I have been looking a bit into the problem of enactment and war games. In so doing, a couple of interesting links came up, including to a couple first-order practitioners of war gaming, James F. Dunnigan and Kenneth Watman and to an article by James Der Derian at the Watson Institute that is worth a read. In our article on “Distributed Preparedness” Andy and I put forward the idea that imaginative enactment is one of the key techniques of a future oriented (rather than archive-oriented) form of knowledge about collective life. The war game story is clearly an important part of the genealogy of imaginative enactment. Civil defense was one point of transfer from military to civilian affairs. Certainly there are others.
As an aside, Der Derian’s website is very much worth checking out as an effort to produce some online space for security discussions.
Wargaming is a venerable technique for future-oriented forms of analysis. Another key methodology, developed primarily in the private sector, notably by Shell Oil’s Pierre Wack, is scenario-planning.
One of the questions that has interested us — which Nils may know something about — is where the private sector got this technique. As Andy and I have shown, there is an initial migration out of the military into civilian admininstration immediately after World War II in civil defense. So a question would be: is there any genealogical link between that trajectory of enactment and the history of scenario planning? Presumably the folks at Shell, brilliant though they no doubt must be, didn’t pull it out of the air.