In the spirit of making all things relevant to September 11th, here we open a new column on game matters with something different than originally intended. In the wake of the tragic attacks in New York City and Washington, DC the question on everyone's lips was "didn't we know about this?" or "how could we not have known about this?" Then the tragedy suddenly expanded with the spate of anthrax poisonings. If anything, the hysteria was greater in the anthrax attacks than with the original aircraft bombings. The question of did we know with respect to the World Trade Center et. al. is a broad intelligence question. It will be addressed widely, no doubt will become the subject of investigations if not witch hunts, and is distant from our interest in games. But there is an angle here for us--the anthrax attacks. It turns out that these sorts of situations were widely anticipated and were studied through simulations. One of these is of particular interest today and that's where we shall go. First a bit of back story. Terrorism really entered our national consciousness beginning in the late 1960s with a wave of aircraft hijackings. Shootings, kidnappings, bombings, and other incidents, where the political motivations were those of terrorist groups, were gradually added to the mix. In the late 70s and 1980s, with a series of assassinations of American ambassadors, the occupation of our embassy in Teheran, and bombings of embassies and the barracks of a Marine peacemaking unit in Beirut, the U.S. government began to perceive terrorism as a major international problem. In 1985 Vice-President George H.W Bush (the current president's father) led a governmentwide study of terrorism that focused executive attention on the overall problem for perhaps the first time. Until then the study of terrorism had largely been the province of a number of scholars or policy analysts, less or more astute but basically crying out in the darkness. One result would be the CIA's creation of a counterterrorism center in the late 1980s. Another was the dawning realization that the U.S. government needed policies both to counter terrorist groups and for preparedness in the event of terrorist attacks. A start was made in the first Bush administration, where the emphasis stayed primarily on the counterterror side of the equation. But very early in Bill Clinton's presidency, when Islamic terrorists made a first attack on New York's World Trade Center, it became clear that preparedness needed much more attention. Through the 1990s an assortment of programs grew willy nilly under the general rubric of combating terrorism, spending for which reached $6.5 billion in 1998, and stood at $9.3 billion during Clinton's last year in office. Meanwhile, the 1995 terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway, in which a religious sect used nerve gas, brought specific attention to terrorist use of "weapons of mass destruction," which include chemical and biological weapons like the anthrax spores which have roiled America. In the ways of government new concerns often become fixations and so it was with weapons of mass destruction. Survey official studies and even the popular press for the past several years and it will become evident that mass destruction (and another current fixation, cyber attack) has dominated public discussions of terrorism issues. Similarly with the budget, funding earmarked for weapons of mass destruction concerns out of all monies for the physical security of government and population or responding to attacks increased by fifty percent between 1998 and 2001. Trend The trend is even more marked when we turn to exercises and simulations, which were accorded greater emphasis after 1996, when the Clinton National Security Council issued a presidential directive on combating terrorism. Between June 1995 and June 1998, the most recent period for which there is data, the U.S. government conducted a total of 201 exercises simulating terrorist events or practicing responses. (Efforts have been increasing: just 32 of the exercises were held in the first year, 53 in the second, but II6 in 1997-1998.) A total of 85 of these exercises were tabletop simulations or decision games. In the last year simulation treatment of terrorist incidents outpaced field exercises (60 to 56), and overall the use of simulations increased at a much faster rate, partly due to the Pentagon's implementation of a domestic preparedness program that mandated greater use of the simulations. In spite of the varied purposes and measurement objectives of all these terrorism practices, the treatment of weapons of mass destruction in the games has been the dominant theme throughout. In 1995-1996 there were 23 exercises/games involving the weapons of mass destruction and just 9 others. The next year there were 32 practices with the exotic weapons versus 21 others. In 1997-1998 a whopping 84 of the exercises or games looked at terrorist incidents with weapons of mass destruction as against 32 practices of all other kinds. (Parenthetically it can be noted that the foci of all these exercises suggests that what was not practiced was response to the kind of attacks that actually occurred at the Pentagon and World Trade Center.) The data on types of incident is also quite revealing of U.S. government focus on specific types of weapons of mass destruction. Counting now just those exercises/simulations that took up the mass destruction theme, some 42.4% of the total dealt with terrorist release of chemical weapons. This concentration relates clearly to the Tokyo subway attack. Another 12.9% of the exercises