Speaker 1: Pushkin. In C. S. Lewis's famous book The Lion, the
Speaker 1: Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevency Children happen upon the
Speaker 1: magical land of Narnia, entering through a secret passage in
Speaker 1: an English country house. When I spoke with Uniwong about
Speaker 1: her own adventures, that story was the first thing she
Speaker 1: brought up until recently. The path into war gaming is
Speaker 1: similar to the path to getting to Narnia. You stumble
Speaker 1: upon it by accident. It's not of your own design.
Speaker 1: You don't even know it exists. Narnia an imaginary world
Speaker 1: that teaches us something important about the real world. Uniwong
Speaker 1: zoom background is a still from Star Wars Are two
Speaker 1: D two standing next to C three po. She's part
Speaker 1: of the group of intellectual scholars PhDs strategists who spend
Speaker 1: their careers helping the Pentagon think about how to better
Speaker 1: wage war and more importantly, how to better avoid war,
Speaker 1: and how do they do that by playing games. Someone
Speaker 1: said I should go to the Connection's war gaming conference.
Speaker 1: So that was in twenty eleven. But I walked into
Speaker 1: this room of middle aged men in baseball paps, hunched
Speaker 1: over miniatures, rolling dice, and I suddenly had this sense
Speaker 1: that I had come home and these were my people,
Speaker 1: and this is what I was supposed to have been
Speaker 1: doing all along, and I didn't know it. Why was
Speaker 1: it You walk in that room and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: this is where I belong. Can you explain why you
Speaker 1: had that feeling? I think it's the this is it's
Speaker 1: the geekdom, right, Like geeks recognize each other at a
Speaker 1: deep level. So I recognize this brand of geeks at
Speaker 1: a deep level that I didn't realize existed. I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: by the idea that there's a certain kind of insight
Speaker 1: that you can only get from a simulation. Can you
Speaker 1: explain why is that? Why can't Why can't I look
Speaker 1: at this scenario with a bunch of smart people and
Speaker 1: without a simulation, come up with all of the different
Speaker 1: angles in a dance just on our own. Why do
Speaker 1: we need a war game? I think we will invoke
Speaker 1: Thomas Shelling as is appropriate for nearly all occasions related
Speaker 1: to deterrent and wargaming and anything I think truly imaginative.
Speaker 1: Thomas Shelling was an economist, a Nobel Prize winner, and
Speaker 1: the spiritual godfather of the war gaming. World game theory
Speaker 1: is really the study of how rational people interact when
Speaker 1: they know that their decisions impinge on each other, and
Speaker 1: people have to anticipate what another will do or what
Speaker 1: another is already doing, or when people try to influence
Speaker 1: the choices of others through threats and promise so some
Speaker 1: various devices to change their expectations of how one will
Speaker 1: behave He once wrote that no one, no matter how intelligent,
Speaker 1: can make a list of the things that would not
Speaker 1: occur to them, And if we've learned anything recently, it
Speaker 1: is surely that there is an ever expanding list of
Speaker 1: things that have not occurred to us. My name is
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History by podcast about
Speaker 1: things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about the idea
Speaker 1: that the best way to prepare for the unexpected is
Speaker 1: not to make plans or predictions, but to play games,
Speaker 1: not board games. Grand theatrical productions costing many thousands of dollars,
Speaker 1: planned over months, stretching for days, experts and specialists playing
Speaker 1: each role, each with the passion of an actor on
Speaker 1: a probadway stage, with the hope that the rest of
Speaker 1: us will learn from what they found in their elaborate
Speaker 1: imaginary worlds. When I was young, we lived in a
Speaker 1: house by the highway with a very long, narrow backyard
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty yards deep, lined with what must
Speaker 1: have been more than a hundred tall poplar trees. In
Speaker 1: the fall, when the leaves fell, we all realized that
Speaker 1: raking the leaves would be an overwhelming task, so my
Speaker 1: father through a party. He was a math professor and
Speaker 1: decided to invite all of his graduate students in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: He told them they would deal with the leaves. In
Speaker 1: the evening, there would be a big dinner and then
Speaker 1: party games of the sort that eccentric math professors consider
Speaker 1: appropriate for their graduate students. My father's students were all
Speaker 1: from overseas, from the top colleges of India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Israel.
