At the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, the Royal Naval Division is quietly building something significant. The Division is establishing wargaming as an essential instrument of officer development, directly aligned to the priorities set out in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) 2025 and the Royal Navy's ambition to field a hybrid, technologically enabled warfighting force.
The vehicle for this work is the Intermediate Command and Staff Course (Maritime), (ICSC(M)). A Level 7 postgraduate programme for senior lieutenants and lieutenant commanders drawn from across the Royal Navy and NATO partner nations, ICSC(M) has embedded a carefully sequenced series of three linked wargames at the heart of its curriculum. This makes it one of the most doctrinally coherent and educationally rigorous applications of wargaming within MOD's professional development and strategic education offer.
A pathway from strategy to combat
The three games: the Procurement Wargame, the Course of Action (COA) Wargame and the Kriegspiel take officers on a deliberate intellectual journey. Course members begin by grappling with the hard realities of future force design: balancing investment across submarines, cyber, hypersonics, uncrewed systems and data integration against the constraints of budgets, industrial capacity, and alliance politics. They then move to employment, testing their COA against an adaptive adversary in a time-pressured, multi-domain environment. Finally, in the Kriegspiel, they fight a plan they have spent two weeks developing, stress-testing it in a friction-rich, consequence-laden operational scenario.
This progression is intentional. Officers see directly how a procurement decision made at the strategic level ripples through to the tactical choices available to a commander in a contested maritime environment. It teaches them to think in time, to understand how risk compounds, how dependencies accumulate and how legitimacy and operational assurance can be won or squandered over years.
Directly answering the Strategic Defence Review's call
The SDR 2025 placed warfighting readiness, intellectual agility, and multi-domain integration at the centre of defence priorities. ICSC(M)'s wargame series operationalises precisely these demands. Officers must integrate uncrewed aerial, surface and subsurface systems, electronic warfare, space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, AI-enabled data, and coalition dynamics into their planning and decision-making. Scenarios have shifted from a Pacific focus to the High North, reflecting the evolving threat picture, with the contested undersea environment, cyber dependency and alliance cohesion all featuring prominently.
The First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins has been explicit: wargaming is the mechanism through which the Royal Navy understands how to apply the force it has today against the threats it faces today. The Royal Naval Division at the Defence Academy is delivering on that intent at scale, running four course iterations annually and building wargaming fluency across the officer corps and beyond.
Academic rigour and real-world challenge
Quality is assured through partnership with King's College London's Defence Studies Department, whose academics provide expert red-teaming during the Kriegspiel. This brings deep subject matter expertise to bear on officer decision-making, probing assumptions, surfacing brittle planning, and challenging officers to think from the adversary's perspective. It lifts the educational experience into the higher-order skills of analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and reflective practice that a Level 7 learning environment demands and that future senior commanders require.
Research bears out the approach. Studies in professional military education confirm that wargaming develops tacit knowledge that lectures alone cannot produce: faster problem framing, sharper risk judgement, and greater composure under pressure.
High impact, minimal cost, lasting effect
The entire wargame series is delivered at minimal infrastructure cost, with printed charts, tokens, and a commercially available ruleset, yet produces an intellectually immersive experience with immediate, palpable consequences. More importantly, it builds capability that travels. Officers leave ICSC(M) equipped to design and run their own COA wargame back in the fleet, seeding wargaming culture across the Royal Navy one course at a time.
In an era when the SDR demands more from every pound invested in defence education, the Royal Naval Division's approach to wargaming stands as a model worth noting — and worth expanding.