Always Fighting the Last Insurrection

War games have been on my mind a lot lately. This is mainly because I've been reading up in them for the design of a new simulation tool. But also because of the looming election and inevitable aftermath. So, on a recent night we spent $5.99 to watch the new documentary, War Game, out of professional as well as personal curiosity.

Released in September, as the heat rose toward a tightly contested election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, War Game "...sweeps audiences into an elaborate, future-set simulation that dramatically escalates the threat posed by the January 6, 2021, insurrection," according to its creators, a group called VetVoice. Over 94 minutes, viewers are taken into a theatrically staged war room where a dozen or so former government officials play key roles: president (former Montana governor Steve Bullock), chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Gen. Wesley Clark), attorney general (former Senator Doug Jones), director of national intelligence (ex-CIA officer David Priess), secretary of defense (former secretary of the Army Louis Caldera), FBI director (former FBI counterintelligence head Peter Strzok), and advisor to the president (former Senator Heidi Heitkamp), among others. They face a red team made up of a few ex-military veterans and a couple of advisors. Interestingly, D.C. Republican stalwart Bill Kristol is seen smirking from a sofa in several shots but is never heard from. And, of course, the game runners are ever-present.

The purpose of the simulation is to stage a January 6th-style insurrection, led by a group called the Christian nationalist Order of Columbus (read: Oath Keepers), headed by a quasi-fundamentalist Mike Flynn stand-in—in this case, a true believer named Lt. Gen. Roger Simms—and test the sitting government's response. In this scenario, President John Hotham (Bullock), the incumbent Democrat, has won a close election, and the Order's militia makes its move on the Capitol and several key statehouses in support of the losing Republican, Gov. Robert Strickland. The action, which is "unscripted" but built around key scenario elements, unfolds over six hours, though viewers see these compressed into an hour and a half.

The production, interspersed with biographical snippets into the key players from VetVoice as justification for the exercise, mirrors the outcomes of many war games, and, for that matter, scenario planning—after much testing, the good guys win. A lot of narrative is constructed, and an attempt is made to build tension with countdown clocks, headset-wearing producers toying with participants, and clips of the real January 6th deployed behind a green-screened newscaster Isha Sesay. However, the standoff with insurgents is ultimately resolved predictably by adhering to the rule of law, with the president refusing to militarize the response. In other words, President Hotham does the "right" thing, and the militia, radical enough to start the fight, backs down under the sway of his wise words delivered from a faux White House podium. The Insurrection Act, described by one advisor as "the nuclear option," remains sheathed.

This may all sound familiar. In 2020, the Transition Integrity Project, organized by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman, ran four exercises to game out a potential confrontation around the 2020 election outcome—many months before the actual election and, of course, January 6th. These war games identified a number of weak points in the civil management of the US election, including use of fake electors, disregard of the authority of the Supreme Court, and the possible use of militias as a false flag tactic to justify sending troops into the streets to quell protests. This exercise so incensed conservative Republicans that they ran similar exercises, using the same Transition Integrity Project name later. And, of course, Alex Garland's Civil War, released this past Spring, played out the domestic conflict following an election.

War Game may entertain an audience just looking for drama, like the audiences for anti-Trump podcasts, but it doesn't do a great deal to educate or inform the viewer about the threat it centers on, radical christian nationalists who want to redefine how America works. I've seen more interesting, informative, and even dramatic episodes of PBS's Frontline. War Game has all the going-through-the-motions drama of a reality show. You can guess how it will end.

My concern with a film like this is that it oversimplifies the situation, making the strategic decision-making within the White House seem like something out of a Frank Capra film. Wise leaders do the right thing, and the bad guys scatter. But we know, at least from the Trump side, it was chaos—every person for themselves—while the big guy upstairs was eating hamburders in front of Fox News, and Democratic leaders, having been hustled away from the danger down the corridor, were making decisions from a sofa, also while watching the news coverage of the actual melee. (Ironically, my team missed all of this because we were running a Zoom workshop on strategic narratives on January 6th and weren’t following social media.)

Things next time around will be much more complicated, multi-front, and flooded with disinformation. It will play out less on the lawn of the Capitol, and more in the parking lots of voting facilities, vote-counting areas, and statehouses across the country—more like the 2020 Brooks Brothers Riot, but distributed, multi-platform, and far uglier. War Game loosely dramatized attacks on several statehouses rather than in DC alone, and for that it gets credit.

These kinds of war games can be useful when approached thoughtfully, and with a heavy dose of realism—and—space for unpredictability, but not when they are partisan, overly dramatized as entertainment, or otherwise create a false sense of confidence that the good guys will win. War Games got a lot of good reviews, but mainly in the entertainment press. That's great for ticket sales, but not great for actual public education.

I learned something about how another group runs the logistics of a war game (hint: Slack), but nothing new about what we might face next time around, and there will be a next time, nor how those charged with protecting and defending the Constitution might deal with a rapidly metastasizing threat from people who, far from being patriots, are looking to break the system altogether, and turn the United States into something quite different from what its founders had in mind.