2010 Patterson Simulation

On Friday and Saturday, the Patterson School conducted its annual policy simulation. This year, Patterson students simulated the 22 hours following an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, with a focus on the diplomatic consequences of such an attack. The University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications cooperated in the simulation, with students from thee SJT operating websites representing two news networks, Gulf News Service (an Al Jazeera clone) and International News Network (a CNN clone). A full summary of the simulation can be found at Information Dissemination.

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Return of the Vampires

Every spring, Patterson runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information. Every fall, I run a two hour mini-simulation designed to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out. In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla. Since vampires seem to be in the news lately, this year I chose a vampire oriented scenario.

The scenario was broadly organized around the motivating concept of True Blood; vampires, in existence throughout human history, reveal themselves and demand civil recognition. With vampires the devil is always in the details, so I gave them the following characteristics:

• Sun Sensitivity: Able to move about during day, but direct sunlight kills in short time frame (15 seconds)
• Some shape-shifting ability; some vampires capable of turning into wolves, bats, while others lack such capability
• Coffins: Not necessary, but typical
• Human blood: Human blood is most nutritious, but mammal blood will do in a pinch
• Fangs: Retractable
• Super strength: Well in excess of human norms of endurance and physical strength
• Vulnerabilities: Cross and other religious paraphernalia have no effect; wooden stake kills, incineration kills, silver injures. No effect from garlic, running water, etc.
• Propagation: Vampires have to intentionally create additional vampires by force feeding “candidate” victims
• Lifespan: Spans centuries, at least

Again, with a couple of exceptions these are broadly similar to the vampires in True Blood. I also gave the vampires a transnational governance structure of generally feudal character. I estimated the total numbers of world vampires at around 15 million, with a US population of just under a million.

I divided the students into the following groups:

• Department of Justice
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Central Intelligence Agency
• Department of Defense
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of State
• Department of Health and Human Services

Each group was tasked with developing an organizational response to the imminent public declaration of the existence of vampires. I gave each group a few general questions, then set them lose. CIA and DoD each received a bit of additional information. CIA had been aware of the existence of vampires essentially from the point of its founding, as had most major foreign intelligence organizations. The CIA even employed vampiric agents from time to time; a CIA vampire killed Salvador Allende. DoD's relationship was even longer and more extensive. In its previous incarnations as the Departments of War and Navy, the US military had employed vampires since the Civil War. In World War II, an entire brigade sized unit was created, although it was mainly concerned with responding to the activities of German and Japanese vampires. I also indicated that many analysts believed that Osama Bin Laden was a vampire, and that Al Qaeda seemed comfortable with the use of vampiric agents.

Here are the highlights of what they came up with in the two hour window:

Department of Justice

• Prioritize vampire-specific policies. When crafting initial vampire policy, reducing risk to humans must take precedence over the granting of equal protection to vampires.
• Define vampire’s legal status. If the President desires full vampire inclusion in the human population, they must be granted equal protection under the law.
• Review U.S. laws to make them species neutral, as far as possible.
• Strengthen criminal statutes that address crimes likely to be associated with vampire behavior, including feeding and conversion. Also, create human-on-vampire hate crimes.
• Amnesty for past crimes and legal food supply based on self-identification within a specified time frame.
• Create and fund a new interagency entity headed by the Department of Justice to deal with vampire registration, identification and criminal enforcement, and distribution of vampire food.
• Liaise with Interpol regarding transnational vampire threats.

Department of Defense

• Upon legal recognition of the U.S. vampire population, the DoD has determine that a policy of further R&D should be pursued in regards to vampire defense and technology associate with vampire capabilities.
• The increased integration of vampires into the armed forces brings up the issue of special training for both vampire and human troops. The DoD proposes to keep vampire units separate from human units.
• A Global Conference on the Special Needs of Vampires is recommended to address international security issues, specifically a Convention on the Use of Vampires in Combat (CUVC).
• Vampires are vital assets to the DoD. While vampires do have some limitations such as ability to withstand direct sunlight, their superhuman strength and longevity make them very valuable. Currently, US Armed Forces include three thousand of the one million U.S. vampires; this number should be bolstered through a voluntary conversion program.
• With Osama bin Laden as a suspected vampire, other terrorists and terrorist groups may also be assumed to be vampires, given the inherent tactical advantages of converting a small force to vampires. Therefore there is an urgent necessity to create additional Special Forces units in the military to combat these insurgents wherever they may operate.
• The DoD foresees civilian and military concerns about maintaining a sustainable, non-threatening ratio of vampire to human soldiers. The Department of Defense proposes a thorough internal review of the roles and positions of current vampire soldiers, past incidents of vampire misconduct, and the threat of defecting vampire units.
• The increased vampire presence in the U.S. military presents logistical concerns that must be addressed by the DoD. Vampires have been previously granted Veteran’s Benefits after the traditional twenty years service. Instead, the required length of service should be adjusted in proportion to the longer vampire life span of several centuries.

