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lenges that the next administration might face?”
The team also conducted a simulated cyberattack on a piece of critical infra- structure. The simulation did not assess technical questions but instead focused more closely on the impact of an attack, he added.
“We looked at how to deal with the aftermath \[of the\] attack itself, includ- ing panic, food lines and people lining up at gas stations,” Sanders said. The analysis of responses to the simulation will show the feasibility of doing “this on an interagency basis because that’s one of the great challenges of govern- ment, working across agency lines and intergovernmental lines.”
The legacy of war gaming was heav- ily influenced by the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, which became a powerful standard for addressing crisis management and coordination. “That’s been a theme that’s continued over the past 15 years,” Monteforte said.
Even so, cybersecurity remains the primary challenge for most government war gamers. It has become “a huge fo- cus area for a number of our clients across the government and commercial markets,” Monteforte said.
She added that as much as half of Booz Allen’s war-gaming portfolio is fo- cused on cybersecurity.
“We find that people use war games to help them think through the really sticky issues that they’re facing today or in the next two to five years,” she said. “Cyber just seems to be the thing that’s at the front of everybody’s mind.”
THE WEAKNESS WITHIN
War gaming can also help agencies look inward to find potential cracks in a plan or strategy. “A war game can be a very powerful diagnostic,” Sanders said. A simulated cyberattack, for example, lets executives see how everyone will react.
“We’ll reveal short-term technical and tactical issues that the organiza- tion needs to deal with,” he added. “But almost invariably it also reveals more deep-seated organizational and structural problems that the organiza- tion needs to contend with.”
A war game can also be an effective way to build new and stronger teams, Sanders said, “especially when you have career civil servants dealing with a new group of political appointees who have just been sworn in.”
At the beginning, the groups might not work well together, but “the sooner they mesh and come together as a team and focus on the challenges that the agency has to contend with, the more likely they’re going to be able to solve
them,” he added. “As a team-building tool, this is powerful.”
However, “at the end of the day, you’re never going to predict the fu- ture,” Sanders said. “But this is about preparation, not prediction. And if the team is prepared to coordinate and col- laborate and share information, they have to practice that.”
Yet Monteforte said war games are not for everyone. “This is for those really big problems...\[where\] you’ve got competing interests, competing equities, lots of different people who have to come to the table to work together.”
She added that “whether you’re talk- ing about leadership training for how leaders are going to work together or you’re talking about responding to a crisis, having those different personali- ties and different perspectives working together in that simulated environ- ment, where they can make mistakes and try to feel each other out, is really one of the most powerful definitions for when you need a war game.”
If a solution rests with just one per- son, he or she “can write a study and you don’t need a war game,” Monte- forte said. “But if you have seven peo- ple and they all want to go in different directions, bringing them together in this environment is really powerful.” •
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