The U.S. military has historically used wargames — simulated battle scenarios — to prepare and practice for potential threats and geopolitical conflict. In the 1950s and ’60s, many of those exercises focused on existential threats, like nuclear war. These days, climate change is the focus of some of the Pentagon’s wargames.
In 2021, the Department of Defense held its first tabletop game on climate and security, called Elliptic Thunder. Individual branches like the Coast Guard and the Navy have held their own climate change-focused games, and the Pentagon has put aside millions of dollars specifically for climate wargaming.
What can we learn from playing out the fallout from climate change? In this episode, we discuss how climate began to factor into humanitarian crisis war games as far back as the 1990s, then we head to the near future to play our own mini-climate wargame. Host Kai Ryssdal steps into the Oval Office to play out a climate crisis set in 2044, with help from two retired high-level military officials and a professional game designer.
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Kai Ryssdal: We learned back in the very first episode of this season that the Pentagon’s been researching climate change since the 1950s, the Navy technically. Shouldn’t be a surprise, right? It’s the military’s job to anticipate bad things happening. Foreign adversaries, possible attacks, unexpected threats. And part of that preparation means simulating those scenarios so we can figure out how to react.
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Would you just to set the table a little bit, I think when the layperson hears wargames, they imagine some computerized, super sophisticated, very high-tech simulation of actual warfighting.
Jacquelyn Schneider: You know, we’re doing this oral history project as part of our initiative at Hoover —
Kai Ryssdal: Jacquelyn Schneider is the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford.
Jacquelyn Schneider: I started asking everyone that we interview, what do you think a wargame is? And I think one of the most remarkable things we found is that no one has the same idea of what a wargame really is. What we generally think of in the popular world is this something that’s kind of a newer version of the Matthew Broderick wargames.
WarGames movie clip: Shall we play a game?
Kai Ryssdal: Matthew Broderick, 1983, the movie WarGames, playing a teenager who almost starts World War III by hacking into a Pentagon computer from his bed.
WarGames movie clip: How about global thermonuclear war?
Jacquelyn Schneider: Where we’re playing computer games, they’re very closely representing combat realities, and that there’s kind of like synthetic experience, but the history of wargames is actually more about kind of human behaviors and human players. So if you look back to, you know, the 1950s and the ’60s and the nuclear wargames that played a large role in developing kind of the deterrent strategies of the American nuclear arsenal. These were individuals sitting around tables with maps. The bottom line is it comes across a wide spectrum of different types and possibilities of games, from board games all the way up to computer games.
Kai Ryssdal: Stanford’s got a ton of games in its archives, at least the ones that have been declassified. They often have these kind of CIA style code names, like Proud Profit, High Heels and Able Archer. Games that simulate worst case scenarios all the way up to nuclear war. But in the past couple of decades, the military has started to integrate a new kind of adversary.
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When do we start to see climate becoming a factor in wargames, and when do they become sort of the focus of some wargames?
Jacquelyn Schneider: Climate is very interesting, because there have been climate games. Each of the Armed Services is thinking about integrating climate change into some of these games. I would say it’s still not like the number one priority. And I think where there still needs to be an evolution is thinking more concretely, or using games to better understand how climate change might create the sort of resource scarcity or demographic changes that actually incite conflicts instead of just thinking about how we respond to specific crisis incidents.
Kai Ryssdal: We started this season, which is looking at how the institution that shaped me, the American military, is going to shape our climate future. We started with this idea.
Sherri Goodman: Climate change amplifies all the other instabilities we face from great power competition to terrorism, the fight with Russia, the potential fight with China, the difficulties we’re having in the Middle East now.
Kai Ryssdal: We’ve gone to the far north and to the far Pacific in search of what that climate change threat multiplier looks like on the ground and what the Pentagon’s doing about it, but what we’ve been hearing in our reporting is that when the threat is as slippery as climate change is, when it comes to you in unexpected ways, it’s not so easy to draft a battle plan.
I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome to How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace. For this episode, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to play our own climate change wargame to get a sense of just how much the American military’s role in the short and medium term future is going to be shaped by climate change. Spoiler alert, I get the best job.
