The Enemy Within
By Gavin Smith
War Game
Dir. Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, U.S., Submarine Deluxe
The QAnon Shaman will surely go down in history as the most prominent avatar of the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His now-iconic presence irresistibly suggests, at least to me, that there’s another way to frame the mayhem of that day. Among many other things—riot, insurrection, insurgency, call it what you will—was it not, for at least some participants, in some small part, also a clueless macho cosplay session gone wildly out of control?
Cosplay abounds in War Game. The ironic dichotomy of the film’s very title invokes it: war, a deadly serious undertaking, for sure; game, fun!—with nothing truly at stake. Understandably the film’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, aren’t interested in the inherently comic potential of their material, even if they cite Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as an influence. After all, people, this is no laughing matter.
Exactly what material are Moss and Gerber dealing with? On one level War Game is a kind of making-of, taking us behind the scenes of a secret national security exercise organized by Vet Voice, a nonprofit military veterans’ organization. Vet Voice took its cue from a Washington Post op-ed by three U.S. Army Generals, who voiced concern about extremism in the ranks, speculated that a future insurrection might involve members of the military, and recommended that the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security should conduct a war game to address these issues. The ensuing (unscripted) exercise runs through a scenario set in the not-at-all distant future, on January 6, 2025. The premise of the game? What if January 6th was just an amateur-hour dry run—and when Congress next convenes to certify the election results, this time the insurrection will be highly organized and playing for keeps? Vet Voice went to work, and the result was a six-hour real-time role-play session succinctly described as “coup prevention 101.”
We’re back in the realm of cosplay. The exercise’s gamers run the gamut from formerly elected officials from both political parties, and a host of mostly retired professionals from state and federal government, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the National Security Council, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army. These 16 officials get to play (nameless) members of the U.S. President’s cabinet and advisors. Steve Bullock, former Governor of Montana gets to be POTUS, former North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp is his hawkish senior advisor, former Alabama Senator Doug Jones gets to be Attorney General, retired General Wesley Clark gets promoted to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and so on.
The film divides its attention between three groups. In this corner: the White House Situation Room, where President Hotham, recently re-elected by a margin of 6/10ths of one percent, convenes his cabinet and national security advisors. In the opposing corner: the far-right Red Cell, composed of a handful of beardy-bro ex-military operatives hunkered down with their laptops in their secret basement, coordinating efforts to overturn the election certification and install narrowly defeated, patently right-wing presidential candidate Robert Strickland. And ringside, in a control room designated White Cell, the game-masters run and monitor the exercise, occasionally serving as a Greek chorus.
Moss and Gerber’s pre-credits sequence follows a couple of those beardy dudes play-acting recon in D.C., and right away the premonitory music kicks in, as if War Game were a suspense thriller, which I suppose it is in a way. (In grand 007 tradition, a digital clock countdown alerts participants that they’ve only six hours and counting to avert civil war!) The Red Cell leader outlines the plans in slightly grandiose sub-Bond villain style: “This is going to be the most high-viz area, so this is where we’re gonna want people seeing U.S. troops gunning down patriotic Americans…. The key is trying to lure the response team into Virginia and then cut the bridges… All of our insiders are in the D.C. Guard, correct?”
War Game’s score sets the tone for the next 94 minutes as the scenario’s events unfold, and it’s symptomatic of the film’s hybrid status. With six DPs, War Game takes a loose vérité approach to the debate and deliberation in the Situation Room, which gets the lion’s share of coverage, and the Red Cell bad-guy basement. But Moss and Gerber also freely shock-cut to video footage and images from January 6, 2021, and they do this, I think, not so much to supply historical referents, but more to pump up the sense of crisis and make the exercise more concrete. In effect, the actual insurrectionists are co-opted by War Game to represent the bad actors in the game model’s hypothetical scenario. Are these dupes fair game? Tell that to Ashli Babbitt: War Game revisits the footage of her being shot dead at close quarters by a Capitol Police Officer and follows it with shout-outs to Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State to illustrate the Red Cell’s conception of martyrdom as a recruitment tool.
The film also interpolates the action with interviews with a range of Situation Room participants and key Vet Voice people who recount their personal backstories and how they got from an alienated there to an engaged here. Chief among them is Iraq war veteran Kris Goldsmith, one of Vet Voice’s prime movers, who does double duty in War Game as the Red Cell leader and strategist who orchestrates the insurgency/coup (mainly, it would seem, by churning out disinformation via social media posts and deep fake video clips e.g., Antifa rounding up insurrectionists). In his interview, it is Goldsmith who sounds the loudest alarm about the infiltration of the U.S. military by far-right extremists, men who might “break their oaths,” by disobeying Presidential orders. His concern is that “service members and veterans are very specifically being targeted with disinformation that is meant to make them question the legitimacy of commander-in-chief.” (In the course of the exercise, the FBI estimates that seven percent of the 3,900-strong D.C. National Guard are bad apples.)
