Cyber-Rattling: Jacquelyn Schneider on (War) Games People Play

>> Bill Whalen: It's Monday, June 12, 2023, 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 Whelan, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow doing podcasts these days.

I recommend you go to our website, which is hoover.org,and when you get there, click on the tab on top of the homepage, it says Commentary. Scroll over to where it says Multimedia, and up will pop our whole Audio Podcast menu, I think there are 17 in all. And I think my humble little podcast is at the top of the list because I get really cool guests today being no exception.

My guest today is Jacqueline Schneider. Jacquelyn Schneider, or Jackie to her friends, is a Hoover fellow and director of the Hoover War Gaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. She's also an affiliate with Stanford University center for International Security and Cooperation. Her Hoover research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology with a special interest in cybersecurity, autonomous technology, war games in northeast Asia.

Jackie, welcome back to the podcast.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thank you for having me.

>> Bill Whalen: So, my friend, we passed an important milestone in american history a few days ago. I can't believe it got such a little fanfare, Jackie, it was the 40th anniversary of a big event, June 3rd, 1983.

Jackie, American moviegoers were introduced to a film that was part comedy, part suspense, it's titled WarGames. You're nodding your head because you've seen the movie.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, yes, I would do a lot of work on cyber, nuclear and war games. And so it's almost obligatory to, at some point in the conversation, reference war games.

Like if you're doing a bingo card, I would put that right in the middle. That's a wonderful movie with Matthew Broderick back in his early days.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, so for our non-war gamers listening to this podcast, or non-baby boomers, here's what War Games is all about. The premise is a teenager played by Matthew Broderick, hacks his way into a military computer system.

He thinks he's playing a game called Global Thermonuclear Warfare, when in fact, a computer thinks it's the real McCoy and thus wants to trigger World War III with ICBM's warming up in the silos and whatnot. As Jackie mentioned, it stars a very young Matthew Broderick. Maybe they do a sequel, Jackie, he comes back to town and brings Carrie Bradshaw with him because in real life, he's married to Sarah Jessica Parker.

It's just a very clever cast and all, Jackie. Dabney Coleman is in this movie, he's great character actor in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He plays the civilian chief in charge of the malfunctioning computer system. Jackie, what's the name of the computer system?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: My gosh, you're catching me, I don't remember.

 

>> Bill Whalen: WOPR, War Operation Plan Response. Another great character actor is an air Force general, Jackie, played by the great character actor Barry Corbin, who plays something of an anti-technology stuffed shirt. By the way, if you like movie errors, he is a four star Air Force general, Jackie. And his entire, everything he's wearing is from the World War Two era.

Apparently, he didn't go to Vietnam, so somebody didn't do their homework on that side.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, the movie was really influential. I mean, it's an entertaining movie, but also, you know, that Ronald Reagan watched it, huge movie lover. And as the story goes, he watched it and was said, could this happen to us?

And it actually was the impetus for the very first cyber vulnerability study. And as the lore goes, they actually did find vulnerabilities. And this is kind of where you begin to see the relationship between cyber and nuclear weapons in US vulnerability studies.

>> Bill Whalen: And another trademark of 80s movies, Jackie, there is a great tagline that you take away from this movie, like a Schwarzenegger film saying, I'll be back, or hasta la vista, baby.

And the tagline of this movie is, shall we play a game? Which comes out in that very creepy computer voice. But it turns out, Jackie, the military does play games. War games in particular, that war games are having a moment right now. What do you mean by that, that war games are having a moment?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, war games have been a huge part of American planning for, wow, we can talk more extensively about kind of the role of war games in American defense policy and foreign policy. But at this particular moment, war games are having a moment. And because we're seeing a revitalization of interest in war gaming within the foreign policy community.

