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January 6 2025. As Congress convenes to certify the election of the incumbent nominee, violence sweeps through the streets of Washington DC and erupts across the nation. When the Capitol building is stormed, it becomes clear that the rioters who claim victory was stolen from the narrowly defeated candidate — a demagogue favoured by ultra-conservative Christians and conspiracists — are being aided on the ground by rogue members of the US army, backed by high-ranking generals.
This is the narrative devised by the Vet Voice Foundation — a veteran-focused non-profit organisation — for a simulation designed to stress-test the US government’s capacity to withstand an attempted coup involving active soldiers. Drawing on the real-events of the Capitol attack of January 6 2021 and invented scenarios, the exercise asks a bipartisan group of former politicians, diplomats, intelligence analysts and military personnel to review procedures for dealing with an organised insurrection. Role playing as a president and his advisers, they have just six hours to avert an all-out civil war.
War Game, a gripping documentary from the BBC’s Storyville, follows the participants as they try to resolve this carefully constructed crisis. While the presence of cameras and White House replica sets bring a touch of theatricality to proceedings, everyone taking part is fully committed to the exercise. Given the first-hand experience of some of those present — such as former secretary of the army Louis Caldera and ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok — this feels like a privileged glimpse at how things might actually play out in the Situation Room.
Not only do the participants have to quell the escalating insurrectionist violence on the ground, but they also have to confront a tide of online disinformation, juggle contradictory intelligence briefings and balance security concerns with the political fallout of potentially deploying federal troops. All the while, their every decision is being watched in the room next door by the game’s developers.
Punctuating the exercise are illuminating interviews in which these veterans-cum-consultants provide real-world context for their fictional military coup. What they personally witnessed while serving, they say, is the pervasiveness of disillusionment and attendant rise of right-wing extremism among soldiers. That one-fifth of those charged after the 2021 riots had a military background, they suggest, is a warning of potentially bigger, more organised uprisings to come.
Yet while both the simulation and documentary raise urgent questions about the stability of American democracy, it leaves little time to propose solutions to systemic issues or analyse what went wrong in 2021. The exercise itself ends, rather abruptly, with a stirring presidential address that could have concluded an episode of The West Wing. Still, with just a month to go until what has already been an election cycle marked by division, discord and violence, it is reassuring to know there are conscientious people preparing for “the unthinkable”.
★★★★☆
On BBC iPlayer now