Last January, the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives created a special committee to examine the economic and military challenges China poses to the United States. Mike Gallagher, a Republican representative from Wisconsin who is one of Washington’s most vocal China hawks, was an obvious choice to lead the panel. For the past year, Gallagher has used the committee to sound the alarm on China and rally support for new measures that could hinder Beijing in its competition with the United States.

In his quest to build political consensus around a tougher approach to China, Gallagher (and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthi) has employed one particularly effective tool: the war game.

In April, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi convened a bipartisan group of lawmakers to spend an evening playing a war game that simulated a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. In Gallagher’s opening remarks, he said he hoped that playing the game would impart “a sense of urgency” and demonstrate “that there are meaningful things we can do in this Congress through legislative action to improve the prospect of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” Players were asked to act as advisers to the president, recommending diplomatic, economic, and military responses to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. These members of Congress gathered around a campaign map, their foreign and domestic moves adjudicated by a war-gaming facilitator from a Washington think tank. Their goal was to deter China, represented by a team made up of think-tank staff members. According to Gallagher, the game revealed that the United States needed to “arm Taiwan to the teeth”—a strong endorsement for a multibillion-dollar package of Taiwanese military aid that his China committee was considering at the time. Since then, Gallagher has taken his war game on the road, playing a version with Wall Street executives in New York City in early September, and he says he plans to play a similar game with leaders of American technology companies.

These congressional games came on the heels of a series of high-visibility unclassified Taiwan war games played in 2022 at prominent American think tanks. The outcome of these games made waves in American media, securing segments on the Sunday morning news shows and headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The games drew broad attention partly because of who was playing them: among the participants were Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense and a possible future secretary of defense in a Democratic administration, and General James “Mike” Holmes, the retired four-star commander of Air Combat Command. Although run with different players and designs, these games demonstrated that there would be “no quick victory” for either side, that all military forces involved would suffer dramatic casualties, that the United States desperately needs more munitions, and that such a conflict would have a dangerous potential for escalation—even to nuclear war.

Despite the attention devoted to these outcomes, the games did not reveal anything novel or surprising about China or weaknesses in the U.S. military arsenal. But they did reveal something about policymaking and influence-peddling in the United States, where advocates of various foreign and domestic policies have come to see war games as a useful tool in advancing their agendas.

War games go beyond predicting futures; they are interactive and evocative experiences for players and compelling stories for domestic and foreign audiences. They can be used (knowingly and unknowingly) to influence choices about budgets, weapons, foreign policies, and, ultimately, international power. By designing and framing a war game carefully, planners can create an outcome of their choosing. Accordingly, a war game often reveals more about the interests and intentions of the players than it does about the outcome of the game itself.

In the case of the Taiwan games that are so popular in Washington right now, their value is not in informing defense leaders that a war between the United States and China would be difficult to win. U.S. officials don’t need war games to tell them that. The games are more useful to officials—and to outside observers—for what they reveal about the factions and players in American politics pushing the country to start preparing for war with China.

REHEARSING WAR

It is important to understand what war games are. While the Chinese game of Go is often credited as the first “war game,” it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that war games became professional military tools. The military campaign game Kriegsspiel introduced maps, dice, and rule sets created by Prussian officers. The games were interactive and engaging, and—for the first time in war-gaming history—realistic enough to simulate military battles. As the Prussian field marshal Friedrich Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Müffling exclaimed in 1824 after being introduced to it, “This is no ordinary game—this is a school of war!” The games were used so extensively in Prussian campaign planning and military training that many argued that they were key to Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866. The combination of immersion and vividness captured the attention of Europe’s new industrial-age military leaders, who were keen to apply new scientific approaches to the large ground wars of the Napoleonic era.

Kriegsspiel focused on ground wars. In the United States, however, the most influential war games focused on naval warfare. As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Navy employed war games as part of its budgeting and planning process, and it was the navy that professionalized military war games in the United States by making them a part of officer training. Similar to Kriegsspiel, which was modified by officers as they experimented with military campaign tactics, the navy war games between World War I and World War II modified rules, scenarios, and players to account for different tactics, technologies, and points of view—all while gaming a Pacific war against Japan.

These interwar games shaped the naval tactics, logistics, and aircraft carrier deployments of the Pacific campaigns of World War II. After the war, Admiral Chester Nimitz told an audience at the U.S. Naval War College, “The war with Japan had been reenacted in the game room here by so many people in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war.”

