This week academics at the School of Security Studies launch a new Wargaming Network to advance wargaming as a tool for innovation and education to address current security challenges. 

The network will launch with a lecture on 4 December featuring preeminent US wargaming expert Dr Peter Perla, kicking off the network’s public lecture series examining fundamental challenges for adapting wargaming theory and practice to usefully address contemporary security problems facing the UK and its NATO allies.

“Wargaming saves lives by helping us avoid mistakes without paying the price in blood for the lessons learnt,” said Prof Philip Sabin who has been teaching a graduate-level wargaming module since 2003. Sabin will serve as a co-director of the Network with Ms Ivanka Barzashka, who has led the development of a new strategic gaming method as part of a King’s project on nuclear deterrence and stability.

“Policymakers have revived their interest in wargaming as a tool for analysis and innovation in a new strategic environment marked by the return of major power competition. Yet there are important theoretical and practical challenges to the rigorous application of wargaming to usefully address consequential national security questions. The new lecture series seeks to better understand and address some of these challenges,” said Barzashka.

King’s College London is the global non-governmental institutional leader in civilian wargaming research and education. The Wargaming Network builds on King’s rich history of gaming activities, and seeks to engage and convene world-class wargaming scholars, practitioners and emerging talent to advance wargaming as a method of inquiry, learning and teaching. It will serve as a hub for the growing community of King’s students and staff studying, researching and applying games and simulations. 

King’s established the Wargaming Network in response to a revived interest among US and UK government officials, think tank experts and academics to use wargaming to understand the requirements for modern deterrence and defence, and to adapt strategy, doctrine and capability in the new era of strategic competition.