My 2026 tour of defence academies

By improbable coincidence, in August I visited four different military educational institutions in three different countries;

- the UK Defence Academy at Shrivenham (as invited participant in a Waterloo wargame);

- the US Army War College, Carlisle PA (to present BBB at a Symposium on Wargaming in Professional Military Education);

- the US Military Academy at West Point (strictly as a tourist);

- and Sweden's Defence University, Stockholm (to participate in an academic workshop).

I also took in a couple of good military museums on the way.

I already reported on the Waterloo game in a previous post here.

The symposium at AWC was a much more substantial and significant event. It was the first conference of its kind, gathering nearly 100 international participants to discuss the use of wargaming in military education, share best practice, etc. It was initiated by Professor Nicholas Murray, who has regular used the Bloody Big Battles! rules to run games for educational purposes at the US Army's Command & General Staff College, Naval War College, and elsewhere. Consequently I attended to present a BBB demonstration game.

I chose to use the Montebello scenario that is my favourite "training game". A couple of bold participants took up the challenge and played it through, while a fair number of others stopped by to view and discuss it. (Since you ask: crushing French win, their all-out aggression from the start paid off, everything went right for them and none of the Austrian potential reinforcements made it onto the table.)

An example of the other games on display at AWC, this one by LTC Tyler Brooks of AWC.

As well as presenting the game, I attended a lot of interesting talks and met some really impressive people. It was an exciting meeting and I understand is likely to become an annual event. Other related activities may follow as well.

These slides are from COL Tim Barrick's presentation, reproduced with his kind permission.

Maybe I will adapt it to create my own Cognitive Wargaming Competency Framework and assess my gaming buddies. The risk is that it might be turned against me.

Professor Murray has published a report on the symposium in Small Wars Journal here. Participant Aaron Danis has also done a write-up in Armchair Dragoons here. (You'll find a pic of my Montebello game captioned as "a Kriegsspiel-type game with effective terrain representation". I used a printed battlemat with Kriegsspiel blocks rather than miniatures.)

AWC has a rather fine museum on-site. Exhibits include this mighty FT-17.

Also of particular interest to us wargamers is this Apparatus, as explained by COL Parrish below. Further information on it can be found here.

As if that wasn't enough, half an hour down the road from AWC is the National Civil War Museum at Harrisburg PA.

Vignette from Pickett's Charge, a display at the NCWM.

We spent a good couple of hours there and could easily have spent a couple more. Its collection of firearms is particularly impressive, including all sorts of firearms by makers I'd never heard of. Well worth a visit.

Sherman on gate guard at West Point.

The West Point visit was just an opportunistic side-trip on the drive between AWC and the airport. Obviously I knew it was an impressive institution but actually going there helped to reinforce that impression.

Illustrious alumni greeted us at the West Point visitor center.

The Defence University in Stockholm.

The workshop in Stockholm was perhaps the most important of the month's excursions (for me, at least). All I'll say for now is that it relates to the Clausewitz translations Professor Murray and I have published. Oh, and that he demonstrated his excellent map game of the 1799 campaign, illuminating the challenges of coalition warfare and of allocating resources between competing theatres of operations. More in due course.

I can't praise our generous hosts' hospitality highly enough. These eminent Swedish generals watched us eat some very fine lunches in the VIP room.

The 1799 campaign game. Map in foreground is the German theatre of operations; the further one, northern Italy and Switzerland. This has helped to educate a lot of officers and strategic thinkers over the years.