From August 16th-18th, Joshua Greenberg (BTPI Fellow and PhD Student in Information Science) attended a wargaming conference hosted by the Carnegie-Maxwell Policy Planning Lab at Syracuse University’s Minnowbrook Lodge in the Adirondacks. The theme for the conference, “Stress Over the Straits: Sino-American Relations in an Era of Great Power Competition,” reflected a growing understanding that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the current pacing threat for United States defense planners, and principally sought to understand the political, diplomatic, economic, and military objectives of the PLA and Chinese Communist Party.

On the first day, attendees from the federal government and academia participated in a red-team exercise that explored the strategic thinking of the PLA across three scenarios: (1) Taiwan defending itself alone, (2) Taiwan defending itself with US support, and (3) full-scale regional war implicating Taiwan and a coalition of US and East Asian/South Pacific allies. The second day began with a lecture from Andrew Reddie, Associate Research Professor of Public Policy at the University of California – Berkeley, about the history and experimental validity of wargaming. Later, Prof. Reddie guided attendees through several competitive rounds of Signal, a stochastic three-sided wargame designed to test decision-making under the nuclear umbrella.