“Yemen has just attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.”  “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula launched a massive covert Facebook campaign to increase recruitment.” “France has declared war on Yemen.” “They are ‘scudding’ Djibouti.” “We got the dirty bomb!”

You would be forgiven if you overhead these statements at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy during the previous week and came away wondering if classrooms had turned into nerve centers for managing a spiraling Middle East crisis.

Welcome to Simulex 2011, an annual exercise in policy debates, war games, crisis management, and decision-making hosted by The Fletcher School’s International Security Studies Program. This year, the exercise -- held November 4 to 5 -- offered more than 100 students from The Fletcher School and other graduate schools in the area, a taste of the tenor and tempo of complex situations that military planners, diplomats, policy makers, and others face while dealing with international crises.

“This is an opportunity for students to learn how a complex crisis unfolds, even in a controlled, albeit hectic, environment, and how difficult it is to arrive at a peaceful solution,” said Charles Butler, an officer in the United States Air Force and a security studies fellow at The Fletcher School who helped organize this year’s Simulex.

Centered on a succession crisis in a Middle East kingdom, the simulation also referred to the present-day turmoil and churnings in the region. The verisimilitude makes this exercise all the more useful, according to its organizers.

“It’s not a war game. It’s a military political game, a simulation,” said Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Shelby Cullom Davis professor of international security studies at The Fletcher School, who has overseen the exercise for the past thirty-seven years. “Simulex sensitizes students to issues that they would face in a real world situation, even though those real world situations might differ profoundly.”

Seven groups, representing countries like Israel and Yemen, or terrorist organizations, or regional security groups, worked around-the-clock in classrooms at The Fletcher School’s Mugar and Cabot buildings, sending instant messages online, receiving press releases via Google Docs, recording videos on Flip video cameras and setting up one-on-one “negotiations” with other groups in hallways. From the Mugar Computer Lab, the Simulex overseers, called “Control,” nudged the exercise along and took care to keep it as realistic as possible.

In past years, according to Prof. Pfaltzgraff, the exercise has cut very close to real events. Planning for the 1989 exercise included a scenario with the Berlin Wall coming down, just weeks before the Wall actually did come down. At the Simulex in 1990, hosted in July that year, the focus was on a hypothetical invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. A month later, the real invasion occurred. This year was no different, as Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, heir to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, had died just over a week before the start of the simulation.

The Simulex team included several security studies fellows from The Fletcher School: full-time military officers like Lt. Col. Butler, who have come to the School for a year to study policy, history, law, and diplomacy. The actual operation of the exercise was overseen by a team from the US Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, led by Professor Doug Campbell, who directs the college’s Center for Strategic Leadership.

“Simulex,” Prof. Campbell said, “is a strategic experiential education event -- instead of talking about these issues and hearing lectures, you get to actually face them head on.”

He said simulation organizers try to replicate “real world situations and environments,” getting participants to grapple with uncertainties, and incomplete, contradictory, or even outright false information.

“[Simulex is all about] how you sort the chaff from the grain, the background noise from the signal,” he said.

The keynote speaker for the two-day exercise was the commandant of the U.S. Army War College, Major General Gregg F. Martin, who told participants that the traits needed for strategic leaders included “skill of negotiations, creative and critical thinking, open-mindedness, and effective communication skills”.

“In a world where uncertainty and complexity is increasing […] what do you think we need more of?” Maj. Gen. Martin asked. “We need wise, innovative, creative, smart leaders to find newer, better, smarter ways to find the solutions we need.”

“Develop yourself as a leader with a global perspective. Expand your network. Deepen your intellectual foundation,” he said.

“It’s easy to get into conflict, to get into war. It’s a lot harder to get out of one.”

-- Mike Eckel, F13 MALD candidate