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”.

Our theme for the 2025-2026 exercises will focus on a crisis on the Korean Peninsula which will raise the risks of both conventional conflict and nuclear weapons use in East Asia. During the fall and spring semesters, a one-and-a-half-day program will be held for 20-25 security studies students and military fellows. Students will participate as a part of one of four country teams (China, Japan, Russia, and the United States) to develop a strategic approach for how to respond to the escalating tensions on the Peninsula and in the region more broadly. The exercise will give students the opportunity to more closely contend with nuclear weapons dynamics, alliance management approaches, and domestic political issues.