Procurement: The First Battle

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 rarely treated as the dramatic part of defence. Most military games begin once the tanks, ships, aircraft, drones, and headquarters already exist. The war starts. The counters move. The force is simply there.

But real military power does not appear at the point of crisis. It is built years earlier through decisions about money, people, industry, risk, and political ambition. Some of those decisions are sensible. Some are compromised. Some are delayed until the choice becomes worse and more expensive. By the time a force reaches the battlefield, many of its strengths and weaknesses were already locked in.

That is what makes procurement such a promising game design problem.

Over the next few updates, I want to bring you along as I try to turn that world into a playable system. Not a lecture. Not a spreadsheet with dice. Not a thinly disguised policy seminar. A game with pressure, negotiation, bad incentives, imperfect information, and decisions that come back to haunt the players later.

The question is not simply, “what should the armed forces buy?”

The better question is, “what happens when government, industry, military services, and procurement officials all try to shape the future force while facing different incentives, limited resources, and an uncertain threat?”

Now that starts to sound like a game.

The original concept began as a professional military education game about defence finance, capability planning, and uncertainty. Players selected capabilities across domains and then had to re-prioritise them as 'chance' interfered in the form of a 60% likelihood of 'something going wrong'. The nature of the problem was largely immaterial and the team would need to delay, cancel or descope one or more of the capabilities in front of them. Foundationally sound but largely a seminar discussion with a dice roll and appointed roles.

My starting premise here is that there is a better way to show defence procurement through gaming than simply replicating the meetings of the real world. I contend that the game is not really about buying equipment. It is about competing institutions trying to transform resources into military power under pressure, often for their own specific rather than collegiate agendas. The Government wants affordability, credibility, and visible public value. Each of the armed services want relevance, readiness, budget share, and future force structure. Industry wants profit, stability, and long-term dependency. Procurement officials want control, legitimacy, and the avoidance of major failure. Red, if they were to be a player, would want to be outpacing the blue team in terms of high or low tech or fight in a manner or time that was not predicted.

Stephen Downes-Martin’s 2025 paper, “Wargaming to Support Force Development,” captures the problem well: force development is not an internal housekeeping activity. It is a competition against adaptive adversaries who watch what we build, exploit what we neglect, and move inside the long timelines of our acquisition systems. His argument that wargaming should expose force development weaknesses and failure modes, rather than simply validate preferred concepts, sits very close to the design intent behind this game

Procurement is also not untouched territory in serious game design. Strand Simulations Group’s Guns N’ Money is a useful example: a seven-player game about cooperation and competition inside the military establishment, with players representing actors such as the ministry, industry, army, navy, and air force as they manage crises, weapons acquisition, and institutional self-interest. Its stated themes include military procurement, bureaucratic politics, and defence innovation.

Once those incentives exist, the game stops being a committee exercise and becomes a contest.

That matters because real procurement decisions are rarely clean technical choices. A new armoured vehicle, aircraft, ship, drone system, or cyber capability is never just “better” or “worse.” It has a cost, a timeline, a workforce burden, an industrial footprint, an interoperability question, a sustainment tail, and a political story attached to it. If you want to be a serious defence commentator you need to say what a military will divest or won't do to afford the new stuff you have in your shiny org chart.

One of the key design lessons so far is the need to separate capability from product. A military may identify a need for a future infantry fighting vehicle capability, but that does not mean the answer already exists. Several companies might offer different solutions, each with different costs, levels of maturity, delivery timelines, risks, and industrial benefits. The friction between identifying a requirement and fielding an actual platform is where much of the real procurement drama lives.

Legacy equipment is another major design challenge. Procurement is not always driven by bold visions of future war. Often it is driven by ageing fleets, obsolete systems, exhausted stockpiles, and equipment that has become too expensive or embarrassing to keep alive. Players should be able to delay replacement decisions, but not for free. Kicking the can down the road should increase sustainment costs, readiness penalties, breakdown risk, and political exposure.

This is why procurement makes a good game. There are no perfect answers. A cheap option may become expensive later. A prestigious programme may starve less glamorous but more urgent needs. A rapid purchase may solve an immediate problem while creating decades of dependency. A future technology may be brilliant, late, unaffordable, or all three.

Future updates will take us into the game design - ideally I will be following the model laid out above (derived from 43 sources in our NotebookLM on Wargame Design) take a look to get your own design journey started.