NATIONAL SECURITY SERVICES

War Games are back in vogue in Washington in a major way. The primary reason is uncertainty. Everything that is old is new again. The US won the last GPC - the Cold War. But the new GPC does not look much like the old one. Consequentially, Washington has to test and evaluate how it thinks and acts in a ‘new’ world of Great Power Competition (GPC). Games are the best vehicle to do that.

It has been a while between GPC’s. The certainties of the bi-polar era dissolved into a new disorder. Pent up frustrations were unleashed throughout the periphery. Soon the chaos of far off ungoverned places like Somalia and Afghanistan made themselves felt in New York and Washington DC. Overnight, Counter Terrorism (CT) became something it had never been before - a core activity. When that failed to quickly and decisively solve the problem, Counter Insurgency (COIN), dormant since Vietnam, had to be relearned as it was applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Now we have come full circle. GPC has displaced CT/COIN as the primary focus of concern in the Pentagon. Accordingly, GPC has to be relearned. One of the many challenges with re-learning GPC is the context has completely changed since last time. The stable bi-polar order is out. An unstable multi-polar competition demanding constant dynamic rebalancing of power is in. A further complication is the economic, technological, social and military settings have all completely changed as well. The abundance of uncertainty and changed context has driven strategic and operational thinkers back to war games as primary GPC educational vehicle. 

War games are excellent vehicles to explore new contexts but they have to be done right. There is an art of war gaming and if the context is not right, the rest fails. All the tech in the world cant fix a game suffering from flawed assumptions, unrealistic narratives or an opponent(s) that is a caricature of a complex system. Contexr has a very creative war gaming department that will deliver world class war game scenarios, narratives and “if this, then that” logic trees. If you need to run a technology-centric simulation but get stuck on generating a realistic yet challenging scenario to underpin the “fly-through” we can work with your IT engineers to develop narratives and branches and sequels that suitably challenge the technology, the operators and decision makers.

The Contexr team is comprised in part by the founder and two long serving members of the US Special Operations Command Red Team. 

Readers might have heard of both “Red Cells” and “Red Teams” and wondered if they are the same thing? Categorically no. Red cells are a war game construct. Blue forces represent the US and allies. Red the opponent force (OPFOR). Red and Blue cells are the group of people role-playing those functions in the game. The “White cell” is the game administration and adjudication functions. War games take many forms, from table top exercises to fielded forces on maneuver (see the war game section on this page). 

Play can be at the tactical, operational or strategic level of war or a combination thereof. Red cells are charged with inventing creative ways of winning a battle or war. The concept has been extended beyond games to the creation of red cells within certain organizations to apply persistent opponent force thinking against security programs. This is of course a key concept in cyber security. But its origins can be trace in part to special options. The founder of Seal Team VI, Rich Marcinko set out to create the premier counter terrorist organization in the world. He understood that his team had to first master the ideas, tactics, techniques and procedures of terrorists before devising ways to effectively counter them. In the pre-911 days, US special operations force counter terrorism units would be employed to ‘attack’ all sorts of US military and intelligence organizations to find and fix weaknesses in defense plans.

By contrast, Red Teams are not charged with thinking like an opposing force. They are designed to provide a second look over US plans and policies. They examine the assumptions and arguments underpinning plans looking for inconsistencies, fallacious reasoning, faulty intelligence or interpretation thereof, and changes in the context that might require reevaluation of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of policies and plans. For example, prior to the attack on pearl harbor the Japanese high command spent all its extensive deliberations on ‘how’ to pull off the audacious raid. They had to surmount incredible technical, organization, communications and logistical challenges to have any chance of success. What they neglected to debate was whether they should attack America and if they did, what the consequences might turn out to be over time. Had they employed Red Teaming they might have come to see things from Yamamoto’s perspective. “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Having lived in America and attended Harvard, he understood America better than the rest of the Japanese high command. 

Richards Heuer’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis is the ‘red team’ classic text. Heuer was concerned that “Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves.”

Red Teams appeared particularly after the WMD in Iraq crisis in the IC when concerns were raised about analytical tradecraft issues. Key among these were all forms of cognitive bias, for example, confirmation bias, unchallenged assumptions, mirror imaging, importance of expressing doubt, ‘mindsets are quick to form but hard to change’, attribution bias, ‘correlation does not imply causation’, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, and no structural mechanism for alternative analyses or conflicting opinion.

The USSOCOM Red Team adhered to the Heuer model (with later relevant works by others, in particular Kahneman) and used the following scheme to discipline its analytical assessments and recommendations. In the SOCOM case, the Red Team was not purely an intelligence function. It was a mixture of intel, ops, planners, logisticians, public affairs, and other elements of the HQ’s departments that were charged with contributing to CONOPS (concepts of operations or policy).

Contexr has extensive experience in strategic planning and Red teaming. It can provide a vital second look to your plans to ensure your assumptions are solid, reasoning tight, and plans foolproof. 

An important and under appreciated art in intelligence is speculative intelligence. It is the second mission objective of the 2019 US National Intelligence Strategy.