Speaker 1: I don't think any of them would ever rake leaves before.
Speaker 1: But my father believed strongly that a day of yardwork
Speaker 1: and playing games was as good as life got, and
Speaker 1: his students picked up on his enthusiasm. The leaf raking
Speaker 1: turned into sport. The games were hilarious, they convoluted, and
Speaker 1: the party proved such a success that every year a
Speaker 1: new crop of students would show up, and the leaf
Speaker 1: rakers from previous years would invite themselves back, until the
Speaker 1: party became huge, a united nations of math geeks in
Speaker 1: our backyard, creating huge piles of leaves calling out to
Speaker 1: each other in strange accents. My working definition of smart
Speaker 1: at the age of eight or nine was knowing things.
Speaker 1: But when I listened in on the dozens of Africans
Speaker 1: and Indians in my backyard, it seemed to me that
Speaker 1: they defined themselves by what they didn't know. They would
Speaker 1: never say I just solved such and such problem that
Speaker 1: was boring ancient history. They would say, I'm working on
Speaker 1: a problem. There is something that I don't understand that
Speaker 1: I wish I did, and an even larger group of
Speaker 1: things I don't yet know that I don't know, with
Speaker 1: the clear implication the pleasure of finding out the unknown
Speaker 1: was why they got up in the morning. I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought of the leaf raking party for a long time
Speaker 1: until I started talking to the war gamers, when I realized, oh,
Speaker 1: these people all belong to the same tribe. I think
Speaker 1: that what wargaming does is by putting people in these
Speaker 1: simulated positions, these realistic but unreal realities. It encourages them
Speaker 1: to exposes them to things they maybe haven't father. That's
Speaker 1: David Schleipack, who was one of the founding directors of
Speaker 1: the Center for Gaming at the RAND Corporation. RAND is
Speaker 1: the big think tank out in Santa Monica that's been
Speaker 1: running war games for years. Unawong worked at RAND, so
Speaker 1: did Thomas che author of the War Gamer's Creed. One
Speaker 1: of the things Schlaipeck started doing in his war games
Speaker 1: was to make the element of chance tangible. You have
Speaker 1: one army against another, you make a list of the
Speaker 1: ten different things that could conceivably happen, and then you
Speaker 1: roll the dice. And the first time we did that,
Speaker 1: I was terrified. I was thinking, when we go in
Speaker 1: front of a bunch of people who have experienced combat,
Speaker 1: who have actually been fighting real wars for the last
Speaker 1: fifteen years, and we show them that we're going to
Speaker 1: use dice, they're just gonna laugh us out of the room.
Speaker 1: And we had all sorts of arguments prepared about why
Speaker 1: that was legitimate. He was going to play the war
Speaker 1: game with senior military officers, and he didn't know how
Speaker 1: they would react. We were ready to defend it, and
Speaker 1: nobody batted an eyelash. The military guys playing Schlaipacks games
Speaker 1: didn't want things to be predictable. Predictable they could do
Speaker 1: on their own. What they wanted was to be forced
Speaker 1: off the narrow path that logic and prior experience would
Speaker 1: have them follow. Schleipak was once involved in a game
Speaker 1: to test what would happen if the Russians invaded the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,
Speaker 1: three small countries right next to Russia, all members of NATO.
Speaker 1: If Russia attacked, it would face the wrath of Western
Speaker 1: Europe plus the United States. On paper, the war games
Speaker 1: seem to be based on a dumb question who would win?
Speaker 1: We would? NATO has thirty five times Russia's GDP. Russia's
Speaker 1: just emerging from this demographic crisis that is more severe
Speaker 1: than any that's ever been inflicted on an advanced nation.
