War games are one of the cheapest ways militaries can get better at the decisions they may one day have to make for real. Instead of learning on the battlefield — where mistakes cost lives — military planners simulate wars on giant maps, digital screens, and game boards, forcing decision-makers to think through scenarios that could one day become catastrophic reality. That's exactly why we visited CNA, a research and analysis organization that works directly with the US military, to play out a Taiwan invasion war game ourselves — and what we experienced was more intense and illuminating than anything we expected.
Why Do Militaries Play War Games?
The core reason militaries use war games is simple: war is expensive, chaotic, and deadly — but bad decisions are even more costly. War games offer a controlled environment where planners can stress-test strategies, expose blind spots, and rehearse decisions without anyone getting hurt.
As one of the experts at CNA put it, war games are "a very cheap way to get better at decisions than war itself." Militaries pour millions of dollars into designing and running these simulations because the alternative — learning through actual combat — is unthinkable.
But it's not just about tactics. War games are specifically designed to target different cognitive processes. Each game is built to ask: How would I solve this problem? What information would I have — and what wouldn't I have? They force participants to inhabit a role, feel the pressure of the moment, and make judgment calls under uncertainty. That experience is impossible to replicate through reading, lectures, or watching films.
The games also reveal something less obvious: how the other side thinks. Red team players learn about blue team capabilities. Blue team players learn how adversaries reason. That mutual intelligence is invaluable before any real conflict begins.
What Would a China Invasion of Taiwan Look Like?
To explore this question firsthand, we played a scenario at CNA where China had already invaded Taiwan and held the island for 90 days. One of us played the leader of China (the PRC), and the other played the United States. Both sides were given objectives that mirror real-world strategic goals, and then left to make decisions — just like actual leaders would.
Playing as China, the immediate instinct was to make any US response as costly as possible. The goal wasn't just military — it was narrative. Who does the rest of the world side with? How do you frame your actions to make the US look like the aggressor?
The US, playing as the blue team, didn't launch a direct military strike. Instead, they targeted China's natural resources — blocking oil shipments from the Indian Ocean. A strategic economic choke rather than a shooting war. China responded by moving naval assets near the Suez Canal and Djibouti, framing the US blockade as an attack on global trade.
Things escalated quickly. The US sent ships through the Taiwan Strait escorted by Japanese and Filipino vessels. China issued warnings. The warnings were ignored. A Filipino ship was sunk. The US shot down a Chinese jet. A shooting war had begun — and neither side had planned for it to go that far that fast.
That's the point. The scenario forces you to feel how quickly miscalculation can spiral into open conflict, even when both sides are trying to avoid it.
How Does a Military War Game Actually Work?
The setup at CNA used a giant physical map of the Pacific region, with blocks and pieces representing naval vessels, aircraft, troops, and military assets. Each side had two operations planned per turn. A game adjudicator — essentially a referee — kept the scenario realistic and moving forward.
Crucially, dice were involved. Not because war is random, but because outcomes in war are probabilistic. Will a ship's defenses intercept a missile? Will a covert operation succeed? Dice introduce controlled uncertainty that prevents either side from assuming perfect execution — which mirrors the fog of real combat.
Advisers surrounded both players, representing experts in diplomacy, military capability, economics, and regional politics. This isn't a one-person game — it's a collaborative simulation that forces teams to argue, align, and decide together under time pressure.
What Role Do Storytelling and Narrative Play?
One of the biggest surprises in playing the game was how much narrative mattered. As China, the question wasn't just "what military move do I make?" — it was "how do I tell this story to the rest of the world so that other countries don't side with the US?"
Framing the US oil blockade as an illegal attack on global commerce, moving ships near international choke points, messaging to Southeast Asian nations about who the real bully was — these were as strategically important as any military maneuver. Modern geopolitical conflict is fought as much in the information space as on the water.
How Long Have Militaries Been Playing War Games?
Military wargaming has ancient roots — as long as there have been wars and solid maps, commanders have tried to simulate battles before fighting them. But the practice became formalized in the early 1800s with the Prussians, who developed structured war games with real constraints and mechanics designed to mimic actual combat conditions. These weren't casual board games. They were rigorous planning tools.
World War II saw wargaming reach new heights. One US Admiral famously stated that by the time the Pacific War began, they had gamed out so many scenarios involving Japan that "nothing that happened during the war was a surprise — absolutely nothing" — with one exception: the kamikaze tactics, which no one had imagined.
Over time, war games evolved from physical maps to massive productions involving thousands of participants, eventually moving into sophisticated digital simulations that added layers of realism, data, and precision.
Did the US Ignore War Game Warnings Before Vietnam and Iraq?
This is where the history of wargaming gets genuinely troubling — and important.
In the 1960s, the US military gamed out joining the war in Vietnam. The simulations showed that gradual bombing of North Vietnam would only escalate the conflict, turn the American public against the war, and increase communist support in the north. The game results were, in the words of one analyst, "eerily prophetic of what actually happened." But the warnings were largely ignored.
In 1999, the military gamed out overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Every scenario — assassination, internal coup, installing a new government — resulted in ethnic conflict, military infighting, mass violence, and chaos. The conclusion was stark: this would create "a period of widespread bloodshed" and a "less than desirable post-Saddam state." A few years later, the US invaded Iraq anyway.
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the most expensive war game in US history was conducted — simulating conflict with a fictional country. When the red team used low-tech tactics to sink an American ship and immediately won, the adjudicator stopped the game, refloated the ship, and ruled that such tactics would never work in reality. The game was reset with new constraints that effectively guaranteed the US would win.
Critics argued this was the administration seeking validation, not insight. And it illustrates the most dangerous pitfall of war games: they're only as valuable as the honesty of the people running them. If you design the game to confirm what you already believe, you lose the entire benefit of playing.
What Is CNA and Why Does the US Military Fund It?
CNA — the Center for Naval Analyses — is a federally funded research and development center that provides independent analysis and gaming support to the US military, particularly the Navy and Marine Corps. It's not a government agency, but it works closely with the Department of Defense to research everything from operational strategy to long-term geopolitical risks.
One of CNA's key tools is the war game — structured simulations that help military planners explore "what if" scenarios before real decisions have to be made. The Taiwan conflict scenario we played is representative of the kind of high-stakes futures they're actively thinking through.
Can Playing War Games Actually Prevent Real Wars?
There's a famous principle that has guided military thinking for centuries: if you want peace, you must prepare for war. War games are one of the most concrete expressions of that idea.
By thinking through how conflicts escalate — by actually feeling the pressure of making decisions as an adversary, by discovering where your assumptions break down — military planners and policymakers can potentially avoid the catastrophic miscalculations that start real wars.
Spending a day playing as Xi Jinping on a giant map in Arlington, Virginia made the geopolitics of the Pacific feel viscerally real in a way that no article, documentary, or briefing could replicate. The emotional experience of feeling outmaneuvered, of watching a conflict spiral past the point you intended, of realizing your threats have backed you into a corner — that's the kind of learning that sticks.
War is chaotic, emotional, and deeply human. The best argument for war games isn't just that they help you win — it's that they might help you understand why not to fight in the first place.
