Wargames Need Policy Records to Become Usable Evidence

Hoover’s Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative is built around a claim larger than preservation: a wargame’s value is not exhausted by its scenario, rules, or outcome. Jacquelyn Schneider argues that the surrounding record — why the game was commissioned, who discussed it, what memos circulated, and how its lessons entered later decisions — is what turns a game into usable evidence.

The initiative has two linked functions. The first is to run its own games. Schneider describes these as exercises built around defined research questions and designed through an academic process. Hoover’s International Crisis Wargame Series is described in the source as an “experimentally-designed strategic crisis wargame” examining the relationship among new technologies, domestic politics, conventional military capabilities, and nuclear threats. It was designed specifically to study cyber operations and nuclear stability, while also helping researchers think more broadly about emerging technologies, crisis decision-making, and the limits of Cold War-era deterrence and escalation frameworks.

The second function is the one Schneider says makes Hoover distinctive: building an archive. The Wargaming Archive is presented as a publicly accessible digital repository housed within the Hoover Library and Archives, containing scholar-designed games, unclassified and declassified government games, and think tank or industry games. The archive is searchable across substantive and methodological terms, and is meant to support both large-N analysis and close case studies.

Schneider’s organizing distinction is between the “inner game” and the “outer game.” The inner game is the exercise participants played. The outer game is why the exercise was played, how it was interpreted, and what effect it had afterward.

That distinction explains the kind of material Hoover is collecting. The archive is not only preserving game reports. Schneider emphasizes memos, conversations, side evidence, and declassified documents that show how policymakers used the exercises. The source shows examples including a 1962 Joint Chiefs of Staff document labeled “SIGMA I-62 FINAL REPORT,” handwritten White House notes attached to a war-gaming report, and a “SECRET NOFORN” National Defense University document on “PROUD PROPHET - 83.”

The Berlin Crisis Game is the example Schneider uses to make the archive’s value concrete. The Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. An August 22, 1961 document stamped “SECRET” described a proposed “game-type analysis of the Berlin situation,” sponsored by International Security Affairs and prepared by the RAND Corporation, with participation from high-level officials from the White House, State, Defense, and CIA.

The game was played less than a month after the Wall went up, at Camp David. Schneider places it in the middle of an active confrontation with the Soviet Union over Berlin, at a moment when the United States was considering whether it was willing to use nuclear weapons and trying to understand whether the Soviets were willing to use them. “It feels like at that moment,” she says, “the stakes cannot be higher.”

The exercise began from a domestic episode and escalated into an international nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union. A document titled “Berlin Decision Exercise” said the scenario was designed to carry events from the present to a future point, intended to be plausible though “not necessarily more plausible than a dozen alternative scenarios,” and to provide a “climactic starting point.” A separate “BRIEF SCENARIO” placed the simulated crisis on February 11, 1962, in Berlin, after the sealing off of East Berlin and a tense but calm period through late summer and fall.

The game, Schneider says, was the brainchild of Thomas Schelling, then a researcher at the RAND Corporation. Participants included Henry Kissinger, described by Schneider as a young, up-and-coming Harvard professor at the time.

The result was ambiguous in precisely the way crisis simulations can be useful. Schneider summarizes the outcome as one in which both sides believed they had won. The game ended close to the status quo: neither state escalated to nuclear war, but there had been some level of conventional violence between the two. That is not presented as a simple success or failure. Its importance lies in what it revealed about crisis perception and self-assessment.

One document shown on screen makes that point explicit. A September 22, 1961 memorandum for the president, stamped “TOP SECRET,” recorded that a Berlin political-military game had been played at Camp David over the weekend of September 8–11. A highlighted passage drew out “the real difficulty that we have in seeing our position as it looks to the other side in the real world.”

That is the outer game in documentary form. The value is not merely that a simulated Berlin crisis produced an outcome. It is that the game generated a record of how officials understood escalation, misperception, and adversary interpretation under nuclear pressure.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962, Schneider says participants talked about how influential their Camp David experience had been. In her account, the lessons from the Berlin Crisis Game were taken “straight to the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

The clearest surviving theme in the materials shown is the difficulty of seeing one’s own position as the adversary sees it. That is the interpretive bridge Schneider offers between the game and later crisis decision-making. A researcher looking only at the game’s result could say that a scenario ended without nuclear war and with some conventional violence. A researcher with the surrounding memos and participant reflections can ask a more consequential question: what did officials think they had learned, and how did they later connect that lesson to an actual crisis?

The Berlin example therefore functions as both a historical case and a methodological argument. Wargames can matter beyond the room in which they are played, but only if the materials survive that show how people interpreted them, remembered them, and carried their lessons into policy settings.

The initiative’s access claim is practical. Schneider says Hoover has prioritized making these documents available so that students, researchers, and others interested in history can work with them directly. Materials brought into the Hoover Institution Library and Archives for the initiative are digitized. Users can go to wargaming.hoover.org, search by war game, subject, or time period, and interact with the records.

The source shows examples of the kinds of materials available, including “DESERT CROSSING Pre-Wargame Intelligence Conference,” dated April 28–30, 1999 at MacDill Air Force Base, and Hoover’s “Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative Collection,” which identifies resources including “Games to Play & Replicate,” “Historical Games & Materials,” and “On Wargaming.”

The educational ambition is explicit. Schneider wants history to be easier to use, and wants a new generation of students, including undergraduates, working with primary source documents to improve historical understanding. In that framing, the archive is not only a specialist repository for defense scholars. It is also infrastructure for teaching students to work from records rather than summaries.

The practical value of Hoover’s effort rests on the combination: academically designed contemporary games, historical preservation, contextual documentation, and public digital access. Schneider’s account treats wargaming as more than scenario play. Its value depends on whether the evidence survives in a form that can be evaluated, replicated, tested, taught, and connected to the decisions it helped shape.