Games People Play

>> Bill Whalen: It's Tuesday, October 8, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbs Carpenter distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism. But I'm not the only Hoover Fellow podcasting these days.

So if you don't believe me, I recommend going to our website, which is hoover.org click on the tab at the top of the homepage, it says commentary, then head over to where it says multimedia, and there you'll see an option that says audio podcast. And the app will come about a dozen or more podcasts, including this one.

Definitely check them out, we cover the waterfront. It's great to incorporate your lifestyle if you listen to podcasts when you are exercising or just lounging, or, as our guest today will tell you, on a God awful commute to work. But Hoover podcast is terrific, so check them out, definitely.

My guest today is Jacquelyn Schneider. Jackie is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. She's also the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and she's an affiliate with Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology with a special interest in cybersecurity, autonomous technologies in war games.

Jackie, welcome back to the podcast.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thank you for having me.

>> Bill Whalen: So now that I've said war games multiple times, I think that's a hint that that's where we're going to go today. We're going to talk about war games. We're doing this because later today you are co-hosting a panel, its title is To War Or Not To War: Vietnam And The Sigma Wargames.

Let's talk a bit about that. Jackie, for those who are gonna now put this podcast on hold and go to Google and look up Sigma games, let me spare you the trouble of that. The Sigma Games was a series of political military war games run by the Pentagon's joint staff in the 1960s.

Its intent to understand the unfolding conflict in Southeast Asia. Jackie, that was 60 years ago. Talk a bit about what they were doing then, how they went about doing it, and why, despite the foundings they had that basically everything in Vietnam, every scenario would not work out. We still went down the course we did.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, these games are fascinating because they pretty much get it right and yet make almost no difference in decision making. So Sigma game series starts in 1962, that's the Kennedy administration. So the first game is actually looking at kind of the balance of power within Southeast Asia.

And so instead of looking at Vietnam, they actually are looking at Laos in the beginning. And then there's a lot going on right during the Kim administration in Southeast Asia. They're making decisions about whether or not to intervene in Laos and their form of governance. And then, 63, the Sigma game is scheduled for October 31, 1963.

So ostensibly, we're once again looking at Southeast Asia, either Laos or Vietnam, we don't know because to be fair, we have a hole. We cannot find the 1963 games. Maybe we can't find the 1963 games because what happens shortly after the games are run? Well, Diem, I have very bad pronunciation of Vietnamese, but Diem is executed in November.

Right. And Kennedy shortly after. So you can imagine a 1963 game becomes less consequential in the face of everything that's going on with these assassinations. Now, fast forward to 1964, and the game is run twice. It's run once in the spring and once in the fall. And the game takes on a really important role at this point because the Johnson administration is making really, really big decisions internally about what it wants to do in Vietnam.

So they're deciding, are we going to escalate? Are we going to send more ground troops in and are we going to bomb the North Vietnamese? And this is all happening in the context of an election. So basically, Johnson does not want to lose the 64 election. So they are trying to make these decisions.

And the idea is that it's kind of on hold until the election, and then the Johnson administration will execute. So the two games that are held in 1964 are some of the most senior players in the Johnson administration, as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, members of the National Security Council, members of State Department, the Director of the CIA.

These are extremely senior individuals. This actually very rarely happens in war games. The first one in 1964, ends up being somewhat calamitous, the results. So the first one says, hey, you're not gonna beat the Vietcong. They're going to mire you in a multi year war that will lead to 500,000 plus American soldiers in southeast Asia.

As you can imagine, that's not the desired result. And so some of the players in the game who are advocating for strategic bombing, like Lemay, they get frustrated because they say, hey, you didn't adjudicate strategic bombing well enough. And then those who want a more gradual escalation like that, McNamara prefers, and really, Johnson prefers, they also dislike it.

So then they play the game again in September and they find something very similar.

