more on the Brookings Iran simulation

Two quick links regarding the Brookings Institutions December 2009 simulation of an Israeli strike on Iran:

• Kenneth M. Pollack, Osiraq Redux: A Crisis Simulation of an Israeli Strike on the Iranian Nuclear Program, Brooks Institution, February 2010.
• David E. Sanger, Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran, New York Times, 26 March 2010.

*The milgeek in me is a little dubious about feasibility of the military scenario (“using a refueling base hastily set up in the Saudi Arabian desert without Saudi knowledge”) —it is one thing to refuel C-130s and helicopters in the desert as the Americans attempted in Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 (which, of course, went rather badly)… it is quite another thing with large numbers of modern high-performance strike aircraft in a country with quite good AWACS radar coverage. Still the simulation was largely about the politics, so it doesn’t much matter.

and, yes, ANOTHER Iran nuclear simulation…

Initially this was reported it as taking place at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but in fact it was conducted at the Brookings Institution. Laura Rozen has a few sparse details on here foreign policy blog here.

At this rate, soon we’ll be simulating Iran nuclear simulations!

another Iran simulation

Iran seems to be all the rage for high-profile crisis simulations these days–first the simulation at Harvard (blogged about below), and now news of a similar simulation at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. According to a Reuters report published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

Think-tank: U.S. will sideline Israel in Iran nuclear dispute

By Reuters

Israel will find itself diplomatically sidelined and militarily muzzled as the United States pursues a nuclear deal with Iran next year, according to a closed-door wargame at Israel’s top strategic think-tank.

Not even a warning shot by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the simulation featured an undeclared Israeli commando raid on Iran’s Arak heavy water plant – would shake U.S. President Barack Obamas’s insistence on dialogue.

Israel’s arch-foe, meanwhile, will likely keep enriching uranium, perhaps even winning the grudging assent of the West.

“The Iranians came out feeling better than the Americans, as they were simply more determined to stick to their objectives,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser who played Netanyahu in the Nov. 1 wargame at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

…

Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, a former chief of Israel’s military intelligence who played Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, envisaged Tehran staying on its nuclear track “unless facing a threat to the survival of the regime”.

“That just wasn’t forthcoming from the Americans or their coalition,” Zeevi-Farkash said, adding that “Obama” should have buttressed negotiations by boosting the U.S. naval deployment in the Gulf or persuading India to slash its business ties to Iran.

According to Zeevi-Farkash, Iran would be unlikely to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, preferring to use such weaponry to protect against invasion and wield regional clout. As such, a preemptive Israeli strike could spur Iran to get the bomb.

…

Walt on the Harvard Iran simulation

Following on from my earlier blog post on Harvard’s recent Iran nuclear simulation, I’ve come across additional pieces on the simulation by Gary Sick (who participated as part of the Iran team) and Stephen Walt (who participated as part of the US team). Both provide additional detail on what transpired during the exercise.

What is especially interesting from a PaxSims point-of-view, however, are Walt’s comments on how the technical design of the simulation may have shaped the validity of its outputs. Given their broader applicability to simulation design, they are worth quoting at length:

In my view, what one might call the “external validity” of the game was limited by three unrealistic features.

First, the timetable of the game was extremely compressed. In effect, we were trying to simulate a full year of negotiations in a mere six hours. Thus, each hour of the game covered two months, which meant that a team could send a message to another team and receive a reply in due course, only to discover that a month or more had passed and the original message was now effectively obsolete. More to the point, the breakneck pace of the game did not allow for any time for reflection, for the weighing of alternatives, or even the formulation of clear or novel strategies. (Each team was given about twenty-five minutes to plan its approach before the game began, and I like to think U.S. leaders do a bit better than that in real life. Heck, Obama just spent several months deciding what to do in Afghanistan). Yes, time is a precious commodity and policymakers are often forced to juggle multiple commitments, but I believe a more realistic timetable would have produced very different results.

