Description:

This presentation discusses what I’ve learned as I researched and designed some tactical games dealing with the subject of the German campaign of 1940. That campaign highlights how German tactical training at the level of troop leaders—partly through the use of wargames and wargame-like substances—created a tactical superiority which overcame their technical inferiority and overall inferior numbers of troops, tanks, guns, and aircraft to produce unexpected operational success, which led to strategic triumph. At least temporarily. How can this story help us as we apply wargaming to address future military challenges?

Dr. Peter P. Perla

Peter P. Perla has been involved with wargaming, both hobby and professional, for over fifty years. After earning a PhD in probability and statistics from Carnegie-Mellon University he joined the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in 1977 as a naval operations research analyst. Over his forty-plus year career at CNA he has directed major projects, served as Special Assistant for Command and Control, led a research team for Interactive Research Products, and received the award for Outstanding Analyst of the Year in the Advanced Technology and Systems Analysis division in 2012. Dr. Perla continues to serve CNA currently as part-time Principal Research Scientist. In 1990, the U.S. Naval Institute published the first edition of his book, The Art of Wargaming. This book became a fundamental international reference on the subject (including a Japanese-language edition), and a standard text at U.S. military schools. It was republished by the History of Wargaming Project in 2011. Dr. Perla is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on wargaming and its use in research, learning and innovation. He has spoken at international conferences on wargaming and analysis, including presenting keynote addresses at Connections professional wargaming conferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, and gave the keynote at the inauguration of the King’s College Wargaming Network in 2018.

He has edited several books for the History of Wargaming Project, and published articles and columns in both the professional and hobby wargaming press, as well as writing and speaking for the War on the Rocks blog and podcast. In the hobby world, Dr. Perla has designed or developed half a dozen games in the commercial boardgame industry and is a regular columnist in the hobby press. His writing has received a Hugh Nott award from the Naval War College Review and a John K. Walker, Jr. award from the Military Operations Research Society (MORS). Dr. Perla is one of the instructors for the Wargaming Certificate course sponsored by MORS, beginning in 2016. In 2017 he received the first award for Lifetime Achievement in Wargaming by the Connections Wargaming conference.