Considerable experience has been gained in technology seminar war games by NATO as an alliance and by several individual nations including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Some useful reports of their experiences are:
A technology seminar war game draws together two communities represented in a military group and a technology group.
Members of the military group come with their experiences with tactical, operational, and strategic issues and the with notions of capability requirements that some technology may be suitable to satisfy. While they may not have a clear image of how some technology may be implemented to satisfy their requirements, they may have some broad vision of where technology may help them or their successors on future battlefields.
In addition to their impressions of what requirements for technology they may have, the military group should also be aware of ancillary issues of introducing new technology. These issues may include the ability to train military personnel to employ future technology appropriately, the feasibility of maintaining high-tech systems on the battlefield, or the ability to integrate some futuristic prototype with legacy systems. Note: Some strongly held beliefs on such ancillary issues may be the result of myths that can develop within military communities -- science and technology can play a role in "myth busting" here, just as they do in the civilian world.
As illustrated in the diagram, some military requirements may be decomposable into "sub-requirements". (And these may be decomposable in additional levels, not shown in the diagram.) Before a technology seminar war game, there may also be requirements of which no one is yet aware: the unrecognized requirement shown at the bottom.
A technology seminar war game is an excellent venue for members of the military group to clarify their ideas on exactly what some requirement really is. For example: "Do we just need a longer range sensor?" "Yes, of course... ummm, but it should also be stealthier than what we have now. Oh, and it would be better than what we have now if we could get by with less tech support for maintenance."
Members of the technology group may come with fleshed out technology concepts for which they hope military colleagues will provide a critique. Members of the technology group often lack the military experience to visualize how their ideas will be applied to military operations, and they may be blind to constraints that the military may consider vital, e.g., easy to train, efficient in the use of scarce battlefield resources, frugal in demands for highly trained technical support personnel.
There may also be technology subject matter experts without their own pet concepts, who are participating to provide reference material on the scientific or technological constraints of some proposals.
Many members of the technology group may come to the game with concepts, but without a well-developed idea of how they may be employed on military operations. For them, one of the benefits of a war game is to see more explicitly how the military could be employing their concepts. And there may be surprises, innovative military participants may well find an unanticipated application for some proposed technology concept.
Another benefit to members of the techology group is that they may come to realize that some technologies might be configured in a way that was not obvious before the game. It may take the interaction of military and technology subject matter experts to find such undeveloped concepts
Members of the technology group should be given advanced notice of certain aspects of the scenarios of the wargame, e.g., the locale, the general nature of the operations, the types of equipment the military expect to employ. This will give them a contextual understanding for the natures of technology that may be appropraiate (and what may be entirely inappropriate).
Technology concepts should be developed to the point of the an "artist's impression" -- enough for game players to visualize how the concept would be implemented on the battlefield. In future-thinking games, this should be sufficient for an appropriate discussion.
Often after a call for candidate technology concepts, there are too many to address with limited resources for a short war game. This happened in the NATO studies of future land operations (NATO LAND OPS 2020 and URBAN OPS 2020). The reports on these studies outline how the study group "down selected" from a large number of candidate techology concepts (over 100) to a more manageable number (about 30). The down-selected concepts were then incorporated into a series of technology seminar war games.
Military participants in a technology seminar war game may leave with their eyes opened in many respects. They may discover new technologies that will affect their specific military speciality; they may come to realize they had a requirement that had gone unrecognized; they may develop social contacts with members of the technology group that can be exploited later to develop new applications of technology.
Some members of the technology group may leave a technology seminar war game with their egos bruised: that concept that looked so great back in the lab might get demolished by members of the military group. Often, such criticisms are not over what a new concept might contribute to future military operations, but more over how difficult it may be to train troops, or how expensive it could be to maintain, or how difficult it may be to provide necessary resources in the middle of a fire fight. Or, the criticism may be even bruising: the concept is simply not required -- there may already be something almost as good available. Perhaps there are substitutes to meet some apparent requirement that are as good, and even more appealing to the military group.