Democracy prevailed on Jan. 6, 2021, but that doesn’t mean it can sustain a second, better coordinated attack during the next election cycle—an opinion shared by enough former and current government officials that they agreed to participate in a unique training exercise designed to “stress test our national security system.” Directors Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s War Game is a document of that role-playing drill, and what it suggests is that there are key areas of weakness at the local, state, and national levels (and, in particular, in our military) that might beget disaster, as well as that certain seemingly decisive countermeasures may do more harm than good. Unfortunately, what it also indicates is that a reactive response may be insufficient to deal with a rapidly escalating threat, thereby turning the film into non-fiction nightmare fuel.
As with Moss’ Boys State and Girls State, War Game (which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) is a portrait of a government simulation. This one was designed by non-partisan organization Vet Voice Foundation and carried out on Jan. 6, 2023, in close proximity to the site of the Donald Trump-instigated Capitol riots. Executed on stages with men and women from various service branches who are concerned about the United States’ readiness for a second attempted coup, it was an unscripted role-playing performance that was run by a collection of White Cell gamemasters and pitted a ”good guy” Blue Cell administration against a “bad guy” Red Cell insurrectionist movement determined to seize power through a multi-pronged campaign. The results, in the end, were nominally heartening. However, the lessons learned, and the dangers highlighted, were anything but comforting.
War Game’s make-believe scenario isn’t far removed from the recent past and immediate present. At the conclusion of the 2025 election, incumbent president John Hotham (played by Montana governor Steve Bullock) narrowly defeats his rival Robert Strickland (Chris Coffey), a fascistic Trump proxy, who immediately contests the results.
On the day that Congress gathers to certify the electoral votes, all hell breaks loose courtesy of a militant group loyal to Strickland called the Order of Columbus which convinces thousands of protestors to gather on the National Mall and face off against law enforcement. Almost immediately, these extremists breach a security checkpoint with the aid of two DC Guardsmen units that choose to betray their oaths and side with Strickland and his supporters. This is the first step in a spiraling breakdown of the American military, with soldiers in various states eventually opting to follow rogue commanders and “constitutional sheriffs” in order to seize control of legislatures and prevent Hotham from remaining in office.
Produced by Vet Voice Foundation’s Janessa Goldbeck, a former Marine, this exercise is predicated on a terrifyingly real premise: namely, that revolutionary militias have specifically and successfully recruited active military personnel to their cause. They’ve done this by using armed forces veterans and conspiracy theory-addled propaganda to prey on their disillusionment and anger, and thus when Hothman is informed that 7 percent of DC Guardsmen have joined the insurrections, the notion sounds plausible. Much of War Game’s action revolves around questions of containment and neutralization, yet what it indicates is that we should be doing whatever we can to identify and weed out terrorist agents in our ranks today so that such a situation doesn’t materialize in the first place.
While the U.S. military appears to be in grave need of a MAGA-cleansing colonoscopy, Vet Voice Foundation’s exercise assumes that it’s too late for such a purge. Its focus is on Hothman’s effort to process a multitude of intensifying factors and to weigh the various strategic ideas and proposals presented to him by his advisors. Those come fast and furiously throughout War Game, and though Bullock’s commander-in-chief takes a level-headed and prudent approach to managing this crisis, he’s so contemplative that he and his staffers are constantly behind the curve, trying to play catch-up to each new, harrowing development, from local law enforcement defections to hostage stand-offs. By wreaking havoc on the ground, army veteran Kris Goldsmith’s insurrectionist Red Cell keeps the president so busy that he doesn’t have the bandwidth to simultaneously cope with the enemy’s flood of incendiary social-media disinformation.
As things go from bad to worse and the pressure mounts, Hotham is forced to contend with the “nuclear” option of invoking the Insurrection Act, which gives the president the power to deploy military and National Guard troops on American soil. In an emergency such as the one devised by Vet Voice Foundation, using this law would allow Hotham to forcefully put down the Strickland-led revolt. The problem, ostensibly, is that doing so would likely feed into the insurrectionists’ narrative about the federal government’s tyrannical overreach and inflame an already combustible state of affairs. Behind the scenes, the gamemasters routinely remark that resorting to the Insurrection Act is a last-gasp bad idea, but no one makes a truly convincing argument that this is the case. Consequently, the way that this fantasy turns out (for the better) feels, in light of the preceding madness, a tad too easy.
Given that the drill’s participants are servicepeople rather than actors, War Game’s drama is often stilted and its suspense fizzles out at the moment it should crescendo. Still, its analysis of our military’s extremist elements is unnervingly persuasive, as is Goldsmith’s frightening discussion about his own experience grappling with the sort of post-tour-of-duty disillusionment that motivates gung-ho G.I. Joes to flip allegiances and partner with domestic terrorist outfits. Moss and Gerber’s doc has just enough space to address that worrisome trend but offers no answers for how to combat it. Nonetheless, in raising some of the questions that desperately need to be asked before next January, it serves as an urgent warning about the fact that the barbarians are at the gates, that we may be ill-equipped to recognize them until it’s too late, and that it’s increasingly apparent that the United States isn’t immune from being torn asunder by destabilizing forces cultivated right in its own backyard.
