We Have Wargames, Why Not Peacegames?
Don Smith / ThinkerFeeler

(August 27, 2026) — I asked ChatGPT:  “The Pentagon conducts war games and war gaming (computer simulations), which include simulating attacks, with either conventional or nuclear forces.  Has anyone conceived of the concept of peace games?”

ChatGPT responded:

Yes. In fact, “peace games” and “peacegaming” are established concepts, though they receive vastly less institutional attention and funding than military wargaming.

One of the clearest formulations is almost exactly what you have in mind: take the intellectual machinery of a war game—scenario, adversaries, moves, countermoves, uncertainty, time pressure—but change the objective from defeating the opponent to preventing escalation, negotiating settlements, identifying mutually acceptable concessions, and building durable peace.

For example, Foreign Policy/FP Analytics runs “PeaceGames” specifically described as applying “the same creativity and focus traditionally devoted to war games” to diplomacy and peacebuilding. Participants may include diplomats, government officials, NGOs, business leaders and experts; they work through crises with the objective of de-escalating them rather than winning a military contest. (Foreign Policy Solutions)

There are some particularly interesting precedents:

• In 2023, fifteen members of Congress participated in a peace game at the U.S. Institute of Peace involving a hypothetical Sino-Japanese crisis over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. A collision between Chinese and Japanese aircraft created the crisis, and participants had to manage U.S. responses while explicitly considering pathways toward de-escalation rather than simply optimizing military responses. The authors subsequently argued that U.S. policymakers should use peace games more systematically to explore alternatives to escalation. (Modern War Institute)
• The Diplomatic Studies Foundation and the University of Maryland’s ICONS project developed a Peace Game for State Department, USAID, intelligence and military personnel. Its premise is that civilian officials ought to practice “winning the peace” with something approaching the seriousness with which military officers practice fighting wars. (Army University Press)
• The U.S. Institute of Peace has used computer-assisted peacebuilding simulations for years. One, SENSE, models a post-conflict society and gives participants feedback on things such as political stability, social justice and economic recovery. Interestingly, this work was conducted partly with the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense. (United States Institute of Peace)
• Principles for Peace and CRISP now operate an AI-assisted “PeaceGames” platform explicitly modeled on traditional military wargaming. Players can represent governments, armed groups, mediators, international organizations and civil society and test diplomatic settlements and peace processes. Their system won a simulation-industry innovation award in 2024. (Principles for Peace)
• The idea is not especially new. A 1999 academic article titled “Simulation as a Possible Tool for Peace” explicitly asked, essentially, Why not peace gaming? It proposed assigning participants to antagonistic parties but charging them with finding peaceful solutions to conflicting objectives.

There is even a NATO literature on “peacegaming.” NATO authors have described it as an extension of conventional wargaming into situations where political, economic, diplomatic and social variables have to be considered alongside military ones. (NATO Joint Warfare Centre)

But I think there is a more radical version of your idea

Most existing “peace games” are still crisis-management exercises. Someone starts a crisis and the players try to prevent it from becoming a war. That’s useful, but it leaves much of the Pentagon’s wargaming paradigm intact.

You could imagine something considerably more ambitious.

Suppose the scenario were:

It is January 2028. Relations between the United States and China are deteriorating over Taiwan. Your mission is to make the probability of a U.S.–China war less than 5% over the next ten years, without sacrificing Taiwanese self-government or Chinese security interests.

Teams might represent the United States, China, Taiwan, Japan, ASEAN, UN, businesses and civil society.

Instead of scoring:

ships sunk / airfields destroyed / territory captured

you score:

war probability ↓
civilian deaths ↓
arms expenditures ↓
economic disruption ↓
mutual security ↑
political autonomy preserved ↑
verification and compliance ↑
public acceptance ↑

Then you could allow the players to “buy” policies:

arms-control agreements, hotlines, troop withdrawals, demilitarized zones, sanctions relief, security guarantees, UN observers, trade agreements, neutrality arrangements, confidence-building measures, shared resource agreements, peacekeeping forces, referenda, inspections, treaties, cultural exchanges, etc.

And the Red Team’s job wouldn’t necessarily be “China.” A really sophisticated peace game would have Red Teams whose job was to discover how the peace agreement could fail:

What makes China believe we’re cheating? What makes Taiwan reject this? What domestic political event destroys the agreement? What accidental encounter starts an escalation spiral?

That is exactly analogous to military red-teaming—but employed to attack weaknesses in a peace plan rather than weaknesses in an enemy army.

The asymmetry is striking. Governments routinely spend enormous sums gaming questions like:

“What happens if China attacks Taiwan?”

but comparatively little gaming:

“What sequence of policies makes an attack on Taiwan increasingly unlikely over twenty years?”

Those are both strategic problems. There is no methodological reason the second cannot be subjected to simulation, adversarial testing, Monte Carlo modeling, game theory and repeated exercises just as rigorously as the first.

And that, I think, is where the concept becomes much more interesting than merely teaching diplomats negotiation skills. It would amount to developing a genuine discipline of peace engineering parallel to military operational planning.