Red Team

ISSP offers two Red Team simulations each year (fall and spring) for students concentrating in International Security Studies. Red Teaming is a cognitive approach to framing problems and planning using structured analytical tools that help individuals and teams ask good questions, expose and challenge assumptions, identify information gaps, and develop creative alternatives. The intent is to improve group understanding, develop a more diverse set of options, and mitigate individual and group biases that are inherent in problem solving and decision making.

Red Team tools were developed as a direct outgrowth of military lessons learned in the wake of mistakes made in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tools and methods are designed to help organizations ask better questions and develop creative solutions that take into account and mitigate organizational preferences, and individual and small group biases. A number of military and corporate entities have requested red team analysis including the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO Headquarters, U.S. Strategic Command, as well as Verizon, Google, and Chevron.

Colonel (retired) Steve Rotkoff, the former director of the U.S. Army’s “Red Team University” at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Ms. Whitney Hischer, Lecturer in strategy, entrepreneurship, and scenario planning at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, serve as facilitators for “Red Team Thinking”.

In AY2024-2025 participants will apply Red Team concepts to a scenario in which China and Taiwan draw increasingly closer to an overt conflict. The scenario is that increasing Taiwan nationalism threatens China and China responds with a blockade of Taiwanese islands close to the mainland. Students will participate on one of four country teams to develop a strategic approach for how to respond to China’s encroachment of Taiwanese sovereignty