Professional wargaming
How the Royal Navy is putting wargaming at the heart of officer training
The Royal Naval Division at the Defence Academy has made wargaming a core part of how it develops mid-career officers, in line with the Strategic Defence Review 2025.
Three games, one thread
The Intermediate Command and Staff Course (Maritime) is a postgraduate course for senior lieutenants and lieutenant commanders from the Royal Navy and NATO partner nations, run four times a year. It now includes three linked wargames:
- A procurement wargame, on designing the future force.
- A course of action wargame, on how to employ it.
- A Kriegsspiel, in which students fight the plan they have spent two weeks developing.
The Defence Studies Department at King's College London provides the red team for the Kriegsspiel. Scenarios have moved from the Pacific to the High North, with undersea warfare, cyber and alliance cohesion as recurring themes.
Low tech, high value
The games use printed charts, tokens and a commercially available rule set, keeping costs low. The aim is that officers return to the fleet able to run their own course of action wargames. The First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has described wargaming as how the Royal Navy learns to fight with the force it has against the threats it faces now.
Why it matters
It is a direct line back to 1824. The Kriegsspiel that Prussian officers played on map sheets is still the tool of choice for testing a plan against a thinking opponent, and it still works best on a table with paper and counters.
Sources
- Defence Academy's Royal Naval Division: leading the way in wargaming, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, 3 June 2026