Use case · Deterrence & alliance defense
How do you wargame alliance deterrence and force design?
An alliance deterrence wargame puts alliance and national planners inside the decisions that keep a commitment credible: what to field, where to base it, how fast forces can be generated, and what to do when an incident is ambiguous. Organizations can run WarPaths’ own alliance-deterrence scenarios with their staff, or build a private game from their own report.
Two ways to run this.
Play a WarPaths scenario
Take a seat in a WarPaths scenario and be scored on how you reason, not on where the pieces end up.
- After November Sixth · 6 turns Play →
- Ambiguous Incident · 5 turns Play →
- Suwalki Window · 6 turns Play →
Build your own on this topic
Upload your posture review, force-design study or exercise plan. WarPaths drafts a playable scenario from it; you edit, approve, and invite your audience. The game stays private to your organization.
report → drafted scenario → your edits → invite
What do these games test?
An alliance deterrence game tests whether a commitment stays credible under pressure. You set the deterrence posture, meaning what is fielded, where it is based and at what readiness, and then hold to it when an incident arrives that nobody can yet attribute, the senior ally’s own posture is in question, and every response has to pass through consultation and consensus.
Four questions recur: whether force design and force generation put credible forces where the plans need them in time; how burden-sharing holds when one ally’s contribution becomes uncertain; how to manage escalation against an adversary probing below the threshold of attack; and what extended deterrence asks of the allies who rely on it.
How does the heavyweight model work today?
Alliances exercise deterrence at scale. In January 2024 NATO launched Steadfast Defender, its biggest military exercise in decades: 90,000 personnel in months of maneuvers across the North Atlantic and Europe, testing the alliance’s ability to defend against a near-peer adversary in an Article 5 scenario. Steadfast Noon, NATO’s nuclear deterrence exercise, runs every year; the 2026 edition, hosted by Italy from October 13, was announced with 17 nations.
Force design runs on planning cycles rather than events. The NATO Defence Planning Process takes five steps over four years and apportions the alliance’s requirements to each ally as capability targets, on the principles of fair burden-sharing and reasonable challenge. The NATO Force Model, agreed at the 2022 Madrid Summit, sorts allied forces into three readiness tiers, from 0–10 days to 30–180 days.
Allied governments keep standing wargaming centers. The UK’s Defence Wargaming Centre, part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, runs wargames for customers from the frontline armed forces to the Cabinet Office. Research organizations run their own: in February 2016 CNAS ran a two-day war game on Nordic-Baltic security with about 50 participants, through two hybrid scenarios and one conventional one.
These are single events and long cycles: months of preparation, days of play, lessons carried into the next plan. They put the staffs who own the plans in one room with one scenario. No single-player format replaces them.
| Alliance exercise | Scored solo format | |
|---|---|---|
| Who plays | Alliance and national staffs, commands and forces, together | One planner in one seat |
| How often | Annually, or across multi-year planning cycles | As often as the scenarios allow |
| What it measures | Whether plans, forces and procedures hold across the alliance | How one person reasons through the decisions, scored on five dimensions |
| What you get after | Lessons for the plans and the next cycle | An individual evaluation, and a record that accumulates |
What does a scored solo format add?
- Repetitions. The officers and officials who sit in an alliance exercise get one when the calendar allows. A WarPaths scenario in this category is a sitting they can take as often as the scenarios allow, scored the same way each time.
- A record. Each game is scored on the reasoning behind its decisions, so individual judgment accumulates into something a person, or a team lead, can look at.
Can we build a game on our own force-design or deterrence problem?
Yes. Upload the report you already have: a posture review, a force-design study, an exercise plan. WarPaths drafts a playable scenario from it, citing the passages it drew on with page references, and your organization edits every turn and approves it before anything is published.
Participants play under their own accounts. Your organization sees how the cohort reasoned — written responses under a code and a consolidated read — not named individuals’ evaluations. The game stays private to your organization: it never appears in the public catalog, and nobody reaches it without your invite link. Organization accounts are by request during the beta.
Who runs these games?
Alliance and allied national staffs
Headquarters and national staffs that write the plans and want officers to have reasoned through them before the exercise, not only during it.
Defense ministries and program offices
Offices that own a posture or force-design decision: the study behind it becomes a game for the people who will carry it out.
Transatlantic research organizations
Think tanks and university programs that publish on deterrence and want readers to decide inside the problem, not only read about it.
Which scenarios are open in this category?
After November Sixth
The White House has ordered roughly 30,000 US personnel out of Europe over 24 months; allies must source the aircraft and ships.
Ambiguous Incident
Forty drones crossed into Estonia overnight; two civilians are dead and the Tallinn-Narva rail line is cut.
Suwalki Window
About 40,000 Russian and Belarusian troops are massed on exercise within striking distance of the Suwalki corridor.
Sources
- NATO, NATO’s largest exercise in decades, “Steadfast Defender”, gets underway (24 Jan 2024)
- NATO, NATO holds annual nuclear exercise Steadfast Noon (8 Oct 2026)
- NATO, NATO Defence Planning Process (updated 16 Apr 2025)
- NATO, NATO Force Model (updated 2 Apr 2025)
- GOV.UK (Dstl), Defence Wargaming Centre (26 Apr 2023)
- CNAS, Your Move: Contesting Russia in the Baltics, a table top exercise (transcript, 20 Jun 2016)