Curricula
RESIDENT COURSE
Offered as part of NPS resident course curricula
The Naval Postgraduate School has taught the Wargaming Applications course in the Operations Research Department for well over three decades. The course is taught during the Fall and Spring quarters. This 11-week course for NPS resident students is a mixture of lecture and hands-on practical exercises designed to develop student wargaming knowledge and skills. In this course, teams of 3-5 students design, develop, conduct, and analyze a wargame for a Department of Defense or defense ally or partner. The first half of the Wargaming Applications course teaches the fundamentals of wargaming using a mix of lectures and practical exercises. The first half of the course concludes with the completion of the “Wargaming Apprentice Certification Exam.” The second half of the course focuses on applying wargaming fundamentals to design, develop, conduct and analyze a wargame to answer a sponsor’s actual wargaming requirement.
The completed wargame is then conducted for the sponsor during NPS Wargaming Week, typically the first full week of December and June.
MOBILE EDUCATION TEAM (MET) BASIC ANALYTIC WARGAMING COURSE
Available by request
Since 2011, NPS has offered a five-day Basic Analytic Wargaming course to defense partners at their home station. The Basic Analytic Wargaming Course teaches much of the 11-week NPS resident Wargaming Applications course in 5 days (around 40 hours of contact time). Like the resident course, this course is a mixture of lectures and practical exercises. The course provides students a hands-on experience with designing, developing, executing, and analyzing a wargame. This course is for 16-20 students.
The sponsoring organization provides the wargaming topic that is used as the basis for the course’s practical exercises. The instructors then mentor the student teams’ development of a wargame that is executed by the student teams on the last day of the course. This course format provides the sponsoring organization two primary benefits: First, it builds a cadre of personnel who can initiate, design, develop, conduct, and analyze a wargame. COCOMs have leveraged this opportunity by having personnel from their J-3, J-5, J-2, J-4, J-7 and J-8 staff sections attend the course and work, in teams, to learn how to design and execute a wargame. Second, since the sponsoring organization chooses the wargaming topic that is used in the course’s practical exercises, the organization can have the framework of a wargame created by the course’s completion that can then be further built out and used by the organization to meet actual organizational wargaming requirements.
MET ADVANCED ANALYTIC WARGAMING COURSE
Available by request
The Advanced Analytic Wargaming course is a 3-5 day course designed around the needs of the sponsoring organization. This course is typically a mixture of lectures and practical exercises. It can be conducted the week after students complete the Basic Analytic Wargaming course, which allows the students to enhance the organization’s wargame that they created during the previous week. Topics that previous organizations have requested include:
- Project Management
- Interaction with Sponsors and Sponsors’ Staffs
- Problem Structuring
- Facilitation
- Adjudication
- Modeling and Simulation use in wargames
- Data Sources
- Modeling COIN and Counterterrorism
- Wargaming analysis plan elements
BASIC ANALYTIC WARGAMING FUNDAMENTALS COURSE PHASES I AND II
Phase I offered online through this website
Phase II available by request (minimum 12 students)
This two-phased wargaming course (Basic Analytic Wargaming Fundamentals (BAWF) Phases I and II) provides a high-quality wargaming education option for DoD, allied and partner organizations in lieu of the week-long Basic Analytic Wargaming Course. Basic Analytic Wargaming Fundamentals (BAWF) Phase I provides the means for students to acquire and assess basic analytic wargaming fundamentals through a web-based asynchronous education and assessment website. BAWF Phase II is a three-day, hands-on, instructor-led practical exercise based course conducted at the sponsoring organization’s location. Phase II is designed for a group of 12-16 students who have demonstrated proficiency in the basic analytic wargaming fundamentals by successfully completing the Phase I course of instruction. Phase II brings the students through the design, development and execution of a unit-sponsored wargame. Phase II concludes with the students executing a wargame that they designed and developed during the three days of practical exercises. This two-phased course is not intended to replace the Basic Analytic Wargaming course, but is a lower-cost alternative that still addresses most of the learning objectives of the Basic Analytic Wargaming course.