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GOVT299: Directed Study on National Security Crisis Simulation
In this course, government and international relations faculty Brian Cook and Kristen Williams provide students with a hands-on way to understand the process of national security decision making. |
Interview with students Omar Lamrani '09 and Ben Raynak '09
Omar Lamrani and Ben Raynak, both government and international relations majors, took part in the national security simulation, Lamrani acting as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Raynak as Secretary of State. Both had previous experience participating together in Model UN. In a recent conversation, summarized below, they talked about the simulation and their roles.
What did Professors Cook and Williams tell the class at the first meeting?
Omar: Professor Williams told us that what we did with the course was very much up to us. They would give us briefings and intelligence, but all the decisions were supposed to be made by us.
Ben: Diplomatically speaking, they maintained an observer status.
How did the course work?
Omar: There were nearly thirty students in the course and we were divided up into different U.S. government agencies. We were different teams that formed a greater team.
Ben: There were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, the CIA, the Office of the National Security Advisor, and the Presidential Staff, and in each group there was a principal. So there was the National Security Advisor, who had two people working under him. I was Secretary of State and had seven people working under me. Omar was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and each person in his group was chairman of one of the armed forces. We all worked under the Presidential Staff, and the professors interacted with us through intelligence that they sent to the different groups. I would get intelligence from my embassies abroad, Omar would get military intelligence, the CIA would get field reports, and that's how the back-and-forth went.
Omar: The professors would, for example, send a cable to the CIA group and tell them that there was something happening in North Korea, and then the CIA would inform the rest of the agencies and we would have a meeting together to discuss how we were going to respond. I would give the military side of the equation, providing the military options; Ben would provide diplomatic options; the CIA would provide intelligence. Each group had its own territory.
What happened next? Would you then be faced with another issue to deal with?
Ben: Always. For me, a lot of the learning that took place--and there was a lot--happened when, for example, I would get a report from our Nigerian embassy in Lagos, saying that an extreme separatist group had taken several American oil workers hostage. We'd never heard of this group, so we had to go research it. We'd come back with pages and pages about who these people were. That happened over and over again with different types of things.
Omar: They did a really good job of throwing red herrings all over the place. We would get so much intelligence that had nothing to do with the final crisis simulation, so we were very much thrown off the path until the crisis part of the simulation actually started.
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Was there required background reading?
Omar: The professors encouraged us to do a lot of that. They wanted us to know our respective agencies very, very well before we got into the simulation, because each agency has different responsibilities. It would be very uncoordinated if we just stepped all over each other. We needed to know exactly what our responsibilities were, and that's why it was important to read up on what we had to do.
Ben: At the beginning of the course the professors posted on the Blackboard course web site crisis decision-making material about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and our crisis ended up being similar. Omar and I are pretty far advanced in the major, and we'd studied the Cuban missile crisis, but towards the second day of the simulation I went back over the course and thought, 'We should have seen this coming!' The professors had given us those readings for a reason.
Was it hard for either or both of you to work so intensely in such a group-oriented process? Some people prefer to work on things by themselves.
Omar: I'm that type of person. I like to do everything by myself. I am a hands-on person, and at first that worked well when there wasn't so much intelligence coming in. But then I realized that I had too much on my hands and had to delegate. Thankfully, my team was very dedicated and right there on the job all the time.Whenever I needed something done, I just gave it to one of my people and he or she did it. It worked out pretty well, and I learned a lot from that. I learned that you can't just do everything by yourself. It's good to have a team, and if you work well with your team, everything's going to be fine.
How was the actual 48 hour crisis portion of the simulation different from what had been going on in the course up until that time?
Omar: Before the crisis, we would get intelligence once every three or four days and we'd meet at any random time. The crisis itself was much faster, and very much more intense. We didn't get much sleep - I didn't get nearly any sleep - and I had an exam during that period of time. I had to go take the exam and come back into the simulation. We had to be awake all the time because we were getting intelligence all the time. We had to deal with it and make decisions. Before the simulation, we could take our time thinking about the problem: we could postpone it and have meetings whenever we wanted.
Ben: I was sending diplomatic communications to Israel at 4:00 in the morning, and that was just business as usual.
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How did the different agencies communicate with each other?
Omar: Each agency had its own room to meet in, and the heads of each agency would meet in a room set up to parallel the White House crisis situation room, where the president and the vice-president were. For example, Ben wanted someone from the military side-- my group, to work with him on a paper because he wanted some military advice. So he asked me if he could have one of my people working with one of his people on a briefing, and we sometimes sent our people over to each other so they could work together.
Ben: That worked really well and was one of the best things in the simulation for me. I needed to write a policy brief for the State Department. Correction: we didn't actually have to do anything; we weren't required to do anything. We had to decide what was necessary for each step of action. No one dictated to us what to sign or what communication to write - the professors didn't tell us anything. But I wanted to have a State Department policy brief on Iranian nuclear capabilities. Omar's department had just done a presentation the day before, based on some intelligence that they had received, to the effect that Iran might have a tactical nuke. I needed that information, so he sent one of his people down to brief my undersecretary of arms control prevention, and they just sat for a half hour while John lectured with schematics, the whiteboard, diagrams… It was really great. I think that when people communicated well, things ran really smoothly.
Omar: Most people were surprisingly professional when we worked on things, to the point where there were some times when I thought this was actually real. I was so into it, and I hadn't slept for a long time, so I was a little dazed by the whole thing. I think that it helped a lot that Ben and I knew each other beforehand and were friends beforehand, because that really helped with the communications. It ran less efficiently if you just met someone and then had to introduce yourself and get to trust each other. Keep in mind that we had a lot of turf battles going on; for example, my department and the Department of Defense often had overlapping responsibilities. I established a really close relationship with the Secretary of Defense, Bill Howe, and through that close relationship we managed to overlook all those turf battles and run the whole system efficiently.