So you're seeing more unclassified war games, really big games that are being lauded in places like 60 Minutes, ABC News, NBC. And they're unclassified games that are run by think tanks like the Center for a New American Security or CSIS. And at the same time, you have congressmen like Congressman Mike Gallagher, who are using war games as part of the policy planning process in a very kind of open and visible way, as part of the way to motivate and inform spending on Us China, foreign policy issues.

Those are kinda like the visible moments that are happening, but under the surface, there's also a lot going on. So you have a revitalization of war gaming, an effort that started in the Department of Defense in 2010 by then Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work. And this effort for revitalization of war gaming led to investments in new types of war games and using war games within the policy planning process.

At the same time, in academia, you have a use of war games to answer kind of more academic and policy questions and a real experimentation with methodology. So all these things are coming together at the same time. So war games are hearing more about them. They're being used more often in policy, but we're also seeing a reinvention and invigoration of the different ways in which people run war games.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right, before we go much further, let's differentiate what we mean when we say war games. If you google war games right now, a lot comes up, and it comes up in terms of physical exercises by military forces. For example, right now, today being June 12th, Jackie, NATO is conducting its largest aerial war games ever, it's called Air Defender 23.

I think there are like 250 aircraft from 25 NATO countries involved in this. This comes a week after Russia began naval war games in the Pacific and Baltic. Something like 40 warships involved in that, a couple of nuclear bombers buzzing off the coast of North Scotland. In April, Jackie, China carried out naval war games, precision strikes and blockades around Taiwan.

This is in response to Taiwan's president meeting in California with Kevin McCarthy in May. Taiwan then in turn stages its war games, it calls it Hong Kong, I believe, and this is tabletop drills and forces mobilized, focusing on combat force preservation and maritime interception. I understand this in terms of saber rattling.

I understand this in terms of showing that we have a vigorous defense and so forth. But what other benefits are there in these shows of forces?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and war games are slightly distinct from exercises. And some of that list was, I would consider an exercise. So the big difference between an exercise and a war game, an exercise, you kind of have a plan or an idea about what you're going to do, and you are exercising your plan.

So it's not trying to look at different types of uncertainty. It's we have an idea about how to do things. We want to make sure we can do it well. War games, at their best are designed to understand uncertainty. So war games are often not necessarily exercises where you're actually employing weapon systems, but instead involve kind of the simulated use or movement of weapon systems in order to understand how they might interact in scenarios that have not occurred yet.

So you're taking human players and putting them in a scenario that is not occurred yet. And you are trying to understand what might unfold given all these different variables. A lot of the games that we hear talked about in the news right now are games that are simulating the type of exercise movements that we see in real life.

And so often, exercises are generally a signal. A way of showing alliance credibility, alliance resolve. A way of demonstrating that you have some sort of military capability. And so their ultimate impact might actually be more in deterrence. Whereas a lot of time war games are usually done covertly.

And more often than not, the results are not released. And they're part of a larger planning process instead of necessarily kind of and exercising the forces that are already in theater.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, let's talk a bit about the history of wargaming, Jackie. Tell me who Johann Christian Ludwig Helwig is.

And explain to me what Kriegsspiel is.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Okay, so, Kriegsspiel, this is kind of the first real use of a war game, a game. To as part of training and a part of campaign planning. And this evolves in Prussia. And it's part of their way of thinking about how do they build the forces they need?

Where do they allocate their forces without actually having to put them in the field? And so Kriegsspiel was a series of different rules that allowed them to exercise these campaigns. Or to practice the different types of campaigns in different ways. And Kriegsspiel becomes the the first real use of these games in modern conflict.

And then becomes a cemented part of how western militaries were thinking about planning. Going up from these kind of Austria Prussian wars all the way into modern day defense planning.

>> Bill Whalen: And the United States Navy did war gaming in the lead up to World War II. Supposedly, it helped us with the campaign in the Pacific, no?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so the Navy is very famous for what we call its inner war year, war gaming. So this is the time period between World War I and World War II. And what was happening was they were training officers at the Naval War College. And so every time these officers would come through the Naval War College, they would iterate these different types of Pacific games, and they change things up.

