Latest / Revisionist History / A Serious Game

Transcript

A Serious Game · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Bushkin. In C. S. Lewis's famous book The Lion, the
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensey Children happen upon the
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: magical land of Narnia, entering through a secret passage in
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: an English country house. When I spoke with Uniwong about
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: her own adventures, that story was the first thing she
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: brought up until recently.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: The path into war gaming is similar to the path
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: to getting to Narnia. You stumble upon it by accident.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: It's not of your own design. You don't even know
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: it exists.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Narnia an imaginary world that teaches us something important about
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: the real world. Uniwog zoom background is a steal from
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Star Wars R two D two, standing next to C
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: three po. She's part of the group of intellectual scholars
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: PhDs strategists who spend their careers helping the Pentagon think
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: about how to better wage war and more importantly, how
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: to better avoid war, and how do they do that
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: by playing games.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Someone said I should go to the Connection's worgaming conference.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: So that was in twenty eleven. But I walked into
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: this room of middle aged men in baseball paths, hunched
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: over miniatures, rolling dice, and I suddenly had this sense
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: that I had come home and these were my people,
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: and this is what I was supposed to have been
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: doing all along, and I didn't know it.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Why was it You walk in that room and you say, oh,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: this is where I belong. Can you explain why you
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: had that feeling?
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: I think it's the this is the It's the geekdom, right,
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Like geeks recognize each other at a deep level. So
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I recognize this brand of geeks at a deep level
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: that I didn't realize existed.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by the idea that there's a certain kind
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: of insight that you can only get from a simulation.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Can you explain why is that? Why can't Why can't
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I look at a scenario with a bunch of smart
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: people and without a simulation, come up with all of
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: the different angles in a dance just on our own.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Why do we need a wargame?
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: I think we will invoke Thomas Shelling as is appropriate
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: for nearly all occasions related to deterrence and wargaming and
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: anything I think truly imaginative.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Thomas Shelling was an economist, a Nobel Prize winner, and
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: the spiritual godfather of the wargaming world.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: Game theory is merely the study of how rational people
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: interact when they know that their decisions impinge on each other,
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: when people have to anticipate what another will do or
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: what another is already doing, or when people try to
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: influence the choices of others through threats and promise and
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: various devices to change their expectations of how one will behave.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: He once wrote that no one, no matter how intelligent,
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: can make a list of the things that would not
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: occur to them.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: And if we've learned anything recently, it is surely that
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: there is an ever expanding list of things that have
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: not occurred to us. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History by podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: This episode is about the idea that the best way
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: to prepare for the unexpected is not to make plans
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: or predictions, but to play games, not board games. Grand
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: theatrical productions costing many thousands of dollars, planned over months,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: stretching for days, experts and specialists playing each role, each
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: with the passion of an actor on a Broadway stage,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: with the hope that the rest of us will learn
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: from what they found in their elaborate imagine worlds. When
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: I was young, we lived in a house by the
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: highway with a very long, narrow backyard one hundred and
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: fifty yards deep, lined with what must have been more
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: than one hundred tall pauper trees. In the fall, when
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: the leaves fell, we all realized that raking the leaves
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: would be an overwhelming task. So my father through a party.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: He was a math professor and decided to invite all
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: of his graduate students in the afternoon. He told them
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: they would deal with the leaves. In the evening, there
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: would be a big dinner and then party games of
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: the sort that eccentric math professors consider appropriate for their
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: graduate students. My father students were all from overseas, from
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the top colleges of India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Israel. I
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: don't think any of them had ever raked leaves before,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: but my father believed strongly that a day of year
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: hard work and playing games was as good as life.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: God and his students picked up on his enthusiasm. The
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: leaf raking turned into sport. The games were hilarious, they convoluted,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: and the party proved such a success that Every year,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: a new crop of students would show up, and the
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: leaf breakers from previous years would invite themselves back, until
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the party became huge, a united nations of math geeks
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: in our backyard, creating huge piles of leaves calling out
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: to each other in strange accents. My working definition of
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: smart at the age of eight or nine was knowing things.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: But when I listened in on the dozens of Africans
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: and Indians in my backyard, it seemed to me that
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: they defined themselves by what they didn't know. They would
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: never say I just solved such and such problem that
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: was boring ancient history. They would say, I'm working on
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: a problem. There is something that I don't understand that
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: I wish I did, and an even larger group of
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: things I don't yet know that I don't know, with
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the clear implication the pleasure of finding out the unknown
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: was why they got up in the morning. I hadn't
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: thought of the leaf raking party for a long time
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: until I started talking to the wargamers, when I realized, oh,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: these people all belonged to the same tribe.