Just how bad are these apples? In the game’s scenario, Red Cell are the arrow point of a fictitious Sovereign Citizen movement called the Order of Columbus, whose members are “knights” led by a quasi-religious figure referred to as “the patriarch”—a renegade Lieutenant General named Roger Simms and not-so-subtly modeled on former General and “convicted felon” Mike Flynn (cue clip of Flynn stirring up the crowd on the night before January 6). Invented by Goldsmith as what he calls “a mishmash of real extremist movements,” the Order of Columbus is, per the exercise’s FBI Director, “founded on the belief that the founders established the United States based on biblical interpretation and that therefore the existing government is largely not legitimate.” Simms is one of a handful of roles in the exercise played by actual actors, since presumably no self-respecting former government official or military officer would want to step into those shoes. Much like Alex Garland’s Civil War, the pre-credit sequence concludes with Simms recording a bombastic tele-prompted address calling on the members of the armed forces to join him in the battle “to defend our liberty and land with faith and purpose.” (“Should I be friendlier?” he says after completing a take—and symptomatic of the film’s light ambiguity, we aren’t initially sure if the question comes from Simms or the actor playing him.)
To be sure, Vet Voice have fully imagined their bad guys (not a stretch) but the initial insistence that this be a “non-partisan” endeavor quickly goes up in smoke. Before the exercise even begins, Goldsmith briefs two actors playing Red Cell operatives that “in the simulation we’re the real chaos agents and you guys are like the Bannon/Stone figures.” And among the game consultants is retired Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who was fired by Trump after testifying in his first impeachment proceeding in 2019. Likewise, Peter Strzok, who plays the FBI Director, is a former FBI agent who denounced Trump as “a counter-intelligence nightmare.”
So, what does this prequel to Civil War envisage as a possible scenario for a coup d’état? It’s a fast-moving threat landscape, people, and shit gets serious. As in January 2021, thousands of protestors converge on the Capitol to prevent the election’s certification, facing off against law enforcement and special guest stars the D.C. National Guard. Renegade guardsmen help protestors breach a security checkpoint, while social media disseminates unverifiable images of violence and casualties. Television airs Lieutenant General Simms’s video urging the military to disregard any orders from POTUS. Protestors in Texas, Colorado, Michigan, and Pennsylvania besiege state capitols. The Arizona State Senate is over-run and its elected officials taken hostage behind a defensive perimeter manned by civilian militia, rogue military personnel, and law enforcement. MacDill Air Force Base in Florida is seized by a dozen special ops soldiers. Ammunition and weapons theft from military armories in some cases results in standoffs between loyal and disloyal forces. Chatter attempts to spread the insurrection to other bases. Simms orders all constitutional sheriffs and OC knights to report to their nearest military posts to support insurgents. Order of Columbus members assemble in front of the Michigan Governor’s mansion. Governors of Michigan and North Carolina mobilize National Guard and, along with Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania, request mobilization of federal support, i.e., the U.S. military.
Damn, what’s a President to do? In this case, Bullock, a reassuringly mild presence, listens calmly for a good 70 minutes as his advisors and cabinet members bombard him with reports, advice, and recommendations and argue amongst themselves. In the initial stages of this coup, it’s the dilemma of avoiding either under-reacting or overreacting. But ultimately it all comes down to the Insurrection Act of 1807 (which the Oath Keepers urged Trump to invoke in 2019, and which President Bush did at the request of the Governor of California in 1992 during the Rodney King riots). First brought up at the 33-minute mark, the act is described by gamemaster Ben Radd, from the sidelines, as “a nuclear option.” Its invocation authorizes the federalization of the National Guard, the deployment of U.S. military on domestic soil, and the suspension of certain civil rights in order to maintain national peace, using lethal force if necessary. Any drastic backfire is all on POTUS. Heitkamp bluntly states that invoking the act “basically says our democracy is failing.”
To invoke or not to invoke—that is the crux of the film, as it slowly builds to this decisive moment. “This is going to be a defining moment of your presidency,” one advisor says. “The Insurrection Act is a trap” insists another. “Your audience is the American public and they want to know that Congress is coming back to certify,” maintains a third. Meanwhile the Red Cell team, whose strategy is to lure the government into over-responding to events real or fake, are keeping their fingers tightly crossed—they’re all about escalation and over-reaction.
The suspense should be agonizing—but for all War Game’s would-be turn-of-the-screw thriller tactics, somehow it isn’t. In part it’s because Moss and Gerber can’t quite decide what their film is about. At just past its midpoint, War Game unexpectedly veers somewhat off topic to give us a reminder of the events of 2021 (as if we needed one), and the reaction of Goldsmith, who it turns out was present at the Capitol insurrection in some undefined journalistic capacity. This leads to a discussion of his experience fighting the Iraq insurgency, and then Radd is brought in to share his childhood memories of the Iranian Revolution. Where is this going? Is it intended as a break from the situation room cosplay?
In the end what the filmmakers seem to want to leave you with—the film’s real topic, slipped in with two closing titles—is the conundrum of insider infiltration of the military. War Game somberly reports that nearly one in five defendants in the Capitol insurrection were military veterans and that legislation to tackle extremism in the ranks failed to gain bipartisan support in Congress. Sobering stuff in a sobering film. Moss and Gerber certainly can’t be accused of alarmism.