On Friday, February 3, Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider, a Hoover Fellow, hosted the Hoover Maritime Crisis Wargame in the institution’s Blount Hall. Funded by the Stanton Foundation, the Maritime Crisis Wargame was the second iteration of a wargame series designed by Schneider to explore the relationships among new technologies, conventional military capabilities, and nuclear stability in a hypothetical conflict scenario. The game featured an interdisciplinary group of experts and leaders within national security, foreign policy, emerging technology, and business communities.
The Hoover war game was a part of a larger set of games Schneider is running all over the world that compare crisis responses across different countries and cultures. Results from previous games have informed U.S. weapons acquisition, arms control efforts, campaign design, and foreign policy. The simulations have received notable mention in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. Previous players have included former heads of state, ambassadors, senior appointees in the US Department of Defense and the US Department of State, senior military officers, and leaders of Fortune 500 companies.
At Hoover, players were given two hypothetical crisis scenarios and a briefing on capabilities and adversary threats. Together, players formed a team representing a national security cabinet and generated strategic and military plans in response to the crisis. The wargame was complemented by surveys of players and used experimental design to tease out how variables like expertise, beliefs, gender, and group dynamics impacted final wargame outcomes.
The Maritime Crisis Wargame is the first game run under the auspices of Hoover's new Wargaming and Simulations Center, directed by Dr. Schneider. The center aims not only to run frequent wargames but also to foster innovations in wargame design and analysis—including a new wargaming repository housed at the Hoover Library & Archives. This new collection will enable researchers from all over the world to conduct wargame meta-analysis, as well as gain access to wargames for teaching and training.
