Natesh said, “Please use your area of expertise where it is helpful, but be flexible and open to new ideas. Try not to say `that won’t work’ too much. Use the people around you to find out new ways that it can work. Think about the links from one activity to another. Try to help figure out all of the possible connections and solutions. I will help out with this more as we go. Thanks, and I look forward to working with you all.”

Lena said, “Thank you Natesh. Today, we’ll go over what we, as representatives of our country, know to be true right now. Our big-picture goal for week one is to identify potential vulnerabilities. The goal of week two is to plan out how to best take action to capitalize on those vulnerabilities.”

A deep voice from the back of the room spoke up, “Are we going to be planning the actual defenses too?”

Lena looked up and cocked her head. She spoke with the effortless rhythm of someone who had done a thousand public speaking events. “Could you please state your name and your background?”

The man cleared his throat. “Sure. Sorry. Uhum. My name is Bill Stanley. I’m a defense contractor. I work on satellite connections to drones and reconnaissance aircraft. And I’m retired Air Force.”

Lena said, “Excellent. Mr. Stanley, welcome to the island and thank you for your service. To answer your question, we want you to help build out a potential Chinese attack plan with your knowledge of what the expected American response would look like. We want you to plan around that as if you are really trying to win the war for the Chinese. Some of you have actually worked on counter-terrorism plans. Some of you have worked on plans to counter “what-if” scenarios...like if North Korea invaded the South or if China invaded Taiwan. But ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be different.”

She clicked a remote control in her hand and a large flat screen monitor in the front of the room went from a black screen to a map of the Pacific Rim.

“The short answer to Mr. Stanley’s question is no. We are not here to plan our nation’s defense. Some of you might have good ideas about this and could even be considered experts...but that isn’t why you are here. We want you to play the bad guy. If we brought you in to this project to also plan the defense, you’d be thinking of problems at the same time you would be thinking of solutions and you wouldn’t be as good at creating attack plans. At least that’s what our psychologists have told us.” She gave a nod to the grey-haired man in the second row who nodded back. Apparently, he was a psychologist.

She clicked on the remote and the screen changed to a black map of the United States with a bunch of different sized blue dots scattered throughout.

“Anyone know what this is?” she asked.