Speaker 1: Their military has been on the down slope for twenty
Speaker 1: five years. This is a no brainer. Of course NATO
Speaker 1: is going to win. But the first time they played it,
Speaker 1: NATO didn't win. Russia. Did now mean Russia would actually
Speaker 1: win in the battle against the Baltics. No, this was
Speaker 1: a game, an active imagination, but it did show everyone
Speaker 1: involved that an absurdly remote possibility had to be taken seriously.
Speaker 1: Schleipak ran the game again and again. Russia always won.
Speaker 1: Russia's always winning. In fact, we eventually started telling people, look,
Speaker 1: we've done everything except go out on the street and
Speaker 1: grab random individuals and ask them to play. And no
Speaker 1: one's done better than X. Can you do better than X?
Speaker 1: The expectations and predictions of experts are useful, but only
Speaker 1: up to a point. The war game is where you
Speaker 1: put those expectations to the test. A few years ago
Speaker 1: I was invited to join Rand's Board of Trustees. It
Speaker 1: requires two meetings a year, one at RAND headquarters in
Speaker 1: Santa Monica, the other at their office near the Pentagon
Speaker 1: in northern Virginia. Half of every board meeting is devoted
Speaker 1: to the kinds of things that non profits worry about, budgets, fundraising, hiring.
Speaker 1: The other half is research presentations from RAND staffers, like
Speaker 1: the electricity grid in Puerto Rico has just been wiped
Speaker 1: out by Hurricane Maria, how much would it take to
Speaker 1: fix it? Or do American school children get enough sleep?
Speaker 1: But my favorite presentations are always the war games like
Speaker 1: this one. The Army comes to RAND with a question.
Speaker 1: They asked us to do a war game type of
Speaker 1: analysis to understand what it would take to secure loose
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons in a failed North Korean state. That's Colonel
Speaker 1: John Genteel, retired Army, former tank commander. He did two
Speaker 1: tours in Iraq. He's a doctorate from Stanford and taught
Speaker 1: history at West Point. He's now a senior historian at RAND,
Speaker 1: and he gave a presentation to the board about his
Speaker 1: North Korean game. War games always start with a path
Speaker 1: to war, an imaginary but plausible scenario that explains why
Speaker 1: a conflict might start. In this case, the scenario was
Speaker 1: a sudden spike intentions between North Korea and the United
Speaker 1: States that led to a number of other events where
Speaker 1: the US starts to mobilize forces in the US ground
Speaker 1: forces starts putting him on ships, you know, in the
Speaker 1: ports of Texas in California. North Korea is aware of
Speaker 1: all of this, tells the US to stop, and it doesn't.
Speaker 1: And I think at some point in that road to
Speaker 1: war scenario, we had the North Koreans firing a small
Speaker 1: nuclear round. May just know it was a conventional missile
Speaker 1: that hit the US island of guag Just imagine that
Speaker 1: this had actually happened a North Korean attack on American soil.
Speaker 1: The world will be in crisis. The US would have
Speaker 1: to respond. But the problem is that North Korea is
Speaker 1: a country with an expanding nuclear program, and if a
Speaker 1: war broke out, a whole lot of exceedingly dangerous nuclear
Speaker 1: material would suddenly be floating around in the midst of
Speaker 1: a whole lot of chaos. The Army wanted to know
Speaker 1: what would happen next, what would it take to round
Speaker 1: up all those stray nukes. Rand spent months planning the game.
Speaker 1: Then Genteel and his team flew to South Korea to
Speaker 1: play it out for the Army a big conference room
Speaker 1: a map of the Korean peninsula on the table. In
Speaker 1: that game, we did use counters like the little square
Speaker 1: you know war game that this is a tank brigade,
Speaker 1: this is an artillery battalion or whatever, with numbers on them.
