Applications

Where ACE Is Used

A traditional exercise lights a few circles of the outcome space. The ensemble expands the explored scenario space. Outcomes can turn up outside every circle a single exercise would have lit. Illustrative geometry, synthetic field.

This illustration requires JavaScript. It shows a few lantern circles lighting part of a dark outcome space, then a much larger region illuminating, with a marker appearing outside every lantern circle.

Use Case 1: Combatant Command Conflict Simulation

Combatant commands and joint staffs run exercises to test operational concepts, but traditional approaches produce a single narrative outcome. Government auditors have found that results from many wargames are left completely unrecorded or unshared across organizational stovepipes (GAO-23-105351, Apr. 2023)[GAO 2023]. ACE transforms these exercises into designed experiments: hundreds of adversarial scenarios, each with AI agents reasoning through doctrine and constraints. Decision-makers see outcome distributions across the full scenario set, not a single story about how one game played out.

Use Case 2: CONOPS Stress-Testing

Before committing to a concept of operations, stress-test it against adversaries that reason. ACE explores how a CONOPS performs across a range of adversary responses, environmental conditions, and force postures. You find the failure modes in simulation, not in execution.

Use Case 3: Exercise Augmentation

ACE plugs into human-led exercises at three points: before (analytical baseline and scenario design), during (real-time excursions exploring alternative decisions), and after (quantitative post-exercise analysis grounded in the full scenario set, not facilitator notes).

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Abstract options and synthetic distributions, illustrative.

This interactive requires JavaScript. It shows a trajectory pausing at a decision node with three options, then reveals an outcome distribution behind each option once one is chosen.

Use Case 4: Strategic Foresight

Strategic foresight requires understanding not just what might happen, but which strategies remain viable across many possible futures. ACE applies the same designed-experiment approach used for military conflict simulation to any domain where decisions are made under adversarial uncertainty: commercial market entry, policy analysis, international negotiations, coalition dynamics. The connection is direct: if you can model the actors, their objectives, and their constraints, ACE can show you the distribution of outcomes. Foresight stops being a workshop exercise and becomes a quantitative discipline.

Conflict simulation and strategic foresight are the same machinery pointed at different questions. A wargame asks how a plan survives an adversary. A strategic foresight exercise asks which strategies remain viable across many plausible futures: markets, policy environments, coalitions, competitors. ACE runs both with the same discipline: agent teams play the actors, a white cell referees the exercise, adjudicating moves, keeping scenario logic honest, and ruling on what the world does next, while the run ensemble turns one facilitated conversation into a distribution of futures. Where a traditional foresight workshop produces flip-chart scenarios, an adjudicated foresight exercise produces outcome distributions, decision points, and a ledger of why each future unfolded the way it did.

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Sources

GAO-23-105351. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Apr. 2023. (Wargaming results unrecorded/unshared finding.)

Consolidated citations for the whole site: References.

Every game is fictional. Every number is real.