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3. Into the Vault
605 Plays9 months ago
Dr. Reid Pauly, the Dean's Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Brown University joins Andrew for a conversion about Cold Wargaming. Reid has spent significant time in different archives, trying to reconstruct the decision making processes inside games being played at the Pentagon during the Cold War. In this episode Andrew and Reid focus on the legacy of a particular set of Cold Wargames and the way they still shape the way we think about geopolitics today.
Key Points
- Wargaming is a particularly useful tool for those in the nuclear field, where we lack real world data on use cases but still want to understand risks and escalation pathways. Wargames allow us to study nuclear war in simulated environments. This method was also popular in the U.S. Defense Department during the Cold War for the insights they could bring on potential nuclear crises.
- Thomas Schelling and Lincoln Bloomfield played a series of wargames at MIT and with the Department of Defense, exploring topics such as nuclear deterrence, compellence, and brinkmanship. Their games were more political than previous military-only games, driving at topics like the effects of nuclear weapons on interstate competition
- Schelling and Bloomfield walked players through several different problem sets and geopolitical crises, including conflict in Europe, strategies to end the war in Vietnam, and responses to events on the Korean Peninsula. In these games, Schelling and Bloomfield introduced new design choices, including not telling players when rounds would end and adding more politics and diplomatic options to games.
Reid’s Reading Recommendations
- Reid Pauly’s “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security (2018)
- John Badham’s 1983 film WarGames
- The Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at the Hoover Institute, directed by Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider, and its publicly available wargaming archive.
A reading list to accompany this podcast series can be found at: https://brsl.berkeley.edu/podcasts/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Risk Calculus' Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
It's fascinating to hear anybody in a war game express concerns about escalation because it's just a war game. They're just sitting in the basement of maybe the Pentagon or somewhere debating options, but we see them taken incredibly seriously because they know that it could be real.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Risk Calculus, a podcast from the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab. I'm Andrew Ready, the lab's founder and your host for this series on wargaming. In the last episode, John and I talked about the long history of wargaming. You also heard about some of the games that were played in the United States at the dawn of the atomic age. My guest today has spent a lot of time in the archives trying to reconstruct the decision making inside these Cold War games, exploring nuclear brinkmanship and strategic decisions in Korea and Vietnam.
00:00:52
Speaker
In this episode, we'll take a closer look at their particular series of war games, what's the legacy of these games, and how do they shape the way that we think about geopolitics even now.
Meet Dr. Reed Polley: Expert on Nuclear Security
00:01:04
Speaker
We're delighted to be joined by Dr. Reed Polley, Reed's the Dean's Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Brown University. So Reed, can you tell us a little bit about some of the wargames that you focus on? Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here, Andrew. Thanks for having me. I got fascinated by wargaming when I was a graduate student at MIT.
00:01:24
Speaker
as a scholar of nuclear issues, nuclear strategy, and nonproliferation, it's a field that lacks data in the real world, right? So it's very hard to understand the dynamics of nuclear war when you don't have nuclear wars, and yet we don't want nuclear wars, and so how do we get the data to study them?
00:01:42
Speaker
When I was at MIT, I discovered through some coursework, some historical posters on the wall, and through some wonderful archivists that I got chatting with, there's actually a good history of war gaming at MIT after the Second World War.
Historical Innovations in Wargaming at MIT
00:01:57
Speaker
And some of the earliest innovations in the Cold War about running political military war games happened at MIT in a collaboration between a guy named Lincoln Bloomfield and an economist from Harvard up the road called Thomas Schelling.
00:02:11
Speaker
And they designed new kinds of war games that were based on the kinds of militaries around the world and especially the Pentagon had been using, but in updating them in a way that made them more political, made them more useful for studying strategy, things like how will nuclear weapons affect competition between states.
00:02:32
Speaker
And they did some of that earliest work at MIT. And so I went to the MIT archives and saw some of the records of these war games. And that's where it started. But it took me to lots of other presidential archives and on a historical journey to figure out how much of this data we could hoover up and what's available, what still needs to be declassified, what I need to file FOIA's for and all that kind of thing.