>> Bill Whalen: Jackie, do the games start before or after the Cuban Missile Crisis?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Great question, after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in fact, the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis ends up being very influential into these decision makers and actually how some of the decision makers play the game.

So quite often they'll refer back to, okay, well, what we learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and especially, the people who work for McNamara, the kind of civilian brainy kids, the whiz kids, these folks are both influenced by the experience of the Cuba Missile Crisis, but also influenced by thinkers like Schelling, who was at Rand, but who also kind of helped develop the idea behind coercion and signaling and these kind of limited aims conflicts.

And very influenced by him, and so they're very influenced by this as they're trying to think about how to go about Vietnam. So should the 64 of games matter? Yes, absolutely, all the indicators, you have top players, you have a very realistic game. You have the game being briefed up to SEC def level, and yet the games end up having very little influence into what Johnson eventually decides doing.

And so then the games continue actually on 65, 66, and 67. And so they continue to be a political military game. They're looking at, hey, can we get north, the Viet Cong to negotiate? What type of bombing would affect their decision to negotiate? And really the whole time they're trying to test these theories of gradual escalation and limited war, and every single one of the games indicates this isn't going to work.

And so because of that, it becomes a fascinating game historically because it ends up being right and yet not influential at all.

>> Bill Whalen: What's interesting to me, Jackie, is if you look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy does not trust the military. He has been burned by the Bay of Pigs, and this gets into a complicated story about the Pentagon, the CIA, and so forth.

And if my history is right, he and Robert Kennedy decided to create what they call ExCOM, the executive committee to decide what to do in Cuba. And I'm not sure that ExCOM Jackie had military buying into it. Members of the military on ExCOM I guess I think it was more a function of the best and brightest of the new frontier.

But yet you're talking about in the Sigma war games, there is considerable military buy in the form of Curtis Lemay and as you mentioned, the GCOs.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, this is kind of interesting. There's a huge tension in both Kennedy and the Johnson administration between. Civilians and the military.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And so the civilian heads of the Department of Defense are trying to rein in what they think are kinda bad decisions happening by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military are saying, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're getting us into conflicts that you're not prepared to fight.

So that really leads up to explaining kind of the dynamics between the Sigma series. When I first started looking into this game series, I thought, wow, how remarkable LeMay's playing in it, Wheeler's playing in it, Maxwell Taylor, and then there's a series of other kind of admirals and generals that all end up being very important to the story of Vietnam.

They're all playing in this game. That should make the game influential. But if you have read HR McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, his theory is that these games are actually a hedging device by the Johnson administration and McNamara in particular, to make the JCs feel like they have an input into this decision making.

And so by taking these kind of senior military members and putting them in this high vis game in which they're kind of playing it next to the civilian counterparts, it makes them feel like they are a part of the Johnson decision making process. However, as we kind of look at the historiography, we have yet to find any evidence that these games were ever briefed out to Johnson or that he ever even heard about the results, even though they were very influential to members of the State Department and the CIA.

>> Bill Whalen: Interesting, you had foreign policy, national security crises in the fifties and forties, Jackie, you had Berlin crisis, the airlift, you had crisis in Hungary, you had the Suez crisis, situations that would cry for war gaming. Why wasn't war gaming done in the 1950s?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So it really starts happening at the crisis level in the 1950s, and it's really being led by these kind of big thinkers at Rand, the Schellings, the Herman Cahn, the wolf studders.

And so they run a series of games actually in the fifties called the Berlin Crisis Games. And Schelling runs them at Camp David. We have those, those will actually be published on our archive next week. So we have those documents. And he puts these players in this highly immersive experience at Camp David, where Schelling later recounts that when people came out of the game, they needed to reenter society.

And they were so immersed into the game. And he does this interview with Joe Nye a few decades later, him and Alan Ferguson. And they say when the Berlin crisis occurred, these games were so influential that members of the Kennedy administration were saying, hey, but I remember what happened when Schelling played the game.

