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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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INTRODUCTION

Usual 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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THE PROBLEM

God does not play dice with the universe.

But Mars does.

An event occurs, a sponsor/client wants a wargame to examine it and wants it quickly, and there is not off-the-shelf solution at hand.

And saying “sorry, got nothing for you” is not an answer.

At first glance, we live in a world with an abundance of wargames. There are dozens of different options for re-fighting Julius Ceasar’s greatest hits, hundreds of options for recreating operational-level conflict in Europe in World War II, and there’s probably an Advanced Squad Leader module for a nameless hamlet in Italy where a single German and single American soldier once threw rocks at each other.

But an emerging crisis or conflict rarely conveniently mirrors Operation Bagration or the Battle of Midway. Each conflict has its own contours rendering it sufficiently unique. Yet we all know that emerging conflict also often generates a requirement in the defense or national security communities to analyze that conflict in real time, often through a wargaming framework crafted to capture those unique contours.

When presented with the challenge of wargaming a conflict in real time to help a sponsor or client glean insights, what approaches should the professional wargamer take? This presentation offers a couple of case studies of my own approach to this problem.

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1 – GAME FRAMEWORK

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1 – GAME FRAMEWORK

In the case studies I’ll talk about here, I found myself working under different time frames for two different problem sets. As it happened, both the problem sets I worked on were given to me around the fall of 2021. I was at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University at the time, and I was asked by instructors at one of the enlisted schools to come up with some “gray zone” wargame scenarios – looking at contingencies that might require military intervention by Marines, but weren’t open warfare. One key scenario they wanted to focus on was counter-piracy. Developing a counter-piracy scenario was not necessarily time critical, because there was not a particular operational deployment that a Marine unit was preparing for to conduct counter-piracy operations. But the instructors at this school wanted to expose their students to the counter-piracy problem during the next cycle of classes, because as an enduring issue on the high seas, any Marine deploying on a Marine Expeditionary Unit in the future might have to deal with it. So not time critical, but the instructors wanted it to support a class cycle that was just over the horizon.�

The second problem set emerging at the time was the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders. The build-up looked serious, more than just an exercise in saber rattling. It was not a crisis yet, but was certainly shaping up to become one, and so I believed that it was quite possible that, should an invasion suddenly unfold, Marines both at Marine Corps University and in the operating forces might ask for wargame scenarios in Ukraine on short notice. Ukraine could shift from low boil to time critical in a heartbeat, and I wanted to be ready. A challenge here was that absent a specific sponsor requirement, I could not be sure what aspect of the conflict players might want to see, but I assumed the mechanics of fires, ISR, etc. would still be desirable.�

So my starting point for both problems was not creating bespoke games on modern counter-piracy and a possible future war in Ukraine, but aggressively adapt an established game system that I already knew well and which had ISR and fires mechanics that were applicable to both problem sets [click slide]. [05:00]�

The game framework I chose to modify was Fleet Marine Force, now known as Littoral Commander—at the time, the game existed as a prototype developed by Sebastian Bae and a design team of graduate students, with the first version created in 2020. The game’s original focus was on the South China Sea, wargaming potential U.S. Marine Corps and Navy operations against a potential Chinese adversary, looking ahead to the timeframe 2030-2045. It included future technologies that the Marine Corps didn't yet have integrated but as part of Force Design 2030 would acquire in the future. ��A central game mechanic was completing the kill chain, so the way the game presents this is all of your units begin “concealed,” but with general location known within a 20km hex – the assumption being it’s hard to make yourself completely invisible on a 21^st century battlefield, but getting target-quality location still requires work. Players still need to use ISR or other methods to find their adversaries to then target. ��I used this game framework for both problems because of its adaptability and customization. LC’s initial scenarios focused on Luzon with U.S. and PLA orders of battle, and capability cards that captured future capabilities in fires, maneuver, C5ISR, information, and air and missile defense. But the system was flexible enough to allow for the relatively easy creation of new maps and new capability cards, so if the U.S. or China or somebody else fielded something new six months after the game was first created, you didn't have to break the game to make something new. You just make a new card, boom, it's in there. Even a new unit, or whole order of battle, was relatively easy to adjust so long as you worked inside the game engine’s framework of 20km hexes, D16 probabilities, and platoon-sized or single naval vessel units.

