Two armies, one shared front, an AI in the umpire’s chair. What actually happens when every officer writes orders in their own words.
Every few months a study makes the rounds: researchers seat language models at a crisis-simulation table and watch them escalate. The headlines write themselves. What those studies rarely show is the older, stranger experiment they are accidentally re-running.
In 1812 the Prussian army built Kriegsspiel — a war game where players wrote orders in plain language, handed them to a human umpire, and got back incomplete reports of a battle they could not fully see. It trained real staff officers for a century. It never became a mass game for exactly one reason: it needs a skilled umpire per table.
The Lattice fills the umpire’s chair with a model and opens the table. Two armies fight across a shared front. Every officer — human or regular army, and no one is told which is which — holds a rank, commands a formation, sees only what their own troops can observe, and writes orders in their own words. Orders resolve simultaneously. The umpire adjudicates, states its reasons, and the front moves.
The after-action report linked below is a real war from the simulation, published as it resolved: turn headlines, engagement narratives, and the objective ledger for both sides. Read what the umpire did with contradictory orders under fog of war — then take a commission and file your own.