Wargaming Certificate (WG)

Mr. C. Travis Reese is the Director of the Wargaming and Net Assessment division of Troika Solutions, LLC. Mr. Reese is a Marine Corps veteran serving for 21 years before retiring in 2016. Throughout his career, he supported institutional strategy development, operational planning, capability development, wargaming, and force design efforts. His current practice provides wargaming and analytic services to defense and business as well as wargaming education to enable organizations to incorporate wargaming into their operations.

Mr. Reese’s expertise is in institutional strategy, future force readiness, and force design where he honed his craft in wargaming in support of those efforts. He has led wargames at every level for discovery and analysis covering topics as varied as amphibious operations, counter-UAS directed energy systems, and man-machine teaming for subterranean operations to name a few. Notably he co-authored institutional strategy documents as the lead writer for two Commandant of the Marine Corps’ planning guidances and led the establishment of the Joint Force Operating Scenario process within the Department of Defense. Mr. Reese has developed curriculum on design-based approaches to planning and strategy and writes routinely on force planning and wargaming.

Dr. Nathaniel P. Ambler is a principal researcher and systems engineer whose work advances the application of systems engineering, operations research, and strategic wargaming to national security strategy, force development, and operational decision-making. Grounded in mission engineering, his research examines how strategic objectives, operational concepts, force structure, technology, organizations, and human decision-making interact to shape mission outcomes. He develops rigorous analytical frameworks that enable defense and national security organizations to frame complex problems, identify critical dependencies, test strategic assumptions, evaluate alternative courses of action, and translate strategic priorities into operationally relevant capabilities.

His current research explores the integration of strategic wargaming with operations research, game-theoretic analysis, modeling and simulation, decision science, and system-of-systems engineering. His interests include force design, capability portfolio assessment, concept development and experimentation, emerging-technology integration, adversarial adaptation, and decision-making under uncertainty. A central focus of his work is establishing wargaming as part of a disciplined analytical enterprise: linking human judgment, formal models, and empirical evidence to generate defensible insights for strategy, operational planning, capability development, and institutional learning.

Dr. Ambler brings to this work a career spanning national security, diplomacy, intelligence, aerospace, and engineering research. A retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, he supported complex policy, intelligence, and operational decisions across interagency and international environments. His earlier technical work encompassed NASA Shuttle Processing and liquid-propulsion research, the development and testing of sensor technologies for reduced-pressure and space environments, research on human performance in demanding spaceflight operations, and operational responsibility for an International Space Station–based remote-sensing platform. At Virginia Tech, his doctoral research applied agent-based modeling and complex adaptive systems theory to examine how organizational structure, communication, and complexity influence the performance of collaborative engineering design teams.

Dr. Ambler holds a PhD and an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech, an MS in Space Studies with an engineering emphasis from the University of North Dakota, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida.