Why My Background Made CADE Possible

CADE did not start as an AI project.

It started long before that, with wargaming.

I have a very clear memory of buying my first board wargame in the late 1970s on Guam. It was Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader. From that point on, I was hooked. When computers became part of the picture in the 1980s, I added computer wargames too, but board wargames were where it started for me.

That matters, but not because playing games automatically makes someone a designer.

It does not.

Playing wargames gave me a way to think about decisions, tradeoffs, friction, timing, constraints, and consequences. I did not know that at the time. It took years in the Army before I made the connection.

After I retired from the Army in 2001, my first job was with Northrop Grumman at the Command and General Staff Officer Course. The work involved Decisive Action, a commercial game that CGSOC wanted to use. A few years later, I went to West Point as a GS-12 managing the simulations center, then called the WARCEN.

From there, I spent two years in Afghanistan training the Afghan Uniformed Police. Later, I went to Ukraine to work at the Odessa Ground Forces Academy, helping develop NATO-based curriculum as part of a Department of State program focused on improving professional military education.

There is a common thread through all of that work.

It was never just about knowing doctrine. It was about helping people learn through decisions.

At CGSOC, that happened through Decisive Action. At West Point, it happened through different commercial games like Virtual Battlespace and Follow Me. In Ukraine, it happened through curriculum development, training design, and the need to translate NATO concepts into something useful for a different audience and context.

One of the reasons I was hired for those roles was my background in gaming and simulation. In Odessa, that connection was even more direct: they were using Follow Me, a program I had contributed to developing while I was at West Point.

So when I talk about CADE, the Combined Arms Decision Exercise, I am not talking about something that came out of nowhere.

CADE was built with AI assistance, but it was not built from AI alone. It came from years of working around military education, staff training, simulations, wargaming, and partner-force development.

That background gave me the pattern recognition to see the problem.

AI helped me move faster.

The experience helped me know what was worth building.

The next field note covers the meeting where CADE was born and the training problem that forced us to come up with something different.