LEXINGTON, KY - Secluded for 22 hours in separate rooms around UK's Patterson Office Tower, 37 UK grad students spent part of this weekend guiding reaction to an international incident - in simulation.
Assistant Professor Robert Farley of the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce led his fifth such simulation, in which master's degree students who are looking for careers mainly in government diplomacy and intelligence must play the roles of different national governments in reacting to a world crisis, in this case an Israeli bombing of nuclear installations inside Iran.
"I was a little bit concerned about the possibility that this might happen before the simulation happened, in which case we would have had to revise our plans for doing the simulation," Farley said about his "ripped from the headlines" approach to simulations. "We try to think of things that are plausible, but obviously it's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen in the international system."
In the past, one simulation centered around the death of Cuba's Fidel Castro, which at times has seemed as imminent as an Israeli attack on Iran, but has yet to occur. Israel has previously attacked a neighbor's nuclear capabilities unilaterally. In 1981, Israeli planes crippled a reactor soon to be activated inside Iraq, an attack condemned at the time by the Reagan administration which had no previous knowledge of the strike.
"What the simulation tries to do is to put them in situations where they have limited time to make decisions, where they are in a tense situation, where in many cases they have limited rest and in particular they have limited information," he said. "They don't know exactly what's going on. Much of the information that's presented to them may be wrong. Different teams may know different aspects of reality, which then creates different incentives for the teams to act."
Within the simulation, Farley split the students up into teams of five or six to play the role of each major player in an scenario in which the Israeli Air Force would make a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear capabilities. The teams represented seven powers: the Israelis and Iranians, of course, along with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States and the UN.
Farley puts the choice of how each entity will react in the hands of the students, rather than following a script, to allow students to see a multitude of unknowns and unexpected reactions. In this case, the students heading up the Iranian team took a laid-back approach to being hit by Israeli airstrikes, which put pressure on others in Patterson's simulated international community.
"They played with a great deal of restraint, much more restraint than I expected them to play with and that anybody else expected them to play with. That was interesting, because that created some pretty serious strategic problems for some of the other teams," he said.
"In the end it led to a confrontation between Israel and the United States, where the United States had denied over-flight rights over Iraq to Israel (on their attempt for a second airstrike)," Farley said. "(The United States team) ended up actually firing on Israeli aircraft, after which the Israelis turned around and went home."
Though a situation in which the United States would fire on such a close ally as Israel may seem unfathomable to those on the outside, Farley said that is what is great about allowing students to be a part of the decision-making process in a tense situation. "The United States clearly opposed a second strike and the Israelis were clearly trying to make a second strike, and both sides were calling each other's bluff."
Farley said unexpected twists like an armed exchange between the United States and Israel and a relatively calm Iran in the face of attack should arm his students with the cognitive capabilities to better serve them, and possibly the nation, when they make it into the workplace. The ability to make good decisions in crisis situations is inherently valuable both in corporate and government environments, according to Farley.
"This is the situation we've put them in, in order to give them the opportunity and experience at thinking through making major decisions or contributing to major decisions during crisis situations," Farley said. "This is what crisis is made up of; it's made up of decision making with limited information under the context of limited time."