• 6:37
  Speaker 4: I think that what wargaming does is by putting people
• 6:41
  Speaker 4: in these simulated positions, these realistic but unreal realities. It
• 6:48
  Speaker 4: encourages them to and exposes them to things they maybe
• 6:53
  Speaker 4: haven't bought up.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: That's David Shlaypak, who was one of the founding directors
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: of the Center for Gaming at the RAND Corporation. RAND
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: is the big think tank out in Santa Monica that's
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: been running wargames for years. Yuniwong worked at RAND, so
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: did Thomashef, author of The Wargamer's Creed. One of the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: things Shlaypack started doing in his wargames was to make
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: the element of chance tangible. You have one army against another,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: you make a list of the ten different things that
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: could conceivably happen, and then you roll the dice.
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: And the first time we did that, I was terrified.
• 7:30
  Speaker 4: I was thinking, when we go in front of a
• 7:32
  Speaker 4: bunch of people who have experienced combat, who have actually
• 7:35
  Speaker 4: been fighting real wars for the last fifteen years, and
• 7:39
  Speaker 4: we show them that we're going to use dice, they're
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: just gonna laugh us out of the room. And we
• 7:44
  Speaker 4: had all sorts of arguments prepared about why that was legitimate.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: He was going to play the wargame with senior military
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: officers and he didn't know how they would react.
• 7:53
  Speaker 4: We were ready to defend it, and nobody batted an eyelash.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: The military guys playing Schlapeck's games didn't want things to
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: be predictable. Predictable they could do on their own. What
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: they wanted was to be forced off the narrow path
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: that logic and prior experience would have them follow. Schleepek
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: was once involved in a game to test what would
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: happen if the Russians invaded the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: three small countries right next to Russia, all members of NATO.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: If Russia attacked, it would face the wrath of Western
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Europe plus the United States. On paper, the wargame seemed
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: to be based on a dumb question. Who would win?
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: We would?
• 8:41
  Speaker 4: NATO has thirty five times Russia's GDP. Russia is just
• 8:47
  Speaker 4: emerging from this demographic crisis that is more severe than
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: any that's ever been inflicted on an advanced nation. Their
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: military has been on the downslope for twenty five years.
• 8:59
  Speaker 4: This is a no brainer. Of course NATO's going to win.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: But the first time they played it, NATO didn't win.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Russia did now mean Russia would actually win in a
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: battle against the Baltics. No, this was a game, an
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: active imagination, but it did show everyone involved that an
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: absurdly remote possibility had to be taken seriously. Schlapek ran
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: the game again and again. Russia always won.
• 9:28
  Speaker 4: Russia's always winning, and in fact we eventually started telling people, look,
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: we've done everything except go out on the street and
• 9:36
  Speaker 4: grab random individuals and ask them to play. And no
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: one's done better than X. Can you do better than X?
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: The expectations and predictions of experts are useful, but only
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: up to a point. The war game is where you
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: put those expectations to the test. A few years ago
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: I was invited to join Rand's Board of Trustees. It
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: requires two meetings a year, one at RAND headquarters in
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Santa Monica, the other at their office near the Pentagon
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: in northern Virginia. Half of every board meeting is devoted
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: to the kinds of things that nonprofits worry about, budgets, fundraising, hiring.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: The other half is research presentations from RAND staffers, like
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the electricity grid in Puerto Rico has just been wiped
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: out by Hurricane Maria. How much would it take to
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: fix it? Or do American school children get enough sleep.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: But my favorite presentations are always the war games. Like
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: this one. The Army comes to RAND with a question.