During the Cold War, U.S. war games evolved to incorporate the impact of nuclear weapons. This new generation of games, played by the economist Thomas Schelling and the political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield at MIT; Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Herman Kahn at RAND; and officers at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon were largely free play, with limited rules or strict parameters. Unlike the navy’s interwar games, designed to train military officers, these games involved senior civilian officials placed in highly immersive scenarios meant to recreate the high-stakes decision-making of a nuclear crisis. In one instance, a group convened for three straight days at Camp David in Maryland to war-game a scenario that foreshadowed the Berlin crisis of 1961. Red and blue cells had four hours to make each move, their actions adjudicated in heated debate among top experts of the day. The experience was so absorbing that Schelling, one of the organizers, remembered that “these were games in which people got desperately involved. . . . Their pride, their self-esteem, and sometimes even their local reputations were very much wrapped up.”

War games reached an important inflection point in the 1960s with a series of games code-named Sigma that were focused on Indochina. These games included highly detailed scenarios, limited rules built by and adjudicated by a staff of experts (some sources claim that each scenario involved more than 1,000 man-hours to create) and played by senior decision-makers from across the federal government. The games’ findings—that strategic bombing would fail to convince the North Vietnamese to surrender and that the United States would end up stalemated in a bloody conflict in Vietnam—were remarkably prescient.

Despite the Sigma games’ success at predicting the outcome of the Vietnam War, senior government officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, distrusted the heavy emphasis placed on human decision-making. McNamara sought to decrease the subjectivity of games by replacing human play with computer simulations of warfare. The proponents of this “scientific” approach argued that computer-run war games could solve nuclear conflict by reducing human error caused by irrationality and emotion.

Ultimately, the drive to automate war games created a backlash as scholars at RAND and other war-gaming centers criticized the attempt to trivialize the human decision-making part of war. In the years after McNamara’s departure, the Pentagon returned to games that evoked the large-scale, richly detailed scenarios of the earlier Sigma games. Worried about potential nuclear escalation with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Reagan administration called on Schelling to once again design immersive political-military games. Dubbed the Proud Prophet games, the series ran over seven weeks in 1983 and included 200 players.

Perhaps paradoxically, the normalization of games within defense planning led to a kind of stagnation in game design as they began to mirror the bureaucratization of the national security state. When Robert Work became deputy defense secretary in 2014, he concluded that war games were not evolving or providing valuable information. He tried to lead a renaissance, investing in war-gaming initiatives throughout the Pentagon, including the creation of a large library of games.

GAMING WASHINGTON

The history of war games shows how game designers and conveners can influence outcomes through their choice of players, rules, and scenarios. This is why, even though war games are ostensibly designed to help people understand how a war might play out, the results of this “inner” game can reveal only so much. Instead, it is the outer game—who convened the game, who is playing it, how the game is played and distributed, and ultimately why it is played—that offers real insight.

The essential puzzle piece to understanding the outer game is the decision to run the game in the first place. Games are costly. The most famous U.S. war games—such as the Sigma, Global War Game, or Proud Prophet series—required thousands of man-hours to prepare and took senior decision-makers away from their primary duties for extended periods. Games can require so much logistical support that even the top gaming facilities in the Department of Defense, such as the one at the Naval War College, can run only a few a year. Because of the resources involved, there is a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and political fight to determine which games will be “sponsored” and prioritized. The act of gaming a particular region, weapon capability, or doctrine signals who is currently wielding the most power in the Department of Defense and what that person or group cares about. For example, a 2019 “Global Integrated War Game” seemed at first glance to be an innocuous and jargon-heavy future warfighting scenario. A closer look at the sponsoring institutions—the Joint Chiefs of Staff and functional commands such as Cyber Command, Strategic Command, and Special Operations Command—revealed how the games were being used to influence a power shift within the Department of Defense away from the combatant commands, which focus on specific geographic regions, toward “global integrators,” commands whose functions span the globe.

Games played outside of government can also signal public sentiment and political will, providing adversaries with clues to the level of popular support for a particular scenario. If war games about a specific adversary are played widely in civilian society, this could be a sign that this society is considering the prospect of a future war. In Washington, games run by different think tanks can signal convergence around a policy problem. For example, today’s Taiwan games are being funded and run by think tanks that span ideologies and political parties.