And they would say, it was amazing how accurate the experience that they had at Camp David was for then how they applied those logics to the Berlin crisis and to some extent, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, I mean, these games, and actually, I mean, those type of games, these kinda political games were occurring with the civilian elite that was coming out of think tanks like Rand or out of Harvard.

And that really is kind of a tension that you start seeing in the Sigma games because you have these kind of civilian political games. And it's in juxtaposition with these operational campaign level games, which the DoD had been running basically since the 1880s. And then kind of how those intersect and then influence policy really comes to the fore with the Sigma games.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, so the Sigma games, Jackie, they run scenario after scenario. They asked the question, could the US bomb North Vietnam into submission? They asked the question, could the US sustain a ground war with minimal casualties? They asked the question, could the US keep the war in Southeast Asia from escalating beyond Vietnam?

And in each case, Jackie, the answer is a decided no. How often does this happen? Wargaming, where you keep coming into the same bad inclusion, the same bad ending?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, this is actually, I mean, to be fair, that type of findings are what makes games influential usually.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, what I'm getting at, is it a question of how you pose a scenario, or is it just the matter of the cards that you're dealt?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, I mean, I was talking to my husband about this game series, and he said, well, Jackie, even a blind squirrel can find a nut, right?

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So just because the games are right, I doesn't mean that they should have been listened to, like who knows? There was a lot of kind of fuzzy that goes into game outcomes. So the control cell is making determinations about how are the Viet Cong going to be able to endure these attacks?

What is the political will of the domestic population in both north and South Vietnam? What is the political will of the United States population, what's going to be the international reaction to these incidents? And those are not things that we inherently know before you go into conflict, you're making assessments based out of best guesses.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: In this case, it turns out their best case was right multiple times, over and over again. But one of the reasons why the games end up being not influential, and we actually get this in post hoc kind of memos and conversations that are documented at the NSC and at the state department is that people didn't believe the control.

They said, look, these are best guesses that these people are making about variables that are not modelable. They could be wrong. And there are other games that make similar kind of assessments and are ignored. I'm thinking, for example, of a game that was run in the 1990s called Desert Crossing by General Tony Zenny, and he runs it.

This game, which is in some ways very similar to Sigma, had a lot of the civilian expertise that was playing alongside military members. And they were playing a game to look at how difficult it might be to reconstruct Iraq after an invasion. And he finds it's really difficult.

It's going to take a very long time, and the human population is very complicated. And that game is kind of overlooked and not used later on in iraqi decisions about what we do in an invasion of Iraq. So there are kind of historical examples of games like this that get it right and yet are ignored.

>> Bill Whalen: Right. So why are they ignored at the end of the day?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, I think in the end of the day and at the end of the day, war games are one input into decision making. And what I have found is that when war games are influential, it's because they're at a point in decision making where people have not formed their opinions yet.

So, for example, when you look at games that senior decision makers played earlier in their career, those games have an outsized influence on how they think about the future. So why does the Berlin crisis games at Schelling run? Why are they so influential? Well, they're influential because they occurred before anyone had an idea about what they wanted to do.

And so now that they played the game, the game is part of the formation of thinking about what their policy desires, what they want to do. Sigma is played in a time period where MacNamara kinda already knows exactly what he wants to do in Vietnam. Arguably, Johnson does as well.

They don't wanna put 500,000 American troops in Vietnam, and they don't want to do these very large strategic bombing and mining of ports. They want something that's limited and coercive. And because of that, the game saying that that doesn't work well, fine. It's just one piece of information compared to other pieces of information that are coming in.

So I think it really, in some ways, when decision, when games matter is based on what the political context in which they're run.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, what struck me as very interesting about the Sigma games, Jackie, is they come up with all these military scenarios that don't work out, but maybe you could.

You could say, well, we believe in the US military we can actually overcome considerable odds. But there's also a warning in there about you're gonna lose public opinion over the course of time, which indeed is a lesson in Vietnam. You go from 1963 just on this downhill slope in the early 1970s, which to me would strike at the heart of any politician in Washington, because even today, what are they thinking about?

