Games of War

The problem

Most training rehearses the plan. The adversary rehearses breaking it.

A capable adversary doesn't fight the war your doctrine was built to win. He targets your patience, exploits your rules of engagement, and turns your own assumptions into the weapon — mirror-imaging, doctrinal blindness, the tunnel vision that fixes you on the fight in front of you while the real blow lands somewhere else.

The physical battlefield is the easy part. The harder war is cognitive — and it's the one training usually skips.

What it is

A wargame built around the decision, not the box score.

Not a campaign simulator and not a supply-chain optimizer. A decision trainer — the reps happen where judgment meets a thinking adversary.

01

Adversary-driven scenarios

The threat escalates, reconstitutes, and coerces on its own logic — punishing mirror-imaging and rewarding the commander who questions the obvious read.

02

The model-validity layer

Every call is scored on one question: was your model still trustworthy when you trusted it? The debrief shows where it wasn't.

03

Contested logistics

Magazines, fuel, tempo — all finite. The enemy spends cheap to make you spend dear.

04

Play the adversary

A second player can take the enemy’s side. The vote stops being simulated — and the debrief scores the exchange head to head.

The product

What the player holds.

Live screens, not mockups. The chart is always the player’s intel picture, never ground truth — the debrief replays the same chart with what was actually there, and the gap between the two is the lesson.

A CIC watch at fourteen seconds: two tracks held, the watch quiet — THE WATCH, 0:14
Two tracks held: an air contact at 29 miles, a surface contact at four. The watch is quiet and the clock is running.

The same watch at one minute three: the surface contact opens fire with the IFF panel degraded — THE WATCH, 1:03
SK-A opens fire — with the IFF panel degraded. Every line on the right is one watchstander, one source, and the call is yours.

Forty-nine seconds separate the two screens. Certainty moves slower than the water — training inside that gap is the product.

The LONGSHADOW night-orders screen at night three — THE NIGHT’S ORDERS
LONGSHADOW, night three: the fleet stands down, held fixes age toward expiry, and the force still needs tasking.

Campaigns

Distinct theaters. One question: does your model survive contact?

Persian Gulf

CHOKEHOLD — Strait of Hormuz

Respond to an escalating closure. Swarm, suicide USV, dhow-laid mines, coercive denial. The enemy plays to make transit not worth the cost.

Persian Gulf · Marines ashore

LONGSHADOW — Strait of Hormuz

Hunt a missile network that hides in caves and towns and rebuilds what you kill. The picture finds everything and confirms nothing; the Marines ashore do the confirming.

Gulf of Thailand

DEEPWATER — Ream Naval Base

Gray-zone A2/AD, maritime-militia ambiguity, and a logistics picture that degrades inside the strait.

Western Pacific

GAUNTLET — Taiwan Strait

A contested transit under coastal fires and persistent ISR — where every counter-move carries an escalation cost.

For instructors

One platform, a whole cohort.

A session is four moves: a concept check before anyone deploys, a campaign that fits in an afternoon, an after-action review generated from each player’s own decision record, and aggregate analytics across the class.

Pre-game assessment

Five questions on the concepts the scenario will test. You know what they believed going in.

The campaign

Eight to ten turns in a browser, on the laptops already in the room.

The debrief

Every decision paired with its outcome, generated per player. No two are alike.

Class analytics

Where the cohort clustered, which concepts they missed, who improved.

The debrief pairs what a student answered before the campaign against what they did during it — and shows them where the two diverged. That gap is the training objective.

How to engage

Three ways in. All of them end in a debrief.

01 · PILOT SESSION

One cohort, one afternoon.

Your instructor runs a live campaign with us in the room. The debrief is theirs to keep.

02 · COHORT LICENCE

The platform for a course or a term.

Pre-game assessment, campaigns, after-action reviews, and class analytics across the whole cohort.

03 · CUSTOM SCENARIO

A new theater from your threat set.