Thomas Schelling's Strategic Contributions
00:02:57
Speaker
Obviously, as well, one of the parts of your bio is that you got to spend a summer at Rand with one of the shops that's kind of at the forefront of the defense community, Wargaming. I'm just wondering if you can reflect on the fact that Tom Schelling and Lincoln Bloomfield came at gaming as scholars. Did that change the way that they were doing Wargaming design or were they kind of very similar in the way that they were doing the game setups to what you might see inside the defense community? Did it matter at all that they were in the academy?
00:03:23
Speaker
Sure. I think it mattered a great deal. Unfortunately, neither of them are still with us. Lincoln Bloomfield had passed away before I got interested in this. I did know Thomas Schelling. He was a wonderful man, but he has also passed away now. Tom Schelling is an economist who is credited with, by a lot of people, but especially the Nobel Prize committee, with helping humanity prevent nuclear war.
00:03:44
Speaker
And the reason is that Schelling's work, even though he's an economist, is all about trying to figure out how nuclear weapons change international politics and how it is that states can still compete under the shadow of nuclear war without actually turning to the use of the weapons and how they can bargain, how they can come to new mutual agreements about what is an acceptable division of whatever pie we're
00:04:09
Speaker
conflicting over while fighting, if anything, only limited wars and not total wars that result in nuclear war. And he's got a lot of fantastic ideas, the genius ideas about how that is. He invented the concept of compelling, which is different from deterrence. He invented the idea of nuclear brinkmanship that you can engage in strategies of risk manipulation to try and signal that I'm willing to
00:04:32
Speaker
risk nuclear war more than you're willing to risk nuclear war and therefore we could in theory come to a new status quo and resolve our differences simply by comparing who's willing to risk nuclear war more and not actually requiring anyone to fire a shot.
Incorporating Uncertainty in Wargames
00:04:49
Speaker
So all that is to say Schelling has these great ideas and they're all theories, especially in the late 50s, 1960s. And he goes and works at the Rand Corporation and he sees how they're doing war gaming. And he thinks, ah, this is a potential method that I could use to test my theories of how different strategic actors are going to interact in a world where they have nuclear weapons, but both of them would like to avoid nuclear war, but both of them would like to threaten nuclear war in order to get what they want.
00:05:19
Speaker
And so he's thinking about how to design a war game that does that, but he's thinking about it as a scholar. And so he makes a couple of key changes to the games that he's observed at the Rand Corporation, him and Lincoln Bloomfield. And they say things like, hey, we can't tell the players when the game's going to end because that's not like the world. We can't just say, oh, we're going to have three rounds. And in the third round, you feel free to use nuclear weapons because it's over after that.
00:05:48
Speaker
He's saying that when you look at his writings about it, he thinks it's a shame that the limits of these games are always decided in advance. It's also a shame if you're scoping out the prospect of nuclear escalation. So sometimes you're really interested in studying conventional war. And so the game designers will tell the teams, okay, so you can't use nuclear weapons in this game because we really want to understand the limits of combined arms warfare in the inner German border or something.
00:06:14
Speaker
And so they tell them you can't use nuclear weapons. Well, that's not a good way of studying the real world and fighting under the nuclear shadow because nuclear weapons are always in the background. And he also introduces or they do Bloomfield and Schelling a lot more politics. So war games are
00:06:31
Speaker
in the defense community about war, that is, you are using the tactical conventional forces that have been given to you and saying, you know, I'm going to move this division over here and it has X amount of firepower and it has X amount of probability of killing, you know, these this number of troops on the other side, et cetera, et cetera. And so their games are still allowing for that, but they're much more interested in the political effects of those military forces. So you can do you can make diplomatic moves in shelling in Bloomfield's games.
00:07:01
Speaker
you can move military forces around the geographic area for the purpose of signaling resolve and signaling your political intentions to the other side and a lot less for the purpose of using those military forces. That's what they're interested in at the end of the day is when one side decides to signal something to the other,
00:07:26
Speaker
and they're separated in separate rooms. So one side is trying to signal something to the other. Let's go over to the other room and find out whether that signal came through or not. Did they get that the blue team was trying to signal that it's willing to go to nuclear war over Berlin?
