Wargamer suchen nach Antworten

This Q&A with [Jacquelyn Schneider](https://www.hoover.org/profiles/jacquelyn-schneider), director of[ the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative](https://www.hoover.org/news/hoover-digital-wargaming-collection-offers-unique-historical-perspectives), considers why wargames and wargaming are “having their moment” and receiving renewed interest and attention from a variety of individuals and organizations. Schneider describes her efforts leading the International Crisis Wargame Series, which investigated contingencies related to cyber warfare and nuclear command and control. Says Schneider, “It ran over three years and had 580 players. The players were in teams of about four to six, about 115 of them. We published those results in scholarly journals. Those games found that cyber operations, interestingly enough, do not create uncertainty and fear; instead, it’s the way in which they may imbue misperceived confidence that creates escalatory dynamics.”

Schneider also shares her observations on how scholars, military members, business leaders, and members of Congress are similar and different in their approaches to wargaming. “Maybe all Americans play the same first strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re an undergrad, a mom who works at the bakery, or Henry Kissinger—maybe not Henry Kissinger, that might be an outlier, but a senior practitioner—but you’re hedging in the first move. You’re going to do intel, covert operations, you might do a little cyber thing here or there, and then hedge for time. I don’t know why, but they have to do it. I call it the throat-clearing move. Maybe it’s our national gift of having these oceans and borders with relatively friendly countries. Some of my foreign audiences, on the other hand, are more aggressive in that first move.”

Schneider continues, “In games we ran with NATO players, they’re generally sophisticated about their understanding of nuclear stability and the effectiveness and risks of counterforce operations. But when we ran the same game in South America, a nonnuclear continent, we found that military officers were more likely to use counterforce and early, aggressive counternuclear operations. That might be because they haven’t had fifty years of people talking about nuclear stability the way NATO officers have.”

One other interesting finding highlighted in this interview centers on the role of expertise in wargame scenarios. Schneider reports, “In general, I find that the more technical or tactical a game is, the more expertise matters. But the more “big strategy” is involved, the less expertise matters.” This finding would seem to cut against at least some theorizing on the role of strategic education in national security crisis decision making.