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As a former member of the military who went through very good and relevant training, I can attest to the TACTICAL value of simulations and war games. However, they were basically worthless in training to a highly dynamic strategic environment. Many were designed to validate a system or belief rather than test the unknown. In theory war games should be built to be free play oriented...in reality the aren’t.

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Those are usually just exercises with adversarial component.

The war games I'm thinking of are those what flag officers and staff do in RAND and other places. For example, they bring in diplomats and other outsiders to play the opponents. Or they may be pen and paper games (spreadsheets) scenario analysis where sequence of actions are played out and consequence of every decision are updated into the environment.

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