00:07:44
Speaker
or was the signal misperceived and it was taken as something more escalatory or less escalatory because it was simply missed. So I think all those changes are fascinating and incredibly important and allowed Schelling and Bloomfield to refine their ideas, but also just develop this incredible new way of generating empirical data to try and understand the puzzles of the nuclear age in which they were now living.
Government Participation in Realistic Simulations
00:08:15
Speaker
Great. Yeah, it's striking that some of the same challenges that Tom Schelling and Lincoln Bloomfield were facing back in the 1950s and 60s are the very same ones that we kind of face today. You know, I know that in my work, I struggle to convince the IRB to let me have, you know, games where I lie to the players about when the game's actually going to end, for example. So that's pretty interesting.
00:08:36
Speaker
Um, obviously, you know, this is a bit of an unfair question given that your archive captures so many different types of games from those about, you know, the Berlin crisis to Vietnam and Korean war escalation scenarios. But you can kind of take us through the setup of these types of games, how they're getting played. Who's the, who are the people that actually get to play in them?
00:08:55
Speaker
Sure. So that's one of the most exciting parts, right? Is that Schelling and Bloomfield end up getting quite well connected and already are connected to when they're designing these at MIT to the US government. And so in the late 50s, when they're starting to run these games at MIT, they're inviting their friends who are essentially high level government national security bureaucracy folks.
00:09:18
Speaker
And they play some of those games at MIT, and so you can find those in the MIT archives. But then even more interesting is when the Pentagon sets up a joint war games agency, they get interested in these political military war games. They set up something called the joint war games control group that later becomes the joint war games agency. And they don't have in-house methodologists designing new methods at the
00:09:40
Speaker
time, all they do is they ask Schelling to come in and run them for them, right? So Schelling comes in and starts running games. The earliest ones he runs at Camp David. And so we know that deputy national security advisors, national security advisors, and Schelling says up to the cabinet level came to these games. And you got a sense when you're reading the participant list, right, that this is a time before the tyranny of the inbox when
00:10:05
Speaker
a high-level national security official actually had three days to sit and think about a potential escalation process in a war game over Berlin. In the transcripts of discussion, it's all anonymized. So it is a little frustrating that you can go to the archives and say, well, I know that one of these people is Karl Kaysen, National Security Advisor, but I can't figure out exactly which one. But at least we know that these
00:10:33
Speaker
Players were what I call strategic elites, right? They're hypothetically similar to those who in the real world would actually be empowered to give advice about whether and when to use nuclear weapons and what threats to make and what not to make. What else? What else should I pick up on, Andrew?
00:10:52
Speaker
No, it's great. I mean, I think that the question that naturally kind of follows from having those strategic elites in the room is, you know, as you look across your now effectively, what is a data set of games, what's your read of kind of what comes out of them? You know, is it the experiential component that's doing a lot of the work here in terms of the fact that we have these policymakers that get to explore these really hard problems? Or they're actually analytical findings that are actually changing the way that we actually are thinking about strategy and doctrine in these various different conflict scenarios.
Testing Theories of Nuclear Non-Use
00:11:22
Speaker
Sure, so I think there's a lot to get out of the games. The piece that I published first when I got really into these archives was about testing theories of nuclear non-use. We have in political science a whole bunch of writing by scholars over the years about why is it that nuclear weapons haven't been used in war since 19th?
00:11:43
Speaker
45, is it just deterrence? And others argue it can't just be deterrence because there's many circumstances in which the United States especially could have used tactical nuclear weapons against somebody like Vietnam who was not capable of retaliating with nuclear weapons. So, you know, it can't just be deterrence. So we turned to concepts like the nuclear taboo, moral aversion to the use of nuclear weapons, practical constraints of just, you know, the United States is the most
00:12:11
Speaker
powerful conventional military in the world and so maybe it just didn't have to turn to nuclear weapons to achieve battlefield effect. What we see in the games is that of course there's lots of deterrence, but the other ones that leap out of the transcripts are things like reputation. So I do not want to be known as the person that brought up the option.
