All scenarios

Use case

How do you wargame a supply chain or industrial-base crisis?

You wargame a supply chain the way you wargame a campaign: put decision-makers inside a crisis, give them the real constraints, and make them choose. The heavyweight version is a facilitated government exercise with industry in the room. A scored single-player format adds repetitions between those exercises and a record of how each person reasoned.

What do these games test?

Chokepoints, foreign dependencies and surge capacity: semiconductors, munitions, critical materials. The decisions trade speed against resilience and allies against markets. Undersea cables, power grids and the physical systems a country cannot run without. You manage the response while the cause is still uncertain and the pressure to attribute is rising.

Four questions recur: where the chokepoints are, which dependencies on other countries bind, how fast production can surge and for how long, and whether allies can coordinate demand instead of competing for the same capacity.

How does the heavyweight model work today?

Government sponsors commission facilitated exercises and bring industry to the table. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy asked CNA for a wargame on the defense industrial base; CNA ran the Arsenal of Policy series from November 2024 to January 2025, two facilitated workshops and a culminating wargame with government and industry representatives, scoped to munitions supply chains, and published the analysis in November 2025.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence ran its first wargame with industry in December 2024, stress-testing the replenishment of ammunition and equipment in wartime, and followed it in April 2026 with an exercise alongside Boeing, KNDS, MBDA, Rheinmetall and Tekever on sustaining a surge in demand for key equipment over an extended period.

The US Defense Logistics Agency ran a week-long medical supply chain wargame in July 2026 with more than 120 federal and industry partners, looking for bottlenecks, resource limits and foreign dependencies under a protracted, contested conflict.

These exercises are events: months of preparation, a few days of play, a report after. They answer the sponsor’s question with the people who own the answer in the room, and nothing single-player replaces that.

What does a scored solo format add?

  • Repetitions. The people who sit in those exercises get one or two a year. A WarPaths scenario in these categories 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.
  • Reach. A resilience report, a continuity plan or a supplier study becomes a game the organization’s own staff play, authored from the document, approved by its authors, private to the organization.

Which scenarios are open in these categories?

No scenario in these categories is open to play yet. The scenarios page lists what is, and new ones appear there as they are published.

All scenarios

Request access for a government team Request access for a research organization

Sources