They change the players up. They change the weapons up. They would change the adversaries up. And the adversaries intentions up. And they played this over a series of about a few decades.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And really, the Navy didn't really know what was going on. It kinda left it alone.

This is when the best moments in defense planning happened. It kinda left it alone. And they played the game so many times. And in so many different ways. And so many different iterations. And different players that the Navy felt like they were ready for the campaign in the Pacific.

And there is this famous quote by Admiral Nimitz that says, because of the gaming that we did during the interwar years, there was nothing that surprised us in the Pacific except the Kamikazes. And these games are also credited with a lot of the decisions that led towards focus on the aircraft carrier and the aircraft over the more capital ship focused Navy that they had in the past.

 

>> Bill Whalen: And how does wargaming affect non-traditional different kinds of wars, Jackie Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? I'm curious how you can actually plan and kind of anticipate wars like that, where you're dealing with insurgency forces, not traditional militaries. But just almost not rebellious, but just a different kind of warfare that we were not used to.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, a lot of the Vietnam games, they looked at insurgency and the different types of kind of asymmetric campaigns that might occur in Vietnam. But they also looked at the relationship between Vietnam and that war that was occurring there and the greater soviet nuclear dynamics. So if you look at a lot of the famous games from the Vietnam area.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Correct.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: They ultimately link and look at the role of escalation and what actions the US is going to take that not only affect whether you win or lose the campaign. But also whether winning or losing the campaign would lead to nuclear stability or nuclear instability. So those games had a big role not just on the development of different types of campaigns.

And actually, McNamara was probably more of a fan of modeling and simulations when it came to campaign planning. He's a numbers guy, as opposed to gaming, which is a little bit more about human behaviors. And so the gaming was focused a lot more on the strategic. Whereas they relied on kind of computer models and computer simulations to devise a lot of the campaign choices.

Now, but moving into Iraq and Afghanistan, once again, you're using games along with models and simulations in order to try to understand what the extent of the campaigns are going to be. What are the casualty rates going to be? What types of tactics and strategies are going to be most effective?

How should we posture our forces? And so games are used actually in the planning process, alongside model simulations and kinda more mathematical approaches in order to understand how different changes in what the Iraqis do. Or how we employ forces in different ways. How that might affect the ultimate outcomes.

Now, that said, gaming doesn't predict outcomes.

>> Bill Whalen: Mm-hmm.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I would say we don't have a lot of the declassified games from the planning going into Iraq or Afghanistan. But my guess would be that a lot of those games did not actually anticipate the counterinsurgency tactics that ended up coming out of those two campaigns.

Which I think is kind of a good lesson to learn that games are not always predictors. And they just kind of show the wide array of possibilities of outcomes.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, but you could take what you learn in one war and apply it in games to anticipating future wars, right?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: That's the hope. That's always the dream.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Is that you can actually use war games to help predict the future.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I would say that in some ways, it does help us predict the future. Because if war games are run many times and in many different ways, like the inner war games at the Naval War College, it allows you to see patterns of behavior.

So you can't predict, this is what's going to happen, this is not going to happen. But you can say, I run the game so many times, this is generally what happens, is generally what doesn't happen. And when there are these aberrations, this is why. And actually, that's what I do in my gaming is I'll run my game.

We last game series had 580 players and 110 different iterations. And what I look at is, hey, here's the tendencies in those iterations. But then I almost learn as much from when things don't occur in the normal pattern, right? Cuz the people like Putin, they're not the normal pattern.

So part.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: About war games is understanding the general outlay of potential. And then when something is abnormal, why is it abnormal? What kinda person is that? What kinda situation? What kinda context? And because in real life, it doesn't always follow a probabilistic curve.

>> Bill Whalen: What do we know, Jackie, about Ukrainian wargaming?

