
Marines and sailors would test the prototypes in something akin to a real contested environment, and then provide feedback to industry and service decision-makers. When the Navy and Marine Corps started ANTX in 2017, businesses large and small, traditional and nontraditional, were encouraged to bring prototypes to the beach for a ship-to-shore maneuver demonstration.
WHAT IS THE WARGAMING GAME CENTER SERIES
Much like the Advanced Naval Technology Exercise, or ANTX, series before it, the war-gaming facility could provide a new way for small businesses to get their ideas to the Marine Corps without needing a fully fledged manufacturing capability. But the benefits could extend to the acquisition process and to industry, providing faster and clearer requirements for companies to address emerging capability gaps, Lacy said. The center is meant to help the Marine Corps as well as its joint and interagency partners focus on preparing for future operations. And so we need to be able to rapidly identify when the adversary has created a counter-move that impacts our plans, and then find our counter to that counter - and this will really expedite that process.” “And as the commandant has described a number of times, this is likely to be against a peer adversary and move/counter-move pacing threat. “The analysis that results from this process and the decisions that are underpinned by that analysis will be part of the institutional decisions on resourcing and decisions on way ahead,” Lacy added. The center will help shape how the service looks in 2030 but will remain relevant well into the future to ensure the force stays ahead of ever-evolving threats. “Where we have something like Force Design, where we have a very concrete vision of the way ahead that needs additional details filled out, this is the center that will help us get at those details faster and figure out what works and what doesn’t work” in the war game, and then use that information to design live experiments, Lacy said. The primary mission of the center will be capability development, Lacy said, noting the facility will be large enough to host war games involving hundreds of participants and to simultaneously run multiple, differing scenarios. Sophisticated graphics and modeling technology will help players clearly see the challenges they face and recognize how new concepts, tactics and weapons would fare in a potential battle. Science and technology experts will help shape the tools adversaries employ in the modern and futuristic scenarios. Real-world intelligence will inform the background environment in the war games. The 100,000-square-foot center in Quantico, Virginia, will transform military war gaming from a tabletop exercise to an immersive experience in a simulated environment.

“Everything we can do to hasten the process of change in the right ways, that puts us in a better position for competition with a peer adversary because that adversary is not slowing down, that adversary would love it if we continue to operate as slowly as possible.” “We’re not currently manned, trained or equipped for a peer adversary in this operational environment, and we owe it to the country to get ourselves into a better place,” Lacy said.
WHAT IS THE WARGAMING GAME CENTER FULL
Construction should be complete in 2023, with the center opening in 2024 and reaching full capability in 2025, according to a news release.

The Marines broke ground on the center in May. “And so if you can hasten that process of campaign of learning and build a really rich body of analytic work that underpins those decisions, it’s really valuable to the institution.” “It’s beneficial because it enables us to speed up what we call the campaign of learning, which is about identifying a concept war gaming that concept ultimately taking that result and conducting a live, virtual or constructive experimentation with it and also identifying where new technology on the horizon may fit in to that process, and then ultimately that turns into requirements, which ideally turns into acquisitions,” Lacy told Defense News on Aug.

The Marine Corps Wargaming and Analysis Center will give the service this rapid learning capability, said Scott Lacy, the chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, which will oversee the center’s operations.