FBI

• All vampire citizens must be required to register and carry identification so that FBI agents will be able to determine the difference between a vampire and a human. The FBI proposes to maintain a database of all vampire citizens that can be checked in the event of suspicious activity involving superhuman strength.
• Vampire agents must be recruited to work within the Bureau to assist in infiltrating organized vampire crime groups.
• Current tools such as handguns, steel handcuffs, and bullet proof vests will not be appropriate weapons in dealing with vampire criminals. The FBI must integrate silver handcuffs that resist shape-shifting, be armed with wooden stakes and bows and arrows, and trained in archery.
• Underreporting of crimes related to blood sucking poses a threat to the FBI and to American citizens. The FBI will need to adapt our intelligence collecting methods to detect when humans change into vampires unwillingly by vampire attack. In the event of such attacks, the FBI must ensure that the vampire database is updated with new members of the species for both the protection of FBI agents as well as American citizens.

CIA

• The most alarming threat from vampires is the potential for infiltration into the United States government, and their unique application in covert operations in the United States and abroad, especially as vampires retain the allegiances of their former lives.
• CIA’s primary policy proposal focuses on the recruitment of unaffiliated vampires in an effort to check the influence of transnational vampire organizations. Efforts for this policy should focus on emphasizing vampire identification and vampire tracking with the United States.
• If the DOJ supports interrogation efforts for vampires, a new interrogation manual needs to be created that includes techniques including UV rays and liquid silver-boarding for coercing information out of vampires that relates to US national security.
• Vampiric individuals provide opportunities to enhance current counterintelligence efforts. Efforts to incorporate and assimilate vampiric individuals in a counterintelligence sphere should be coordinated with intelligence services worldwide who hold similar interests with CIA and the United States. Their physical characteristics allow for new levels and new methods of data collection in clandestine operations.
  

DHS

• There are millions of vampire attacks on humans and animals yearly, many of which are fatal. This poses a different degree of terrorist threat. The Department of Homeland Security recommends a continued threat level of “High” (orange) as pertaining to vampire attacks.
• The fear that the anticipated public vampiric announcement could incite in the United States population at large is a threat to homeland security generally in the risk mass hysteria poses. A more specific aspect of the threat is the probability that a marginalized population poses in the fight on terrorism. If the larger population fears Vamperic-Americans, this marginalized population will become a prime recruiting base for terrorism. This potential threat should be addressed with a public awareness campaign.
• Given the large number of annual vampire-caused attacks, the Department of Homeland Security proposes the implementation of a microchip identification system. Current vampiric American citizens will be encouraged to voluntarily give up violent behavior and participate in the program to ensure their compliance.
• Given the fact that there are approximately 15 million vampires worldwide and only 1 million in the U.S., it is reasonable to assume that some vampires will seek to immigrate to a country in which they will enjoy full citizenship. The DHS will direct Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to implement the microchip identification system on a mandatory basis for all vampires entering the United States.

HHS

• Vampires will not fit within current human-oriented health administrative codes and regulations because, should they be granted full citizenship, they will have access to the national health care system. Their particular strength, lifespan, and sustenance needs would not fit into normal codes, and new ones must be developed, separate from human regulations to account for vampires’ unique condition. Medicare regulations will have to be severely restricted to vampires, as their life span is known to be far longer than average unaffiliated humans. Medicaid will also require adjustments, as human diseases afflict vampires to a far lesser extent.
• In order to avoid any violent public backlash or outcry against vampires, the Department of Health and Human Services will publish an education campaign to inform the public about the honest intent of the vampire population to openly acculturate. The medical community will receive education on how to treat vampires, how to treat unwilling participants in vampirism, and will receive educational literature for public diffusion on what vampirism is and how it affects the body both positively and negatively.
• In order to protect the US human population from becoming an unwilling food source to vampires, Health and Human Services will provide policy for the distribution and sale of human and animal blood to support the nutritional needs of the vampire population.
• It is recommended that grants and funding be provided for the essential task of medical research into vampirism and related health concerns. Currently there is no known cure or treatment for vampirism. Research must be done into potential vaccines and cures for vampirism in order to assure the general public that options are available if accidental contraction occurs.

