The U.S. Air Force is turning to artificial intelligence to boost its wargames.
The Air Force wants a cloud-based, AI-powered “digital sandbox” as a hub to generate and run wargames at speeds of up 10,000 times faster than real time, according to a recent request for information.
The WarMatrix system aims to remedy some of the problems that have hampered defense wargaming for years, such as cumbersome, labor-intensive simulations.
“Currently, the DAF [Department of the Air Force] faces challenges including the inability to answer critical questions about capabilities, Courses of Action (COA) analysis, or costing, due to a reliance on disconnected, outdated, and vendor-locked tools,” according to the Air Force RFI, which was posted Nov. 23.
“This initiative marks a revolutionary shift from traditional, analog methods to a fully digitized and scientific approach,” the Air Force proclaimed.
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The project is ambitious.
“WarMatrix is a toolkit and orchestration environment that enables rapid scenario creation and provides a common analytical workflow with human on the loop adjudication,” an Air Force spokesperson told Defense News.
For example, the Air Force is seeking “technologies capable of delivering simulations at super real-time speeds, ideally accelerating simulation processes up to 10,000x real-time,” said the RFI. For tasks such as experimenting with force design, logistics and battle plans, WarMatrix could run hundreds or thousands of iterations in the time that it would take a tabletop game to run one.
In addition, the system “must be scalable to hundreds of users and tens of thousands of entities, and must be built to operate across classification levels (Unclassified, Secret, TS/SCI/SAP),” the RFI said.
It must also be compatible with existing Air Force simulations such as AFSIM — as well as simulations of other military services — with an interface that transforms “the high barriers to entry” and makes the Defense Department’s “simulation arsenal accessible to every airman.”
“The system is designed as a joint wargaming tool with the government acting as the lead integrator rather than outsourcing design and implementation,” said the Air Force spokesperson.
The Air Force is relying on AI to solve many of the problems that have afflicted defense wargaming, such as weak computer opponents that had difficulty with routine tasks like marching a tank column down a road. Some computer simulations have had to rely on “pucksters,” human players who sit at computer terminals and control enemy forces in the game and thus function as a sort of human AI.
Matthew Caffrey, former chief of wargaming at the Air Force Research Laboratory, recalled the problems with big computer models used to adjudicate wargames.
They “would be too slow to adjudicate four moves in a week, so expert panels would adjudicate the moves and the big models would continue to run after the wargame, we were told, for post-game analysis,” he told Defense News.
But the Air Force envisions taking advantage of AI to create sophisticated computer players that can act competently and realistically. In WarMatrix, “every entity is represented as an autonomous agent that reacts to real-time events,” said the RFI. The simulation system would incorporate effects such as jamming and cyber warfare.
Particularly welcome to harried wargame designers and umpires will be WarMatrix’s ability to handle much of the administrative burden of wargaming. For example, the Air Force wants “LLMs capable of facilitating real-time transcription and diarization of qualitative data (e.g., commander discussions) to enable rapid analysis during and after events.”
AI could also function as an adviser to help players create courses of action, “utilizing a neuro-symbolic process to rank options with risk assessments and resource tradeoffs,” the RFI said.
Despite DOD’s rocky history with elaborate computer simulations, the Air Force says it will avoid those mistakes.
“WarMatrix fuses both computational precision and human insight, ensuring decisions are transparent, and strategically sound,” the spokesperson. “Compute and tooling, data integration, a human-centered design, and auditable trails address shortcomings of ‘black box’ mega-sims by making assumptions and outcomes inspectable and integrated.”
“This tool is being built by wargamers for wargamers,” the spokesperson said.
Michael Peck is a correspondent for Defense News and a columnist for the Center for European Policy Analysis. He holds an M.A. in political science from Rutgers University. Find him on X at @Mipeck1. His email is [email protected].