Elections.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah. So this is really interesting because most DoD games do not account for domestic opinion, right? So while it's always a huge part of decision making, when american presidents are thinking about how they're using the military and the use of force, like, hey, what is this going to do to me in election?

They're generally kind of abstracted out of Department of Defense games. So you come into games with assumptions about what type of capabilities the decision maker is going to be willing to use and against what type of targets. And yet when it comes to real-life, those domestic constituents are often a very important part of foreign policy decision-making and the use of force.

So these games are very interesting in that they try to simulate domestic opinion. And actually, that adjudication of domestic opinion is one of the kind of big controversies and something that ends up making a lot of the players very angry because, you think the American public really cares about that?

No way they're gonna do that, that's ridiculous. In the end, it turns out to be right, but not something that the Department of Defense or American foreign policy decision makers are always experts at.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's fast forward 60 years now, Jackie, to the present day, and the question of if the 47th president, if he or she decided that they wanted to do a version of the Sigma games and you could apply it to, let's say, China and Taiwan, if you want to describe to me, Jackie, how mechanically you would go about building that, because we're now in the information age as opposed to the 1960s being in a largely paper age, as there were computers back in the 1960s, but we're talking computers that were the size of a room, so not as opposed to a computer that's now the size of a chip in your cell phone.

So how would the Sigma games look differently today?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, what's kind of interesting is how little they actually change. I mean, one of the things that we often talk about in game design is that the best games you can execute with paper or with the computer. Some of the more complicated kind of defense games rely on a computer-based adjudication, right?

So if you have significant modeling that underlies the assumptions between moves. So, for example, okay, what happens when a Chinese destroyer with an advanced surface-to-air missile system goes up against a package of US aircraft? That's really complicated and not something that I'm gonna best guess. That's something that's gonna be modeled, right, so that we have some sort of information.

So the more inputs that you're giving it about kind of battlefields capabilities, the more likely computers are to adjudicate outcomes. Now, that's a potentially a significant difference from SGMA. In Sigma we're primarily relying on people who are kind of experts to make a best guess. And actually that still happens quite often in the Department of Defense.

But you have this kind of complementary relationship between the computer adjudicating some of these capabilities. So I mean in some ways that is different. I think there are specific capabilities and technologies that are different. You mentioned, we're in the information age. So now if you are building this type of game, you need to think about, well, what role does social media or information narratives that are dispersed on the Internet or via these different digital platforms?

How does that affect international opinion? How does that affect domestic opinion? That would be new and yet not new. We're still trying to understand how domestic and international opinion affects conflict. That's not new from the Sigma games, but maybe the way in which it's disseminated and the overall effect might actually be new.

And then I think there are people, including us, who are experimenting with the use of LLMs and computer based modeling to increase the iteration of games so that there are more and more ways in which it's played. And so that's a big difference from Sigma. In Sigma, you have the Viet Cong played by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That's not happening these days. That's insane, right? Like, wow. My God. That guy took all that time off of work to do that, that's crazy. Where we're seeing some advancements, right, is the use of LLMs and chatbots to try and simulate kind of red behaviors so that you can increase the iteration.

You're not just getting, Maxwell Taylor's approach to the Viet-Cong, you have Maxwell Taylor's approach plus all these different kind of computer iterations. So in the end, I could run the Sigma games tomorrow cuz there's so much documentation that historically, I could play the same game tomorrow. But what might be different?

If we're looking at a US, China is maybe kind of the, the fidelity of the way in which we adjudicate some of the control.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's talk about who is wargaming these days Jacquie. I'm curious what the United States government is up to if other nations governments are doing wargaming and then what the Hoover institution and other academic outfits are doing.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so, I mean, I think one of the big differences between what was happening in the 1960s and what's happening today is that most of what was happening during the sixties was really held among this, like, very small group of elite figures. And so when you get the results of the Sigma games, those aren't necessarily games that everybody reads about, knows about.

