ABSTRACT
Can red teaming be used to preclude adversarial surprise?1This is the question that lies behind every war game. The effort to find unanticipated outcomes is the primary purpose for attempting to recreate the strategic interaction that constitutes war and other types of conflict. But because red teaming is based on the assumption that conflict is a strategic interaction (i.e., outcomes are determined by the interaction of at least two opponents), it encounters some fundamental limits when used as a tool to anticipate surprise. Surprise, as it approximates its ideal type, transforms war from a strategic contest into a matter of administration.2 For some period of time and over some part of the globe, surprise can literally eliminate the blue team from the contest, allowing red to operate completely unopposed. Surprise allows one side in a conflict to reach the theoretical potential of a military action. The element of surprise enables asymmetric attacks and by itself can yield asymmetric results. Surprise made it possible to destroy the World Trade Center with the aid of only a box cutter in less than two hours.