Speaker 1: Do you have one person playing each actor? I think
Speaker 1: we had two separate teams, and we may have run
Speaker 1: two different games, but we had the Army colonels play
Speaker 1: the Blue Military Forces Blue team in war games, peak
Speaker 1: is the home team, the United States and its allies,
Speaker 1: the colonels were playing themselves. One of rand's top East
Speaker 1: Asia specialists, Mike Mazzar, played North Korea Genteel, and some
Speaker 1: of his fellow RAND staffers served as referees. In the
Speaker 1: first run, the US and South Korean forces attacked across
Speaker 1: the demilitarized Zone, the border that separates North and South Korea,
Speaker 1: maybe the most dangerous border in the world. Landmines everywhere.
Speaker 1: The result was catastrophe losses. In the next version of
Speaker 1: the game, the US and South Korea imagine that they
Speaker 1: could broke or a deal with a faction of the
Speaker 1: North Korean army to let them across, which got them
Speaker 1: to the other side. But now they had an even
Speaker 1: bigger challenge. I mean, it's freaking hard as hell. I mean,
Speaker 1: a failed North Korean state with nuclear weapons at large.
Speaker 1: You know, parts of a nuclear device, delivery systems, records,
Speaker 1: documents of scientists, all those kinds of things to track
Speaker 1: those down in the chaos of a North Korean state.
Speaker 1: It was pretty clear. What was your conclusion. Was it possible?
Speaker 1: Oh yes, but it won't take weeks, it won't take months.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take years. In the game, it took thousands
Speaker 1: of soldiers to secure even a single North Korean installation.
Speaker 1: It took that long because you just you have to
Speaker 1: secure the outside of it, which requires forces to do that.
Speaker 1: Then you have to move inside of it. Potentially there
Speaker 1: could be North Korean forces that still wanted to fight
Speaker 1: to protect it. How many sites do you think they have, oh,
Speaker 1: more than one? And then let's not even take into
Speaker 1: account the chemical weapons, potential biological weapons that North Korea has.
Speaker 1: But we're talking scores and scores and scores of nuclear sites.
Speaker 1: You remember from my Board of Trustees talk, I made
Speaker 1: the point that core nuclear components to one of those
Speaker 1: nuclear warheads, you could put it in the size of
Speaker 1: your backpack and so then you could scurry it off
Speaker 1: on a road with a civilian carrying it. So it
Speaker 1: just presents all kinds of problems. It is. Talk to
Speaker 1: the ramboat about the game. Genteel also spent a surprising
Speaker 1: amount of time on traffic jams. Because armies aren't the
Speaker 1: only factor in a military crisis, North Korean refugees would
Speaker 1: start streaming across the border. South Koreans would start fleeing
Speaker 1: their capital soul. The US and Japanese governments would order
Speaker 1: the citizens to leave the country at the same time
Speaker 1: as a huge army is trying to head towards the border,
Speaker 1: which adds up to the mother of all traffic jams.
Speaker 1: As I listened to Genteel that day at RAND, I
Speaker 1: remember thinking traffic jams as a factor in any war
Speaker 1: with North Korea. That had not occurred to me, and
Speaker 1: I assumed that was because I'm not a military expert.
Speaker 1: But then I looked around the room at the people
Speaker 1: who were particularly Harold Brown, the gray eminence of the
Speaker 1: American defense establishment, big leonine head, thick black rimmed glasses,
Speaker 1: even in his nineties, the smartest person in any room
Speaker 1: he walked into. He had a look in his eyes,
Speaker 1: and I realized, Oh, traffic jams had not occurred to
Speaker 1: him either. Now, what did the war game teach the army.
Speaker 1: They already knew it would be hard to secure nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons in a failed North Korea. The war game just
Speaker 1: told them how hard it would be. There's people on
Speaker 1: the road. If you're passing through the DMZ, chemical weapons
Speaker 1: may have been used, so the military forces have to
Speaker 1: put on protective gear to move through chemically contamidated area.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the tanks has to be in full chemical
Speaker 1: protection gear, bodysuit, mask, rubber gloves, boots what the US
Speaker 1: military calls MOP for protection. Can you imagine what it's
Speaker 1: like trying to move through this kind of terrain where
Speaker 1: a Bradley commander or a tank commander is buttoned up
Speaker 1: and in MOP four and can only look out through
Speaker 1: the little sits on the top of the turret or
Speaker 1: even through the optics. And then bring in the fact
Speaker 1: that potentially there's combat action where US tanks, North Korean tanks,
Speaker 1: infantry are being destroyed, killed, cries for help, blood, anger,
Speaker 1: all these kinds of things. There's the anguish of seeing
Speaker 1: people on the road freezing to death, can't do anything
Speaker 1: about it, and then there's just the anger and the hatred,
Speaker 1: the desire for revenge, to kill, and then you're trying
Speaker 1: to manage all of that and still carry out the mission.