And I'm asking in this regard. We are approaching the 16 month anniversary of Russia's invasion of that country. We know that Russia's plan has backfired horribly. They were gonna go in and just roll over the country and decapitate the government. And use their version of shock and awe and just overwhelm the Ukrainians with force.

And now here they are almost 16 months later. And they were bogged down in a war. Now, I read a lot of articles which suggest there are basic problems. Russian leadership with Russian technology, Russian military strategy. But I had a thought the other day, Jackie. What if the Ukrainians were wargaming and they were anticipating an invasion, and the Russians have been guilty all along of just kind of doing what was predictable?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: There is some open source reporting suggesting that the Ukrainians were wargaming, that the Ukrainians perhaps were being involved in some NATO war games leading up to the invasion. I mean, that said, the other open source reporting suggests that most people didn't believe that the Russians were actually going to invade.

So how helpful that wargaming was to them, it's kind of hard to know. But war games are also very useful in helping alliances or relationships in solving kind of communication problems. So wargames are often used not just to find outcomes, but also as a means by which countries can come together and have be in a difficult scenario and work out kind of who would be in charge when, where do we not have communication mechanisms already set up?

Where are there real gaps? And hopefully what the war games revealed if they were war gaming before, hopefully what those war games revealed is where they would really need support from the west. I'm not sure any war game expected the Russians to flounder quite as monumentally as they did, cuz I think one of the big problems we have in war games actually is capturing public will and the professionalism of forces.

These are kind of variables that don't have fixed terms, so you're making a giant guess at how important those two variables are going to be when you make an assessment about campaign outcomes.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, it just crossed my mind, Jackie, because if you go back and look at World War Two, for example, some great military blunders are just not anticipating innovative moves.

For example, the British famously have their guns trained out to sea in Singapore. They never anticipate the Japanese actually being able to march down the malay peninsula. Now, granted, that's both closed-mindedness and some kind of racial prejudice as well, just thinking the Japanese were inferior soldiers. The French build a Maginot line.

They never anticipate the Germans crashing through the forest as they did. So, again, I just look at the Ukraine war and I just wonder just how much Russia is doing that's predictable and just kind of buy a big Russian playbook.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think what you're highlighting is how important two concepts are at wargaming to make them effective.

One is red teaming. So who is playing your bad guy and what is informing the choices that they're making? Quite often you're having your country, the us players for us, playing the bad guy, and they're making a guess about kind of how that bad guy is going to what their intentions are, how they're going to use their forces.

If you look at the war games and you find that we're always playing the bad guy the same way, we're probably playing war games in a biased way, where we're mirror imaging or that limit the overall use of war games to understand where the adversary might do something that we don't expect.

So that's red team. Are you picking the right people to play red team? And the second is, are you playing it enough? So are you doing this enough times that you have a sense of what the potential possibilities are? So instead of playing one giant game with one set of experts, you could play that game over many, many, many different times with lots of different types of experts.

And that's actually kind of what we're trying to push towards at Hoover is to be able to look at games across many, many, many iterations, whether it's running games with lots of iterations or looking across games using historical data.

>> Bill Whalen: So as the United States does war games right now, Jackie, we are wargaming China and who else?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, I'm just gonna make a guess based on the strategy, cuz generally our planning falls directly from our national defense strategy and our national security strategy. But those strategies lay out China, they lay out Russia, as well as North Korea, Iran, and kind of terrorism writ large and insurgencies.

So my guess is, if those are the focuses of the strategy, more than likely war games are built into the planning process that help us understand how we combat those adversaries.

>> Bill Whalen: Right. So it's a lot of planning on the usual suspects, for lack of a better phrase, just the kind of most likely culprits to do something out there.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, I mean, more than likely. But also institutions have, that we have both geographic combatant commands that are gonna be focused on a geographic adversary, and we have functional command. So if you're a functional command like cyber command, for example, you're probably going to be focused on those adversaries, but you're also going to be focused on problems that are kind of specific to your domain, and that might mean that your war gaming situations that go beyond typical Russia, North Korea, China.

