The Empty Chair: Designing Wargames That Account for Absent Decision-Makers

Most wargames assume someone is minding the store. Every role gets a player, every cell has a voice, and decisions move through the chain of command the way doctrine says they should. That assumption is a design flaw.

Photo by Matias Luge on Pexels.

Real crises routinely feature the wrong people making the right decisions, or the right people being completely unreachable. The Cuban Missile Crisis nearly ended badly on October 27, 1962 precisely because key figures were managing fatigue, competing signals, and incomplete delegation. During the 1983 Able Archer exercise, Soviet duty officers were interpreting NATO signals without full access to their own leadership's intent. Absence, not malice, nearly caused a catastrophe.

So how do you build a wargame that treats unavailability as a first-class variable rather than an afterthought?

Design the principal before you design the absence

Start by mapping decision authority explicitly. Before your scenario launches, document which roles hold veto power, which hold initiative authority, and which are purely advisory. This is boring work. Do it anyway. You cannot design a meaningful absence if you have not first specified what presence does.

For each role, write a one-paragraph brief on what only that role can authorize. Not what they typically do. What only they can do. In most organizations, this list is shorter than people expect, which is itself a finding worth surfacing.

Inject the absence with a trigger, not a timer

The weak version of this mechanic: remove a player at the 90-minute mark and see what happens. Teams adapt quickly because the absence feels artificial and scheduled.

The stronger version ties absence to scenario events. The senior decision-maker goes dark when a specific inbound crisis demands attention elsewhere. A communications blackout hits the forward command post exactly when the ambiguous contact report comes in. The trigger makes the absence feel causal, which forces players to reason about it rather than just route around it.

Below is one way to wire this into your scenario flow:

graph TD
    A[Scenario Event Injected] --> B{Triggers Absence Condition?}
    B -- Yes --> C[Role Flagged Unavailable]
    B -- No --> D[Normal Play Continues]
    C --> E{Does Team Recognize Gap?}
    E -- No --> F[Umpire Flags Missed Decision Point]
    E -- Yes --> G[Team Attempts Workaround]
    G --> H[Umpire Adjudicates Workaround Validity]

The umpire's job at node H is consequential. Workarounds that rely on informal authority, verbal delegation, or assumed consent should be adjudicated more harshly than players expect. That friction is the point.

Give substitutes the wrong information

When a principal goes absent, whoever fills the gap inherits their role but not their situational awareness. Design that gap explicitly. The substitute player receives a truncated version of the briefing packet: some items redacted, some simply missing because no one thought to pass them along.

This sounds unfair. It is supposed to. Succession under pressure is rarely clean. The 2002 TOPOFF 2 exercise (a full-scale federal response simulation) surfaced repeated instances where acting officials were operating on outdated information because information transfer protocols assumed orderly transitions. They are almost never orderly.

Watch for the normalization move

Here is where most teams surprise themselves. Given an absent decision-maker, players will often proceed as if the absent authority had been consulted and implicitly approved. They call it "acting within the spirit of guidance." What it actually is: filling uncertainty with optimism.

Build a specific debrief question around this: "At what point did you stop waiting for authorization and why?" The answers locate the precise threshold where teams convert absence into assumed consent. That threshold varies wildly by organizational culture, and knowing where it sits is operationally valuable.

The absence as a probe, not a punishment

None of this works if players feel the empty chair is punitive. Frame the mechanic as a probe: you are stress-testing your organization's actual decision topology, not testing whether individual players are good at their jobs. The question on the table is whether the system can route around a missing node, and if so, at what cost.

Run the scenario twice if resources allow. Once with the principal present, once without. The delta between outcomes is your finding. Document it, brief it, and resist the urge to fix it with a new procedure. Procedures do not survive contact with actual crises any better than wargames do. What survives is judgment, and judgment only develops when players have practiced making calls without the comfort of the person who is supposed to be there.