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2 - RESEARCH

(Above) mothership (below) high-speed raiders (reavers)

(Above) Navy SEALs (below) Maritime Raid Force

Step 2 in developing piracy and counter piracy mechanics for Littoral Commander was assessing the state of piracy by non-state actors in late 2021, as well as how nation-states were countering them. Pirate tactics often came from operating from a home base of some kind, which could be land-based but could also be a “mothership” that got close to prospective targets, which then released raiders using small high-speed boats for actual boarding and seizure of vessels. (I called the high-speed raiding boats “reavers” as a private joke for myself in reference to the space pirates from the fantastic space opera show “Firefly”).

Conversely, the military side had a few options for attempting to take down hostile vessels or re-take hijacked ships. For the United States, options include special operations forces like Navy SEALS, or conventional forces specially trained for vessel seizures such as the Maritime Raid Force deployed on a Marine Expeditionary Unit.

Finally, given increased proliferation of capabilities by non-state actors usually reserved for nation-states, I decided to make the gray zone problem for the Red and Blue players a little more challenging by adding narco-submarines to the mix. Certainly these would not be nearly as deadly as the submarines of nation-state navies, [click slide] but low profile, low probability of detection naval targets can still be deadly to surface combatants, and I wanted game players to have to honor that threat. [click slide]

Much of this information was well-documented, so collecting it was a matter of a few days of dedicated research.

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2 - RESEARCH

For the Ukraine scenario, part of my research for a prospective scenario had already been done by Sebastian’s design team – they had already worked up an order of battle from open source research on Russian air assault companies, naval infantry companies, and armored/mechanized companies, along with elements of the Black Sea Fleet.

[click slide] So in January 2022 I did my initial order of battle research focused on Ukraine’s 36^th Naval Infantry Brigade, in part because I have a bias for Marines but also because there was fairly detailed open source information given that the U.S. Marine Corps had previously done semi-regular bilateral training with them. Specific elements of the Brigade that I couldn’t find open source, I used more generic doctrinal templates from English-translated Ukrainian military sources. This research took longer than a few days given there was not actually a war yet to trigger more detailed order of battle analysis that external entities often perform once fighting gets underway. [10:00]

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3 – INTEGRATING WITH THE GAME FRAMEWORK

Third step: I had done research on the challengers that players said they wanted – or in the case of Ukraine, I assumed they would want - based on respective requirements. Now I had to figure out how to integrate those problems within the game framework of Littoral Commander, both without breaking the game or watering down the challenges to the point that they were not actually challenging the players to make meaningful decisions.

[click slide] For my counter-piracy scenario, the INDOPACOM maps already provided several major trade lanes that pirates could raid, making areas for conflict relatively simple to develop. Creating units for the pirates was also relatively simple; it was matching known mobility for pirate vessels into the 20km hex scale. [click slide] Pirate motherships and pirates reavers were under the same concealed conditions as Red and Blue’s units: Red and Blue would need to conduct ISR to complete the kill chain to attempt to do fires against pirate targets before they could hijack commercial vessels.

Certain pirate capabilities also meshed with Littoral Commander’s framework; there was already a mechanic for submarines and magazine depth for fires, so creating cards for narco-subs and drones was relatively straightforward as well. [click slide]

But I did need to add new mechanics to account for the irregular aspects of piracy, as well as the environment pirates operate in. Once pirates hijacked a ship, that ship was no longer a viable target for fires; but I also didn’t want hundreds of additional tokens on the game map to represent commercial shipping because that would quickly become unwieldy and unplayable. So I added a mechanic that once a pirate successfully hijacked a ship, it converted the reaver token into a hijacked ship token, meaning it could not hide itself from ISR anymore, but that Red and Blue could no longer shoot it – they would need to use their SOF or VBSS teams to attempt to recapture the ship.

Additionally I wanted to model the risk of conducting long-range fires in the middle of heavily trafficked shipping lanes – big collateral damage risk there. So I added a special event card for this specific scenario, requiring players to make a collateral damage check every time they attempted long-range fires against pirate vessels. If they caused collateral damage, there would be a penalty to their reputation, and gaining positive reputation was the goal for both Red and Blue in conducting counter-piracy operations.

