Crisis Management in Action: Using a Simulation of the U.S. National Security Apparatus to Teach Foreign Policy Decision-Making Under Duress

Abstract

Domestic and international crisis dynamics and management is often a difficult subject to teach to a group of high school or undergraduate-level students. Attempting to convey the sense of physical and mental duress that often exist during times of crisis is extremely difficult through conventional lecturing and discussion. In most cases, the best method to teach such lessons to a classroom of students is through in-class simulations such as Model United Nations, or Model Arab League among others. While teaching a course on U.S. National Security Policy at the University of Georgia, I designed a simulation of the U.S. national security apparatus in order to teach institutional design, decision-making, crisis dynamics and management, as well countless other lessons from material and lessons throughout the course. As part of the design of the simulation, I created positions and personalities for approximately 40 student to play that helped to provide students with essential background information for preparation as well as to make the interpersonal dynamics of the simulation as realistic as possible when compared to the same dynamics that we covered when learning about how U.S. national security policy is made and carried out. To accomplish this, I provided each student with a unique position assignment (i.e. President, Vice President, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, etc.), their general position on the use of military force (which included categories such as a pure hawk, hawkish, moderate, dovish, or a pure dove), a brief description of the actor’s position to help students to conduct background research and to prepare position papers on their respective position prior to the simulation, the actor’s relationship with other actors (i.e. those who are their allies and who are their opponents during the simulation), and the actor’s particular area of expertise and what the basic expectations of their character during the simulation will be. During the actual simulation, the students are presented with a real-time national security crisis that begins as an energy security threat and evolves into a multifaceted crisis that operates within several domains simultaneously. These include domains such as global and domestic terrorism, economic crises and trade relationships, humanitarian interventions, weapons proliferation, energy security, among many others. The fundamental purpose of such a simulation is to place students in the position of real American policymakers to reinforce the lessons and activities covered over the duration of the course.