You have a small group of people within the Johnson administration, and that actually allows the games to be controlled and their influence to be somewhat mediated by whoever is in control of the information. But today we have games that are classified that are occurring in the DoD, but we also have games that are unclassified that are occurring at think tanks like CNAS and CSIS.

And these games are getting a lot of attention in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Meet the Press, Bloomberg. It would be impossible for a decision maker to ignore the fact that these games are happening and having very similar kind of results. That's a big difference from the Sigma series.

So we have games that are occurring in the DoD and the Pentagon, you have games that are occurring in think tanks. You also have games that are occurring increasingly in academia, so occurring at Berkeley, MIT, researchers that are taking very kind of discreet questions and running them over and over and over again using more scholarly methods of kind of experimental design, for example.

And that's what we do at Hoover, is we kind of bridge this divide between what's happening in the policy, the think tank, the DoD, and what's happening in academia. So we are running games that are looking at questions about some of the biggest emerging technology, AI, cyber space.

But we're also making sure that what we do and what our focus is on is data. So sometimes it's generating data by running wargames, but it's also in hosting data. And so one of the big additions that we have to this world, this kind of wargaming ecosystem, is the use of wargaming collection within the Hoovery Library and archives.

And so what we've been talking about here is a lot of the historical materials that we brought into that collection, but we also have a lot of contemporary materials on the ability to replicate games and then to do meta-analysis across games to understand kind of patterns of outcomes.

So that you can say, Sigma might have expected if you were back in the 60s, you might say, well, that Sigma one series said that we wouldn't win and we can ignore that cuz I don't believe control. But if they had our collection and you're able to say, actually there are like 60 games that have been run and they all find similar things, that's a much more compelling piece of.

The evidence, it's a lot harder to ignore. And so that's what we're trying to do here, is to generate that data so that researchers that are looking at historical and case studies, but also large and kind of regressions and quantitative analysis, can use wargames to answer some of the biggest questions of today.

>> Bill Whalen: I have in front of me Jackie Schneider's guide to wargaming etiquette. Or actually, it's your qualities that you think are important to running a good wargame, and you list the following qualities, Jackie. One, it has to be enjoyable. Two, you need the right players. Three, you need enough players.

Four, bias control and five, good data collection. Let's focus on points four and five, Jackie, bias control and good data collection.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so that's actually extremely, extremely hard to do, because generally, you need to be thinking about what are the ways in which the components of the game, the game design or the game players are affecting, whether I can generalize across wide populations.

So am I saying something that is only good for the way in which I ran this game with these people, or is it something that I can generalize to larger patterns of behavior to larger groups of populations? So for example, we ran a game that looked at cyber vulnerabilities and nuclear command, control, and communications.

Well, we ran that with over 580 players, and those players were really different. They had different types of expertise. They had different types of backgrounds. They were Americans and not Americans. And then having that larger group of people with a lot more data allowed us to look at, okay, is this a core human behavior?

Is this something that is an American behavior? Is this something that a cyber expert would do versus somebody who's more of a military expert? And the last part of that is we publish our data, we make sure it can be replicated. We make sure that people can run our games and see whether, okay, was there finding a moment in time, or is this something that generalizes over a larger period of time?

So that's thinking about data and bias and then using things like surveys in conjunction with wargames in order to kind of build the amount of data that we're able to collect about not only what outcomes occur in games, but why?

>> Bill Whalen: Well, put, looking at the world right now, Jackie, which scenario intrigues you the most in terms of wargaming?

Is it China moving on Taiwan? Is it Putin moving on the baltic states? Is it a full blown war between Israel and Iran? Or am I missing something?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Gosh, so many bad crisis situations. I mean, all of those situations are right for gaming, because what gaming helps us understand is not what will happen in the future, but what are the potential futures?