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: They asked us to do a war game type of
• 11:00
  Speaker 5: analysis to understand what it would take to secure loose
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: nuclear weapons in a failed North Korean state.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: That's Colonel John Gentia, retired Army former tank commander. He
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: did two tours in Iraq. He's a doctorate from Stanford
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: and taught history at West Point. He's now a senior
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: historian at RAND, and he gave a presentation to the
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: board about his North Korean game. Wargames always start with
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: a path to war, an imaginary but plausible scenario that
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: explains why a conflict might start. In this case, the
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: scenario was a sudden spike intentions between North Korea and
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the United States.
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: That led to a number of other events where the
• 11:46
  Speaker 5: US starts to mobilize forces in the US ground forces
• 11:50
  Speaker 5: starts putting him on ships, you know, in the ports
• 11:53
  Speaker 5: of Texas in California. North Korea is aware of all
• 11:56
  Speaker 5: of this, tells the US to stop, and it doesn't.
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: And I think at some point in that road to
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: war scenario, we had the North Koreans firing a small
• 12:10
  Speaker 5: nuclear round and just know it was a conventional missile
• 12:14
  Speaker 5: that hit the US island of guang.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Just imagine that this had actually happened, a North Korean
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: attack on American soil. The world will be in crisis.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: The US would have to respond. But the problem is
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: that North Korea is a country with an expanding nuclear program,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: and if a war broke out, a whole lot of
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: exceedingly dangerous nuclear material would suddenly be floating around in
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: the midst of a whole lot of chaos. The army
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: one to know what would happen next, what would it
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: take to round up all those stray nukes. Rand spent
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: months blending the game. Then Genteel and his team flew
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: to South Korea to play it out for the army
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: a big conference room a map of the Korean peninsula
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: on the table.
• 13:09
  Speaker 5: In that game, we did use counters like the little
• 13:12
  Speaker 5: square you know wargame that this is a tank brigade,
• 13:15
  Speaker 5: this is an artillery battalion or whatever, with numbers on them.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Do you have one person playing each actor?
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: I think we had two separate teams, and we may
• 13:25
  Speaker 5: have run two different games, but we had the Army
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: colonels play the Blue Military Forces.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Blue team in wargames speak, is the home team the
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: United States and its allies. The colonels were playing themselves.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: One of rand's top East Asia specialists, Mike Mazar, played
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: North Korea genteel, and some of his fellow RAND staffers
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: served as referees. In the first run, the US and
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: South Korean forces attacked across the demilitarized Zone, the border
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: that separates North and South Korea, maybe the most dangerous
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: border in the world. Land mines everywhere. The result was
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: catastrophe losses. In the next version of the game, the
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: US and South Korea imagine that they could broke or
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: a deal with a faction of the North Korean Army
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: to let them across, which got them to the other side.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: But now they had an even bigger challenge.
• 14:24
  Speaker 5: I mean, it's freaking hard as hell. I mean, a
• 14:26
  Speaker 5: failed North Korean state with a nuclear weapons writ large.
• 14:32
  Speaker 5: You know, parts of a nuclear device, delivery systems, records,
• 14:37
  Speaker 5: documents of scientists, all those kinds of things to track
• 14:40
  Speaker 5: those down in the chaos of a North Korean state.
• 14:43
  Speaker 5: It was pretty clear.
• 14:44
  Speaker 4: What was your conclusion?
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Was it possible?
• 14:47
  Speaker 5: Oh, yes, but it won't take weeks, it won't take months.
• 14:51
  Speaker 5: It's gonna take years.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: In the game, it took thousands of soldiers to secure
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: even a single North Korean installation.
• 15:00
  Speaker 5: It took that long because you just you have to
• 15:03
  Speaker 5: secure the outside of it, which requires forces to do that.
• 15:07
  Speaker 5: Then you have to move inside of it. Potentially there
• 15:10
  Speaker 5: could be North Korean forces that still wanted to fight
• 15:13
  Speaker 5: to protect it.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: How many sites do we think they have, oh.
• 15:18
  Speaker 5: More than one? And then let's not even take into
• 15:20
  Speaker 5: account the chemical weapons, potential biological weapons that North Korea has.
• 15:26
  Speaker 5: But we're talking scores and scores and scores of nuclear sites.
