Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Paul Selva invested heavily in the revitalization of wargaming. They wanted to use wargames to adapt technology for the nation’s next wars. Understanding the outcome of today’s wargames is an essential step in the process of adapting them for future wars, and unfortunately understanding the outcome of wargames caused us to stumble in the past. History suggests that Pearl Harbor wargames yielded lessons we failed to learn, and Desert Storm wargames predicted casualty numbers that were 20 times too high. These examples frame the critical question, one asked by wargaming practitioners and scholars: how do we express confidence in wargame outcomes? To answer this question, a framework of three rules for communicating uncertainty in wargaming outcomes are proposed.

Mark Jones Jr. is a husband, grandfather, experimental test pilot, and Air Force Colonel. Professionally, he has been part of the wargaming community since 2016, when he served as a wargamer at the Pentagon. Currently, he leads wargaming initiatives for Air Force Special Operations Command’s Operations Directorate (A3) as part of his special operations air power portfolio. His first wargame design is a confluence of tic-tac-toe and Civil War era intelligence gathering, and he is passionate about the full spectrum of wargames.

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