Ed McGrady: Yeah, you’re going to be playing the president. So you get to you get to take the political responsibility for everything.
Kai Ryssdal: Oh, good.
This is episode five, Wargames.
Take me back to the beginning of your archives. How long have we been doing this stuff is the question, I suppose.
Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so the first thing that we would consider kind of strategic games —
Kai Ryssdal: Jacquelyn Schneider again, the wargames expert at Stanford.
Jacquelyn Schneider: We have records of that going back into the Roman and the Egyptian time frame, and definitely in ancient China. But these games are more kind of abstract strategic games. They’re logic games, kind of like the game go, you know, the and the little kind of white and black discs. And they’re games that were designed in order to educate and refine the thinking of senior elites.
Kai Ryssdal: The Prussians are the ones that ended up really modernizing wargames. Kriegsspiel, they called it back in the 1800s.
So take me now to the United States. When, how, under what conditions do do American officials start thinking that that we need to be doing a little bit of this?
Jacquelyn Schneider: So this starts in the Navy, actually quite young, and we see that the Navy really dominates war games leading up into the period in between World War I and World War II, and this is kind of the golden age of navy wargames, because you have a 30 year time period where they’re running almost 500 games. They trained three to four decades of naval officers. So there’s this great letter that Chester Nimitz writes after World War II, where he writes the president of Naval War College, and he says, he said, they prepared us for that campaign in the Pacific because it it didn’t reveal what the future was, but it showed us the many different potential outcomes, and so that we were prepared for anything the Japanese were going to do, except the kamikazes. He said, the wargames did not think about the potential for kamikazes.
Kai Ryssdal: The thing about wargaming is that it’s not just about practicing war. It’s also about testing, testing human decision making and how real people respond when the worst happens.
Jacquelyn Schneider: So if you look at wargames in the early advent of nuclear weapons, so like the 1950s games, for example, you actually quite often see nuclear weapons used within the games, and actually pretty early within the crisis.
Kai Ryssdal: Wow, that’s wild. I’m sorry, that’s just wild, right?
Jacquelyn Schneider: Right? But you have to, you have to imagine, like, 1950s, the nuclear bomb is still just an evolution from, you know, firebombing Japan, right? So this idea that nuclear weapons are both quantitatively and qualitatively very different weapon system is not actually part of our strategic decision making psyche, and it’s definitely not part of our popular psyche. And you see in wargames, actually, that evolution of what we call the nuclear taboo, instead, by playing the war and seeing the impact of these systems, we actually start worrying about the use of them.
Kai Ryssdal: That line’s important. Playing the war. The idea that launching a nuke in a simulated war and seeing the consequences might change what one of those game players does in real life. It wasn’t until after the Cold War that the military’s priorities started to change, and that’s when climate makes an appearance.
Jacquelyn Schneider: First, we do start seeing organizations concerned about climate. I wouldn’t say climate change in general, but this idea of humanitarian crises in the early ’90s, and so the U.S. Navy and other organizations start running games that are looking specifically at some sort of climate crisis scenario. They’re, you know, a hurricane, an earthquake. And the idea is that they’re trying to understand how you use naval resources in order, U.S. Naval resources, in order to provide humanitarian operations. The ’90s were a time period where our budget was decreasing. We lost our big peer adversary in the Soviet Union, which is a good thing, like we won the Cold War. But then what are we supposed to be doing with this big U.S. Navy? And so there was a bit of an identity question about, okay, well, maybe what the U.S. Navy is doing is it’s going to places like Haiti or places that are affected by these large scale climate crises.
Kai Ryssdal: After September 11th, the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were, of course, priorities, but in the past couple of years —
Jacquelyn Schneider: We are seeing a resurgence of climate games. On one hand, you have think tanks, right? So there’s a 2008 game that the Center for New American Security ran, but I would say that’s actually a very early example of think tanks that were thinking about climate change. But then most recently, you have the integration of climate issues, whether it’s food security or access to mineral resources, or the way in which climate change might affect some of the U.S.’s more vulnerable ports or vulnerable bases. You see these being integrated in a more systematic way within, for example, the U.S. Navy and to some extent, the U.S. Air Force.
