Consilio et fide
Independent analysis for matters of national consequence.
Holmvard Systems conducts independent defense and foreign policy analysis, combining wargaming, physical science, and defense economics to assess doctrine, emerging capabilities, and the balance of military power.
Research
Areas of research.
Doctrine and Strategy
How military doctrine is conceived, adopted, and implemented across the joint force, and how operational concepts such as joint all-domain operations hold up against an adaptive adversary, deterrence dynamics, and escalation risk.
Defense Economics
Defense macroeconomics: the effects of military spending on growth, inflation, and fiscal capacity; industrial base capacity and surge production; procurement cost growth; and the cost-imposition strategies that decide long-term competition between great powers.
Wargaming and Simulation
The design, execution, and analysis of analytic wargames, from seminar and matrix games to computational campaign models, agent-based simulation, and Monte Carlo methods. These are used to test courses of action, expose assumptions, and estimate outcomes under uncertainty.
Emerging Technology
Autonomous systems and human-machine teaming, counterspace threats to space-based nuclear command, control, and communications, and the cyber and quantum technologies that may reshape them. Our approach is theoretical: we examine the physical principles and constraints behind each technology to clarify what it could make possible and what it would mean for doctrine, deterrence, and escalation.
About
Our method
How a study proceeds.
Inquiry.
Every project opens by defining the question precisely: the decision it informs, the actors and capabilities involved, and the historical record that bears upon it. Before any view is offered, we establish what is known, what is disputed, and what remains to be learned.Analysis.
We test the question against the full record: doctrinal and strategic documents, open-source data, historical precedent, physics-based performance estimates, and economic and cost models. Where the established instruments are inadequate to the question, we build our own.Findings.
Our findings are delivered in writing, together with the reasoning and sources on which they rest. Each finding is designated as documented, contested, or projected, so that the reader may weigh it accordingly and decide with a clear view of what is known and what is not.Demonstration.
Where a finding depends on how a contest unfolds over time, we build wargames, simulations, and models that let the client see the result, vary the assumptions, and examine the consequences of a choice before they arise.
The founder
Alyssa I. Agard founded Holmvard Group and serves as its principal. She is a defense analyst and historian whose work combines wargaming, simulation, defense macroeconomics, and the physics of emerging military technologies, with particular focus on doctrine, autonomous systems, and the space and cyber domains.Her research has been published by Marine Corps University Press and the U.S. Naval Institute. Publications and qualifications are available upon request.
Contact
Research inquiries
We welcome inquiries from institutions, agencies, and research partners regarding studies, wargames, and briefings, and we respond to each one personally and in confidence.