• 15:31
  Speaker 5: Remember from my Board of Trustees talk, I made the
• 15:34
  Speaker 5: point that core nuclear components to one of those nuclear warheads,
• 15:39
  Speaker 5: you could put it in the size of your backpack
• 15:42
  Speaker 5: and so then you could scurry it off on a
• 15:44
  Speaker 5: road with a civilian carrying it. So it just presents
• 15:46
  Speaker 5: all kinds of problems.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: It is talked to the ran boat about the game.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Gentiel also spend a surprising amount of time on traffic jams.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Because armies aren't the only factor in a military crisis.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: North Korean refugees would start streaming across the border. South
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Koreans would start fleeing their capital, so the US and
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Japanese governments would order the citizens to leave the country
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: at the same time as a huge army is trying
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: to head towards the border, which adds up to the
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: mother of all traffic jams. As I listened to Genteel
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: that day at RAND, I remember thinking traffic jams as
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: a factor in any war with North Korea. That had
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: not occurred to me, and I assumed that was because
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: I'm not a military expert. But then I looked around
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the room at the people who were particularly Harold Brown,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the gray eminence of the American defense establishment, big Leonine Head,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: thick black rimmed glasses, even in his nineties, the smartest
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: person in any room he walked into. He had a
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: look in his eyes, and I realized, Oh, traffic jams
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: had not occurred to him either. Now, what did the
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: wargame teach the army. They already knew it would be
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: hard to secure nuclear weapons in a failed North Korea.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: The wargame just told them how hard it would be.
• 17:07
  Speaker 5: There's people on the road. If you're passing through the DMZ,
• 17:11
  Speaker 5: chemical weapons may have been used, so the military forces
• 17:16
  Speaker 5: have to put on protective gear to move through a
• 17:19
  Speaker 5: chemically contamidated area.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Everyone in the tanks has to be in full chemical
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: protection gear, body suit, mask, rubber gloves, boots, what the
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: US military calls MOP for protection.
• 17:36
  Speaker 5: Can you imagine what it's like trying to move through
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: this kind of terrain where a Bradley commander or a
• 17:42
  Speaker 5: tank commander is buttoned up and in MOP for and
• 17:45
  Speaker 5: can only look out through the little sites on the
• 17:48
  Speaker 5: top of the turret or even through the optics. And
• 17:52
  Speaker 5: then bring in the fact that potentially there's combat action
• 17:58
  Speaker 5: where US tanks, North Korean tanks, infantry are being destroyed, killed,
• 18:05
  Speaker 5: cries for help, blood, anger, all these kinds of thing things,
• 18:10
  Speaker 5: the anguish of seeing people on the road freezing to death,
• 18:14
  Speaker 5: can't do anything about it. And then there's just the
• 18:17
  Speaker 5: anger and the hatred, the desire for revenge, to kill,
• 18:23
  Speaker 5: And then you're trying to manage all of that and
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: still carry out the mission. It would be easy for
• 18:30
  Speaker 5: the North Koreans to build an atomic ied and to
• 18:34
  Speaker 5: plot that in a choke point going through a steep valley,
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: and to set that off. Then you have that, and
• 18:40
  Speaker 5: then the whole larger operational political context of now a
• 18:44
  Speaker 5: nuclear weapon has been used, what will be the US response?
• 18:47
  Speaker 5: All those kind of things.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: The wargame added detail, color, emotion to the Army's understanding,
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: and the army ordered up the wargame because they knew
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: enough to know that many of those details would be
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: on the long list of things that had ever occurred
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: to them. These are the details that clear your mind
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: of wishful thinking, of comforting delusions, of the false reassurance
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: of overconfidence.
• 19:19
  Speaker 5: Sherman said, war's hell, and you cannot refine it. And
• 19:23
  Speaker 5: I've said this before. Look, I mean for the US Army,
• 19:26
  Speaker 5: US military, Iraq and Afghanistan was not easy, right, and
• 19:30
  Speaker 5: it was specially not easy for the populations of those
• 19:33
  Speaker 5: two countries. I mean devastating in a lot of ways.