But otherwise, integrating new pirate units and mechanics was not a tall order, and could be done as quickly as it took me to do arts and crafts to make the unit counters and cards. Littoral Commander was already geared toward naval operations, and counter piracy was simply an aspect of naval operations.

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3 – INTEGRATING WITH THE GAME FRAMEWORK

Integrating the potential Russia/Ukraine conflict into Littoral Commander proved much more challenging and approached the threshold of breaking the game. [click slide] I had a prototype map that had been developed based off a terrain map for the Operational Wargame System for an event with II MEF in the fall of 2021; I had not started order of battle analysis at this point, and I had the map made more as a messaging effort to II MEF to let them know that we were thinking about their theater of responsibility, and could potentially do more wargaming in this part of the world if they needed it from us.��[click slide] Fast forward to January 2022, when I created the order of battle for the 36^th Naval Infantry Brigade and built the prototype pieces for Russia and Ukraine. When I put the pieces on the map, it quickly revealed a problem of game scale between the LC game engine and the probable terrain and unit density needed to model large scale conflict between Russia and Ukraine.��The baseline Littoral Commander game assumes very dispersed positions of platoon sized units over lots of terrain because the game was made to talk about distributed operations at a smaller unit level because that's what Force Design 2030 with the Marine Littoral Regiment focused on. ��This wouldn’t work in Ukraine, as the scale of conflict would be over a huge land area with much larger formations. Russia and Ukraine were both large conventional armies, they're not looking to disperse the way the MLR intended to disperse to stay hidden and provide fires and sensors and other things for a larger joint campaign. Play-testing also showed us that the map size of the 20km hexes used on Littoral Commander maps just weren't big enough to capture large ground formations; we had giant stacks of platoons in these small hexes and from a game gameplay standpoint this wasn't usable.

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3 – INTEGRATING WITH THE GAME FRAMEWORK

So I went back to my orders of battle, and up-scaled them from platoon to company size to capture the density of forces without breaking the game engine, because LC is inherently a tactical game. Note that the 36 Naval Infantry Brigade is now just one of three brigades, and I added additional brigades to the Russian order of battle as well. [15:00]��This got us to February 2022. I still needed to solve the hex size problem, I turned back to Sebastian and his civilian map designer who made some expansion maps for the game, and told them I need the same scale of 20 km hexes to support the game engine, but the hex has got to be physically bigger on the map, to accommodate stacking multiple company-sized formations together to match the denser troop concentrations in Ukraine we were likely to see.��Because the invasion hadn’t started yet, I didn’t know what geographic areas would be most important to map out, but I made some assumptions about two starting points. [click slide] The first was southern Ukraine and the port of Odessa, and the coastline extending east across the isthmus to Crimea and then on to the Sea of Azov. If Russia wants total control of Crimea, they're going to want that coast along the Sea of Azov, and blockading or capturing Odessa would also be a huge economic hit to Ukraine’s war effort. So that was key terrain #1. ��I also assumed Russia was planning a push on the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, given the large concentration of Russian troops in Belarus that naturally seemed pointed in that direction. So February 19th is when I started the design process with the cartographer, and I set a pretty aggressive development timeline because it looked like the invasion could start any day. The maps were done by February 24^th, two days after the invasion started.

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4 – ADAPTING IN STRIDE

Game design for real world, real time crises means being prepared to constantly revise aspects of the game to ensure it continues to be relevant the players. I developed the initial version of the counter piracy scenario to be a combination of Somali pirate tactics and certain tactics used by drug cartels, to capture a gamut of maritime non-state actor capabilities. Over the following year, we all watched as the Houthis added increasingly complex capabilities on top of pirate tactics of hijacking vessels.

Their hijacking campaign began including media messaging about their successes, and the collective failure of nation-states to stop them. [click slide] Their Iranian sponsor began providing more long range and lethal weaponry to shift from hijacking to striking and sinking ships. [click slide]

Keeping my counter piracy scenario relevant required acknowledging these new developments, and thanks to the flexible framework of LC, [click slide] it was relatively simple to add new capability cards to give the pirate player the ability to leverage new pirate advantages as we kept seeing them in the Red Sea.