And if we understand kind of like, what are the potential futures, then theoretically, you can do things to decrease the danger of some of the most dangerous outcomes. I'm very drawn to the US, China, because I think we potentially have a lot of room to maneuver to try and decrease the danger of that relationship.

But I think there's definitely room for gaming when it comes to these other scenarios, even scenarios that are kind of hot scenarios. One of the interesting parts of sigma 66 and 67 is they're already in a hot conflict at this point. And yet they're using the game to think about how do we deescalate, how do we negotiate, how do we bring people to the table, and what are the kind of terms that they might take?

And then what are the ways in which we can use diplomatic signaling or military options to try and shape the way negotiations are occurring? So I think games are kind of useful in all those instances.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, the Putin one fascinates me, Jackie, because that strikes me as a very complicated one to wargame.

 

Because you have a very erratic character in Vladimir Putin, who has access to nuclear weapons, who has a formidable military, but not so formidable if you've seen how they've done in Ukraine. But then if he moves toward western Europe, that brings in NATO. Just so many players involved here.

So that would strike me as a really complicated one to try to game out.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, Putin's a tough one. And Putin is a very good example of why generalizable information may not. Even if I run my game 580 times, it might not predict the future because of my 580 players.

How many of them have the same qualities as Putin? Hopefully, a very small contingent of them. So generally, when I brief out the outcome of my games, I'll say, here's our patterns, here's what generally occurred. And then I go to my outliers, who used a nuclear weapon? Okay, what are their characteristics, and what is the way in which they played the game revealed to us something about how somebody like Putin might play a game?

My understanding is that a lot of the games that the US did, both with Ukraine and without Ukraine prior or at the beginning of that conflict, didn't anticipate either the way Putin invaded Ukraine or the way in which the war has transpired. And so games definitely have a limitation in that sense.

But that's why you have to run many, many, many, many, and look across them.

>> Bill Whalen: Do you know of any wargaming, Jackie, that has looked at what's going on in the Middle east right now, and these various scenarios of Hamas striking a year ago, Israel responding and then fighting to the north, Iran getting involved, the Houthis in Yemen and so forth, that, to me, also sounds like a great wargame.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and those games, I mean, we know those games are occurring in the classified spaces. We're limited in bringing in classified material, obviously.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So most of our material is, most of it is 25 years after when it was run. So that's the mandatory declassification review date, most of it.

But the think tanks are running very similar kind of wargames that are looking at the Middle East, and I'm sure we have quite a few in the collection that we'll be publishing over the next few weeks.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, Jackie, let's talk about the balance of technology and human decisions, which you referenced earlier.

You mentioned wargames, and a person of my age is gonna reference that 1983 Booby with Matthew Broderick out of your head. You've seen it, you probably don't like it. I know one reason why you don't like it is because there is a scene where one of the NORAD commanders says it's time to dispatch the F15s instead, they show F16s.

Your husband is a pilot, probably hates that. My dad was in the Navy, Jackie, and anytime he watched a World War II movie and a destroyer was bombing was depth charging a submarine, and they cut to the image of a sleek 1970s frigate. It would drive him up the wall.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, in my household, being able to distinguish between a two engine fighter and a one engine fighter is very, very important. It's been trained into our children from a very young age.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, but I mentioned that movie because it came out, I think, in June of 1983, and there was a lot of nuclear hysteria at the time.

And part of this was driven by people thinking Ronald Reagan was going to kill us all. But the idea that nuclear war could be accidentally triggered, and that's what this movie gets at, the idea that a computer runs amok and almost gets us all killed.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and actually, that game ends up being very influential.

So Reagan, who loves movies, watches that game, and that leads to the very first cyber review, which actually, the cyber review suggests that we do have cyber vulnerabilities and some of the digitization of the nuclear command, control and communications. But the other thing that's occurring in 1983 are two TV shows that occur around the same time period, which I think actually help understand the domestic context in which these decisions were being made in the Reagan years.

