Colonel Saikat K Bose Lieutenant General (Dr) SK Gadeock, AVSM (Retd)

This USI Occasional Paper argues that most traditional combat models—rooted in Lanchester equations and reductionist mathematics—cannot capture the messy reality of war as a complex adaptive system. Military forces are heterogeneous, socially driven, and boundedly rational, with outcomes shaped by morale, anticipation, friction, and emergent behaviour rather than neat input–output causality. The authors propose that professional wargaming be optimised through qualitative agent-based models, and show how board and tabletop wargames already function as such models. These analogue systems represent units as distinct agents with attributes like cohesion, fatigue, and initiative, and use combat results tables to reflect non-linear outcomes and synergy. The paper recommends adapting commercial games, designing bespoke analogue systems, and ultimately developing distributed computer wargames built on qualitative ABM logic—underpinned by a wider wargaming culture and systematic data-farming to refine rules over time.