The selection of participants can also reveal intentions. Game conveners may choose players who they believe will help them get to a certain outcome and avoid players that might derail their purpose. Alternatively, conveners can choose players based on how these participants might influence policy after playing the game. In this case, players become part of an entrepreneurial policy initiative in which the highly evocative experience of the game compels players to adopt a policy position. For example, for the 20XX future military capability games played from 1995 to 2000, the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment carefully chose the players, selecting up-and-coming civilian and military leaders who the team believed might influence defense policy on military technology for decades. One of those was Work, the future U.S. deputy secretary of defense, who cited the influence of these games on his technology-centered Third Offset Strategy, which called for investments in autonomy, unmanned systems, and network technologies.

Sometimes the mere act of attendance in a war game can lend credibility to the game’s outcomes. In his book Obama’s Wars, the journalist Bob Woodward describes a war game the Pentagon was running to help decide how many troops would be needed for the surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan in 2009. According to Woodward, Douglas Lute, President Barack Obama’s special assistant and senior coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time, argued that the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department should boycott the game because he believed it was designed to find a certain outcome (namely, the number of troops the Pentagon believed should be sent to Afghanistan). As Woodward recounts, Lute told his colleagues: “We should not participate in this. First of all, we don’t need the war game. I can tell you what the answer’s going to be. So I’m not spending a day over there in the Pentagon drinking lousy coffee to get to the self-evident conclusion. . . . If State and DNI and NSC participate in this war game, we’re going to give it the legitimacy that it does not deserve.”

Choices about scenario, assumptions about adversaries’ objectives and capabilities, rules about how participants can play and what capabilities they can use, and the way in which outcomes are assessed can significantly affect the outcome of a game. These variables often shed light on what the game’s conveners want to achieve from playing it. For example, in the early twentieth century, U.S. Army advocates of airpower called for the integration of the airplane into war games at the Army War College, hoping that this would help bolster their case. Facilitators restricted how aircraft could be used, however, effectively assuring that airpower played very little role in the outcome of the game. To the chagrin of airpower enthusiasts, those who opposed building out the army’s airpower capabilities had new evidence to stymie investment in aircraft when the game was over.

Finally, how the outcome of a war game is shared or publicized reveals the intentions of the game’s conveners. This is especially true for games played within the Department of Defense, where games are usually classified and their distribution is highly restricted. Declassifying or leaking games suggests that organizations have incentives to publicize the results—as a deterrent threat or to send a bureaucratic signal. In 2020, for example, the Department of Defense disclosed at a news briefing that it had conducted a war game focused on Russian tactical nuclear weapons. The department revealed that the game was played at Strategic Command and included Mark Esper, then the secretary of defense, as a player. Much about the game was unusual: the use of tactical nuclear weapons, the participation of a sitting secretary of defense, and the almost unprecedented disclosure of highly classified strategic gaming. But the war game and its publicization came at an important moment in a bureaucratic fight. The Trump administration had supported the development of tactical nuclear weapons in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. With the Trump administration in its final months, advocates saw a closing window of opportunity to secure funding and support for the controversial weapons. This may be why the administration decided to declassify and advertise the war game, which concluded that the United States needed a tactical nuclear weapon option to deter the Russians from using one.

THE DRUMS OF WAR

The circumstances surrounding today’s U.S.-Chinese games—who plays them, what they focus on, how they are played, and how they are publicized—provide important clues about the future path of U.S. policy toward China. The games’ findings—that Taiwan will urgently need arms and supplies from the United States, that the United States needs more munitions, and that the fight could be long and bloody—reflect what U.S. defense officials have been saying for almost a decade. But now those conclusions are being generated by a bipartisan bloc in Congress, reflecting the emergence of a faction within U.S. domestic politics that is keen to increase military and economic aid to Taiwan.

Two assumptions that undergird most of these games reveal how U.S. policy toward China is becoming more hawkish. The first is that the defense of Taiwan is a strategic interest for the United States. Players are asked not to debate whether the United States should aid Taiwan but instead how to do so. It is easy to imagine a different outcome if players were told to debate that basic objective. The second vital assumption is that China intends to invade Taiwan. “Last night’s exercise reaffirmed what we already know: Xi is running hypothetical invasion scenarios in his head every single day,” announced Ashley Hinson, a Republican representative from Iowa, after the congressional game in April. But the game, which provides no new information about Xi’s intentions, could not have reaffirmed anything of the sort: what is inside Xi’s mind is unknowable.