The engine doesn't change; the adversary does. We build the threat architecture with your subject-matter people.

Practical questions

What running it actually involves.

Is any of this classified?

No. Every scenario is built from open-source material and is marked Uncontrolled/General.

What do we need to run it?

A browser. Nothing to install, no hardware to buy, no network exceptions to request.

How long is a session?

One campaign runs in an afternoon — assessment, play, and debrief.

Can you build our scenario?

Yes. You bring the problem and the terrain; we build the threat model, the turn structure, and the decisions your people will have to make.

Who is it for?

Logistics officers, planners, and the people responsible for training them.

Who built it?

Aaron Myers Sandra R. Thomas Debra Kernstock Mark D. Luther Lawrence Myers Special Advisor

Provenance

A research foundation drawn from the whole discipline.

The engine draws on decades of published defense operations research and decision science — the RAND analytical-wargaming tradition, and the thinking carried forward at the Hoover Institution, the Naval Academy’s wargaming department, West Point’s Modern War Institute, the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, and the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Its method is older than the software: surface the key assumptions, force the competing hypotheses, keep what survives. The synthesis is ours.

The team

Four builders, four disciplines.

Aaron Myers

Engine & Adversary Design

Aaron founded Games of War and built its engine and its adversary. In Washington, D.C., he works as a contract dignitary and executive protection agent, and formerly carried secure correspondence into U.S. embassies and consulates as a contract courier for the State Department, with access few are ever granted. Since February 2022 he has coordinated humanitarian logistics into wartime Ukraine, and in 2020 served on the New York State Department of Health’s COVID-19 testing operation. He has completed CISA and DHS critical infrastructure training.

privateerllc.io aaron@gamesofwar.io

Sandra R. Thomas

Contested Logistics & Industrial Base

Sandra leads Games of War’s contested-logistics design. She is the founder of Thomas Strategy Consulting, where she advises defense and intelligence firms on supply chain resilience, critical minerals, and industrial base vulnerabilities. She is an Army logistics officer with more than nineteen years of experience, stateside and in combat. She served as defense industrial base chief on the Joint Staff J-4, where she ran wargames for the Joint Logistics Enterprise. Her writing on wargaming and the industrial base has appeared in War on the Rocks, Pacific Forum and National Defense.

thomasstrategyconsulting.com sandra@gamesofwar.io

Debra Kernstock

Cyber & AI Architecture

Debra leads the Games of War cyber domain. She is founder and principal AI architect of Unicorn Data Works, where she builds enterprise AI and data systems for defense clients: agentic workflows, LLMOps, and zero-trust data governance on Palantir Foundry and Databricks. A Marine Corps veteran and former communications chief, she holds an M.S. in Applied Data Science and a C.A.S. in Information Security Management from Syracuse University, and an M.B.A. from Saint Leo University. She is the author of The Foundry FDE Field Manual.

unicorndataworks.ai debra@gamesofwar.io

Mark D. Luther

Cognitive Systems & Resilience

Mark leads the Games of War cognitive domain. A former U.S. Army infantryman who trained at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, he supported humanitarian efforts in wartime Ukraine and brings more than fourteen years of insurance and risk-management leadership. His work explores recursive systems design, cognitive defense, and human-machine collaboration — especially the cognitive consequences of simulation, institutional corrigibility, and how organizations adapt while preserving meaningful human judgment.

mark@gamesofwar.io

Lawrence Myers

Special Advisor

Lawrence advises Games of War on intelligence collection, imagery, and the technical side of clandestine operations. He began as a Navy Photographer's Mate Second Class aboard the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, then spent his career in technical intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency. Trained in Hollywood as a cameraman for Agency operations, he supported operations including ARGO and OLIVE HARVEST, the U-2 reconnaissance mission that has verified the Egypt–Israel ceasefire lines since the 1970s. He worked on camera systems for the SR-71 and on the KH-8, KH-9 and KH-11 reconnaissance satellite programs run jointly by the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Air Force.

Writing