Which is that we had the day after, which was a movie, kind of a made for TV movie, that showed the very dramatically what would occur after a nuclear war. And that ends up being a rallying cry for both domestic populations and some of the kind of the Anti nuclear weapon organizations to say, hey, look, this is actually extremely dangerous.

And then at the same time, same network, they run a war game. So they run a war game for, I want to say, three to five nights where they're running an Iran crisis, looking at what a nuclear war would look like. And it was led by Ted Koppel.

It had like, James Schlesinger in the game. And for us, you know, we're trying to understand, like, why do these games make it into the domestic? What is it about games that would make some it interesting enough for somebody to watch? Why is ABC choosing to show the day after and these war games?

So helps us to understand the way war games are being used to shift domestic opinion.

>> Bill Whalen: There are cable channels devoted to this stuff, Jackie, the military channel, the History Channel. I wonder why they are not doing this in the here and now.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Why they aren't doing more.

>> Bill Whalen: Doing more wargaming? Why not do a European war game?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I mean, they can call me, we'll do it. We can actually recreate. Some of these games are so rich and so richly documented that we actually can run them again, which is just a fascinating. And I think for people who are thinking about teaching history, if instead of teaching the Berlin crisis.

Actually having people play Schelling's game and then learning about the Berlin crisis could be a really interesting way to get students excited about war games and about history in general.

>> Bill Whalen: So one thing I learned in preparing for this podcast, Jackie, is that we are wargaming in space.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yes, space is apparently the new frontier, even though we actually have been wargaming space dilemmas all the way back into the beginning of us putting satellites into space. But yes, there's a series of games called the Shriver War Games, which have been run for quite a while that are run at kind of the highest levels, highest classification levels.

Looking at dynamics in space and the way in which those dynamics in space affect kind of strategic deterrence and big questions of strategic stability. And those are very classified games. But we're actually here at Hoover in a partnership with Georgia Tech and the Air Force Academy running a series of games, space as well.

Looking at entanglements and the integration of military and civilian, conventional and nuclear. And all these different variables that go into the space capabilities that are now proliferating in both low Earth orbit and affecting the decisions we're making in Geo and here as well. That we're going to be doing an unclassified game starting in 2025.

>> Bill Whalen: Is this what Space Force does, Jackie?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, Space Force does do games to help understand they're building their strategy. They're building what they believe, how they believe deterrence in space and deterrence through space is going to work. And they are really thinking about how to buy the next architecture of space capabilities.

For example, one of the big debates is instead of buying very vulnerable, very exquisite systems that are devoted mostly to nuclear command and control or nuclear early warning. Instead to buy proliferation of satellites down at the low Earth orbits. Well, that's a big debate, right? Does that work for stability?

Is that good for combat effectiveness? What does that mean for costs? So games can help better understand those questions and then the integration of civilians. There's a concept of the acronym is KASR, which I always get the acronym wrong, but it's like civilian augmentation of space reserve, something like this.

Commercial augmentation, space. Gosh, I should know these acronyms better. Basically what it is, it's putting commercial satellite capabilities already on contracts. So that when a crisis or conflict occurs, instead of you going to Elon Musk and saying, now I would like to use Starlink. You already have bought space or time or capability from a civilian, commercial provider.

So thinking about how war games can be used to understand, how do you integrate that capability? How does that work? What are the specific needs that the commercial and civilian sector might have that maybe the DoD is not aware of as they're building out this concept? So games are definitely being used to build the new Space force and to think about what the strategy, the capabilities, and what that impact is going to be on the way we fight and deter wars on land.

>> Bill Whalen: And I want to get back to Shreever for a second. What is different about war gaming, space versus land, air and sea?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, historically, one of the big challenges has been how classified space capabilities have been. So in the classified world, you have.

>> Bill Whalen: You mean lasers and things like that, just how we can target everything.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: When Eisenhower first created the National Reconnaissance Office and put a bunch of space capabilities there, he was very concerned that this would lead to an arms race in space. And he believed that space was some place where we could actually create stability for nuclear war, the ability to early warning, for example, or redundant communications.

