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Thomas Allen's War Games professional wargaming 1945-1985

extract from CHAPTER 11 Red and Blue in the White House

Johnson was photographed at the sand table, surrounded by aides, tensely contemplating a miniature Khesanh, where little banners in the sand symbolized a few thousand U.S. Marines and the 40,000 North Vietnamese surrounding them. At the same time an Army historian named Colonel R. W. Argo shuttled between Saigon and Khesanh, between past and present, learning about Dienbienphu, France's catastrophic final battle in Indochina—and studying Khesanh, which had become a presidential obsession. That sand table was in the White House because Johnson, fearing an American Dienbienphu, wanted his own model of battle to better understand reality elsewhere.

Through historic analysis, Argo tracked Khesanh against Dienbienphu, U.S. tactics against French tactics, Communist strategy in Indochina in 1954 against North Vietnamese strategy in 1988. "I projected their timetable and predicted their attack to the day— a week or ten days before it happened," Argo told me. "I used history. I did not game. But in Washington they said they were role-playing and they had an Oriental in State playing Ho Chi Minh." (Such role-playing at the State Department often has been reported in anecdotes but never officially admitted.)

Johnson at the sand table and Kennedy at the plotting board were playing a real presidential game. In that special kind of game what happens in the real world is transmitted to the world of the Situation Room, where decision making becomes what gamers call a tabletop game. There may not often be a sand table or a simulation of the Atlantic to aid the President, but there will be briefing papers, scenarios of possible events—the real-life versions of the props used when lower-level officials play in the war colleges and the Pentagon's basement gaming room.

The only difference is that crisis management in a game is usually more orderly than crisis management in the Situation Room. Dr. Robert H. Kupperman, who was involved in crises in the White House and became an impresario of gaming for a prestigious think tank, once said that "at a time of deep trouble," a President "grabs his closest advisers who may know absolutely nothing about the crisis, or its resolution, simply for emotional support." The White House, Kupperman said, never has "a planning horizon beyond ten minutes. It is simply always in trouble."

In games players usually do not make believe they are actual national leaders. Social scientists who have studied presidential decision making frown on such role-playing. They say that only an American President can be an American President, only a Soviet General Secretary can be a Soviet General Secretary. If surrogates do role-play the chiefs of state in a game, one study suggested, the environment should be as realistic as possible—with an overloaded, unreliable communication system "providing ambiguous, threatening, and probabilistic situations." At best, the study said, the setting for such a game is a laboratory, and what happens there does not necessarily happen in real life.

The study pointed out that Freud, after observing apes in the London Zoo, decided that a sexual drive dominated their behavior. Freud then extended this to all primates, including human ones. Decades later, behaviorists studying apes in their natural environment saw that the apes' sexual activity was nowhere near the level Freud had observed in the zoo. Freud's inferences, the study of game behavior concludes, "were incorrect because the nature of his laboratory distorted the behavior of his subjects. The same problem arises when human subjects are placed in a laboratory setting that severely restricts their range of behavior."

In most games the abstract Blue plays the abstract Red. Blue or Red at its highest level is often referred to in games as the National Command Authority (NCA).

The NCA is not an abstraction. It is a real concept embodied in military doctrine, especially the doctrine that governs control over nuclear weapons. If the President is unable to employ his authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, the nuclear "release authority," as it is called, does not follow the Constitution's line of succession. The release authority passes from a disabled or missing President to the Secretary of Defense, and then, if necessary, to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Details about the NCA are vague and contradictory. One source suggests that "calculated ambiguity" cloaks revelations about presidentially delegated retaliatory authority. Another says that definitive information about the NCA is one of the nation's closely guarded secrets. No two authorities I consulted agreed on the passing of authority beyond the Deputy Secretary of Defense. But it can be imagined as a movement down and down, through catastrophe upon catastrophe, to the Secretary of the Army . . . the Navy . . . the Air Force—and ultimately, if all of them are gone, to an Air Force brigadier general in a command plane code-named Looking Glass flying somewhere over a leaderless nation devastated by nuclear war.

The design of U.S. nuclear decision making, Lincoln Bloomfield says, "has walked the line since the 1940s between a different pair of competing pressures: on one hand greater centralization so the President can retain tight control over any use of nuclear weapons, and decentralization so the system is not paralyzed by a communications snafu or a terrified (or incinerated) President."

The NCA is the decentralizing answer to the problem of nuclear release authority. In a real nuclear crisis the NCA is a real human being—the one person who makes the nuclear release decision. In a game, however, the NCA is nobody at all. A game's NCA, although a flesh-and-blood player, is actually a device designed to prevent role-playing. The game NCA is supposed to purify the decision of Blue or Red, making them more useful for analysis because they do not represent a real or contrived personality.

Either way—in game or in reality—the concept of an NCA also reflects the probability that a nuclear war will begin with the killing of the President. The theory stems from modern strategic concepts about starting a war by what nuclear strategists call the "decapitation" doctrine: A nuclear attack upon the NCA to eliminate civilian leadership and the nation's ability to continue fighting the war.

This probability was at the core of Ivy League, a White House war game based on a scenario that wiped out Washington—but not before a thousand or more officials from the Pentagon and civilian agencies were flown from Washington to underground emergency government centers operated by the Department of Defense and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House underground Situation Room was both a nerve center and a target in Ivy League, which was staged in 1982. In this role-playing game former Secretary of State William P. Rogers stood in for President Reagan and former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms was Vice President. Other players formed a simulated National Security Council. They included Fred C. Iklé, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Thomas Reed, a former Secretary of the Air Force; Air Force General James E. Dalton, staff director of the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel.

Under the NCA doctrine the President or his replacement runs the war through the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An ordinary war game would be played in the Joint Analysis Directorate game suite in the basement of the Pentagon. But Ivy League was no ordinary game, for part of the scenario called for realistic tests of the military command, control, communications, and intelligence system—C3I (pronounced "see-cubed-eye") in military jargon.

The crisis began with the role players in their places: the President (Rogers) and the simulated National Security Council in the Situation Room; the actual Joint Chiefs and their staff at the National Military Command Center, the complex of Pentagon offices that make up the nation's primary war room. The players had been told that weeks of tension had brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of war. The minutes to nuclear midnight were already ticking away.

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