• 19:36
  Speaker 5: But this kind of conflict war on the Korean Peninsula
• 19:41
  Speaker 5: would make what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan look very,
• 19:45
  Speaker 5: very simple in comparison.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: A wargame is a reality check, And I think we're
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: willing to test our illusions with reality checks only if
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: we practice, if we make it a habit, if we
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: keep reminding ourselves that the world outside our imagination is
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: much larger than the world inside it. This is what
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: the leafreakers tod for all those years ago in my
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: family's backyard. They took a chance on an afternoon of
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: doing something that they had never done before and which
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: did not, at least in the abstract, sound like fun.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: And then afterwards, a twenty something advanced math doctoral student
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: from Bangalore would sit down with another math whiz from
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Legos and a third from the West Bank, and they
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: would play Charades on a team together. Charades is a
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: game that depends on shared cultural understanding, but here it
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: was being played by three people with no shared cultural understanding,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: which is what made it fun. The experience of figuring
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: it out, of learning what figuring it out felt like,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: was so intoxicatingly unpredictable that they would all come back
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the next year and the year after that, even after
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: they had gotten their PhDs and moved far away, only
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: to discover when they returned, of course, that Charades had
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: been replaced by some brand new and fiendishly impossible game
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: of my father's invention. All the leaf breakers knew is
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: that they wouldn't know what would happen after the leaves
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: were raked, and that was enough one final wargame, one
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: that I still can't stop thinking about, designed by Uniwong Okay.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: So the wargame began with sort of China trying to
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: exert creater control and signal that they were in control
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: of the region and more dominant now in the region,
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: and the United States and Japan were really resisting that.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Yuniwog's scenario was set in the future at a time
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: when the world's major militaries have gone all in on
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: artificial intelligence.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: There was this premise that AI is going to fundamentally
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: change warfare. I propose the idea because I was like, well,
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: what happens if all your dreams come true?
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of work asking whether or not the
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Pentagon can really integrate AI in the way they hoped to,
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: But I'm like, well, what if you got everything you wanted.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: The game was held in a conference room at rand's Washington,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: DC office. Someone playing China, another person playing Japan, the
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: US North Korea. A senior information scientist from rand's California office,
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: a Shandi Shaba, flew in to represent the commercial AI sector.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Yuniwang was part of what's called white team, part referee,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: part instigator, The road to war was deceptively simple, lots
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: of muscle flexing between the US and China, leading to
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Japan and the United States launching a cyber attack on
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: a Chinese aircraft carrier. The Chinese responded with a flyby
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: near US vessels, and with that the game was off
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: and running.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: The U and I States in Japan then went off
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: and then consulted with each other and came back announced
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: they were holding a large joint military exercise around the
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: Sankaku Islands.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: The US and Japan put their missile defense on full auto,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: meaning they programmed the artificial intelligence systems running the missiles
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: to respond automatically and immediately to any hostile act. They
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: did that to send a message to China, don't do
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: anything rash. But then out of the blue, North Korea
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: decided to join in by firing off a missile on
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: its own, aimed at a major Japanese city. Luckily, the
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: missile was intercepted before it could do any damage. What
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: are they doing, They're signaling that they're standing with China.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Yes, so sometimes I say China has one ally and
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: it's the worst ally in the world, and it's North Korea.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: So that is a very complicated relationship. But in the game,
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: they did not pressure them. This was just North Korea
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: decided they would try to be helpful and this was
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: the result.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: But remember in this wargame scenario, the US and Japan
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: had their defense systems on full auto, programmed to respond
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: automatically and immediately to any provocation. Did the US and
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: China in the game. It just never occurred to them
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: that if North Korea weighed in and they were on
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: full auto, we might end up dragging North Korea into
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: the conflict.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Correct, it was the focus was on signaling to China
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: and nobody thought about potential North Korean behavior.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: So North Korea does this thing, the AI fires back
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: at North Korea.
• 24:46
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: China then responded with a limited blockade of Japan. So
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: they announced the blockade, and the AI sent a single
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: destroyer to a single Japanese port to enforce this blockade.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: This is where the plays for South Korea and Japan said, well,
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: that was a failure. But the United States team was
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: really extremely confused and said, wait, we like, I don't
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: understand what's going on here. I don't understand what the
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: AI is doing.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: God knows what the North Koreans will do next. The
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: US is running around trying to figure out what the
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Chinese artificial intelligence systems are up to. Japan is under
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: a partial blockade. Oh and there's a cargo ship at
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the bottom of the sea. The Chinese blew you up right.
