The National Security Decision Making Exercise (NSDM) is an 8-hour, imaginative exercise in political role-playing. It is brilliantly boisterous, if ultimately flawed, and yet contains such potential that makes you wonder why this isn't required at every Politician 101 class across the U.S.

As the scale is global, you need a lot of players and the more the merrier. The NSDM game I participated in had about 60 players and could have easily accommodated twice that many. And for that matter, it needs a lot of judges as well-it had about a dozen and could have used many more as well. As such, I found it difficult to get a handle on everything going on, but a post-game debriefing helped. I'll primarily use examples from my sphere of knowledge to explain concepts. All this was held in the Officer's Club.

Set Up

Each player assumes a role in one of the various government "cells." In our game we had the U.S., Russia, Japan, and three European cells: Western Europe, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. Each of these governments has certain objectives to meet, which usually centers around survival first and economic growth second.

Within each cell are a number of players assuming certain roles. In the case of the three European cells, the roles represent aspects across multiple countries. For example, the "Prime Minister" of Western Europe represents the general leadership across Britain, France, Spain etc.

In any case, within each cell are the roles. For the U.S. you have a President, National Security Advisor, a number of Senators and Representatives, various elements of the military and so on. In Japan, you had politicians, but also a very strong presence of company executives. In Russia, you had the various ministers, a President, members of the Duma, and so on. In each of the European cells, you had broad spectrums: Capitalists, Businessman, Socialists, Federalists, Nationalists, and so on.

My starting position was as a Central European capitalist. I received the following motivations and encouragements:

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

Central European Capitalists

Specific things to work for, in order of importance:

1. Obtain positions, in order of preference: Chairman of EC or EEC, Prime Minister of your nation, chairman of another Pan- European sub-cell, Trade or Finance Minister of your nation, seat on the EC or EEC, recognized leader of the opposition of the nation.
2. Lower taxes and reduce spending all around, but particularly on Social Welfare.
3. Work for a balanced Lending Policy, Floating National Currencies, European Cooperation, and Free Trade.
4. Put together plans for lucrative investments, linking up capital (financial) with industry and governments.

Some people have yet to comprehend that communism was proven a failure. Many of them surround you in your own parliament. Europe will move ahead when business, industry, and banking operate with minimal harassment by governments.

Europe has potential to be a very powerful force in the world's economy. We've made great strides in recent years, but more work is needed. A higher degree of European Cooperation and Free Trade will make it easier for capitalists to operate where it is most profitable in Europe, stimulating the economies for the benefit of all. Either Unification or Nationalism will build up government powers that will tend to choke free market enterprises. Similarly, some degree of government guarantees on lending are good, but too much will encourage investors to throw their money away on frivolous, high-risk ventures (a form of welfare for the rich, and welfare is robbery). You want to take all of the profits from your investments, and are committed to accepting and managing the risks that go with them yourself - more power for you, less government second-guessing you. Floating National Currencies allow you to better protect yourself, letting your put your money where it is safe: going towards linking currencies or the Eurodollar will end up subsidizing underperforming economies at the expense of your economy (meaning at your expense).

No government taxing and spending is good. If an industry, for example, needs government support, than that industry should be forced to become more competitive, evolve, or else should die off so that another can take its place. Government spending on things like this are another form of welfare. You have a particular problem with Social Welfare, which is communism in disguise.

Position is power, and you want to gain as much position as possible. Best affect your nation's course by being Prime Minister, secondarily Trade or Finance; which puts you in position to be the chairman of the EC or the EEC, to affect key European policies.

Work in the international arena to make money, investing, constructing, and selling.

Obviously the others in Central Europe had competing agendas, and since there can be only one top dog, the conflicting agendas start in your country cell, and then the competing interests between the nations kick in, and thus, you plant the seeds of the events requiring said security decisions.

I know the U.S. had presidential elections, but in the case of Central Europe, the very beginning of the game requires our little cell to have a Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Finance Minister. We only had six people in our cell, and the umpire informed us that I (the Capitalist) was the current Prime Minister...except I had to have a vote of confidence, and then select the two other ministers.

Enter the horse-trading as another player (the Nationalist) wanted to be Prime Minister. Well, as my goal sheet indicated, that was the number two personal objective for me, so that was just not part of my agenda. With six people, the give and take was as spirited as any American political debate, only civilized. In the end, status quo remained and we agreed that she would be Defense Minister. Another player wanted to be Finance Minister, and so it was voted 6-0. Who says business skills don't come in handy in games?

With my vote of confidence, we then wrangled over the variety of spending, which of course goes back to horse-trading...and satisfying the other three players who were not ministers. Thus, this game becomes one of balancing the various personal interests--not unlike real politics.

And it was here, after we hammered out an agreement (the first one took a while as personal priorities clashed and we fulfilled our roles). This sheet is handed into the umpire, who hands it to the "economics coordinator" who plugs the numbers into a spreadsheet. A computer program tabulates all the numbers for all the countries and spits out a GNP number, as well as a spreadsheet for each country.