So, for example, in cyber, and I work in this space a lot. One of the biggest problems is criminal actors and ransomware attacks. So a lot of the games that occur in cyber are not necessarily completely just focused at a state to state cyber attack, but instead are looking at how these non state actors influence real national security concerns and kind of what role the us government and the Department of Defense has in working with other members of the us government and the private sector to combat those type of threats.

 

>> Bill Whalen: So you mentioned beginning of the podcast Mike Gallagher and what he was doing in April, and here's what was going on in Washington. Mike Gallagher is the chair of the House Select Committee on China. He's a congressman of Wisconsin. And so in April, what he did was he called a meeting in the House Ways of Committee room.

They unfolded a big giant map atop a table, looked kind of like a game of risk, and it was not a pretty picture of what they came up with. Jackie, Chinese missiles and rockets were raining down on Taiwan. Us forces as far away as Japan and Guam were also struck in attacks.

Our allies apparently in their scenario buckled, leaving the United states alone to fight. Diplomatic channels were not working. It wasn't a very pretty picture. The question, Jackie, is what was Mike Gallagher getting at by doing this?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I'm just gonna make a giant guess here, but war games have a really evocative quality for anybody who's played in a game.

You know that the lessons that you take from a game generally stick with you more than lessons that you take from other types of information. So when you present a policymaker with a PowerPoint that they're looking at, or a memo that they're reading, or a model that they're deciphering, it could be the same information that they're processing when they're playing the game.

But the fact that they are immersed in a game, that they are invested in outcomes, that they have this emotional connection to the game. And more importantly, I think for somebody like Gallagher, who's trying to convince a group of people who have very disparate interests that this is something they should prioritize, having them do the same thing together for a quality amount of time.

I mean, the fact that he can get that many members of Congress to focus on one scenario for half a day is really remarkable. And so games can be an extraordinary tool of polemic. They can convince others about the validity of information. They can give that emotional reaction that convinces folks that this is something I wanna prioritize over another potential threat.

So as a policymaker, it is a fantastic tool to try and convince other policymakers to be worried about the US China issue, to feel like they have a sense of knowledge about where the asymmetries are. And then to be invested enough that they are willing to allocate money and budgets, right?

I mean, in the end, the ability of these games to directly influence line items in a budget. I mean, that is a remarkable piece of influence making by Congressman Gallagher.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me throw two other possible benefits at you. These are not related to Mike Gallagher, but these are related to China, Jackie.

And that is the idea of intimidation and the idea of lack of better morale back home, if you will. In May, Jackie, a news report came out. North University of China researchers published results of a war game in which China used 24 hypersonic missiles to sink a us carrier, task force, USS Gerald Ford, and five of its escorts.

And what the news reports claimed, Jackie, was that they did this 20 times and each time they got the same results. They sunk the carrier, they sunk the escorts. Now I'm kinda curious about this, because this is a autocracy and they're putting out the results that they want you to see that boy went 20 for 20 and seeking the carrier.

In other words, you don't see a report coming out saying that we sunk the carrier twice or we've failed to sink it at all. Instead, this wonderful, perfect result. And so you look that you kinda scratch your head and you think, did this really happen or not? But then you think, what is the really big picture here?

China's trying to show us that, you know what, we can sink your carriers. And so they're trying to intimidate us in South China Sea and they're just trying to flex their muscle.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and I think this is a direct response to the unclassified and very visible war games that were run by DNS and CSIS.

It is no surprise to me that in this game, the Chinese consistently take out a carrier group. I mean-

>> Bill Whalen: But you know what it's like watching Vladimir Putin play hockey. Putin goes out on the ice, he scores eight goals, amazing.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, a few distinctions here because the US does leak classified games when it benefits them.