• 25:29
  Speaker 6: The Chinese blow yet because they were trying to enforce
• 25:31
  Speaker 6: a blockade on Japan.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: I believe that's RAND specialist Ashandi Shaba who flew into
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: play the role of a commercial AI system running container shipping.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: So you just kept sailing into port. You didn't stop
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: and turn away.
• 25:47
  Speaker 6: No, no, I was trying to keep my market open,
• 25:49
  Speaker 6: like serve everybody as much as possible. That that was
• 25:52
  Speaker 6: the idea there, and I figured by being compliant, I
• 25:55
  Speaker 6: could I could keep both sides happy.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Every one of these wargames that people talked to me about,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: it's always a mess.
• 26:02
  Speaker 6: The artists are strategic insight from the mess, and some
• 26:05
  Speaker 6: people doing better than others. It's always a mess. Everything
• 26:08
  Speaker 6: is a mess.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: At the end. The RAND team put out a report
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: on the game with the following lesson In conclusion, current
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: planning efforts have not kept pace with how to handle
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: the potentially destabilizing or escalatory issues associated with these new technologies.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: End quote. The wargame said, don't fool yourself. There's going
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: to be chaos, but with luck we can learn from
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: the chaos. When you made your remark about how everything's
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: a mess and yet we continue on, that's like the
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: most Nigerian thing you could possibly.
• 26:50
  Speaker 6: I grew up in the heart of chaos. Legos is
• 26:52
  Speaker 6: the most chaotic place on Earth.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: I was going to say, you were well prepared for this.
• 27:00
  Speaker 6: I have Legos to thank for lots of things that
• 27:04
  Speaker 6: I've done in my life.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: Basically one moment from Uniwong's wargame, several days in the
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: United States and Japan began hunting the Sea of Japan
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: for Chinese submarines to figure out which ports the Chinese
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: were planning to blockade next. Emotions were running high.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: The player for China said he couldn't tell whether the
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: US and Japanese anti submarine warfare assets were looking for
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: his submarines to just track them or destroy them, so
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: he ordered a submarine to destroy an autonomous anti submarine
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: warfare plane, and then player for Japan felt that they
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: had shown restraints so far, but they could no longer
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: show restraint if the player for China was going to
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: take kinetic action. So the United States in Japan at
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: this point respond and they sink a manned Chinese submarine.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: So these are the first human casualties of the game.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: And at this point it escalates significantly. So the players
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: were Japan and the United States go off to a
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: separate room, and then they're trying to figure out a
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: way of offering the Chinese off ramps right like they
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: seriously wanted to de escalate at this point. The player
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: for China at this point says, no, they got one
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: of mine. I'm gonna get one of theirs and launch
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: his missiles at the combined US and Japanese fleet, and
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: we end the game there. But we believe that there
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: would have been human casualties aboard the US and Japanese fleet.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Wait, why do you guys call the game just at
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: the moment when China is launching missiles at the US
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: and Japanese fleet. Isn't that It's like stopping the movie
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: with ten minutes left. Don't you want to know what
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: happens after that point?
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, some of it was we ran out
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: of time. We only had the conference room for a week, right,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: and we only had people in town for a week,
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: So that is sometimes the unfortunate nature of these things.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: It was only a game, after all, not real life.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: People had to leave Narnia and go home, and the
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: game of Dennet's work hadn't it raised a possibility that
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: might not have occurred to anyone otherwise, a warning that
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: might come in handy one day, or who knows, maybe
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: already has Yuna. You would have loved the Leafreaking Party.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Revision's history is produced by me LaBelle, Lee men Giestou
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith, with Elouise Linton and on a naim Our.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: by Flonon Williams and engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines, and special thanks to the Pushkin Crew.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Had a Fame Carl Migliori, Maya Knig, Danielle Lacan, Maggie Taylor,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Nicol Morano, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Westberg.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladmow. Don't forget my latest book, The Bomber Mafia,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: which is an expansion of several episodes, from the last
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: season of Revisionist History. You can find it wherever books
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: are sold, but by the audiobook at Bombermafia dot com
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: and you'll get a bonus listener's guide, and you can
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: listen in the podcast app you're using now