Speaker 1: It would be easy for the North Koreans to build
Speaker 1: an atomic ied and to plot that in a choke
Speaker 1: point going through a steep valley, and to set that off.
Speaker 1: Then you have that and then the whole larger operational
Speaker 1: political context of now a nuclear weapon has been used?
Speaker 1: What will be the US response? All those kinds of things,
Speaker 1: The war game added detail, color, emotion to the army's understanding,
Speaker 1: and the army ordered up the war game because they
Speaker 1: knew enough to know that many of those details would
Speaker 1: be on the long list of things that had ever
Speaker 1: occurred to them. These are the details that clear your
Speaker 1: mind of wishful thinking, of comforting delusions, of the false
Speaker 1: reassurance of overconfidence. Sherman said, war's hell, and you cannot
Speaker 1: refine it. And I've said this before. Look, I mean
Speaker 1: for the US Army, US military, Iraq and Afghanistan was
Speaker 1: not easy, right, and it was specially not easy for
Speaker 1: the populations of those two countries. I mean devastating in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. But this kind of conflict war
Speaker 1: on the Korean Peninsula would make what we did in
Speaker 1: Iraq and Afghanistan look very very simple in comparison. A
Speaker 1: war game is a reality check. And I think we're
Speaker 1: willing to test our illusions with reality checks only if
Speaker 1: we practice, if we make it a habit, if we
Speaker 1: keep reminding ourselves that the world outside our imagination is
Speaker 1: much larger than the world inside it. This is what
Speaker 1: the leaf rankers tod for all those years ago in
Speaker 1: my family's backyard. They took a chance on an afternoon
Speaker 1: of doing something that they had never done before and
Speaker 1: which did not, at least in the abstract, sound like fun.
Speaker 1: And then afterwards, a twenty something advanced math doctoral student
Speaker 1: from Bangalore would sit down with another math whiz from
Speaker 1: Legos and a third from the West Bank, and they
Speaker 1: would play Charades on a team together. Charades is a
Speaker 1: game that depends on shared cultural understanding, but here it
Speaker 1: was being played by three people with no shared cultural understanding,
Speaker 1: which is what made it fun. The experience of figuring
Speaker 1: it out, of learning what figuring it out felt like,
Speaker 1: was so intoxicatingly unpredictable that they would all come back
Speaker 1: the next year and the year after that, even after
Speaker 1: they had gotten their PhDs and moved far away, only
Speaker 1: to discover when they returned, of course, that Charades had
Speaker 1: been replaced by some brand new and fiendishly impossible game
Speaker 1: of my father's invention. All the leaf breakers knew is
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't know what would happen after the leaves
Speaker 1: were raked, and that was enough. One final war game,
Speaker 1: one that I still can't stop thinking about designed by
Speaker 1: Uniwong Okay. So the war game began with sort of
Speaker 1: China trying to exert creator control and signal that they
Speaker 1: were in control of the region and more dominant now
Speaker 1: in the region, and the United States in Japan were
Speaker 1: really resisting. That Uniwang scenario was set in the future
Speaker 1: at a time when the world's major militaries have gone
Speaker 1: all in on artificial intelligence. There was this premise that
Speaker 1: AI is going to fundamentally change warfare. I propose the
Speaker 1: idea because I was like, well, if what happens if
Speaker 1: all your dreams come true? Right, There's a lot of
Speaker 1: work asking whether or not the pentagone can really integrate
Speaker 1: AI in the way they hoped to, But I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: what if you got everything you wanted. The game was
Speaker 1: held in a conference room at rand's Washington, d C. Office.