Absolutely, when the Air Force leaks a game that says they need new fighters and new bombers, you should not take that as a credible source of information. That game is telling you what the Air Force already wants to do. So it's like we do this too, right? We bake results sometimes, too.

It's generally for domestic politics though, and not international politics. And the thing about the games that have been run recently, they've been run by rather independent organizations. So they are not, like, sponsored by the Department of Defense. They're not sponsored by members of the US government and the researchers have been pretty open about, here are the assumptions that we made.

Here's how we made what's called adjudication which is when you make determinations about weapons effectiveness, when they pair against each other. Here are our players, here's our rulebook, right? So they're being very transparent about the assumptions they made to get to the results that they are. It's not coming out of the Chinese, right?

So you can bake a game to get to any outcome you want. No one should ever say that games are a definitive piece of information, especially with not being able to look and see the work that the designers have done under the hood. And so not very credible, but interesting that the Chinese believe that the games that are being run by unclassified think tanks in the US are important enough that they are responding with their own public release of war games.

 

>> Bill Whalen: And how would we, the United States government be able to verify these results? Because you're reading news reports that they batted 20 for 20 with the hypersonic missiles, you're not looking at the actual simulations, you're not seeing how they did it. So how do we figure out how exactly they did it?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I mean, if they're not showing us their work, we're never gonna know. I mean, the reality is and why would they, right? Are they going to release us what they think our capabilities of our air defenses are? I mean, I probably wouldn't. And so I mean, they're being very disingenuous with this entire war game.

But to be fair to the Chinese, it is really, really, really hard to do these assessments. So making an assessment about how. It's one thing to assess how one platform whether 1 platform can defeat another platform like 1 of 16 versus 1 S 400, right? I can model that, but that's not the way warfare works.

Warfare is how platforms and munitions interact in these complicated networks of command and control, that actually is very difficult to model. So even a game that does the best it can like the CSIS game which I really think they did the best they did, they showed their work.

This is a good example of a good game, right? They could have made assumptions about which weapon wins in which engagement, and they could be absolutely and entirely wrong.

>> Bill Whalen: That was naval forces in the Taiwan Strait, I think, the CIS war games.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yes, and these are hard to model.

Even if you have classified information, how a weapon performs in training and how a weapon performs according to the specifications of the folks make it is not necessarily the same as how that weapon performs in combat. So that's nice that the Chinese said they're gonna take out a carrier group.

What it reveals to me is that they're listening to us.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me ask you two perfectly naive questions. Number one, what's stopping say, a prominent American think tank from reaching out to a university in China and saying, hey, why don't we do war games together and let's see what happens?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, I think the overall international climate is stopping that. I mean, I would personally know. I'm an academic, I'm running academic games. I would love to have chinese players. My first series of games, we had 70% american and 30% non american. And in some of those games, I invited members of every single consulate or every single embassy, for example, DC.

So I invited the Chinese, I invited the Russians, and so far, they have not said yes to my games. My games are also very hypothetical, our state versus other state. We're not revealing us or Chinese capabilities, but I actually do think it would behoove both nations to game together more to better understand the dangers that they.

The inadvertent escalation dangers of different posture choices that they're making. So I hope universities in China and universities in the US can run games with each other.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, another naive question. What about Anthony blinking going to Beijing and sitting down with his diplomatic counterpart and saying, why don't your government and our government get together and do war games?

And therefore, we'll see. Getting back to the 1980s and the whole moral of war games, we'll see what a zero sum game this is. If you want to come across a Taiwan straight, you will not succeed and a lot of people will die. I mean, what's stopping blinky from making that offer or it's just too Pollyannish to suggest something like that?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think it's more complicated that. I think there is fear that you're gonna reveal capabilities. Absolutely, I mean, we never even got to that point really with the Soviets. I'm gonna say that-

>> Bill Whalen: Revealing capabilities, Jackie, and revealing capabilities in terms of what American weapons can do or revealing capabilities in terms of how much we know about Chinese weapons or both.

