Wargaming Your Plan: Red-Teaming Your Own Plan

Wargaming a protective plan is a structured adversarial review: someone on your team attacks the plan before the operation does. One teammate takes the adversary's seat, walks your timeline looking for the way in, and makes the rest of the team answer for every assumption. Before the brief, not after the incident.

This is a method a small team can run this week. It takes thirty to sixty minutes and no special tools or outside facilitator. What follows is one way to do it. Adapt it to your team.

Why plans that look complete fail

The first problem is that the author can't see their own assumptions. Whoever built the advance and operations plan made a hundred small judgment calls — the motorcade stages here, the walk takes four minutes, the venue contact will actually be at the door. Each one felt like a fact while it was being written. Assumptions don't announce themselves to the person who made them. They only surface when someone else pulls on them.

The second is that on a small team, the lead builds the plan and the lead approves the plan. That's the same set of blind spots reading the document twice, and calling it review.

And time pressure rewards agreement. The night before a movement, the path of least resistance is a nod. Nobody wants to be the one who reopens the route question at 2100, so the team confirms the plan instead of testing it, and the first real test happens on the X.

A plan that has only been read by the person who wrote it has not been reviewed. It has been proofread.

The method: a 30–60 minute tabletop

Run it before the brief, not during. The brief is for issuing the plan; the wargame is for breaking it.

Assign a red cell. One teammate whose only job for the next hour is to be the adversary. Give the role a name and permission to attack everything; devil's advocate as a mood isn't enough. Rotate the role between operations. The junior guy often finds what the lead can't, because he hasn't learned yet which questions the team stopped asking.

Walk the timeline action by action. Start at staging and move phase by phase to the last handoff. For each phase, red states what they would do to you right there. Blue (the rest of the team) states the response. Red counters the response. Then move to the next phase. That's the whole engine: action, reaction, counteraction, borrowed straight from military course-of-action wargaming. The military version fills a staff room; yours fills a tailgate. The logic is the same.

Blue answers with the plan, not with intentions. "We'd handle it" is not a response. Which vehicle, which agent, which route, on whose call. If the plan doesn't already contain the answer, write down that it doesn't.

Timebox it. Red can attack forever. Sixty minutes forces the fight to the phases that matter and keeps the session from becoming a planning do-over.

What red attacks first

A good red cell doesn't invent movie scenarios. They attack the load-bearing assumptions:

• Timing. What happens when the departure slips 40 minutes? Half of most plans quietly depend on the schedule holding. Walk the slipped timeline and watch which pieces fall over: the venue hold, the vehicle staging, the shift change you forgot overlaps.
• The choke points on the primary route. The bridge, the single-lane construction zone, the garage ramp. If the route survey didn't already flag them, red will.
• Single points of failure. One driver. One radio channel. One entrance everyone is using. Anything the plan uses exactly once with no backup is a target.
• The handoffs. Arrivals and departures — vehicle to foot, foot to venue, venue back to vehicle. Transitions are where responsibility is briefly nobody's, and that's where plans break.
• The medical plan. Does anyone on the team actually know the trauma route from the venue? Not the nearest hospital, the nearest one that can take a penetrating injury. If the answer lives in one person's head, it isn't a plan.
• What the team is not watching. Every plan concentrates attention somewhere. Red's last job is to name where it isn't — the second-floor windows, the service corridor, the crowd behind the press line.

Most likely and most dangerous

Borrowed from the same doctrine: define the adversary's most likely course of action and their most dangerous one. Plan against both. Resource against most likely — that's where your people, vehicles, and attention go. Then rehearse the branch to most dangerous, so the shift from one to the other is a decision someone has already made once, not a problem being solved live.

One boundary worth stating: this is planning, not actions under fire. Attack response is a different mission set that lives in SOPs and rehearsals, not in a tabletop.

The output is a short list, not a rewrite

If the wargame produces a new plan, the session ran too long or the plan was never ready. The output is three things:

• Changes. Specific, small, assigned. "Move the follow car to the north exit during the hold."
• Accepted risks, written down. Red found it, the team looked at it, the lead accepted it. Put it in the brief. An accepted risk that isn't written down isn't accepted; it's forgotten.
• Triggers and decision points. "If the departure slips past 30 minutes, we shift to the alternate route" is worth more than a third contingency nobody will remember.

The wargame doesn't make the plan perfect. It makes the plan's weaknesses known, and known weaknesses get watched.

Two people and a parking lot

You do not need a conference room or a sand table. Two agents with the route pulled up on a phone, one playing red, walking arrival to departure — that's a wargame. The discipline matters more than the format: a defined red role, phase by phase, answers from the plan.

Match the contingency depth to the team. For most small-team work that's a primary, an alternate, and maybe a third option for the movement that matters, not a full PACE ladder for every phase. Contingencies you can't rehearse or remember are decoration. And when the timeline gives you no room to wargame at all (the hasty advance problem), keep the red-cell question if nothing else. For each phase, ask once: "what would I do to us right here?"

Who owns the wargame

The team executing the mission wargames its own plan. Outside input (a peer from another detail, a manager, a former teammate) is worth having, but it supports the process rather than owning it, because the people on the ground are the ones who live with the assumptions. In protective work that means the agents own the route and the path, and the principal has final say over their own movement unless something is actively going wrong. The wargame doesn't change that arrangement. It makes sure the plan underneath it deserves the trust.