Ben: We had midnight emails. For example, Omar sent me one saying "Just to let you know, I sent a C3 carrier of small arms to Nigeria." I responded, "You idiot! You can't do that!" And Omar replied "Well, it's already been done, and it's been done for a long time." So our reactions were friendly-antagonistic: we never agreed on anything and it would never have worked if we weren't good friends to start off with. If we didn't know each other, it could have gotten ugly.
Omar: Exactly. It was never personal. It was very professional, the way we disagreed.
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Now that the crisis part of the simulation is over, what's does the remainder of the course consist of?
Ben: The crisis was such a grueling experience that we needed at least a week and a half just to get our sleep patterns back in order, the professors as well. Now we each have to do a paper that's an assessment of the simulation: how we got into our roles, what research we did, that sort of thing.
I had a meeting with my state department group about a week after the simulation was over, just to wrap up. My group asked me, "What're we going to do now? Do you want us to write a paper?" I had to tell them, "I'm not your Secretary of State anymore. It's over, it's done, I don't want to be in charge of anybody, no responsibilities, we're all equal now!" It took a few minutes for it to sink in. Robert, my undersecretary for arms control was fantastic - he would do anything I asked of him and would do it amazingly - I see him around campus and that dynamic is still there. It's funny how such extreme situations ingrain that sort of relationship.
What's your take on learning about national security this way, as opposed to reading a book or attending a lecture?
Omar: In government classes usually we study leaders who make decisions and how their decisions affected things, or why they made those decisions. You can't help but wonder sometimes, 'What would be my decision had I been in that position?' This simulation gives you the chance to make your own decisions and see how they play out.
It feels great to work with real people and to put your minds together to figure out how you're going to deal with a problem. You feel pride if your team is working well. There's a little bit of competition between the agencies, and they're your people. It's your team, so you're happy to see them working well. If they give a good presentation, you feel proud of them. It's a lot of teamwork, and it builds friendships. Most of the people in the simulation I hadn't know before but now know really well. It's an amazing experience; I just loved it.
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Ben, during the crisis portion of the simulation you had what you described as a 'Kissinger moment.' Can you describe that?
Ben: Sure. To this day, I still wonder if I made the right decision or not. I told Israel about Iran's tactical nukes.
Omar: I did not know that! Why did I not know that?
Ben: That was my decision…
Omar: No, good job, not telling me was good. It was smart, because I would have given Israel help…
Ben: About an hour afterwards, I got an email back from my embassy in Israel. The foreign minister was flipping out. That probably influenced the course of the simulation a lot. I bet things actually make more sense to you now.
Omar: Well, now I'll admit something. At some points I was itching to press the trigger, to send something…
Ben: We knew that, we knew you wanted to blow something up.
Omar: Yeah, and what Ben did allowed me to do that.
Ben: It's true. I told Israel that we possibly had intelligence that Iran had tactical nuclear capabilities and that their program is more advanced than we thought it was. They took it a little harder than I thought they would… Meaning that they tried to bomb all of Iran's nuclear facilities.
Omar: With nuclear weapons.
Ben: Yes. The thing was, all of my undersecretaries were asking if I was sure this was a good idea. I talked to other department heads, and the president and vice president knew that this was what I was going to do. It was an unsettling thing, and I just had to stick by my decision. I felt that our ally Israel needed to know because it was also a matter of their national security and it's in our best interest for Israel to preserve itself. It may have been the wrong decision. And, looking back on it, things might have gone a little bit differently if I hadn't done that.
In the news, you see the president making decisions every day. People ask, 'What is he thinking? Why would he ever do that?' Now I was in that situation. I had made a judgment call, and it may have turned out wrong, but I can't say that I made the wrong decision. I still think I made the right decision, and if everybody else thinks I made the wrong decision then I have to live with that, but I can't go back on what I did. In that moment, I understood why the simulation was happening. It was intense.
Omar: We had to keep in mind that the president was the one who made the final decisions on everything, or nearly everything, and we were supposed to be his advisors. I understand perfectly well what Ben is saying right now, because I made the decision to send a plane full of weapons to Nigeria, because they asked for help. The president asked me if I was sure that it was a good idea, and I said, 'Yes, this is a good idea, Mr. President,' and he accepted that. Had something happened to that plane, I would have been in big trouble. So I was thinking about that. Or any number of other things could have gone wrong, and then I would have lost the trust of the president. The whole thing revolves around having the president trust you, because if he doesn't trust you, he's not going to follow your advice, and then your agency will lose all its power. Thankfully, nothing happened and everything went well, but I do understand what Ben was saying.
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How did the British team fit into this?
Omar: They had their own situation room. They had a smaller team, and each agency was represented by just one person, so they had more work to do than we did. I could delegate my work, while my British equivalent couldn't. They did a good job keeping up with us, even though we had more people. They were very good additions to the simulation because they were people we'd never seen before, never talked to before, so that added an aspect of reality.
My British equivalent's hobby was, I would guess, military stuff, as mine is to a certain extent. This enabled us to communicate and understand each other really well since each of us knew the material. We could talk and establish connections very quickly.
Ben: We hung out with them the night after the simulation, and got to know them, and they were fantastic people. A lot of them said they wanted to come back and do it again, too.
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Omar Lamrani and Ben Raynak
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