What do we do with the results? At Welt, we've turned them into this podcast, and you've hopefully so far enjoyed listening to it, but what does the research community take away from it? We put that question to our war game adjudication, our white cell, Philipp Jan Schäfer and Josef Werbovský, who run the German Wargaming Center at Helmut Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg.

What we primarily wanted to examine with this scenario was how decisions are made inside a simulated cabinet.

War games are not designed to recreate every aspect of reality.

If we had tried to model everything perfectly, we would never have discovered the blind spot we found.

The real question here was: How do people respond to an escalation they didn't even recognize as an escalation because they've never seen anything like it before?

Philipp Jan Schäfer believes this reflects a pattern that is typical of Germany

GermanyThe idea that the world should function according to rules-based order is a very German way of thinking.

We assume there are rules ideally rooted in international law, and if there aren't, we still believe we know how the other side will behave because we project our assumptions onto them.