Kai Ryssdal: There was a big game in 2021, the DOD’s first climate and security tabletop game. It was called Elliptic Thunder. The Coast Guard and the Navy have been hosting their own games, and the Pentagon is putting millions of dollars aside specifically for climate wargaming.
Not to get all Rumsfeldian on you here, but there’s —
Jacquelyn Schneider: Known unknowns, unknown knowns.
Kai Ryssdal: That’s exactly what I was going to say. There’s a whole lot of unknown unknowns. When you start thinking about climate and how it affects our national security posture, possible humanitarian crises, right? I mean, it’s maybe the ultimate unknown.
Jacquelyn Schneider: And this is where games are at their best, because games are not about providing us like a certainty or some sort of probabilistic understanding of what the future might be, but instead giving us a way to categorize uncertainty. There is something so valuable about using war games in this immersive experience to teach and educate and not convince people of dangers, but help them better understand the dangers of the uncertain world that exists.
Kai Ryssdal: We’re going to wrangle with this uncertain world in a war game of our own, and we’re going to be joined by some people who actually know what they’re doing, which may or may not keep me out of hot water.
We’re just watching things, right, Ed, is that where we are?
Ed McGrady: Yeah, you’ve left your partners and allies more or less on their own to try to sort this out.
Kai Ryssdal: That’s after the break.
BREAK
Kai Ryssdal: Here’s how this is going to work. First, I guess we should tell you. We ran this game for two hours back in July. You’re going to hear maybe 15 minutes of it. We’re going to be led by a real-life game designer.
So do me a favor and tell me exactly who you are and what you do for a living.
Ed McGrady: I’m Ed McGrady. I have a PhD in chemical engineering. I have worked in the defense analysis industry for about 30 years, and for a large part of that, I design professional games.
Kai Ryssdal: Ed works with a think tank, the Center for a New American Security, and he actually teaches a whole course on how to wargame climate change. He designed this game specifically for us, a scenario based on established climate science. In other words, what we’re going to see could easily come to pass. It’s set in 2044, the near-term climate future, as we wrestle with some of the known unknowns and discover just how much of a threat multiplier climate change can be. Wargames can be really complicated, and they can take days or involve dozens or even hundreds of people. We though are going to keep it simple.
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What are the basic rules? What’s the what’s the run of play here?
Ed McGrady: Basically, they’re going to tell me what they want to do, and I’m going to tell them what effects that has, and I’m going to tell them what the situation is. They’re going to brief you, and you’re going to ask them questions.
Kai Ryssdal: We’ve got two players helping us out.
Denny McGinn: I’m Admiral Denny McGinn, retired U.S. Navy. Been working in the intersection of energy, environment and national security for 30 years.
Kai Ryssdal: Admiral McGinn is going to be the Secretary of Defense.
Wes Clark: I’m retired General Wes Clark. I’ve worked energy. I’ve worked the environment, climate change, concerned about all of this, and of course, national security.
Kai Ryssdal: General Clark is going to be the commander of Southern Command, a job he had in real life in the mid 1990s. Between them, they’ve got nearly 70 years in uniform, decades at the very highest levels of policy. And we should tell you here, just so you know, that they have both signed a letter in support of Kamala Harris.
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I will tell you Admiral McGinn and General Clark, you two have an advantage over me in that you you guys have done this in some form or another, I’m sure in the last 40 years. I have not. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna see how this goes is the short answer to this one.
And we’re gonna have a little help.
Sophia: Hi, I’m Sophia. I’m a producer for How We Survive, and you’ll be hearing my voice throughout this episode. I’m gonna help set up the scene.
Kai Ryssdal: All right, Sophia, where do we start?
