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