Red team

What it is

Your team is about to approve a plan. First you hand it to a separate group with one job: break it. That group is a red team. Its members did not write the plan. They argue the other side, play the competitor or the regulator and hunt for facts the authors set aside. They bring back a short list of ways the plan fails, each with its evidence.

Where it comes from

Red teaming has no single inventor. It has three roots.

The name comes from war games. In 1812 Georg Leopold von Reisswitz built an early version of Kriegsspiel, a Prussian table-top war game. The Prussian army adopted the game in 1824. It started the habit of having someone play the enemy, and play to win. In American military and intelligence writing, your side is "blue" and the enemy "red". A 2009 US government handbook, A Tradecraft Primer, says analysts normally work from the "blue" side, the friendly forces. A red team "attempts to work in the environment of the hostile forces."

The written method comes from intelligence work. The same handbook describes two techniques that businesses now blend. In Devil's Advocacy (page 17), when everyone agrees, someone builds the best case for an alternative. In Red Team Analysis (page 31), analysts think like the enemy to avoid "mirror-imaging": assuming an opponent weighs a decision the way you would.

Training came later, after failure. The Pentagon reviewed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and found that officers were not questioning their own assumptions. So in 2004 the US Army opened the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth to train red teams. The Army later said it would stop funding the school from 1 October 2021 and move its $2.5 million budget elsewhere. The main book on red teams is Micah Zenko's Red Team (2015). He follows them through the military, intelligence services, the New York police and private firms.

What it corrects

Picture a team that has worked on one decision for four months. They are not careless. They know the objections they thought of and have an answer to each. But they read each new fact for one thing: does it fit the plan? Facts that fit count for more than facts that do not. The handbook's authors call this a dominant mind-set. They warn that people then tend to dismiss contrary facts or give them too little weight.

Asking the team to try harder does not fix this. They would only dig deeper into questions they already asked. Someone has to be given the job of finding where the plan fails, and be allowed to succeed.

How it works

1. Write down the recommendation and, under it, the assumptions it needs.
2. Pick a challenger from outside the team that wrote the plan. Their job: break it.
3. Choose the weakest-looking assumptions, written down or not. Rate the evidence for each: strong, thin or missing.
4. Play one opponent: a competitor, a regulator or a lender. Write their move in their words.
5. Report one finding: how the plan fails, and which risk was treated as too small.
6. Answer it: keep, change or drop the plan. Note which evidence decided it.

Worked example

In summer 2002 the US military held a joint war game, Millennium Challenge 2002. It lasted three weeks, cost $250 million and involved 13,500 people. Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine lieutenant general, led the red force. With far weaker technology, he refused to fight the war blue had prepared for. He sent orders by motorcycle courier and light signals, so blue's surveillance missed them. When the blue fleet came within range, he struck first with missiles from ground launchers, commercial ships and low-flying planes. Speedboats packed with explosives joined in. In the game, nineteen ships sank, the aircraft carrier among them. "The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes," Van Riper said. He had found how the fleet could lose: masses of cheap weapons against a force that relied on its communications network.

The rest shows what happens when a red team is not allowed to win. The organisers refloated the sunken ships. They banned red from firing at V-22 Ospreys and C-130 planes, made it move its air defences and ruled out chemical weapons. Six days in, Van Riper stepped down. Blue won, as scripted.

In a Business Case Weekly case

The sharpest decision in the SoftBank case puts you on SoftBank's board in 2016. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, wants to buy the chip designer Arm for $32 billion, far above Arm's share price. That same year he is raising a $100 billion fund. A red team would not just say the price is high. It would name what SoftBank is betting on. Arm's strong position has to pay off in the coming computing boom, soon enough for SoftBank to afford the wait. It would ask which rivals must be wrong for that to hold. Then it would play a lender whose loan to SoftBank falls due before the bet pays off. The case asks what checks you would demand for your vote. The red team shows which failure those checks are for.

In your answer

• "The strongest attack on my recommendation is …, and it works through …"
• "That attack succeeds if … is true, so I need evidence that …"
• "If I play the competitor, its first move is …, and my plan answers it only by …"
• "I go ahead because … held up under attack / I change the plan because … changed my mind."

Common misuse

The common mistake is a challenge meeting where people raise only objections the plan already answers. From outside it looks like the real thing: a meeting, a chosen sceptic, a list, a plan that survives. So ask: could the challenger have won? What was the red team allowed to find? Could anything on its list have changed the decision? If nothing could, the game was fixed, as in Millennium Challenge. The second mistake is calling in a red team before there is a recommendation, so it does the thinking instead of testing it.

References

• Micah Zenko, "Millennium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and its Legacy", War on the Rocks, 5 November 2015. The worked example, by the author of the main book on red teams.
• US Government, A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis (March 2009). Devil's Advocacy on page 17, Red Team Analysis on page 31. The method itself, an evening's read.
• Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (Basic Books, 2015). Red teams that worked, and ones that were blocked.
• Bryce Hoffman, "U.S. Army Moves To Close Red Teaming University", 26 October 2020. What the Army built at Fort Leavenworth, and why it stopped funding it.