Speaker 1: Someone playing China, another person playing Japan, the US North Korea.
Speaker 1: A senior information scientist from rand's California office, a Shandi Shaba,
Speaker 1: flew in to represent the commercial AI sector. Uniwong was
Speaker 1: part of what's called White team, part referee, part instigator.
Speaker 1: The road to war was deceptively simple. Lots of muscle
Speaker 1: flexing between the US and China, leading to Japan and
Speaker 1: the United States launching a cyber attack on a Chinese
Speaker 1: aircraft carrier. The Chinese responded with a fly by near
Speaker 1: US vessels, and with that the game was often running.
Speaker 1: The U and I states in Japan then went off
Speaker 1: and then consulted with each other and came back announced
Speaker 1: they're holding a large joint military exercise around the Sankaku Islands.
Speaker 1: The US and Japan put their missile defense on full auto,
Speaker 1: meaning they programmed the artificial intelligence systems running the missiles
Speaker 1: to respond automatically and immediately to any hostile act. They
Speaker 1: did that to send a message to China, don't do
Speaker 1: anything rash. But then out of the blue, North Korea
Speaker 1: decided to join in by firing off a missile on
Speaker 1: its own, aimed at a major Japanese city. Luckily the
Speaker 1: missile was intercepted before it could do any damage. What
Speaker 1: are they doing. They're signaling that they're standing with China. Yes,
Speaker 1: so sometimes I say China has one ALLI and it's
Speaker 1: the worst ally in the world, and it's North Korea.
Speaker 1: So that is a very complicated relationship. But in the game,
Speaker 1: they did not pressure them This was just North Korea
Speaker 1: decided they would try to be helpful and this was
Speaker 1: the result. But remember, in this war game scenario, the
Speaker 1: US and Japan had their defense systems on full auto
Speaker 1: program to respond automatically and immediately to any provocation. Did
Speaker 1: the US in China in the game. It just never
Speaker 1: occurred to them that if North Korea weighed in and
Speaker 1: they were on full auto, we might end up dragging
Speaker 1: North Korea into the conflict. Correct, it was the focus
Speaker 1: was on signaling to China and nobody thought about potential
Speaker 1: in North Korean behavior. So North Korea does this thing,
Speaker 1: the AI fires back at North Korea. Yes. China then
Speaker 1: responded with a limited blockade of Japan. So they announced
Speaker 1: the blockade, and the AI sent a single destroyer to
Speaker 1: a single Japanese port to enforce this blockade. This is
Speaker 1: where the players for South Korea in Japan said, well
Speaker 1: that was a failure. But the United States team was
Speaker 1: really extremely confused and said, wait, like we I don't
Speaker 1: understand what's going on here. I don't understand what their
Speaker 1: AI is doing. God knows what the North Koreans will
Speaker 1: do next. The US is running around trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what the Chinese artificial intelligence systems are up to
Speaker 1: Japan is under a partial blockade. Oh and there's a
Speaker 1: cargo ship at the bottom of the sea. The Chinese
Speaker 1: blew you up right. The Chinese blow me yet, because
Speaker 1: they were trying to enforce a blockade on Japan. I
Speaker 1: believe that's RAND specialist Ashandi Shaba who flew into play
Speaker 1: the role of a commercial AI system running container shipping.
Speaker 1: So you just kept sailing into port, you didn't, yeah,
Speaker 1: stop and turn away? No, no, no no. I was trying
Speaker 1: to keep my market open, like, serve everybody as much
Speaker 1: as possible. That was the idea there, and I figured
Speaker 1: by being compliant up I could keep I could keep
Speaker 1: bullet side happy. Every one of these war games, people
Speaker 1: talk to me about it's always a mess. The artists
Speaker 1: to draw strategic inside from the mess, and some people
Speaker 1: are doing better than others. It's always a mess. Everything
Speaker 1: is a At the end, the RAND team put out
Speaker 1: a report on the game with the following lesson. In conclusion,
Speaker 1: current planning efforts have not kept pace with how to
Speaker 1: handle the potentially destabilizing or escalatory issues associated with these
Speaker 1: new technologies end quote. The war game said, don't fool yourself.
