Stress Over the Straits: wargaming Sino-American relations in an era of great power competition

From August 16th to 18th, Joshua Greenberg, a fellow of the institute and a 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, Stress Over the Straits: Sino-American Relations in an Era of Great Power Competition, reflected a growing recognition that the People's Liberation Army is the current pacing threat for United States defence planners. The conference set out to understand the political, diplomatic, economic, and military objectives of the PLA and the Chinese Communist Party.

On the first day, attendees from the federal government and academia took part in a red-team exercise exploring PLA strategic thinking across three scenarios, Taiwan defending itself alone, Taiwan defending itself with United States support, and a full-scale regional war drawing in a coalition of American and East Asian and South Pacific allies.

The second day opened with a lecture from Andrew Reddie, Associate Research Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, on the history and experimental validity of wargaming. Professor Reddie then guided attendees through several competitive rounds of Signal, a stochastic three-sided wargame designed to test decision-making under the nuclear umbrella.