Jacquelyn Schneider explains Hoover’s wargaming and crisis simulation initiative as both a research program and an archive-building effort. The core idea is to run academically designed war games, preserve not just the game outputs but also the surrounding memos and decision context, and make those primary sources easily accessible to students and researchers online.
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Schneider’s central thesis is that Hoover can play a unique role in studying war and crisis decision-making because it has both the archival resources and the institutional capacity to run original wargames. She argues that the initiative is not just about preserving games themselves, but about capturing the broader decision environment around them — what she calls the “inner game” and the “outer game.” The inner game is the simulation participants play; the outer game is why the simulation was run and how its findings later influenced policy and history. A key example she uses is the Berlin crisis game played at Camp David shortly after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. She describes the geopolitical stakes as extremely high, with U.S.-Soviet tensions over Berlin raising the possibility of nuclear escalation. …
Immediate setup is educational/institutional rather than tradable: the main catalyst is the launch and usability of Hoover’s online wargame archive. The key near-term question is whether the materials are easy to access and useful enough to attract scholars and students.
Over the next few months, the program should gain traction if it can show that archived simulations help explain policy choices and crisis outcomes. If adoption is weak or the archive lacks context, the impact will remain niche.
Longer term, the clip argues for a structural shift in how security history is studied: war games should be treated as primary sources whose surrounding documentation is preserved. That would make simulation archives a lasting part of the research infrastructure for national-security analysis.
Hoover can play a pivotal role in preserving and using war games to study major questions.
This is the opening thesis about the institution’s purpose and value.
What makes Hoover different is that it runs its own academically designed games.
She contrasts Hoover’s approach with other war-game practitioners.
The archive is unique because it collects not just games but memos and conversations around them.
This is her main argument for why archival context matters.
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