Naval Wargaming as a Requirements Elucidation Tool for Warship Design Teams

This paper discusses some of the challenges of setting the requirements for a future warship program and how manual naval wargaming might be employed to make the process more efficient and structured. It goes on to describe some case studies where UCL’s wargame “A Balanced Fleet” was applied to requirement phase problems, in particular the ASW Barrier wargame conducted for the NATO Specialist Team on Naval Ship Systems Engineering. The paper concludes that wargaming is a useful tool in the requirements phase, in particular for helping to direct subsequent and more detailed operations analysis work.