The phrase “war games” falls in the category of oxymoron – generally defined as a combination of incongruous or contradictory words. Familiar examples include minor crisis, Civil War, jumbo shrimp, and old news. We all get the idea.
I’m writing about war games today because of a brief story I heard this week. In a CNN interview over the weekend, former Alabama Senator Doug Jones talked about the role he played in the documentary War Games that aired at the Sundance Film Festival in January. For this film he played the role of the attorney general, and he says that the film is a reminder for the public about the possible outcomes of the attack on the Capitol.
The documentary portrays an exercise where members of the federal government, intelligence services, and armed forces run a simulation in which a paramilitary group attempts to disrupt the certification of the 2024 presidential election that the sitting commander-in-chief fairly won. The film’s director, Tony Gerber, suggested that the Biden Administration should be doing similar exercises. He went on to say that Vet Voice, a nonpartisan veterans group that organized the simulation for the documentary, has written a report based on the exercise and is sharing the findings with “top levels of government.”
I won’t go into great detail in this essay, but I will provide the highlights. The “game” began with this prompt: “You have six hours to prevent a civil war.” What follows is a simulated training exercise in which veterans of the armed forces, intelligence services, and state and federal government play out the possibility of an organized attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2024 presidential election. Conducted on the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, in a mock-up of the White House situation room, the simulation confronts the sobering possibility that even after that object lesson in the fragile nature of our democracy, the nation may not be fully prepared for what comes next.
Participants in the exercise included 35 members of the past five presidencies, including (along with Senator Jones) former Montana governor Steve Bullock, retired General Wesley Clark, retired Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, former US Senator from North Dakota Heidi Heitkamp, and former FBI agent Peter Strzok. According to Bullock, many officials forgot that it was a documentary while they were working through the exercise.
I haven’t seen any plans to air this documentary to a wider audience.
This story caught my interest because I have participated in a variety of wargaming activities.
My first war games occurred while I was working for Science Applications International Corporation in the 1980s. We had a contract with the Department of Defense to assess US nuclear capabilities in the Pacific, and as part of that contract we conducted a war game involving a variety of Pentagon officials (both civilian and uniformed) as we played out various scenarios in a face-to-face war game (no computers yet that could do this). My role was to develop what are called “implementers” – events that are thrown into the planned scenario to see how the players employed existing procedures and policies. The point was to determine if there were holes in the procedures that were revealed only under the stress of an unknown implementer – which could be enemy actions, civilian population issues, or even weather events.
One interesting thing emerged from this set of war games – the uniformed participants were much less likely to escalate the conflict than were the civilians. People in the military know what war is like and don’t pursue it as cavalierly as desktop warriors sometimes do.
The second time I was involved in a wargaming-type activity was a few years later, when I was working for the BDM Corporation, another defense contractor (or beltway bandit). This time our contract was with the Office of Counterterrorism Programs in the State Department, and our specific charge was to assess the security of third-world airports. This contract required the team from BDM to do a fair amount of traveling to airports in the Third World, including Barbados, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. These site visits were required so that we could gain on-the-ground knowledge of the physical and security layout of these airports and then design a series of scenarios that airport officials could use to conduct their own wargaming – or practice sessions – to test their own security procedures and find weaknesses.
As I left BDM, we had been granted an extension of this contract, allowing us to refine our scenarios, have them translated into Spanish (this was specifically for Guatemala), and then applied during subsequent trips to the countries involved.
Back to the Sundance documentary. One report about the film and its reception at the festival noted that the Biden administration is undoubtedly planning for this type of event as it faces the 2024 election cycle. #P01135809 and his acolytes continue to call for violence if he doesn’t win the election. In part because officials in the last administration resisted any plans for a smooth transition, the normal threat assessments and resulting planning didn’t happen. No one is going to let that slide after the November election.
So interesting. Thanks.
Interesting and valuable background, Karen, for an effort within the current administration which is hopefully now in full-on mode.