A Throw of the Dice: Games the Pentagon Plays
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2024
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the new year at Angry Planet.
For the last 100 years, American defense policy has been aided by elaborate war games. SIGMA, the Cold War Game, and the Millenium Challenge are just some of the most famous. Sometimes these games are played with dice and boards, other times they’re purely electronic. Why do we do this, when did we start, and what does it all mean? More importantly, how do we make sure the board games don’t play us?
Here to answer those questions is Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, Jacquelyn Schneider.
One episode of The Crisis Game on YouTube
Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.
https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. This is an episode I wanted to do for a really long time. |
| 0:17.0 | And then I saw your piece in Foreign Affairs, and I've read it like three times now, |
| 0:28.0 | what war games are really reveal, which is kind of this really incredible survey, maybe surveys the wrong word, |
| 0:37.4 | this really incredible article about war games and their importance to the American military and also why we should be skeptical of that importance or at least |
| 0:48.0 | kind of go in with an informed eye. |
| 0:51.2 | So can you hear at the top, can you tell us, can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do? |
| 0:56.0 | Sure, I'm Jackie Schneider, so I'm a Hoover fellow at Stanford University and I'm the director of Hoover's War Gaming and |
| 1:05.1 | Crisis Simulation Initiative. So when we say War Gaming, I think that that brings a lot of different images to people's minds. |
| 1:18.0 | What kind of game are we talking about? |
| 1:21.5 | What does it actually physically look like? |
| 1:24.0 | Yeah, and I'm always surprised, I get this question a lot. And I think the first image that people have, |
| 1:29.5 | that they haven't kind of done this world, is video game and the second images risk. Yes yes I see |
| 1:39.2 | like 20-sided dice actually yeah and you know what some games are like that and but some games are also a bunch of people sitting around a table with a piece of paper that they are writing down their decisions. |
| 1:53.7 | So games take a wide variety of different mediums. |
| 1:58.2 | Most of the games that I'm talking about |
| 2:00.4 | about the games that have like really influenced |
| 2:02.4 | the American foreign policy are games that are kind of a mixture of a lot of different mediums. |
| 2:10.0 | So you have decision makers and military members that are sitting around military |
| 2:14.8 | maps or computer generated military maps making big decisions. |
| 2:19.8 | So this in some way would look like a group of people sitting in a situation room making decisions in a crisis, right? |
| 2:25.9 | So you have games that look like that. But those games on the back end of them you have different what we call cells and there's a |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -401 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matthew Gault, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Matthew Gault and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.