MARCH 20, 2025 – The U.S. Air Force Wargaming Institute hosted the U.S. Strategic Command-sponsored Power Wargame 2025, a five-day, joint, interagency, strategic-level wargame at Maxwell Air Force Base, March 3-7.
The Wargaming Institute hosted more than 280 participants, assembled from multiple combatant commands, the Air and Naval War Colleges, the Department of State, policy experts from across the government and think tanks. This wargame is a crucible forging the next generation of strategic thinkers.
“Power wargame is not merely an exercise — it’s key to the intellectual development of our future leaders,” said Vice Admiral Richard Correll, USSTRATCOM deputy commander. “This immersive, challenging environment forces students and participants to work through a complex strategic landscape with multiple dilemmas — fostering agility, adaptability, and critical thinking.”
The Power Wargame, named after retired Gen. Thomas Power, commander of Strategic Air Command during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is the fifth in the Power series of free play games, where players are given a specific theater-focused scenario, and assigned in-game roles to enact. The game simulated 20 days where the players made decisions and employed all the levers of national power: diplomacy, information, military, and economy.
“Wargames like this are important for identifying gaps in our planning processes, and helping refine leadership decision making,” said Lisle Babcock, AFWI director. “The word ‘game’ in ‘wargaming’ is a misnomer; activities such as Power create a cognitive sandbox to test out multiple scenarios and create a sophisticated learning environment for participants to observe how the international community, military activities, economics and civilian government leaders all interact and respond to each other as we work to defend the homeland from credible threats.”
The player’s decisions were measured against the in-game order of battle, and the moves were examined by 40 adjudicators responsible for assessing whether the moves were plausible in a real-world, high-stakes global scenario. The combination of senior leader engagement and Air University student participation was considered a highlight of this year’s event.
“This year we had a unique collection of senior leaders with both singular and collective qualifications who, significantly beyond years past, demonstrated a willingness to listen to students and their thoughts on analytical design and new concepts of military employment,” said Dr. Jeffrey Reilly, Air Command and Staff College’s Joint All Domain Strategist program director. “Through their engagement with the students, they reinforced lessons being taught in the classroom. They also supported the application of a student-built strategic framework, allowing for increased analysis of that framework, and testing of operational art.”
Power 2025 examined near-future possibilities relating to strategic competition, while focusing on efforts of assurance, deterrence and potential escalation management.
“This process is like an internal combustion engine,” said Lt. Col. Steven O’Dell, AFWI Educational Games division chief and Power 2025 co-director. “You really need to take the machine apart in order to truly understand how things work.”
“The bottom line is that wargames aren’t about winning the scenario,” Babcock said. “They are about learning from successes and failures of the participants’ activities, based on their applications of strategic and operational approaches in the immersive environment.”
The process also supports evolving military education for future conflicts.
“In Professional Military Education, we must apply a greater intellectual investment in maneuver warfare, to truly leverage cognitive competition for national security,” Reilly said. “We must find the road to victory by preparing our people, specifically our future leaders, to be able to take parts of the different theories they’ve learned and developing new concepts by exploring the art of the possible.”
The AFWI is part of Air University’s Curtis E. LeMay Center, the Department of the Air Force’s principal organization for developing and accessing Air Force doctrine and advocating for airpower doctrine in Joint and multinational arenas.
By Senior Airman Evan Lichtenhan
42nd Air Base Wing Public Affairs