00:12:33
Speaker
or we do not want to be known as the country that turns to nuclear weapons. On the other side, we see very little ethical discussion in the war games. I don't think that means that it wasn't there at all. It just means that when you're doing a war game in the Pentagon,
00:12:51
Speaker
you tend to edit out your language that would otherwise be moral or ethically framed, right? If you believe we shouldn't be using nuclear weapons just as a sort of oughtness principle that it is morally reprehensible to do so, you might think that, but then come up with an argument about why it is unnecessary in order to convince an audience that is more hard-nosed and realist generally when you're sitting in the basement of the Pentagon.
00:13:20
Speaker
So I do think we can look at these games and evaluate what we would call in political science, our theories of nuclear non-use, but there's a lot more to do as well. We can look at them and assess things like how to strategically players think about escalation, how scared are they, or cavalier are they under different circumstances.
00:13:42
Speaker
It's fascinating to hear anybody in a war game express concerns about escalation because it's just a war game. They're just sitting in the basement of maybe the Pentagon or somewhere debating options. They're testing potential plants that are obviously not being used at that moment in the real world.
00:14:01
Speaker
But we see them taken incredibly seriously because they know that it could be real. What they're trying to do is simulate something that could hypothetically happen. When they're doing it about Vietnam scenarios, it's a war that is ongoing. And so while the war game that they're playing, the Sigma series,
00:14:21
Speaker
in the 1960s is about Vietnam and they're testing all these strategies and tactic and doctrines about how to maybe fight this war in Vietnam. And they're being consistently frustrated and the war games are showing that there's not a
00:14:36
Speaker
clear way that the United States can win this war in Vietnam. But they're taking it incredibly seriously, even though you'd think in a war game, as one player says, if you lose, it's not for keeps. The biggest finding that surprised me when I have all of this in my mind
00:14:55
Speaker
We should have seen more uses of nuclear weapons than we did in more games.
Nuclear Escalation in Wargame Scenarios
00:15:01
Speaker
So I have records from 1958 through 1972, and in only two of them out of at least 26, 26 is kind of the sample that I get down to of saying, okay, these really meet the criteria for, I think, strong tests of nuclear non-use theory. But I surveyed more games than that, and in only two of them did they use nuclear weapons. And that was the beta series.
00:15:24
Speaker
in the 60s. And it's surprising to me, right, that you wouldn't see at least more efforts to just say, well, let's try it and see what happens, right, in a war game setting. Do you think there, I mean, just taking that series as an example, do you think that it was that nuclear use is driven by the particular sample that happens to be in the room for those playthroughs? Or do you think there was something intrinsic about the game design that led to dilute some of the ominous conversation?
00:15:53
Speaker
It's difficult for me to say exactly. I do think that we have lots of reasons to think that personality mattered. Again, and these transcripts are anonymized, but I have one great quote in them where there's a player in the in the debrief who says in a Vietnam scenario saying, look, why don't we just use one nuclear weapon? This is sort of reminding me of a 1945 like scenario where the Japanese needed a reason to say quit.
00:16:22
Speaker
And so let's use the nuclear weapons so that the Vietnamese have a reason to say quit. And then it's fascinating that whoever was transcribing captured the fact that the room laughs afterward and this player is kind of left all on their own. I do know that, you know, game around that time, Curtis LeMay participated. And so I suspect that this might be Curtis LeMay suggesting that we use nuclear weapons. And it's those who know the history and know who Curtis LeMay is wouldn't be that surprising.
00:16:48
Speaker
personality in the room, like Curtis LeMay, suggesting maybe we should use nuclear weapons. So I think personalities matter. That said, in the beta series that you're talking about, we know that it was misperception, or at least that's what the document suggested was. So in the beta scenario that goes nuclear in a war in East Germany, scenario is basically one where the Soviets
00:17:11
Speaker
try and take West Berlin or succeed in taking West Berlin. And then it's up to NATO to decide whether it wants to fight its way through East Germany to get access to West Berlin again. And so it decides to fight a conventional war. And after a couple of divisions get pinned down, the Blue Team decides to use tactical nuclear weapons to try and continue the fight up the Autobahn towards Berlin.
