New York Times – There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships???yet another look at Millennium Challenge 2002.
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Virtual Worlds News – A look at the future of military training – the use of virtual worlds as “first person thinkers” for training.
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New York Times Magazine – In an age of microscopic technologies and sweeping Google Earth panoramas, Will Wright, the worldís most successful video-game inventor, has set out to create a game (or is it the art form?) that will teach us how to really see. A preview of Spore, the ultimate game (or wargame?). What will be Spore’s applications in – and implications for – military education?
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Wired – Roadside bombs. Hostile insurgents. 1,200 extras in Arab dress. Welcome to Louisiana and the Army camp known as the Box, where the violence is fake but the fear is for real.
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US Naval War College Review – War games can produce valid knowledge, useful for planning and decisions, but they can also produce “valid-looking garbage.” There are principles that can help users and analysts tell the difference and avoid the pitfalls, but if game results are to merit reliably the confidence they are now given, the craft of gaming must become a profession.
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Wired – A seemingly harmless gesture could get a soldier in hot water, especially in a war-torn country. Body language that’s meaningless in the United States — such as showing the soles of one’s feet — is offensive in Iraq. So the American military is adopting a new video game created to help soldiers navigate the mysterious world of international nonverbal language.
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Washington Post – A look at the growing use of videogames to train soldiers and Marines for combat.
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Military & Aerospace Electronics – Improved displays and screens are helping engineers build sharper pictures, but the greatest improvement in military simulation and mission rehearsal has been in software. Military users strive to feed the simulators with real-world, nearly real-time data freshly collected from satellite-based sensors.
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Economist – Can software really predict the outcome of an armed conflict, just as it can predict the course of the weather?
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New Map Game – An extensive summary (90 pages) of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s New Map Game wargame that occured earlier this year.
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Wired – The Pentagon marshals thousands of computer-generated soldiers, tanks, ships and networked flight simulators to make large-scale training exercises more realistic than ever before.
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The Business – Another journalist describes in detail Thomas P.M. Barnett’s recent New Map wargame.

Here is Part 1 and Part 2.
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Washington Post – The United States would be all but powerless to protect the American economy in the face of a catastrophic disruption of oil markets, high-level participants in a war game concluded yesterday.
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Daily Telegraph – A first look at Thomas Barnet’s New Map Game, which took place this week.

The game’s Web site can be found here and the rulebooks may be found here.
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Guardian – In offices created by an ex-Star Trek designer and using techniques and technology from movies and gaming, some of Hollywood’s top creative talents are helping the US military to train for war in the 21st century.
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Washington Post – A look at Gator 6, an interactive video that is being used to train officers bound for Iraq.
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New York Times – America’s Army, a video game developed as a Pentagon recruiting tool, has gained an avid following. Now the Army has put the game developers through a boot camp to acquaint them better with the soldier’s world.

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The Atlantic – Soldiers, spies, and diplomats conduct a classic Pentagon war gameówith sobering results. From James Fallows, a fascinating look at the options available to the U.S. to counter Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
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Wired – You’d hardly expect to find dozens of defense strategists setting aside two weeks at a time to play a video game. But then, Urban Resolve is no ordinary video game. Developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or JFCom, a division of the Department of Defense, the $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. It pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege, and it’s capable of modeling the behavior of the nearly 1 million entities — the soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks and so on — that might exist in such a conflict.
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Fire and Movement – Thomas P. Barnett on what he thinks the role of the commercial board wargame industry might be in the new world war in which we find ourselves.
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US Naval War College – The Newport Papers are extended research projects that the editor, the Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, and the President of the Naval War College consider of particular interest to policy makers, scholars, and analysts, and judge worthy of extensive, selective distribution.

Here are two Newport papers that trace the evolution of the US Navy’s Global War Game and its effect on US policy and strategy during the Cold War. Fascinating reading. Both papers are in PDF format.

Global War Game: The First Five Years (1979-1983)

Global War Game: Second Series (1984ñ1988)

Air & Space Power Chronicles – An outstanding overview of the history of wargaming.
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New York Times Magazine – The military has quietly become an industry leader in video-game design, creating games to train and even recruit the soldiers of the PlayStation generation. Will virtual boot camp make combat more real or more surreal?
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Wired – Inside the fully immersive proving ground where tomorrow’s soldiers are being trained by coalition forces of the Pentagon, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
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