PVEBBER writes about the typical situation in wargaming--at least from what we see in the DoD world:

2) The operational level is driven top down by strategy, not bottom up by tactics. Well "ought to be" - you can drive it bottom up, but evaluating "exit criteria until bells and whistles go off is not a 'strategy'.
Unfortunately, most of the theater wargames I've been involved with do exactly what PVEBBER complains of in his second sentence. I'm personally convinced that not many DoD wargame/scenario designers, military officers, and the contractors who support them are not very conversant in strategy as a subject. While it is taught in various command and staff colleges and war colleges, lessons learned there are rarely reflected in exercises run in the operating forces. Most exercises are really tactical evolutions--it's rare to even see campaigning practiced well, mostly because of the lack of time. CPX evolutions normally are run in "real time" with no time compression, so one hour of exercise time equals one hour of real time. Thus, wars are won or lost in a week or two...because that's all the time we have to exercise. Training objectives are overwhelmingly tactical/procedural, so the entire scenario is skewed to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, we learn a lot that we shouldn't learn in such evolutions...