Use case · Societal resilience & critical infrastructure
How do you wargame critical infrastructure resilience?
A critical infrastructure resilience wargame puts a decision-maker in charge of a degraded grid, cable network or water system: what keeps running, what is restored first, what the public is told. Sector-wide exercises do this every year or two. Organizations can run WarPaths’ own infrastructure scenarios with their staff, or build a private game from their own resilience 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.
OPEN NOW · NEAREST CATEGORIES
Build your own on this topic
Upload your resilience report. 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?
A resilience game starts after the failure. The grid is down across two states, a subsea cable is cut, a water utility has lost its control system, and the cause is unconfirmed. You decide what keeps operating, in what order service is restored, where redundancy is spent, and what the public is told while attribution is still pressure rather than fact. The United States organizes this work around 16 critical infrastructure sectors; these games sit in energy, water, communications and transportation. Cyber has a category of its own.
Four questions recur: which interdependencies turn one failure into a cascading failure across sectors; what restoration sequence shortens recovery time for the most people; how long continuity of operations holds on backup power and manual procedures; and how to communicate with the public under uncertainty without committing to an attribution the evidence does not yet support.
How does the heavyweight model work today?
The bodies that own a sector run its exercises. Every two years NERC’s E-ISAC hosts GridEx, the largest cyber and physical security exercise for the North American grid: thousands of participants from the electric industry, its gas and telecommunications partners and the US and Canadian governments practice responding to and recovering from coordinated attacks. NERC has published a public report after each of the eight exercises to date; GridEx IX is scheduled for November 2027.
The US Department of Energy’s Liberty Eclipse is an annual full-scale exercise in which utility teams defend real operational technology against a red team fielded by the national laboratories, in a testbed in New York, with federal partners and National Guard cyber units alongside. The 2025 exercise ran six scenarios for more than 250 participants from more than 20 organizations.
Real incidents set the agenda. After damage to energy and communications cables under the Baltic Sea in late 2024 — damage NATO’s Secretary General described as sabotage — NATO launched Baltic Sentry in January 2025: frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and a small fleet of naval drones, to protect critical undersea infrastructure and respond if required.
These are single events: months of preparation, a few days of play, a report after. They put the operators, the regulators and the government in one room with one scenario. No single-player format replaces them.
| Sector exercise | Scored solo format | |
|---|---|---|
| Who plays | Utilities, agencies and their government partners, thousands at a time | One decision-maker in one seat |
| How often | Every year or two | As often as the scenarios allow |
| What it measures | Whether plans, procedures and coordination hold under one shared scenario | How one person reasons through the decisions, scored on five dimensions |
| What you get after | A public after-action report | An individual evaluation, and a record that accumulates |
What does a scored solo format add?
- Repetitions. The operators and officials who sit in a sector exercise get one every year or two. 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 infrastructure?
Yes. Upload the report you already have: a resilience assessment, a continuity plan, an after-action review. 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?
Government program offices
Agencies and commands that own a sector plan and want their staff to have reasoned through it before the exercise, not only during it.
Infrastructure consulting practices
Practices that write resilience assessments for utilities and agencies: a client’s report becomes a game for the client’s staff.
Research organizations
Think tanks and university programs that publish on infrastructure security and want readers to decide inside the problem, not only read about it.
Which scenarios are open in this category?
OPEN NOW · NEAREST CATEGORIES
Cyber crisis response
Settlement Day
A cyberattack has corrupted settlement records at two systemically important U.S. banks; equity and bond markets have been halted for 18 hours.
Deterrence & alliance defense
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.
Deterrence & alliance defense
Ambiguous Incident
Forty drones crossed into Estonia overnight; two civilians are dead and the Tallinn-Narva rail line is cut.
Sources
- NERC Electricity ISAC, GridEx (every two years; GridEx IX scheduled 16-17 Nov 2027; public reports I-VIII)
- US Department of Energy CESER, Liberty Eclipse (the annual full-scale exercise)
- US Department of Energy CESER, Powering resilience: how CESER’s Liberty Eclipse safeguards the nation’s energy (26 Nov 2025)
- NATO, NATO launches ‘Baltic Sentry’ to increase critical infrastructure security (14 Jan 2025)
- CISA, Critical infrastructure sectors (the 16 sectors)