Pentagon holds war game simulating world financial crisis

[amyrose2712]

Two weeks before the April 2 economic summit of 20 leading capitalist countries in London, the American military held a war game simulating a concerted financial attack on the United States. The two-day event was held March 17-18 near Ft. Meade, Maryland, according to report published Thursday by the web site politico.com.

Three participants discussed the first-ever financial crisis war game with the web site, describing how they sat “along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data.” One participant described the experience as “a little bit like Dr. Strangelove.”

(snip)

Among the eventualities examined in the war game were the collapse of North Korea, a US blockade of Iran, Russian manipulation of natural gas prices, and increasing tension between China and Taiwan, leading to China dumping some of its US dollar holdings. A group of referees dubbed the “White Cell” decided what the impact of the moves by each team would be.

According to politico.com, “At the end of the two days, the Chinese team emerged as the victors of the overall game-largely because the Russian and American teams had made so many moves against each other that they damaged their own standing to the benefit of the Chinese.”

Bracken told politico.com that the war game shed light on the connection between political-military events, like the US embargo of Iran, and the economic consequences , and also demonstrated that China could successfully sell off at least a portion of its dollar assets, undermining the financial standing of the United States, without wiping out its own reserves.

(snip)

In delivering the “annual threat assessment” coordinated by the DNI across 16 separate US intelligence agencies, Blair was setting aside the Bush administration’s professed obsession with Al Qaeda, as well as more traditional security concerns with Russia and China, to suggest that “the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications” constituted a greater danger.

He described the financial crisis in apocalyptic terms, as “the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries,” and cited the possibility that economic turmoil could produce political instability and “high levels of violent extremism,” not only in the Middle East and South Asia, but in Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union.

Only a month after this blunt warning of the threat of social revolution, the Pentagon held its exercise simulating the geo-strategic impact of the crisis on relations among the great powers. It is only logical to assume that similar exercises, albeit unpublicized, are being conducted to prepare the US military forces to repress revolutionary uprisings of the working class both abroad and at home.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/game-a13.shtml

[blindpig]

1. K&R n/t

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

2. Uh oh.

Vigilant Guardian 2?