A few years ago, it may have been more likely to hear about war games involving inadvertent conflicts with the Chinese in the East or South China Sea. Those games focused on crisis de-escalation and deterrence and generally led to calls for the kind of power projection the United States has been comfortable conducting in the region over the last two decades: carrier group transits, combat patrols of U.S. fighter and intelligence aircraft, and exercises with allies and partners. The new war games, however, imagine a deliberate invasion of or attack on Taiwan by an overtly aggressive China. For the players representing the United States in these newer games, the goal is not just to de-escalate a simmering crisis but rather to defend the island—a mission that calls for a different set of policies than games designed to mitigate the danger of an attack rather than defeat it.

It is worth considering what Beijing might conclude from watching the public discussion of these war games. For starters, the games likely reduce the uncertainty of Washington’s stated position of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to the question of whether the United States would use force to defend Taiwan: it’s hard to imagine anything less ambiguous than a loud, public, and bipartisan discussion of the pros and cons of various options for how the U.S. military could help protect the island. The games might also signal to Beijing that anti-Chinese factions are gaining power and influence inside the U.S. political system, with a consolidation of support among power brokers in favor of military industrialization, restrictive trade, and increased arms sales to Taiwan.

China might also look at these war games and conclude the United States is on an unalterable course toward war. That would be a mistake: the games all fall short of calling for American forces to be stationed in Taiwan or for the United States to unambiguously, preemptively declare a military alliance with its government. They also do not anticipate or call for a U.S. military campaign against mainland China. These are important omissions from the games, although Chinese policymakers may interpret these omissions to be strategic rather than indicative of genuine restraint on Washington’s part.

DON’T GET PLAYED

War games are not crystal balls, but they are powerful tools of influence. Domestically, war games can rally constituencies in Congress, the armed services, opposing political parties, or the public. Internationally, games can signal a country’s intentions and help bolster the credibility of steps it has taken to deter conflict. War games reveal what states care about, what domestic political actors want, and how states believe wars will occur and play out. The immersive quality of such games and the way they bring people together for a shared experience make them uniquely effective forms of persuasion. As Bloomfield, the political scientist and statesman, wrote of the games run by MIT during the Cold War, reentering the real world after a game was “like coming out of a deep sleep after a particularly vivid dream. It takes time for the carryover of emotional content from the game to reality to wear off.”

The richness of that experience is what makes war games so engaging and what helps them illuminate otherwise unpredictable situations. But they can be biased toward a specific conclusion and in this way become dangerous tools of propaganda to make a case for war. Done wrong, they can also turn the horrific reality of war into an abstraction, which could make a conflict seem less deadly. That is the effect that the sociologist Irving Horowitz had in mind in 1963 when he criticized Cold War–era thinkers such as Kahn, Schelling, Wohlstetter and Henry Kissinger as inhabitants of “a world of nightmarish intellectual ‘play.’”

On the other hand, as Gallagher has pointed out, war games can also demonstrate the cost and seriousness of war, leading states to carefully build deterrence and defensive capabilities. Games about why wars start, not just who wins, can reveal patterns of inadvertent escalation and suggest mechanisms or strategies that opposing countries can take to avoid war in the first place. Furthermore, games can play an important diplomatic role in building trust between both allies and adversaries.

It would be harder for organizers to manipulate war games if the press and the public better understood them. That means asking the right questions about the games’ outcomes, including how the players arrived at those outcomes. Who is paying for and convening the game? What are their motivations for running the game? Who is playing the game? What assumptions and rules are embedded in the game? Are details of the game being leaked, publicized, or disseminated in a way that could benefit the sponsors? Asking and answering such questions does not nullify the utility of a game’s findings; instead, it provides necessary context for interpreting them.

The true value of war-gaming is its ability to immerse policymakers in a scenario that might be otherwise unthinkable and in which they might learn something about themselves. This is why war games do not predict the future but can shape it. Today’s war games do not foresee a future war between the United States and China. But the fact that they are being played at all should be viewed as a warning about where things are headed.