTO CARDS CONT.

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LESSONS INTO CARDS CONT.

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LESSONS INTO CARDS CONT.

When I first started designing my card game prior to Russia’s invasion, I had already intended to include what I called “destructible terrain.” This mostly meant that things like bridges could be accidentally destroyed and taken out of play if one of the players wasn’t careful in how much firepower they applied in certain locations. And then after Russia invaded, I watched with the same shock shared by most of the world as Russia indiscriminately launched strikes in close proximity to nuclear reactors and blew up dams where the resultant flooding could have been just as destructive to their own forces as to Ukraine’s. But Russia simply didn’t care. And so Russian actions forced me to include options for destructible terrain that I hade never imagined, which my military game players would have to take into consideration.

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LITTORAL COMMANDER

The second wargame engine I used to help military students understand lessons from Ukraine was Littoral Commander, and I’m confident many of you in the audience have heard of or potentially played this game since it’s been used by many partner and allied nations in addition to U.S. military Services. I didn’t design this game—its creator was Sebastian Bae and group of graduate students at Georgetown University. However I came to use it as my “go-to” game for students at Marine Corps University and especially Marine Corps students, because the game was tailor-made to capture Marine Corps-specific concepts in a future warfare environment.

The genesis of Littoral Commander came in 2020, shortly after the Marine Corps undertook a wall-to-wall reform effort known as Force Design 2030. Force Design touched virtually every aspect of the Marine Corps, but among its key changes were restructuring parts of the Corps to be prepared to fight an adversarial China in the Indo-Pacific region. These changes included concepts like Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, which would disperse Marines in small, disaggregated units across the Indo-Pacific to reduce China’s ability to target them. Small tactical units like platoons would be responsible for much wider areas of operations than seen in the Global War on Terror, using dispersion to protect themselves while using enhanced ISR and long-range fires to still be able to “mass” against Chinese forces—but now, massing fires would not require these units to be physically massed in close proximity to each other.

So the game framework for Littoral Commander used dispersed forces and the requirement to use ISR to complete “kill chains” as its core game mechanics. The game map was divided into 20km hexes, and platoons were dispersed across hundreds of kilometers. Dispersing and hiding let you live; remaining dispersed and mobile while building kill chains with ISR and long-range fires let you win. With the addition of special cards that allowed players to access capabilities from other Service branches and things sometimes reserved only for the leaders of nations, Sebastian’s game was the best possible thing I could put in front of Marine students: it dealt with their future challenges and had the best open-source up-to-date information available.

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LITTORAL COMMANDER

I used the early edition of Littoral Commander for two years at Marine Corps University before the Russian build-up on Ukraine’s borders started. In the fall of 2021, when it began to look like Putin was not bluffing, I decided it might be useful for my military students to have a Littoral Commander version of Ukraine available for them should war actually break out. I started working on a prototype, getting a map with the normal 20km hexes to cover the eastern part of Ukraine. [click slide] [10:00]

As 2021 moved into 2022, I also developed new orders of battle for Ukrainian and Russian forces. [click slide] However, I created these units based on the original parameters of Littoral Commander—platoon-sized and thus with the underlying assumption of the game framework that future warfare would be conducted by small, highly dispersed units leveraging ISR and long-range fires to fight.��But when the invasion finally happened on February 24 and I started placing my prototype units on the map based on how things were unfolding on the real battlefield, [click slide] it quickly became clear that the war Ukraine was fighting was not the same as the one Marines were preparing for in the Pacific. And so if left unaltered, Littoral Commander’s basic framework would be completely overwhelmed because the scale of combat and the troop density on both sides were much greater than a platoon or two every 20 kilometers. This was war on a scale the Marine Corps—and thus the Marine Corps’ wargames—could not conceive of.

