Let’s play a game

Imagine: it’s 2026, and China has just decided to attack Taiwan. The US, which maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity,” is faced with a choice: defend the island or stand by idly. America chooses the former.

👆 This was the exact scenario playing out in a game of strategy in the boardroom (🤦‍♀️) of a Washington DC think-tank late last week – all while at the same time in the real world, China was firing missiles around Taiwan and Japan in protest of House Speaker Pelosi’s visit. Talk about meta.

🤔 Wait, what?... Geopolitics is basically one big game of Risk – almost literally. The Pentagon plays classified games to simulate how various real-world scenarios would play out, and the one that unfurled at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank last week is the only such one in the public domain.

It was specifically designed over two years with experts from MIT and the Naval War College with the goal of sharing its results with a broader audience… since the Pentagon isn’t exactly sending out press releases.

• The setup is also a little bit more complex than a game of Battleship. It requires “Red” and “Blue” teams, computers that calculate everything from the size of aircraft runways to how long it takes submarines to rearm, 20-sided dice to introduce an element of randomness, and seven free hours to see it all play out.

👀 Looking ahead… Last week’s exercise was the 22nd in a series of games being played by retired US generals and Navy officers and former Pentagon officials, with the overall results to be released in December.

+Sneak-peek: In 18 of the 22 rounds played so far, Chinese missiles sink a large part of the US and Japanese surface fleet and destroy “hundreds of aircraft on the ground,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and retired US Marine, told Bloomberg. “However, allied air and naval counterattacks hammer the exposed Chinese amphibious and surface fleet, eventually sinking about 150 ships.”