A development diary on turning defence acquisition into a playable contest of ambition, scarcity, institutional pressure, and uncertainty. Hi folks, This is the first in a short development diary about an awkward design problem: how do you turn the murky world of defence procurement into a game? That may not sound like the most obvious subject for play. Procurement has a reputation for paperwork, committees, delays, cost overruns, and arguments about requirements. It is rarel

In the latest episodes of the Think. Fight. Learn. Repeat. podcast, we go beyond the buzzwords of modern warfare. Host Lex Luciak is joined by Colonel Elizabeth Pham, Director of Joint Plans and Operations at the NATO School Oberammergau, for an intensive two-part masterclass on Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).

Many serious games model capabilities and processes well, but ignore incentives (also called politics). That creates a quiet failure mode in design. The game assumes every actor shares the same objective, so the system behaves like a perfectly coordinated team solving a problem as efficiently as possible. Real systems rarely work that way. Actors operate under competing pressures, and those pressures often shape outcomes more than the formal capabilities on the table. When in