00:17:36
Speaker
The red team responds and then this sort of tactical nuclear war goes on until the blue team uses nuclear weapons that are fired from submarines that are stationed in the Atlantic. And the control team interprets this decision as a use of nuclear weapons from outside the theater of war. The blue team doesn't see it that way, right? They think they're using nuclear assets that are
00:18:04
Speaker
basically in theater and meant to support exactly this scenario, right? According to the war plans, we're going to use tactical nuclear weapons. Soviets are trying to take NATO territory and, you know, we're losing a conventional war. We'll turn to tactical nuclear weapons. And so what ends up happening because this salvo came from submarines in the Atlantic, control picks up a contingency plan that has been submitted by the red team long before the nuclear war began.
00:18:31
Speaker
And the contingency course of action simply says if the Blue Team uses nuclear weapons from outside the theater of war, we will respond with a counterforce attack against the continental United States.
00:18:47
Speaker
And so the control team decides that this triggers the red counterforce attack. And then you get a blue response and everybody loses the game. It's a global thermonuclear war. And then when the players are talking about it afterwards, they're saying,
00:19:06
Speaker
Look, we're not sure we really meant that. You should have given us another opportunity to decide whether in fact we wanted to start a strategic nuclear exchange. You know, it's hard to know because they're just saying it in retrospect, but I do kind of believe these players when the red team says, yeah, I was bluffing. We weren't actually serious about starting a strategic nuclear war and the control team didn't give us a chance to try another chance to try and avoid it.
00:19:34
Speaker
So that's an example of how you can get strategic nuclear war and how it happened in one of the beta series. I really appreciate you taking us through some of the nitty gritty. And later on in this series, we'll talk about control cells and their pros and cons with Jackie Schneider at Stanford. And that's a good example of where maybe the white cell is doing things that the players might not have appreciated.
Challenges in Reconstructing Wargame Data
00:20:04
Speaker
And so, Reed, when you get a wargaming product, if you will, from the 1950s, 1960s, how do you actually end up piecing together what happened? Was there somebody in the room at the time taking notes? What are the data products that you're using to figure out what's happening?
00:20:19
Speaker
First thing to say is that it's challenging and oftentimes you will get pieces of evidence that you have to triangulate and stitch together. So it is rare to go to the archive and have a document in a folder that's been perfectly curated as here's everything related to beta 67. They tend not to organize things that way. Papers are organized by like whatever
00:20:42
Speaker
produced by or they're consumed by what agency they made them. And so very often you just stumble across and try and hoover up as much of this as you can and then come back home and triangulate it. So we have things like letters of invitation to say, will you please come and participate in this war game? We have people accepting that we have people writing after, after action reports saying, you know, this is what I think I learned from participating in this war game. And the best thing we have, if we can find it from a game.
00:21:10
Speaker
is the post game report. So generally when the joint war games agency put on a game, you know, they would justify their existence by putting a report together. This is what we were trying to learn. This is the scenario that we gave to all of the participants. If we're lucky, they'll say who the participants are.
00:21:29
Speaker
And then they'll say, you know, this is a summary of what each team decided in each round to do. And then the golden nugget in all of these is if in that report or somewhere else in the archive, you can find the transcript of the after action critique after every game.
00:21:47
Speaker
They would get all the players to sit back, come actually back from, you know, wherever they were playing their game separately, come to one room and discuss what happened and why. And that's where you get these fascinating discussions about, well, we were trying to signal resolve with this move. How come you didn't perceive that? And so you get these conversations finally between the teams and usually it's moderated by the director.
00:22:14
Speaker
And sometimes we know that that director was Tom Schelling. So what you got is a scholar who is directing and designing the game with all of these participants afterwards saying, OK, what happened? I want to get to the bottom of everyone's perceptions and misperceptions and we can try and understand whether we can distill lessons from this game.
00:22:34
Speaker
So another reason those are the golden nuggets is that this is the time when somebody was in the back of the room with a stenographer capturing a literal transcript. We know there can be flaws in transcription, but to the best of their ability, this person is capturing literally what everybody is saying in that room.
