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Short abstract

Generative AI is transforming military wargaming into a system that produces synthetic futures of war. This paper argues that LLM-enabled wargaming creates a “fiction of control” while embedding algorithmic authority within a new political economy of military AI and software-based warfare.

Long abstract

(open panel) Contemporary debates on military artificial intelligence largely focus on autonomous weapons and the automation of lethal force. This paper shifts attention to an earlier and insufficiently theorized site of algorithmic warfare: AI-enabled military wargaming. With the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), wargaming is increasingly transformed into a generative simulation environment that produces not only scenarios but coherent worlds of strategic plausibility, thereby shaping how military futures, threats, and responsibilities are imagined in advance of violence.

The paper conceptualizes this transformation as a fiction of control: a socio-technical formation in which human oversight is rhetorically affirmed, infrastructurally embedded, and visually staged, even as epistemic authority shifts into algorithmic systems. Rather than disappearing, meaningful human control is reconfigured into a relational form that remains symbolically visible while becoming epistemically attenuated. To situate this development within the broader expansion of software-based war, the paper examines the emerging political economy of AI-enabled wargaming. It further analyzes which actors develop LLM-based wargaming systems and how boundaries between technology start-ups, defense contractors, and state actors are increasingly blurred through dual-use narratives and militarized AI infrastructures.

Building on STS scholarship on algorithmic perception and distributed agency and analyses of the technopolitics of war, the paper argues that generative wargaming functions as an epistemic infrastructure of militarized world-making. In this emerging military-AI ecosystem, algorithmic systems do not simply support decisions; they increasingly shape the conditions under which war becomes knowable, imaginable, and governable.