Wargaming as Political Science

Wargaming as Political Science: A Research Method for Decision-Making Under Uncertainty How can political scientists study strategic interaction when decisions are made under uncertainty, information is incomplete, and actors continuously adapt to one another? Wargaming as Political Science presents wargaming as a systematic research method for observing and analyzing political and strategic decision-making. Rather than treating wargames primarily as tools for prediction, training, or professional education, the book examines how structured interaction can generate analyzable evidence about strategic behavior, organizational processes, political judgment, and mechanisms of decision-making. The book develops a Wargaming Research Framework (WRF) that connects research questions and theory to scenario construction, participant design, interaction, adjudication, data generation, coding, inference, triangulation, and validation. It also introduces a Seven-Layer Evidence Architecture for organizing move data, rationales, deliberation, adjudication records, self-reports, debriefing material, and observational evidence. Across applications involving nuclear strategy, escalation, cyber conflict, emerging technologies, diplomacy, foreign policy, and AI-augmented wargaming, the book addresses a central methodological problem: how can researchers move from simulated strategic interaction to defensible political-science inference? Part methodological guide and part conceptual argument, this book also examines the limits of wargaming-including participant effects, facilitator influence, adjudication bias, scenario design, coding challenges, and questions of external relevance. A complete worked research-wargame design and practical appendices provide researchers with tools for protocol development, evidence collection, coding, validity assessment, and preregistration. The result is a research architecture for treating wargaming not simply as a game, but as a structured environment in which political and strategic behavior can be observed, documented, compared, and analyzed.