involved biological weapons such as anthrax. The nuclear tally comes to 15.1%. Aside from chemical the largest concentration in the exercises has been on multiple releases of weapons of mass destruction, which account for 29.4% of the exercise themes. A typical multiple release scenario was a Pentagon field exercise with a team at one location coping with a biological threat while a second group elsewhere dealt with a chemical release incident. In all chemical and biological scenarios constitute a majority (55%) of the terrorist exercise scenarios, an even greater preponderance given that they also make up a large proportion of the multiple incident scenarios. To the degree that the analysis of exercise outcomes has since influenced U.S. government spending on medicine stockpiles and response preparations it is evident that antidotes to chemical and biological attack have had a prominent place. In fact the U.S. budget for response preparations almost quadrupled 1998 to 1999 and has remained at the same high level since. Thus when, in the wake of the October 2001 anthrax attacks, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson got on television to assure Americans that HHS stood ready to respond to this kind of outbreak, there was some basis for his remarks. The American public was nevertheless not reassured and fear reigned from coast to coast. Simulaton: Dark Winter The fear reaction which actually occurred should also have been predictable from exercises. Most recently, in June 2001 there was a decision game held at Andrews Air Force Base called "Dark Winter." The two day game was devised by Randy Larsen, of an Arlington, Virginia, think tank called ANSER, and organized by that group along with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, and the National Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. The players simulated the National Security Council plus state and local officials deciding how to contain an outbreak of smallpox created by four two-person terrorist groups with aerosol spray in shopping malls in Oklahoma City, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Oklahoma governor Frank Keating played himself in the game, former Georgia senator Sam Nunn was the president, White House media maven David Gergen became the national security adviser, and former CIA director R. James Woolsey functioned as the intelligence chieftain. The other players had similar levels of experience for the roles they assumed. Set in December 2002, the game began eight days after the hypothetical attack, with the players learning of a single case of smallpox in Oklahoma and suspicions of perhaps twenty more. The "president" tried to limit contagion, authorizing use of existing vaccine stocks by medical and security personnel at the scenes of infection while ordering emergency production. By the sixth game day all the vaccine had been used up, interstate commerce had stopped, there were riots by citizens demanding vaccination, and the question of quarantining victims was real but unanswerable. On the thirteenth game day smallpox had spread to twenty-five states and fifteen foreign countries, there were 2,600 dead and more than II,000 sick. Play was halted at that point. Sam Nunn was so disturbed at what he had experienced in this game that he subsequently testified in Congress for more attention to response and medical issues associated with terrorism, as well as starting now to prepare for production of new smallpox vaccine. Others have commented along similar lines. In "Dark Winter" the scenario was deliberately structured to be a worst-case. Smallpox is highly contagious, partly because it has been virtually wiped out as a disease. But the virus can leap from a person to another six feet away. Very few samples of the virus exist and most of those were in the U.S. and Russia. Production of a vaccine is slow, in part due to the paucity of samples. (Since "Dark Winter," however, the Bush administration has increased its order for doses of vaccine sufficiently to innoculate every American citizen if necessary.) The controllers running the game also made their decisions so as to stymie the players at every turn. Thus moves that might have succeeded in a real world situation failed in the simulation. For gainers this brings back the classic question of the tradeoffs to be made between realism and playability. The organizers of "Dark Winter" had an agenda-- which they admit--of dramatizing the extent of the biological terrorism threat. That goal seems to have been achieved. But notice that the near panic among participants in the game would be matched shortly afterwards by the concerns among Americans faced with an anthrax attack. Meanwhile Americans are entitled to ask whether "Dark Winter" is typical of the simulations carried out on these subjects. If the preponderance of mass destruction simulations are blinding us to more probable conventional types of attack, and if the mass destruction simulations themselves are responding to private agendas, are we really well-served by this entire practice? One of the criticisms of U.S. counterterror programs is that they are a collection of individual initiatives (read hobby horses) rather than a coherent effort. Games would be a positive danger if they were helping drive a process like that. Gainers are the best equipped people to ask questions like those. Does art follow life? Does life follow art? In this unfortunate tragedy we have an unusual connection to gaming. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 1 no. 1 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.