About 20 years ago, I was sent to participate in an anti-terrorism exercise at the Disney Resort complex. The idea was that they used off duty personnel to respond to a simulated terrorist attack at one of the Disney resorts. Some of the people were there as responders, and some were chosen to be the terrorists. They had government employees who had been voluntold to be resort guests and serve as victims.
I was chosen to staff the one ambulance that they had for “real world” injuries, in the event that someone really got hurt, so they wouldn’t have to stop the exercise. It was great, because I got to stand around and learn, without having to worry about doing anything.
It started with a mass shooting. The initial response went well. Initial officers arrived, then SWAT, and SWAT began clearing the area. No shooter had yet been found. Then the command team got there and began coordinating everything. All was going smoothly, and according to procedure.
An hour into it, the exercise had to be stopped and then restarted because the OPFOR had figured out where the command post was likely to be (the parking lot where there were few cars) and placed a command detonated IED there. It wiped out most of the command post. The two guys who had command detonated the device (a car bomb) then strolled through the command post and shot every single person who was left.
The incident commander complained that it was unrealistic for terrorists to know where his CP was going to be, so they started over.
That entire thing reminded me of the tabletop exercise that the Japanese had carried out in May of 1942, where the Japanese Navy was wargaming out the Midway attacks. Admiral Yamamoto hosted the exercise and invited all of the senior commanders involved in the Midway operation to participate.
His chief of staff ran the game and served as the chief umpire. The purpose of the exercise was to fight out the battle on paper first and expose any flaws in the Japanese plan so they could be corrected before launching the actual operation. The game was treated as a formality, and not a serious tool.
The player controlling the U.S. forces sent a flight of land-based bombers from Midway to attack the carriers. The game umpire rolled a pair of dice to determine how many hits were scored. The result of nine was enough to sink two carriers, Akagi and Kaga. The chief umpire did not believe the Americans would be so aggressive. Even if they were, he was confident the Japanese carriers would be up to the task of defending themselves, so he overruled the umpire and reduced the result to just three hits, meaning that Akagi was still afloat.
Every operation carried out by the Japanese Navy from the invasion of Midway and the Aleutians, down to the assault on Johnston and Hawaii, was carried out in the games without the slightest difficulty. The Imperial Navy handily won every engagement in these tabletop games. This was due to the conduct of Yamamoto’s Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Ugaki, who was the chief umpire and who frequently intervened to set aside rulings made by the umpires.
How can we apply those lessons to the current day? I leave that to your own imaginations.