Fundamental Game Flaw

Here, we players discovered a fundamental game flaw: no feedback. We had no idea whether our economy was growing or stalling, whether we had more jobs or less, whether the populace liked or hated our policies, or anything else but a GNP number. After a couple of turns, our Defense Minister was trying to land a U.S. base, the Finance Minister was bringing in Japanese factories, and other players in our Central European cell were out getting deals done. As Prime Minister, I loosely rode herd on them, but quickly learned to let 'em run with initiative.

And yet, despite the factories and other deals, despite brokering a peace plan between Eastern Europe and Russia, despite getting a pan-European summit together and electing two Central European players as EEC and Defense Commissioners, we still had no feedback about what we were doing.

In many ways, that might be accurate. All the efforts of Central Europe pale before the might of the U.S. Indeed, in diplomatic forays, I found a growing opinion that, not only were our deals to buy Russian oil and build Japanese car factories apparently pointless, the amounts are unreal. Could Central Europe afford to buy 100-million barrels of oil? Will Japanese money and new jobs push the standard of living up? Who knows? Not any of us.

I asked for reports. The Ministers asked for reports. The Officer's Club staff asked for a report on the food and drink--we told them we were out of drink and they brought more. Hence, the staff got more feedback than we did.

Ultimately, without feedback, the initial enthusiasm and effort waned. It seemed no matter what was done, the only thing that wavered was the GNP. I'd like to point out that the pan-Europe GNP was 4%, 4%, 3%, 3%, 4.5% and 4.5% for the 6 turns done in 8 hours.

Well, maybe that's the point of the game. No matter what you do, you really can't affect anything. Certainly, I believe--in my own narrow view--that our Central European team worked very, very well together, giving and taking, and not only with one another, but with the rest of Europe too. Or maybe, that if people go to know each other, we built trust.

Japan had earthquakes, we sent humanitarian aid, then got car factories and other trade relations in return. Eastern Europe had separatist problems, but Western Europe wanted to be one big happy Europe. We brokered finance, trade, and monetary compromises that not only counteracted an Iran-led oil embargo of the west, but jumped our GNP growth form 3 to 4.5%. As we worked together as a Central European team, we constantly found common ground in order to advance not only our objectives, even if we had to shelve or compromise our individual objectives, but global objectives. Now, if we could only find out whether we were as successful as we thought we were, we'd be happy.

Ideas

One suggestions we would make is to have some sort of central bank per nation to give an idea of how much money you can spend, etc. Like everything else, it doesn't matter the size of a trade agreement. Of course having some idea of a budget amount would be nice. As you recall, the game deals in percentages, not amounts. Various suggestions-monopoly money, poker chips, and so on.

But it all carries back to the lack of feedback. In the end, there was a short recap, but no idea of how anyone did, other than the US won. It doesn't seem that they could lose, but they won.

The leaders took their bows, some comments were made about approaches, and that was about it. The biggest disappointment was that the promise of declaring a winner and loser was not kept. Instead, some weasily "you were all too close to call" pronouncement was offered.

So, what was the result? Well, eight hours of negotiations may have been the actual objective. On the other hand, what I learned was that despite my best efforts, and the best efforts of our team, the focus on the U.S. was pre-ordained. Indeed, the Japanese seemed to be doing so well, the umpires declared not one, but two, 7.8-Richter scale earthquakes to cut their economy off at the knees.

Would I play again? Certainly, only this time, I'd try to form a global coalition to embargo the U.S. and collapse the U.S. economy to see what would happen. Then, so a bunch of really oddball deals to push the game system over the edge.

You see, we were told that this was the 48th time they ran the NSDM game. I figure that after so many games, there must have been people who asked for more feedback than a GNP number. You'd think programmers could be a little smarter at upgrading their simulation.

On the positive side, we did get to circulate and negotiate and the buffet table was superb, and after a while, when the above nations solidified, it was a pleasure to kick back with a number of designers and brainstorm fixes for the system. I'm not quite sure apathy was a goal of the NSDM, but that's how it ended up.

Looking over my personal sheet of objectives, probably the worst sin of the game's design is the inability to rank its players. I had four things I was supposed to do, and I figured I had achieved a lot of them. I suspect no one had achieved all of them, but it would've been nice to see a Fortune 500 style ranking at the end of the game.

More Connections 2000:

Introduction
Lecture: Opening Remarks
Lecture: History of Wargaming
Lecture: Aerospace Power 101
Lecture: Games the Navy Plays: Naval Wargaming Past and Future
Lecture: Sliding Timescales in Published Wargames
Lecture: Wargaming: The End of the Millenium
Lecture: Effects-Based Modelling
Lecture: Global Defense and Wargaming
Lecture: Army Transformation 2000
Lecture: Global Wargame
Lecture: Global Engagement
Lecture: Commercial Wargaming 1999
Lecture: The Human Factor: Modeling Inputs
Lecture: The Modeling of Intangibles
National Security Decision Making Game Recap