Second, trying to simulate a complex multiparty negotiation with four or five-person “teams” was problematic, particularly when some team members (myself included), had to leave the game temporarily to teach their regular classes. This constraint required me to be absent for 90 minutes, which in terms of the game’s timetable meant that the U.S. Secretary of Defense was effectively incommunicado for three “months.” The same problem sidelined the person who played the Secretary of State for a similar period. Moreover, given that team members had no staff and thus no subordinates to give orders to, there was no one to delegate to and it was impossible to conduct continuous consultations with all of the relevant parties, even when both sides may have wanted to. What must have looked to some like Bush-era “unilateralism” was instead simply an unavoidable artifact of the game’s structure.

Third, the composition of the different teams was unavoidably slanted. The U.S., Russian, Chinese, Iranian teams were all populated with and led by Americans, while the Israeli team was made up entirely of Israelis and the EU team was composed of Europeans. To have confidence in the validity of the results, therefore, you have to assume that each of the teams actually played the way that their real-life counterparts would have. That might be true in the case of the U.S., Israeli, and European teams (though I wouldn’t assume it), but it’s obviously more of a stretch with the others.

These difficulties are not the fault of the game’s organizers, who faced obvious constraints in putting the exercise together. Ideally, such a simulation would have been played over a long week-end and covered a shorter time period, but it would have been far more difficult to assemble an equally impressive array of participants for an entire weekend. Putting together a genuinely multi-national participant list (including appropriate Iranians?), would have been even harder if not impossible.

The bottom line is that one ought to be exceedingly wary about drawing any conclusions about what this artificial exercise actually teaches. To me, its real value is not as a crude crystal ball that allows us to divine the future, or even as an analytical device that helps us identify particular barriers to resolving some thorny diplomatic problem. After all, it’s not exactly headline news to discover that resolving the Iranian nuclear issue isn’t easy, that there are certain tensions within the P5+1, or that Iran’s objectives are at odds with those of the other participants.

Rather, the potential value of such an exercise lies in forcing participants to take on different roles and see how a problem looks from a wholly different perspective. With hindsight, I wish we had mixed things up a lot more: with some Israelis on the Iran team, with real Russians, Chinese or EU citizens playing on the U.S. or Israeli side, and so forth. That might have taught us about some of the sources of misunderstanding that have made this issue so hard to resolve, whatever the actual “outcome” of the game might have been.

Harvard KSG Iran simulation

The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University recently held a simulation examining Iran and the nuclear weapons issue, with the key roles played by a rather impressive list of former officials and subject matter experts.  The Israeli paper Haaretz has a quite extensive summary of the outcome:

Haaretz, 10 December 2009

10/12/2009

Experts say Iran has clear path to nuclear weapons

By Yossi Melman

Last week the Harvard Kennedy School held a simulation game of the Iranian nuclear crisis, and Israel should be very concerned about its course and its outcome.

The game made it clear: Iran will not stop on its path to producing nuclear weapons. The United States will not embark on a military action and will find it difficult to enlist support at the United Nations for imposing more severe sanctions, while relations between Israel and the United States will deteriorate.

Prof. Graham Allison, a leading analyst of American security policy for decades, conducted the game, whose participants were representatives from countries and organizations likely to be affected by the real outcome.

Israel was represented by Dore Gold, former ambassador to the United Nations, and Dr. Shai Feldman, currently at Brandeis University, and by a former brigadier general and a nuclear physicist. Their decisions were made by consensus. The U.S. team, headed by Nicholas Burns, who was an assistant to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice during the administration of George W. Bush and was responsible for the “Iranian portfolio,” included Admiral William Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command from 2007-2008.

Iran was represented by Prof. Gary Sick of Columbia University, who was a member of the U.S. National Security Council under Jimmy Carter.

Also participating were American and European academics (some of them former government officials), representing Russia, China, U.K., France and Germany and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar). Also present as observers – the game lasted an entire day – were journalists David Ignatius of the Washington Post and David Singer of The New York Times, who “played” the media. All the participants promised to maintain secrecy about the game and not to reveal the identity of the participants, but details have leaked in the United States and now here as well.

…

Conclusions: The U.S. will not attack Iran. Russia and China will not agree to imposing serious sanctions. The U.S. will pressure Israel to prevent it from attacking Iran, and so a serious crisis is liable to develop between the two countries. Under these circumstances and in view of operational capability, Israel does not in effect have a real option of attacking Iran. If it so desires, Iran can produce nuclear weapons.

You’ll also find a report on the simulation from David Ignatius of the Washington Post (one of the participants) here.