Sophia: In the future. It’s 2044, and our focus is northern South America. Climate change has been hitting the countries of Venezuela and Colombia pretty hard. In the last 20 years, the world has warmed up another two degrees Celsius, which is way above the 1.5 degree warming target set by the Paris Agreement. There’s severe drought, then flooding. It’s ruining the ability for people to grow food. Roads and cities are breaking down. Blackouts are becoming more and more frequent. It’s hot, like really hot, and the government in Venezuela can’t really help because it’s falling apart politically. So millions of migrants are trying to leave. They’re bottlenecked on the Colombian coast without food, shelter, water. In a nutshell, it’s now become a mass migration and humanitarian crisis. The UN is already involved. So the question of this round is, will the U.S. get involved, too?
Kai Ryssdal: Good question. Ed did let game player me, the president now, do a little preparation to set up game player me, president in 2044 — 22nd amendment be damned — for success.
Ed Mcgrady: What change do you want to make, if any, in the next 20 years before we get into this crisis?
Kai Ryssdal: Oh, now see this is much harder than it in real life, than it actually is in my pre gaming of this game. So look, it goes like this. It is a, huh. This is really interesting actually. It turns out I talk a good game, but when the decision comes to me. So here’s where I come down, we’re gonna increase substantially our investment in Southern Command so that we can ameliorate as best as possible these coming threats.
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To vastly oversimplify here, presidenting is hard. In the end, as I said, I leaned hard into Southern Command, more joint exercises, surveillance drones, water and tents. Of course, there is a tradeoff. Whatever I sent to SOUTHCOM meant siphoning resources from someplace else, say Pacific Command, which does have its hands full with China.
Ed McGrady: What’s going to happen is that your partners and allies are much more capable of assisting. So you’ve got partners and allies down there that you built up capacity with. You also have a lot of logistics capacity for yourselves. At the same time, your relative less emphasis on the Pacific has allowed China to get a little bit more aggressive.
Kai Ryssdal: That’s not what I expected, but it turns out China has sent hospital ships to the Caribbean and an aircraft carrier. It’s an opportunity for them, right, to extend their influence.
Ed McGrady: In Venezuela, it’s just a complete collapse. Part of the Venezuelan government has invited you in. So my question for the for the generals, both SOUTHCOM and Defense, is what are you going to do? So are you going to tell the president he needs to risk some of his capital, political capital, to stand up and lead on this? Or should the president try to minimize U.S. forces involvement and rely on UN and partner nations predominantly? What’s your plan? What are you going to do? How much risk do you want to take?
Kai Ryssdal: Admiral McGinn, Secretary of Defense goes first.
Denny McGinn: You know the old expression, Mr. President, lead, follow, or get out of the way, applies here.
Kai Ryssdal: That’s retired Navy three-star Denny McGinn as the Secretary of Defense.
Denny McGinn: We don’t want to take the absolute lead of this humanitarian assistance disaster relief operation. We do, however, want to assist the United Nations and other organizations, international organizations, in getting the capability that they need to help these people. But we do not want to go in there, Mr. President, as the United States claiming leadership and by by extension, ownership of this crisis. We want to assist, but we don’t want to lead it.
Ed McGrady: Now your national security, Mr. President, your national security advisor and your political advisor will advise you that you’ve got 2 million potential refugees potentially moving to the southern U.S. border.
Kai Ryssdal: Yeah.
Ed McGrady: So that’s a that’s another trade off that you have to take into consideration.
Kai Ryssdal: And it is literally, Mr. Secretary, on our doorstep, right? So if we’re not going to lead, who is going to lead? Southern Command, what do you say about this? You got a Chinese battle group coming at you.
Wes Clark: First of all, you know, we need legal authority before we do anything.
Kai Ryssdal: Wes Clark, retired Army four star as the commander of Southern Command.
Wes Clark: So as the Secretary of Defense said, let’s get this thing up to the UN and the Organization of American States and CARICOM, and get everybody who’s got a stake in this, get them involved in it. We’ll be behind it. We’ll coordinate the logistics support. It’s a political call on how much you want to actually do on this at this point. But one thing is for sure, the more you put in, the greater ownership you have of it.
Ed McGrady: So I assume what you want to do Kai as the president, is go with a allied and partner forward strategy, but you’re mainly relying on your OAS and Caribbean partner nations, along with Brazil and Argentina perhaps to to help you out.
