Dr Peter P. Perla III, Wargame, Theorists, Designer, Author, Manager

Peter P. Perla III has been involved with wargaming, both hobby and professional, for over forty years, an involvement that sparked a lifelong interest in military history and games of strategy. A frequent player of commercial wargames as a youngster, he had already published articles in the hobby press

before he was an undergraduate. After earning a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University with his thesis on Lanchester mathematical combat models, he joined the Center for Naval Analyses in 1977 as a naval operations research analyst.

By the early 1980’s Dr. Perla had worked on several navy campaign studies, designed naval games, documented existing navy wargames, and led a study to define the principal uses of wargaming and to identify some of its fundamental principles. Over the next few years, he participated in a nearly a dozen classified major navy wargame, including the Global War Game. Since the first edition of his book, The Art of Wargaming, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1990, Dr. Perla has continued his work on Navy wargaming, and branched out into analysis and gaming for other U.S. government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the intelligence community, and the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Dr. Perla is now regarded as one of the nations’s leading experts on wargaming and its use in defense research.

(Last Updated 31 May 2011.)

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