High level IC documents go through a very thorough interagency vetting process where conditionality is often applied to source trustworthiness and analytical confidence. Intelligence agencies struggle to get the tone and level of confidence of known issues just right. Too assertive and the decision maker might assume a higher level of confidence than actually exists. Too conditional and they might find it useless, or worse, just adds to uncertainty in making a decision. Extend that concern to something that has not even happened yet, but might, or might not, and the discomfort multiples accordingly. 

Speculative intelligence pushes that boundary between context and decision. It is charged with trying to anticipate developments. To go beyond what is already known or suspected, so that decision makers might preempt, forestall, deter or defeat an emerging problem at it source, denying it the ability to flourish into a full blown crisis.

The IC provides the President and other ‘consumers’ with important context about what is happening in the world. Formally, intelligence does not make policy recommendations. Those functions are provided by other parts of government, like the National Security Council, the Pentagon, State, Treasury and other departments and agencies relevant to the issue at hand. 

Contexr has a deep bench when it comes to both sides of the speculative intelligence and policy making divide. Three of our team members pioneered Red Teaming at US Special Operations Command. (See that section for more detail). All of us have routinely briefed 4 star and higher leaders on the contexr of the decisions they face and made recommendations for courses of action that were successfully implemented. Let us help your organization understand its place in the world, anticipate challenges (that we prefer to see as opportunities), and develop courses of action to seize the day.

While cyber warfare is now becoming a way of life, it is not the greatest threat to emerge from new technologies in the digital domain. Narrative (or memetic) warfare is being waged to alter national and global norms in an effort to establish cognitive hegemony in favor of antidemocratic values. Real-time psychometric feedback loops managed by manipulative narrative delivery systems have fundamentally transformed the global mindscape. The United States is enduring a national crisis in large part because algorithms designed to gain and keep attention in digital commerce have perverse effects when applied to political communication. 

The 2021 Facebook scandal revealed to the general public how its algorithms have fundamentally altered politics by manufacturing outrage. “Memes move the masses”. The constant escalation of outrage to maintain attention has driven an explosion of extremist content. This is because algorithms drive consumers to extreme content whether they seek it or not. This technology is the perfect vehicle for Russian disinformation and destabilization programs. 

Contexr has significant expertise in assessing this threat and providing actionable response programs. 

The first step in maximizing success in political risk analysis is ensuring that there is complete mutual understanding and agreement as to what exactly is required. One of the most common refrains in military planning circles when things go wrong is “not enough guidance was provided from higher”. This is an excuse for failure on the planners part. They failed to interact with “higher” to ensure time, effort and resources would not be wasted. Contexr’s people have partnered with the most senior decision makers in the DOD. We know how to help others clarify their own ideas by pressing on the ‘why’ of decisions before getting into the ‘how’, which begs the other key questions - ’where’, ‘when’ and ‘who’. 

Contexr can deliver comprehensive analysis of any country, region or function. An important part of working in a military HQs is ensuring alignment in goals and objectives between parties to a decision. So we will work with you to identify deliverables that will address your needs that you may not even know exist. Once both sides have established the art of the possible, Contexr will design a solution that is completely scalable according to your need and instructions. We can also draw on a global network of intelligence and strategic thinkers and operators to find answers to just about any question in any location. 

Contexr subscribes to the core tenants of operational design. We reject the color by numbers, 12 step program prescriptions of traditional planning processes. They have their place, often when it comes to the science of warfare. We have not found them to be particularly useful or enlightening at the strategic and operational levels of war. All planning must be a living practice, there are no end points, just next points. Planning is not static but constantly evolving. It is a dialectic debate to situate strategic truth, work through mutual concessions, and arrive at a joint resolution for action (hypothesis, antithesis, synthesis). It is a dynamic OODA loop (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) that learns from earlier cycles and builds better solutions as it interacts with external stimuli. 

Contexr uses the full spectrum of planning tools sets outlined on this page to make sure you minimize all errors and learn from them when they inevitably arise. Operational design is alive to the fact the opponent and third parties ‘have a vote’, and chance and fog of war apply in the environment impacting the thoughts and actions of all in the system. 

If your strategic planning is not iterative, constantly questioning and testing assumptions, measuring outputs (as opposed to the common mistake of focusing on inputs) and anticipating (vice responding to) opponent efforts, you need to hire contexr.

Mutually Assured Destruction no longer works. The most pressing emergent security challenge is that nuclear stalemate is eroding. Hypersonic, highly maneuverable, sub orbital delivery systems; intercontinental range nuclear powered and armed torpedos/underwater drones; artificial intelligence, and other new ISR, stealth, cyber and quantum technologies; have already upended the central nuclear balance. Under these circumstances, the incentive to strike first becomes not just plausible, but in some scenarios, desirable. Worse, as Admiral Richard the Commander of US STRATCOM publicly admitted in late 2021, there are no defenses to these new developments. All of this has already happened and almost no one is aware of it.