I can't find State's response, although as I recall it involved the potential for a separate state solution to the vampire problem. Also, several of the organization expressed concern over the extension of social services to vampires; Social Security, military and civil service promotion and retirement, and other program would have to be substantially changed.

Altogether, it was a very professional and carefully considered set of responses to an absurd question.

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Graduation Day!

Today was graduation day at Patterson. For lack of anything better to post, below is the graduation keynote that I delivered to the Spring 2009 graduates:

Congratulations to the graduating class, and thank you for asking me to speak. I’m not going to make any claims about the superiority of the Spring 2009 Patterson School graduating class over any other class. But let’s be frank; I don’t need to. They’ve already sufficiently demonstrated their wisdom…

Graduation speeches are evaluated primarily on their brevity, so I’ll keep things short. Tonight I’ll only talk about two things; the first is service, and the second is myself.

A commitment to service binds all Patterson classes together, and by that I mean all Patterson classes that have been, and all that are to come. When someone decides to come to the Patterson School, they sketch out for themselves a career of service to their community, to their government, to something larger than themselves. Our students go on to work in the government, in the intelligence community, in non-governmental organizations, and in major companies around the world. In so doing, they take responsibility for making the world work; taking responsibility is, after all, what service is about. We live in a world of financial crises, terrible poverty, terrorism, cylons, piracy, and trade disputes, and those are only the exciting bits, the tip of the iceberg. Our graduates tonight will be taking responsibility for all of that, along with the daily grind that constitutes making policy in government, in an NGO, or at a private company. Our graduates, in short, are taking responsibility for making the world run.

I don’t think that this commitment to service, this undertaking of responsibility, can be understood independently of an appreciation of Kentucky. Kentucky is about community; circles of community reaching from family to town to county to state to nation. How this sense of community works can be mystifying, even maddening to an outsider like myself, but there’s no doubt that it exists. I think that this sense of community, and the commitment to service it produces, infuses everything that we do at the Patterson School. We’re not simply a school of foreign policy; we’re a school of foreign policy in Kentucky, and that distinction means something for what our graduates will do.

And so, what has all this meant to me? For four years, I’ve had the privilege of teaching at the Patterson School, and I’ve found it the most rewarding part of my career. If someone asked me, I’d say that teaching Patterson students is, I think, the most important thing that I’ve ever done. But I would also have to say that my attachment, and my enthusiasm, has thus far been detached; I’ve approached Patterson in an analytical sense, detached from the personal.

This has been a luxury of (relative) youth. As some of you know, my wife and I are expecting two baby girls this summer. I expect that many things will change; one thing that has changed already is my appreciation of service, of the acceptance of responsibility that our students have undertaken. Because now it’s not just me; it’s my daughters as well. Now, when we send our students out into the world, they’re taking responsibility for making sure my daughters have the opportunity to grow up safe, healthy and prosperous. And that means that the success of our graduates tonight has, so to speak, become personal. And so as you, the graduates, go forth, I say with all seriousness: Do well.

I should also say that I will be deeply honored if, some 24 years from now, my daughters join you all as Patterson graduates. We’ll see.

Thank you, and congratulations again to our graduates.

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Top Gun: A Film that Never Loses its Relevance

Those who questioned my decision to include Top Gun in last year's Patterson School Fall Film Series must be scurrying for cover now:

A fighter pilot who headed the Navy in the Pacific and made a cameo appearance as a Tom Cruise foe in ''Top Gun'' has taken over as the top U.S. military commander in Asia and the Pacific.

Adm. Robert F. Willard assumed control of the U.S. Pacific Command in a Monday ceremony presided over by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who stopped in Hawaii en route to meetings in Japan and South Korea.

In the 1980s, Willard was the executive officer at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, also known as ''TOPGUN.''

Willard was a consultant and flight choreographer on the 1986 film ''Top Gun.'' He also portrayed a Soviet MiG-28 pilot who wore a black helmet and took on Cruise, who famously gave Willard's character ''the bird'' while flying upside-down above him.

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