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Right, so there's that fear. I mean, I think the only place this could happen would be in a non official track for diplomacy.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So I'm in one of these kind of track twos. We're looking very specifically at AI. We're not looking at the whole kind of campaign and we actually have used scenarios very successfully, it's a US China track two.

We've used scenarios very successfully for the US and Chinese side to be able to communicate to one another and to be able to talk through potential dangers of the The integration of AI. So there are real opportunities for scenarios in gaming to be used within diplomatic negotiations or within the kind of unofficial official tracks of diplomacy.

It would be extremely, extremely difficult to do that in an official way. I mean, we barely have talks on the military side. And to be fair, the US has been more receptive to doing talks with the triainees in the military than the Chinese military has been receptive to talking with us.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Good point. What is AI's future, Jackie, when it comes to wargames?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Good question. And I get this all the time.

>> Bill Whalen: What we're talking right now is people getting together, and a lot of people getting together, doing a lot of simulating. But as we enter this new era where AI does more and more of human functions, will AI just overtake war games?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I have mixed feelings about this, so I actually use war games to help understand how humans respond to AI. So I have a game right now that is led by researcher Harold Trincunis at our sister, the CISAC over at Stanford. And it's looking at US-China relationship, and a situation occurs with AI and how we respond and how does that affect the crisis scenario.

And it's really useful to helping understand how humans deal with uncertainty when it comes to AI. So I think games can help us understand how AI will impact crises and impact campaigns. So that's on one hand. Now, how AI actually influences gaming. I think it can be in a few ways.

The first is that one of the biggest limitations with war games has been the lack of number of war games and the lack of availability of war game data. And so the difficulty of looking across games to understand generalized, well, patterns, what we started talking about at the beginning, this is actually a real role for AI.

And so that's why we at Hoover are trying to build a wargaming collection that allowed a large aggregation of data to be able to use AI to better understand patterns of how people behave in these games. The third and final way to use AI, which I actually don't recommend, but this is, I think, the direction that the field has been going, is using AI as only running a few iterations of games, and then using AI to kind of create a synthetic increase of information, right?

So you only have five players, but you're running it basically through a model these many, many times to try and create synthetic data. And I find that a little bit less useful. But there's a lot of work going on right now to try and figure out both how war games can help us understand AI and whether AI can be a tool to help make war gaming data more applicable.

 

>> Bill Whalen: So I recognize now we're about 40 minutes into this podcast, and I've yet to call you Madam Director, as I would Condoleezza Rice, because you are the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. Let's talk about the initiative, Jackie. Three components to it. One, you've mentioned the wargame archive.

Explain what is in that archive.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so what we're doing is we are building an open source, publicly accessible data collection that allows any individual to look at large amounts of wargaming data and then to actually download games and use themselves. So right now, we're in the very beta version of this wargaming archive, but it includes games that are built by academics, a lot of open source, already declassified Department of Defense wargames, as well as wargames that are conducted with think tanks.

And then going on in the future, we're actually going to try and push the Department of Defense to declassify more games that have kind of hit that 25 year mark that need to be declassified, but maybe haven't yet. And then the point of this repository will be that you can use it to download games to teach, you can use it to download games to replicate or to run, or you can use the gaming data itself to better understand a host of different questions about foreign policy, about decision making, about war game methodology.

And so the hope is that with all this data, we can actually be more transparent about games, that games can become better and that will make it more accessible so more people can use games as a part of teaching and policy planning and academic queries.

>> Bill Whalen: So who is our customer base?

Who is our clientele here?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So, historians, political scientists, economists. So that's kind of on the academic side, but also people working in foreign policy. I got an email a few weeks ago from a member of government who was using our games to help train. So they're downloading the games and then using those games to train people about how to design crisis scenarios.