However, I was reluctant to abandon the Littoral Commander framework for two reasons: first, it was already well-understood by both myself and our military students, and so I believed that using a familiar framework would be more helpful in trying to capture emerging lessons from Ukraine in a wargame. Second: Littoral Commander, through its use of the cards used to capture all-domain military capabilities, already had a structure that would potentially allow for incorporation of the multi-domain warfare we were seeing in Ukraine.

So I decided to try and adapt my prototype Ukraine module for Littoral Commander to the new things I was seeing on the battlefield, and then we could see whether the game framework was sufficiently flexible to incorporate lessons from Ukraine, or the scope and scale of combat in Ukraine would smash through the boundaries of Littoral Commander’s underlying framework and “break the game.”

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LITTORAL COMMANDER

The first modification I made was to up-scale the orders of battle from platoon to company size to capture the density of forces. The second challenge was seeing whether I could actually make the game hexes physically bigger while still retaining their 20km scale, because that 20km hex size was the foundation on which all movement and firing ranges in Littoral Commander were based.

So I asked Sebastian Bae and his civilian map designer whether it was possible to make maps with the proper hex scale but simply…bigger to accommodate stacking multiple company-sized formations together to match the denser troop concentrations in Ukraine.

[click slide] The map designer worked several miracles because I began the re-design process for the maps on February 19^th. By February 24^th the new maps were done, and so two days after the invasion started I had a revised framework ready to start layering in what we were seeing in Ukraine.

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LITTORAL COMMANDER

Displaced civilians

Directional obstacles

Expanded influence meter

New battlefield systems

Capturing new lessons from Ukraine proved to be a demanding process, because there were new data points worthy of being considered in a wargame emerging on almost a daily basis. And there were additional challenges because many of these data points had no existing precedent in LC as game mechanics, or they were present in the game only in a very rudimentary way. But since my goal was to provide military students with a wargame on real-world conflict that was as up-to-date as possible, I spent the initial months of the invasion constantly adding to and adapting Littoral Commander’s framework so that our students could start thinking about how they would solve the problems in the future that Ukraine was facing that very moment. These included:

[click slide] sustainment logistics i.e. food and fuel. LC captured ammunition expenditure and resupply, but the opening days of the invasion of Ukraine highlighted how poor sustainment logistics support left Russian columns hung out to dry for counterattack.

[click slide] density of civilians on the battlefield – significant civilian displacement impacted mobility of both Russian and Ukrainian forces, as well as creating potential humanitarian disasters should those civilians be targeted intentionally or unintentionally by Russia (who did both), and the need for the government of Ukraine to care for those displaced civilians.

[click slide] winning and losing the messaging war, with consequences for both – Ukraine proved very adept early on at crafting a narrative message that gained it concrete military assistance, and Russia rapidly felt sanctions on it that impacted key parts of its military machine

[click slide] extensive use of fortifications and obstacles to protect key areas and channel enemy forces

[click slide] battlefield innovations that saw new weapon systems appear, and then be employed, seemingly out of nowhere

To provide relevance to Marine Corps University students or Marines in the operating forces with a wargame concerning this conflict – and using the LC wargame system which was already widely used and proliferated across that audience – my in-stride adaptations had to capture all of these things.

[click slide] This is where LC’s flexible framework really helped me. Fortifications and displaced civilians were functionally a type of obstacle & LC had mechanics for that; I expanded the mechanic to let players emplace multiple fortifications & use the expanded hex edges to decide what direction to defend. [15:00] I created new movement rules that turned civilians into a mobile obstacle, & which would cause a penalty to reputation – reputation already being a LC mechanic – to any player that started a fight in a hex with civilians.

Sustainment logistics became a new supply category and players would have to think about refueling from supply units that already existed in the game.

Narrative and messaging became further impacts to reputation in the game, and created concrete military benefits for the side that leveraged information in a positive way (and also didn’t commit war crimes).

As for new capabilities – integrating them was doable by making new cards and matching their lethality to the established D16 system.

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QUESTIONS?