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4 – ADAPTING IN STRIDE

Displaced civilians

Directional obstacles

Expanded influence meter

New battlefield systems

As was the case with fitting the Ukraine scenario into the LC framework, in-stride adaptation to battlefield developments was much more challenging than the counter-piracy scenario, with new data points worthy of being wargamed coming in on almost a daily basis. Many of these things had no existing precedent in LC as game mechanics, or were developed only in a very rudimentary way. This 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

surrender and handling of enemy prisoners of war

[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 those 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. 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.

[20:00] 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 – as with adding longer range missiles to the Houthis, integrating new battlefield capabilities was doable by making new cards and matching their lethality to the established D16 system.

Ultimately, having done a large amount of anticipatory work, it still took a lot of days dedicated specifically to revising components, refining mechanics, and playtesting all the amendments, but within two weeks of the invasion starting, I had a fully developed Ukraine module for LC and was gaming out a scenario for a Russian amphibious landing near Odessa.

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CONCLUSIONS

Pay attention to the forecast
Leverage existing frameworks
“Research” includes unconventional information sources

Pay attention to the forecast – if your day job is wargaming – educational, analytical, what have you – this may be less of a concern, but devoting some time and resources to “what if” thinking beyond what a sponsor/client is asking for in the near term can really demonstrate your value should the balloon actually go up in a crisis or conflict. I didn’t have a specific mandate to develop a game module for Ukraine; but my office had a mandate to provide relevant wargaming content for the schools we supported, and observing the contours of what was happening on the borders of Ukraine in the months leading up to the invasion – and doing some “what if” work based off those contours – meant that big ticket items like orders of battle and appropriate maps were already in my hands when the war started. This allowed my focus to go to specific battlefield developments and how to gameify them. If I’d waited until a school had come to me asking if I had something offer military students on the largest land conflict in decades, my answer would have been “no, not right now,” which would have been a failure of our office’s support mandate.

Leverage existing frameworks – creating a bespoke wargame for an unfolding crisis/conflict puts you far behind the power curve in providing something relevant to a sponsor who needs it now. My previous leveraging of LC made me confident the game engine was appropriate for emergent threats like piracy or ground conflict under a 21^st century long range strike regime. So I didn’t need to make a new engine, I just needed to know the engine well enough to determine how to integrate sponsor requirements while being relatively confident those amendments wouldn’t break the game engine. Some amendments strained the engine, but didn’t break them.

There’s a corollary to this – as a professional wargamer, it’s a professional responsibility to know what game engines are out there that could potentially support a sponsor’s short-notice requirements. LC met my needs, but I regularly exposed myself to different game engines in the course of my day job should one of those engines prove more appropriate.

Research includes unconventional information sources – a challenge in wargaming real-time conflicts is that, unless someone has coincidentally done detailed and recent analysis of your corner of the planet and the associated forces, your informational baseline could be stale or completely out-dated. And it usually takes several months of conflict for initial detailed analysis to come forward – but a sponsor may have a requirement that can’t wait that long. So it’s incumbent on the game designer to aggressively study those information sources about a conflict that are immediately available, and that often includes unconventional sources like social media platforms. When the Houthis started stepping up their attacks, and demonstrating the use of longer-range weapons, in the Red Sea, a valuable source of information was Houthi social media itself. When flaws became evident in Russian logistics, or Ukraine suddenly employed a new weapon like the Punisher drone on the battlefield, it was often social media accounts that were the first to break the news.

These sources shouldn’t be ingested uncritically; but they can point you to developments worth deeper research, and if you are also connected to the professional defense analyst community – many of whom are also on social media – you can use those connections to vet what sources are likely accurate, and which are nonsense. But it’s worth noting: just because an information source comes from an adversary, that doesn’t mean the information is unusable in your rapid game design. [25:00] Just like the U.S. military, adversaries highlight their own successes for their own purposes. And in our world of virtually infinite information streams, adversaries can try to control information but often fail. One of the most timely sources on Russian military problems were Russian military bloggers – “influencers” who used the Telegram platform to complain about bad logistics, bad tactics, bad leadership, and more. Russian mil-bloggers generally supported the idea of conquering Ukraine, but were upset that the invasion wasn’t going nearly as well as had been promised. Again, one has to compare sources like Russian mil-bloggers with reliable analyst assessment of which bloggers tend to pass accurate information and which are just posturing; but paying attention to Russian mil-blog threads on Telegram has provided useful insights into the true conditions afflicting the Russian military.

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