You also have the wargaming community, and then finally the defense community and the foreign policy community.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, and that's one of our other cornerstones here, fostering the wargaming community. But the other cornerstone, the third one, is running game series and simulations. How often do you run games and simulations, Jackie?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So the goal is to run two or three kind of very large initiatives in any one year, really. Well, that's the goal. We just completed a big initiative which I started when I was at the Naval War College, which is the International Crisis Wargames series. It's all online now.

And that was like 580 players over three years looking at the role that cyber vulnerabilities play in nuclear stability. So cyber vulnerabilities and nuclear command control and communications. And then we have an ongoing series funded by the Stanton Foundation called the Maritime Crisis Wargame series. And that wargame series looks at decisions about network characteristics, network characteristics in early warning and in different kind of nuclear platforms to understand how the networks that we build affect nuclear stability.

We also have a game with CISAC on AI. That's a US-China scenario. And then finally, just announced, very exciting. We got funding to the Department of Defense's Minerva initiative with a team led by Georgia Tech and also including the Air Force Academy to look at space and conventional and nuclear stability.

So looking at how civilian and military entanglement and conventional and nuclear entanglement, how those might affect kind of how campaigns and crises unfold.

>> Bill Whalen: And our listeners should know you have more than a passing interest in space because you are-

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I am a reservist assigned to Space systems command in LA.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Good, Space Force.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yes, though technically Space Force doesn't have a reserve component, so I am still a member of the United States Air Force.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, question for you, Jackie. In the corporate sector and the private sector, businesses love to use war analogies. Remember going back yet again to the age 80s, we had cola wars between Pepsi and Coca Cola, for example.

Is there wargaming in the private sector?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So, this is another one of this kind of gaming having a moment. Games are actually being used pretty widely in the business community for kind of strategic planning. And I've run a series of games that were kind of private sector cyber games, looking at how private sector companies dealt with large cyber incidents and worked with the federal government.

So these are becoming a bigger part of the strategic planning process. And I actually think, I mean, our initiative is crisis simulations and wargaming. And the reason why it's both is to help imply this is not just about war. In fact, games are a really helpful methodology for understanding a wide variety of rare or difficult to understand scenarios.

And so business is a natural kind of set of questions that lend itself really nicely to wargaming as a methodology.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, very good. So final question here, and I'll let you go. Jackie, where do you see this initiative going with Hoover? What's your goal here in the next couple of years?

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, the primary goal is to really build out the archive. We want to have the largest archive and for it to be extremely, extremely accessible for researchers all over the world. By building that archive, what we hope to foster is a community of people who are using wargaming data and using wargames, and experimenting and innovating with different types of wargaming methodology.

So we're hoping to build a community that extends beyond just kind of the wargaming community and into academia and really serves a bridge between academia and wargames. And at the same time, answer kind of these really big, pressing foreign policy and defense and economic questions that war games can lend some really fascinating insights to.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, congratulations. You found a project that I think is recession proof and time proof in many regards, because this issue is always going to be with us.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I guess, as long as I don't wargame myself out of a job.

>> Bill Whalen: No, I don't think you're out of a job anytime soon.

We love having you at Hoover. Jackie Schneider, thanks for coming on the podcast today.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thank you so much for having me.

>> Bill Whalen: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and 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 Twitter feeds. Our Twitter handle is @hooverinst, that's H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. Jackie Schneider, brave woman that she is, is likewise on Twitter.

And she has a complicated Twitter handle, But here goes. Her Twitter handle is @jackiegschneid. And I'll spell that for you. J-A-C-K-I-E-G-S-C-H-N-E-I-D @jackiegschneid. I mentioned our website beginning of the show, that is 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 weekdays. Also, sign up for Hoover's Pod blast, which delivers the best of our podcast each and every month to your inbox. For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whelan. We'll be back soon with top of the matters of policy and politics. Until then, take care.

Thanks for listening.

>> Speaker 3: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org dot.