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the strategic need for tactical excellence: raising the surface navy’s combat capability. then what? wargaming the interface between strategy and operations, pt. 2. the bad day scenario, part 2: dynamic force employment and distributed operations. then what? wargaming the interface between strategy and operations, pt. 1. wargaming is ubiquitous throughout the u.s. armed forces as a tool for research, education, training, and influence. it is a flexible tool, adaptable to different scenarios, purposes, and levels of war. it is in this last arena, levels of war, that gaming organizations and their the inherent nature of wargaming requires delineation and focus in game objectives and design. a game to address all three levels of war, strategic, operational, and tactical, is simply not feasible, requiring too many players, too much money, and too much time. the normal approach is to pick a level of war to play, with the other levels being either scripted, managed by the control cell, or ignored altogether. even when a game is designed to incorporate free play at two levels, some kind of pruning of factors – frequently time – must occur to make the game feasible within budget and schedule constraints. the net result is that a robust exploration of the among the consequences of this gap in gaming could be a failure of communication and coordination among policy, strategy, and operational decision-makers, such as occurred in vietnam and iraq. this series will discuss the nature of this gaming gap and will offer some the doctrinal partitioning of war into three levels in the u.s. is a relatively recent occurrence. the army’s 1982 field manual 100-5 – and subsequent practice – is the level of command at which campaigns and major operations are planned and directed. this doctrinal development simply provided a theoretical basis for a command structure that had existed since world war ii. between fighting units and their direct commanders in the field and at sea, there were established theater headquarters that not only oversaw,