Kai Ryssdal: I am indeed doing that. I’m also increasingly worried about just, you know, because I’m a politician, I’m increasingly worried about the public perception of what’s going on. So I want to maintain some political awareness of this challenge as as you know, events move forward.
Political awareness, indeed. This round ends with President Ryssdal keeping the United States out of this as much as possible, which, of course, has its own consequences.
Sophia: So here’s where we are after the president’s decision. The U.S. has decided to support its allies. Allow them to handle the humanitarian crisis. But the situation keeps getting worse. On top of the migrant crisis, there are now armed groups rising up in the chaos, soldiers who deserted from the Venezuelan army, and narco traffickers who steal supplies and kidnap people. There’s now a counterinsurgency crisis to deal with on top of the humanitarian crisis. This round, the UN and its allies are asking for more help. Will the U.S. send in military forces?
Kai Ryssdal: We’ve seen this season in our reporting from Alaska and Kwajalein that climate change is a threat multiplier in real life. Some of what’s happening in this game might not seem to be related to climate change, except it is. One domino hitting another domino then hitting another, all because the planet is getting hotter and because of the decisions that higher ups like me made in response.
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So let me recap where I think we stand now, right? So we’ve got this gathering, gathering challenge, 2 million refugees on the move. We’ve decided logistical support to the degree that we can. We’ve decided country to country relations at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level. We’ve decided intelligence gathering and as much support as we can offer, special forces possibly, if possible, otherwise, we’re just watching things right, Ed? Is that where we are?
Ed McGrady: Yeah, you’ve left your partners and allies, more or less on their own to try to sort this out with the with the insurgents.
Kai Ryssdal: So, so here —
Ed McGrady: I think —
Kai Ryssdal: Sorry, let me, let me —
Wes Clark: If I could suggest —
Denny McGinn: Mr. President —
Kai Ryssdal: Hang on. Let me, let me. Rank has its privileges here. I’m gonna go first. An insurgency in Colombia is not, or Venezuela, is not immediately my problem, and we’re doing what we can to ameliorate the challenge it might pose. So for now, I have indeed left our allies on their own with support, substantial support from our assets, right?
McGinn and Clark, the Secretary of Defense and the head of Southern Command, the three of us go back and forth debating whether we’re going to send more support and how.
Denny McGinn: I have directed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Navy and Marine Corps to delay the deployment of a Marine Amphibious Readiness Group, which was headed over to that large exercise that we briefed you on last week.
Kai Ryssdal: We wound up sending those Marines down to the Caribbean instead, just to stand by. We set up a logistics center in Miami to source generators and water purifiers, and we talked about sending some troops.
Wes Clark: And if I could ask, Mr. Secretary, if we could, there are a couple of states worth of National Guardsmen who’ve done specific training with Panama and Columbia in our exercises. If we could, under some mobilization scenario, bring some of those forces back in to help us with logistics and linguistics in the area and with their personal relationships, this would also be useful.
Kai Ryssdal: Man, this gets complicated in a hurry.
Ed McGrady: So while you’ve maintained a U.S. distance from the situation, which is preferable to having U.S. forces engaged in an insurgency, at the same time, you’re going to get criticism for not doing anything and not stabilizing the situation.
Kai Ryssdal: Right. So look, I will explain the specifics of this particular situation, why it’s of grave concern to the United States, and then I will lay out our plan, as recommended to me by the Secretary of Defense and the commander of SOUTHCOM, which is, as we’ve talked about before in this game, logistical and intelligence support as far as we can. I think the suggestion by the Secretary of Defense to perhaps deploy a an amphibious carrier there with some sort of over the shore capability will be something that I will talk to the American people about. I do not anticipate any large numbers of American forces on the ground. I think a security posture has to be maintained by, even though they cannot do it right now, it has to be, for the moment, maintained by the host nations. It is not in our interest to put American troops at risk in this situation where we fundamentally don’t have control, right? Climate change is in charge. We don’t have control. And our, our, the political risk of of putting ourselves in there, is simply too high. He says, cravenly.
