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Long before the dice were rolled and the strategies unfolded, the tension in the room was already palpable. Dozens of graduate students leaned over their tables, maps of the South China Sea spread out before them, each plotting the next move in a contest of brinkmanship that could—if misplayed—tip the world into war.
On October 18th, the Center for Security Policy Studies (CSPS) at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University hosted its biannual crisis simulation, led by Adjunct Professor Lee Roberts, a U.S. Army Strategic Intelligence Officer and chief of operations research for the Intelligence Directorate of the Joint Staff, and Jerad Harper, an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College and a CSPS faculty affiliate.
This fall semester’s exercise thrust participants into the heart of one of the world’s most volatile flashpoints: a confrontation between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea—widely regarded as the world’s most valuable sea lane—has long been riven by overlapping territorial and maritime claims. But since the 2010s, China, which asserts ownership of almost the entire area, has grown increasingly aggressive, especially toward the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally.
This escalation has fueled fears that China’s ambitions could ignite a wider conflict involving the United States and its partners.
As it happened, the simulation imagined such a moment of peril: Chinese Coast Guard and Navy vessels moving to blockade a small Philippine military outpost on the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, cutting off resupply and threatening to “dismantle” the position if Manila refused to withdraw.
The daylong exercise unfolded as a “matrix game” played across two simultaneous seminars, each featuring six teams representing China, the U.S., and Australia, along with the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Each round represented two weeks of tense diplomacy and maneuvering. Teams proposed actions drawn from the Department of Defense’s DIME framework—Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic—and then defended or challenged one another’s strategies before rolling the dice to determine success or failure.
As the simulation progressed, coalitions formed and fractured, ambitions collided, and each decision risked escalating a crisis no one truly wanted.
According to Athen LaFoy, a CSPS Student Fellow in the Schar School’s top-ranked International Security program, the simulations “help students gain a deeper insight into how a country’s grand strategy is affected by great power competition.”
LaFoy, who helped organize the event, praised the participants’ ability to engage in high-stakes brinkmanship without resorting to combat, “accurately gauging the worth of their objectives in relation to the very high cost of conflict.”