And so he actually put those space capabilities in a civilian organization to try and decrease the chance that it would turn into wars in space. But part of doing that, the US was, it's not like the US wasn't using space for military reasons. And so because of that, they made everything extremely, extremely classified.

So the early imagery capabilities, the signals capabilities, the early warning capabilities were very, very, very, very classified. Now, if we start talking about kind of war in space, so anti satellite capabilities, lasers, anything kinetic in space, that would be like, classified to classified classified, right. Because it's potentially extremely destabilizing.

So when you're looking at games that deal with space, it's not normal classification levels. It's like classified to classified, right. And so the challenge has always been how do you integrate a capability that we can't talk about at a game that's occurring at like a secret level or even a t's level.

So that's a big difference about war, gaming in space. The other kind of big difference about space than some of the other campaigns, other domains is. I remember I was talking earlier, earlier about adjudicating a capability versus a capability. So like a radar versus a plane, a tank versus an anti tank missile.

Well, we can model those and input them into the game because we've tested them, we've experimented with them, we've seen them in combat. We have data, in some ways space, because it has been a relatively peaceful domain. We don't have as much kind of resident data about how people think about using space, about the ways in which space might escalate because it has been actually relatively stable.

That's kind of different about space than some of the other domains, but in some ways, like, not different than nuclear, where we also didn't have precedent data, which is good.

>> Bill Whalen: So we started this podcast, Jackie, talking about events of 60 years ago. I want you to try to project 60 years from now.

Now, hopefully, the United States is not reflecting on lessons of a bad foreign policy foray along the lines of Vietnam. But as we look to the future of wargaming, Jackie, what do you think the next chapter in it will be? Or do you think that wargaming is going to be kind of consistent as it is today, as it was back in the 1960s?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think at its core, wargaming is about human behaviors. And when I look at the games historically, the games that matter, it's games that are able to get humans together to understand. The way in which we behave in uncertain circumstances. I don't think that changes. But I do think the context of what, where the uncertainty is and where the unknown is does change.

And I think right now I'm not going to go 60 years, I'm going to go 5 to 10. What's happening in US China relationship and foreign policy with China and thinking about how we arm the Taiwanese or how we build forces in the Pacific that is highly influenced by games, and the games that are occurring today may help set the trajectory of whether that is a situation that ends in war or peace.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Jackie, let's leave it there. You've got a conference to prepare for, but I'd just like to thank you for all the great work you do as a director of the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and also with Veteran's Day fast approaching. Jackie, thank you ever so much for the fantastic work you do behind the scenes on the Hoover Veteran's Fellows Initiative.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thank you, and thanks for having me. It's always exciting talking about what we're doing. And for anyone who gets really interested, all these documents are publicly hosted on wargaming.hoover.org.

>> Bill Whalen: Excellent, you've been listening to Matters of Policy & Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe.

If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, please spread the word. Tell your friends about us. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and x feeds. Our X handle @hooverinst, that's spelled H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. Jackie Schneider is on X and she has a complicated X handle, but here we go.

It is @jackiegschneid, I will now spell it out for you, J-A-C-K-I-E-G-S-C-H-N-E-I-D, @jackiegschneid. I mentioned our website at the beginning of the show, that's hoover.org. While you're there, sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which keeps you updated on what Jackie Schneider and her Hoover colleagues are up to.

That's emailed to you on weekdays. Also, you should sign up for Hoover's Podblast, which delivers the best of our podcast each month to your inbox. For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen. We'll be back soon with another installment of Matters of Policy & Politics. I'll be doing an election preview with Hoover's Ben Ginsburg, he's one of the nation's foremost authorities on election law.

So we're going to be talking about election integrity, the legal aspects of this election, challenging votes, polling hours, how states are braced, and so forth. Should be a great conversation. Till then, take care. Thanks for listening.

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