Ed McGrady: And this is, and this is, this is something I see in a lot of climate games, in the political, geopolitical kind of situation. Is Western countries, the U.S., Europe, other places eventually get tired of supporting these mass migration situations, and they eventually get tired of supporting countries that are under a lot of stress, and they just let it go, and they manage to secure their borders. So then, then you’ve solved your problem. But the other problems for those people that are caught in the extreme temperatures and under the climate stress, it’s only going to get worse for them.
Kai Ryssdal: At this point, I figure this game’s gone as far as it can, and the result isn’t good. The United Nations is overwhelmed. Millions of migrants are still stuck in a life-threatening situation, and my presidential reelection campaign is in some trouble.
I will tell you that my experience in the last, how long we been doing this, hour and a half ish, was fairly sobering. And look, I’m a considered guy who reads the news and is aware of this stuff, but there’s a lot going on that I think a lot of people haven’t really thought of.
So I turned the microphone on Denny McGinn and Wes Clark. They’ve actually dealt with these situations in the real world. That’s why we asked them to play along with us. And what I want to know is, if this scenario, or something like it, did come to pass, what would happen?
I think, Admiral McGinn, I’m going to start first with you. Do you think we’re ready?
Denny McGinn: We’re not as ready as we need to be. We do have humanitarian assistance disaster relief capability, but we don’t have sufficient capacity. We need to really, really make some tough decisions about where our capabilities for infrastructure, military infrastructure, as well as private sector infrastructure are, and may make some tough decisions about how we can make them much more resilient in the future, but focusing on the most important aspect of our national security is protecting our troops. We would no more send our American troops into a into a shooting war without body armor than we should send our U.S. troops into a climate change scenario like this, without the proper medical capability and vaccinations.
Kai Ryssdal: General Clark?
Wes Clark: Well, you know, I think I start with this with this point on climate change. We’re not, we’ve under resourced the armed forces. We’ve had a peace dividend in place for 30 years now, and the administration’s budget goes down to 2.9% or less of the GDP for the armed forces in the out years. The armed forces do so much more for the country than simply fight the nation’s wars once they start. So we’re under resourced across the board in the armed forces.
Kai Ryssdal: Ed, last word goes to the Game Master.
Ed McGrady: Well, what I think, I think this game headed for, and sort of illustrated is that climate change actually changes us. It’s not something that we think a lot about. But at the same time all this was happening in Venezuela and Colombia, we were under stress. People were displacing within the U.S. Changes were occurring in the U.S., because of climate related effects. That will make us hot, tired and grumpy, and that may not make us as good a neighbor as we would want to be.
Kai Ryssdal: I am, I’m deeply grateful for all the time you three have spent with us. I really appreciate it. It’s it’s certainly been eye opening, and I will, I will let you three get back to your afternoons. And again, thank you so much for your time.
Wes Clark: Thanks very much for inviting us.
Denny McGinn: Thanks Kai.
Kai Ryssdal: It was fun being president and all. But what this game has really made clear to me is that once a crisis starts, once things really start going downhill, it’s going to be really hard to get ahead of the problem, to be able to act instead of react. The whole point of this episode was to show how quickly a planet that’s getting hotter is going to make catching up harder, because climate change creates and it changes crises in ways we simply don’t expect. Wargames are all well and good, but at some point, real decisions have to be made, and one of those decisions could be changing the role of the military itself.
Neta Crawford: The United States is secure. It’s really about right sizing the force to the world that we’re in.
Kai Ryssdal: That’s coming up next time. Thanks for listening, and as always, if you like what you hear, please do rate and review. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Sophia Paliza-Carre produced this episode. The How We Survive team includes Hayley Hershman and Katie Reuther. Caitlin Esch is the Supervising Senior Producer. Nancy Farghalli is our editor. Sound design and original scoring by Chris Julin. Mixing by Brian Allison. Bridget Bodnar is the Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is the Vice President and General Manager of Marketplace. Special thanks to those who helped us with our wargame scenario. That includes Borja Gonzalez Reguero, Andrea O’Neill, Kai Parker, and Tom Ellison. Any mistakes of course are ours. Our theme music is by Wonderly.
