Naval Wargaming and Quantitative History

The wargames developed by the U.S. and Royal navies in the interwar period condense in their rules the lessons learned from the Great War. Through a computer simulation that models these rules, we examine how some of the early cruiser actions of 1914 and 1915 conform to the expected mean outcome stipulated by the games, and attempt to explain any deviations.

Alvaro Anton-Radigales is a PhD candidate at the Spanish Ministry of Defense's IUGM. He specializes in combat modelling, with a focus on naval warfare in the World Wars. A teacher and programmer, he is an alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's IVLP program, selected for his work in education as the lead instructor of a long-running project to teach STEM skills in underserved communities.