SIMULATE THIS: Wargaming is having its ‘Moneyball’ moment.

Armies of psychologists have spent entire careers attempting to understand human decision-making. It’s not easy to boil down to numbers and equations. Moreover, it’s conveyed through conversation, discussion and debate, something that technology has yet to harness or replicate.

Wargames have served as an indispensable tool in this exploration. They provide a way to exercise the decision-making process, explore why choices were made and determine what the implications might be. However, being human-centric isn’t always efficient. Wargames often require months of planning by experienced wargamers who deeply understand the defense issues at play. They also require human players with the expertise to emulate the various parties in a conflict. All this means wargames are often hosted on an annual cycle and can only explore a small number of the potential scenarios a national security leader might encounter.

After all, how many people could plausibly play the role of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?

But with the advent of generative AI, we now have the ability to ask a computer to harness human language and, at a minimum, plausibly approximate human conversation and decision-making. That opens an opportunity to merge technology and wargaming in a way that hasn’t previously been possible — meaning we can bring wargaming to a wider audience over a broader set of possible scenarios.

Combine AI and physics-based modeling and simulation, which can traceably adjudicate how interactions between military platforms will play out (think whether or not an F-35 will be detected), and suddenly you can run wargames with a much smaller number of human players across a much larger number of scenarios. Because the artifacts of these games are captured digitally, you can then rapidly conduct assessments of exactly what happened and why it happened — which is incredibly labor-intensive in traditional wargaming.

When this stuff goes commercial, it’ll be the best thing to happen to hobbyist wargaming since “The Operational Art of War” launched in 1998.