Education

Education


The War Gaming Department conducts various operational and theater strategic level student games in support of the College’s Joint Professional Military Education.   Two Joint Military Operations CAPSTONE Exercises are conducted annually, one for the Intermediate Level College and one for the Senior Level College resident students as the culminating event of their trimesters. These CAPSTONE Exercises are the largest and most resource intensive events played, with more than 300 students participating in each . War Gaming also provides a wide range of gaming support to various courses, departments and organizations within the Naval War College and on Naval Station Newport to include: Maritime Advanced Warfighting School, Maritime Staff Operators Course, Joint Forces Maritime Component Course, Senior Enlisted Academy, Officer Training Command Newport, Surface Warfare Officer School.

War Gaming Theory and Practice is one of three NWC electives that make up the Joint Analysis for the Warfare Commander Elective Program. This course provides students with an in depth understanding of the role of War Gaming in strategic thinking and operational warfare and analysis, sufficient to make the student an intelligent and critical consumer of war games. The course addresses war gaming theory and principles as they relate to the practical issues of designing, executing and analyzing war games through readings, discussion, and war game play.   Students design a war game to deal with a set of operational/strategic problems chosen during the course under instructor guidance, and test their design by playing and analyzing it both during the session and during the week between sessions.


The curriculum's design centers on the key policy and organizational designproblems that future military leaders are likely to confront in Homeland Security/Homeland Defense and the analytic skills they will need to meetthose challenges. Each class requires students to master the core issues,principles and problem-solving approaches for the topic in question, andapply those fundamentals to the specific challenges. The sequenced classes will strengthen the overall cohesion of the curriculum, and enhance its effectiveness as professional education. 


The War Gaming Department has a rich history of providing support and exchanging ideas with several prestigious educational institutions in order to assist in the development of realistic experiential learning in national security issues conducted at the strategic and operational level. Some of these institutions are: Naval Post Graduate School, Army War College, Air Force Warfighting Institute, Marine Corps War College, National Defense University, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Intelligence University, Tufts University, and Middlebury College.