Position: AI Is Not Ready for Strategic Conflicts

Open-ended strategic wargames are high-stakes LM-based social simulations: they model adversaries, institutions, escalation, plan brittleness, doctrine, and crisis response. Language models (LMs) are attractive in these settings because they can play agents, generate scenario branches, adjudicate ambiguous actions, and summarize lessons. The same affordances make open-ended player and adjudicator roles dangerous: model language can determine both what an actor attempts and what subsequently becomes simulated reality. This position paper argues that no LM-enabled wargame should inform high-stakes planning, doctrine, policy, or crisis response without an auditable safety case, and that the proper use of openended wargames today is to stress-test decision-influencing LM agents. We identify five failure modes: decision laundering, adjudication opacity, role collapse, escalation-through-adjudication, and failure of strategic imagination. Ordinary benchmarks cannot establish safety for these settings. Wargames can expose failures as stress tests; they are not themselves safety cases for consequential use. Until such safety cases exist, AI is not ready for strategic conflicts.