00:22:55
Speaker
This is my point to people who run war games today, both in government or as consultants outside of it. You don't appreciate often how much data you are leaving on the cutting room floor for future generations to learn from. So it is not always the case that you're going to have a stenographer in the room capturing transcripts today. And it's
00:23:20
Speaker
only really because that was happening in the 1960s and 70s that I can do some of the work that I'm doing today. Were there things inside of that documentation that you find particularly surprising or that as a researcher you were particularly frustrated were not included?
00:23:36
Speaker
Everything is incomplete. So I think that's just the nature of doing historical work. You will constantly be frustrated that there isn't additional data available in the archive. This transcript cuts off here when it shouldn't. Where's the rest of the document? My advice to people is always go make best friends with archivists because they're some of the best people in the world and they might actually be able to help you track down some of this stuff. And I met some amazing archivists when I was at
00:24:05
Speaker
doing this work at various archives, but even they will struggle to find everything and not everything gets preserved perfectly. So I think we always have to just issue lots of caveats in our scholarship about what it is we can't find or just be very clear about when we think that we're making
00:24:24
Speaker
uh, sound conclusions and we can, which hypotheses, you know, we can evaluate more strongly than others. And sometimes we say, well, I don't really have a lot of good evidence to evaluate this proposition. You know, someone else should do really good work to do better than me. And, uh, I'll just speculatively tell you, you know, what we've got an example of that in my work is that I don't really have a lot of examples of what you'd call non elite players playing war
Impact of Non-Elite Players in Wargames
00:24:50
Speaker
games.
00:24:50
Speaker
It wasn't often the case that the Pentagon would bring in non-policy maker elites to come and play. They did, interestingly, on one occasion, seemingly bring their friends. There's a war game I have that participants included. They're listed as business leaders, executives, and representatives of the entertainment industry. One of whom we know is like a cartoonist, Milton Kniff. You've got some great doodles in the archive from this cartoonist.
00:25:19
Speaker
You know, fascinating stuff, but can't really conclude a lot by just comparing, you know, one more game with non-elite players to the rest of the other more games we have with, you know, players up to the national security advisor level. That said, there's, you know, suggestive evidence. In one of those reports with, quote, non-elite players says the Pentagon hosts were surprised at how ready their guests were to go nuclear.
00:25:45
Speaker
And this is just nothing that we can really draw a lot of conclusions from just that it's suggestive evidence that yeah, experience matters. If you want nuclear war, you get high schoolers to play your war game. If you want a more reflection of reality and how complicated a nuclear strategy can be with all the hesitation about relation, you're going to get some experts into play.
00:26:09
Speaker
Other examples of the things that are really important and fun to come across in the archive as a researcher, that sometimes you can get notes from the note takers that helps you to interpret what you're finding. One of the fun ones I found at the MIT archives is that MIT had played a game once where Walt Rostow, who was later Lyndon Johnson's National Security Advisor, Walt Rostow came to play a game at MIT and
00:26:40
Speaker
You can read the whole regular report, you know, and we could just draw conclusions from that until you get to the end of the file where there's this little note from the RA and I don't know the name of the RA to thank them, but whoever it was, they're a wonderful person. The note says, look, it would be a, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Walt Rostow was the blue team.
00:27:04
Speaker
There were other people on the team, but Walt Rostow was such a, now I'm paraphrasing, they didn't quite say it this way, it was such a bombastic, large personality that basically no one else got a word in edgewise and this guy took over the group decision making.
00:27:22
Speaker
That's a really important note, especially if what you're interested in learning about from the archives and from any war games is like how groups make decisions or how groups make decisions under pressure. Right. Without that note, we would just treat the blue team like they were like any other team.
00:27:37
Speaker
Now with that note, we know that whatever the blue team does is basically just Walt Rostow's view of foreign policy. So that is a good lesson though to be cautious because we don't know how often there should have been notes like that in the archive and we simply didn't get them.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, well also too, I mean, that type of insight travels the laboratory effects conversation that's alive and well in kind of how the scholars are using war games today. I mean, a lot of what you're described there is a concern anytime that you have groups that are comprised of heterogeneous types of players, right? If I have somebody older in the room, younger players might look up to that individual for approval in terms of a decision that they might make.