Speaker 1: There's going to be chaos, but with luck we can
Speaker 1: learn from the chaos. When you made your remark about
Speaker 1: how everything's a mess and yet we continue on, that's
Speaker 1: like the most Nigerian thing you could possibly I grew
Speaker 1: up in the heart of chaos. Legos is the most
Speaker 1: chaotic place on Earth. I was going to say, you
Speaker 1: were well prepared for this. I have Legos to thank
Speaker 1: for lots of things that I've done in my life.
Speaker 1: Basically one moment from Unawong's war game, several days in
Speaker 1: the United States and Japan began hunting the Sea of
Speaker 1: Japan for Chinese submarines to figure out which ports the
Speaker 1: Chinese were planning to blockade next. Emotions were running high.
Speaker 1: The player for China said he couldn't tell whether the
Speaker 1: US and Japanese anti submarine warfare assets we're looking for
Speaker 1: his subvereigns to just track them or destroy them, so
Speaker 1: he ordered a submarine to destroy an autonomous anti submarine
Speaker 1: warfare plane, and then player for Japan felt that they
Speaker 1: had shown restraints so far, but they could no longer
Speaker 1: show restraint if the player for China was going to
Speaker 1: take kinetic action, So the United States in Japan at
Speaker 1: this point respond and they sink a manned Chinese submarine.
Speaker 1: So these are the first human casualties of the game.
Speaker 1: And at this point it escalates significantly. So the players
Speaker 1: Japan and the United States go off to a separate room,
Speaker 1: and then they're trying to figure out a way of
Speaker 1: offering the Chinese off ramps right like they seriously wanted
Speaker 1: to de escalate at this point. The player for China
Speaker 1: at this point says, no, they got one of mine.
Speaker 1: I'm going to get one of theirs and launch his
Speaker 1: missiles at the combined US and Japanese fleet and we
Speaker 1: end the game there. But we believe that there would
Speaker 1: have been human casualties aboard the US and Japanese fleet. Wait,
Speaker 1: why do you guys call the game just at the
Speaker 1: moment when China is launching missiles at the US and
Speaker 1: Japanese fleet. Isn't that It's like stopping the movie with
Speaker 1: ten minutes left. Don't you want to know what happens
Speaker 1: after that point? Yeah, you know, some of it was
Speaker 1: we ran out of time. We only had the conference
Speaker 1: room for a week, right, and we only had people
Speaker 1: in town for a week, So that is sometimes the
Speaker 1: unfortunate nature of these things. It was only a game,
Speaker 1: after all, not real life. People had to leave Narnia
Speaker 1: and go home, and the game of Donnet's work hadn't
Speaker 1: it raised a possibility that might not have occurred to
Speaker 1: anyone otherwise, a warning that might come in handy one day,
Speaker 1: or who knows, maybe already has una. You would have
Speaker 1: loved the Leafreaking Party. Revisionist History is produced by Meila
Speaker 1: La Belle, Lee m. Gistu, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise
Speaker 1: Linton and on a Name. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Guera, mastering by Flawn Williams and
Speaker 1: engineering by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking by Amy Gaines, and
Speaker 1: special thanks to the Pushkin Crew had a Fame Carl Migliori,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig, Daniello, Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicolemrano, Jason
Speaker 1: Gambrel and of course Jacob Wesburg. I'm Malcolm Glado. Don't
Speaker 1: forget my latest book, The Bomber Mafia, which is an
Speaker 1: expansion of several episodes from the last season of Revisionist History.
Speaker 1: You can find it wherever books are sold, but by
Speaker 1: the audiobook at bomber Mafia dot com and you'll get
Speaker 1: a bonus listeners guide, and you can listen in the
Speaker 1: podcast app you're using now