Topic: Wargaming For Leaders
Russia's President Medvedev took less than 24 hours (see post below, number 2) to show his hand. Besides setting up a change in their laws that would permit Putin, his likely successor, to have successive 6 year vice 4 year terms, he laid out their response to a US deployment of Missile Defense systems to Poland and Czech. The response is to position some unspecified number of Iskander mobile SRBMs to Kaliningrad. For those who are not familiar with missiles and missile defense, SRBMs can be launched at various trajectories. If they are close they can use a suppressed trajectory, which would give a missile defense system little time and less opportunity to intercept an attack, not to mention shooting sufficient numbers to overwhelm a sparse deployment. To use a chess metaphor, this proposed SRBM deployment is Zugswang.
Zugswang puts your opponent in a position that no matter what they do they hurt their position, usually leading to checkmate. The United States either uses this situation to alter or cancel the missile defense deployment embarrassing our Allies (Poland and Czech) and diminishing our stature or we continue on with the deployment escalating the situation further.
Hopefully all of these moves and countermoves were considered before we went down this path. If not, it would have been easy to wargame and sort through. Clearly this situation has got a ways to go before it is resolved.