00:28:16
Speaker
So that kind of laboratory effects, I think that's kind of very insightful and actually takes me into one of the questions I wanted to ask. I mean, obviously, you've got a lot of insight into these games from the 1950s and 1960s. Are there lessons that you think that we ought to be learning sitting here in 2023 from these past examples? Are there creative ways that you think we ought to be using these archival games in order to maximize the types of insights that we're able to get from them?
Lessons from Cold War Wargames for Today
00:28:43
Speaker
I can answer this question in a lot of ways. One is if you're interested, you're thinking about like, what can we learn from it for Wargaming today? I mean, we need to be, it would be wonderful if we had time to take some of these games and run them again with all of the same injects and scenarios, replicate some of these games, see if they go the same way. But the lesson I think for Wargaming today should be taken from the basic
00:29:11
Speaker
premise that Bloomfield and Schelling had going into these, which is that these are tools beyond what people appreciated them for at the time. And you can see that today as well, where wargaming can be treated like it is a special provenance of the defense world only and that the best games are the ones that
00:29:35
Speaker
get the nitty-gritty details right of the range of the Pacific missile systems and most accurately reflects the balance of power in the Western Pacific and whatever. I get it. Those details are important, but fundamentally what you are engaged in is a political exercise. Even if you are fighting a simulated war in a war game, you cannot lose the fact that
00:30:03
Speaker
These moves, these decisions you are making, these military decisions that you are asking your players to make are having political effects, right? This is all just Klaus Witzian, or his politics by other means. So you should be designing your games in a way that allows for deliberation and discussion of those political effects and capturing the lessons for politics.
00:30:26
Speaker
Every military move, regardless of what its brute force effect is, has a political signaling effect. And you should be allowing your game to capture what was, how was that political signal interpreted? Was it misperceived or accurately perceived? And what did it make you think you needed to do differently now to achieve some political objective in the war, not just win a war?
00:30:55
Speaker
Great, yeah, what a fantastic place to wrap that part of our conversation. Just as we're leaving, I think one of the things that we're trying to do is to give students or those that might not have engaged in the Wargaming Unity before resources to dig more deeply. And so if you had a favorite book on the topic or a favorite Wargame or film to send over to folks, what would you recommend that they go and take a look at?
00:31:21
Speaker
Wow at the risk of self promotion i would suggest people want to go deeper read the article that that i was referring to a lot in this podcast and it came out in twenty eighteen in international security it's called what u.s. leaders push the button.
00:31:37
Speaker
Beyond that, I think you have to keep listening to Andrew Reddy's podcasts. There's a lot of exciting work being done at the Hoover Institution by Jackie Schneider to capture the archival material in one single place so that researchers can go to a wargaming archive.
00:31:55
Speaker
She's building that at the Hoover Institution. If you go to my Harvard Dataverse website, which will just be linked on my website, there is a Dataverse just dumping site for all the PDFs that I have of Wargame reports. If you really want to get into the weeds, please go read those. If you are new to all this, and since you asked me for a movie, you have to go watch Wargames.
00:32:18
Speaker
You're the first one to give us the Matthew Broderick film, but I absolutely agree. Well, thank you, Reed, so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time. We'll include the links to your suggestions in the show notes, and we'll also make sure that they're posted on the BRSL website as well.
00:32:33
Speaker
In the next episode, I'll be talking to Dr. Ellie Bartels of the Rand Corporation and a leading expert on game design. We'll be focusing on the practice of contemporary wargaming and both its educational and analytical applications. I hope you'll join us for that. With that, thanks, Reid, for joining us. Thanks to Andre Anderson and Citrus for recording studio hosts. And special thanks to our amazing producer, Jane Darby-Menton. And finally, to all of you for tuning in. Until next time, I'm Andrew Ready, and you've been listening to The Risk Calculus.
00:33:04
Speaker
I'm still a little quiet. Can I make mine any louder? I can literally like go put my face right up into it. Oh, yeah. I'm getting the big thumbs up from JD. So if you don't mind. I'm leaning forward into the microphone. Cool. Me too.