I’d heard about wargaming for a long time, always assuming it was a research method reserved for think tanks, governments, and the military — something I never imagined I could take part in myself.

The wargame I took part in this time was a civilian-oriented version designed by KTT’s public-education wargaming program, run as a dedicated session for Gang-Hu Civil Defense Corps by the Taiwan Institute for Defense Research.

Letting the public take part in a wargame helps people understand the military better — especially from a more macro perspective of resources, service branches, and government decision-making — rather than just arguing over weapons, bombing, and offensive-versus-defensive advantage.

The whole wargame ran with twenty participants plus a facilitator and three assistants, with each of the twenty people playing a different role. The civilian version plays like a large-scale board game, with clear rules, missions, resource constraints, and a turn-based structure. And since it’s a game experience, it has clear objectives too.

In this public-education wargame, Taiwan’s objective was to maintain the will to resist. The PLA’s objective wasn’t to occupy Taiwan — it was to destroy Taiwan’s will to resist.

In other words, under extreme conditions, even if many areas were occupied, as long as Taiwan still had enough will to resist by the time the game’s set number of turns ran out, that counted as a win.

This actually reflects reality. If you compare pure military strength — troop numbers, weapon counts — Ukraine and Russia are simply not in the same league. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches its fourth year, Ukraine is still fighting hard, and hasn’t collapsed or let Russia achieve its original military objectives.

During the game, because of the time pressure of each turn and the resource constraints, tunnel vision really does set in easily — everyone’s limited attention narrows down to just the mission they’re responsible for. It’s just like the real world: everyone only has 24 hours, everyone’s focus and thinking has its limits — and whatever exceeds that limit just gets ignored.

Conflict tends to start exactly this way — not getting resources you feel you deserve, feeling undervalued, or being unable to properly complete your own part.

I didn’t come away with any real ideas for resolving conflict. All I could do, for now, was trust that everyone working alongside me was working toward the same goal.

Our Gang-Hu session actually didn’t stick strictly to the six-minute-per-turn limit, because the organizers led our discussion so conscientiously — otherwise we probably would have ended up in complete chaos, arriving at some result without ever understanding why.

Even though most participants had already spent time reading the briefing materials and manual beforehand, in the moment there were still plenty of questions that needed help from the facilitator and assistants.

I’d recommend that any group interested in participating set aside enough time — three hours is nowhere near enough. At most, it’s enough for a warm-up round just to get familiar with how the game works. A real wargame, one where you can actually work through strategic discussion and response, probably needs something like 3+6 hours.

Either way, this wargame experience showed me the challenges and the real complexity that an administrative team has to face. Whenever I now see news or articles that oversimplify and jump to conclusions, I can face them more calmly, knowing that reality is far more complicated than that.

And as someone preparing for civil defense, the biggest significance of the wargame for me was seeing the role I might play within the larger system. As it happened, the role I played was the “fifth column,” which in the scenario had two main objectives: sabotaging infrastructure, and guiding PLA strikes. Sabotaging infrastructure mostly means causing shortages of daily necessities — water, power, communications, basic supplies — in order to break the public’s will to resist. Civil defense probably can’t stop fifth-column sabotage at its source, and right now it’s also hard to respond in the moment it happens. But civil defense groups can help the public get prepared, so that when these situations occur, people avoid being caught up and affected by them — reducing how much these acts of sabotage can actually damage the public’s morale.

If civilian self-reliance improves, and losing water, power, or the internet no longer throws society into chaos (or only causes panic in a smaller portion of the population), then the fifth column’s strikes will struggle to have any real impact — and the government can focus more fully on the military threat, without being forced by limited resources into difficult choices between internal chaos and external defense.