War Games: Thriving on Strategic Turbulence

On a wargame table, decisiveness is not about having the strongest pieces. It is about controlling tempo, upending assumptions, and making everyone else waste turns arguing over the rulebook. 

Confusion and shifting norms are conditions that states can leverage, not anomalies to eliminate. The goal is to shape the environment so rivals and partners are forced to reveal what they will support, tolerate, or contest, rather than remain passive observers. In practice, this preserves the initiator’s freedom of action while raising the costs others must pay to pursue their objectives, including time, money, and political capital. Military professionals use similar logic when confronting complex problems in war. U.S. military doctrine is explicit that operational art relies on creative thinking and that commanders should develop innovative, adaptive alternatives when conditions are uncertain and fluid. Competitive statecraft can reward the same mentality.

In the 20th century, the United States also explored turbulence as a signalling device rather than for territorial gains. Nixon’s controversial “madman” logic sought to widen the range of plausible American next moves so that adversaries perceived threats as more credible and concessions as more attractive. The approach rested on classic risk bargaining. Coercion can succeed without ultimately proving intent. It works by raising the perceived probability of intolerable outcomes, thereby pressuring others to yield before costs mount.

That mechanism can be seen today in at least two cases. Venezuela resembles a sudden stroke in an operational-level wargame, while Greenland resembles strategic, positional pressure.

Venezuela illustrates how high-impact action can change the environment. In early January, U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and transferred him to New York to face narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking charges. In game terms, it resembled an unexpected move that forced other players to adjust their posture and decide quickly what matters most. For Washington, it advanced timelines and set the agenda, forcing others to make rapid choices about what to trade off or hold firm. The event also signalled who has real leverage in the Western Hemisphere and the limits of rival influence. Russia and China had equities in Venezuela, but neither could prevent the seizure or reverse it. The episode highlighted limits on what and how they were willing to contest U.S. actions.

Greenland is different. In chess, a queenside threat can matter even if no capture follows. U.S. strategic interest in Greenland is not new and is based on its location and natural resources as well as a desire to deny it to competitors. The United States operates a space base in Greenland and China has pursued commercial footholds. Even if formal acquisition never occurs, Washington’s signalling expands the plausible future set of actions, forcing others to plan against uncomfortable contingencies. In doing so, it surfaces constraints, red lines, and bargaining positions.

If those two cases sound familiar to Asia-watchers, it is because China has made similar moves around its periphery for years below the threshold of open conflict. Its actions seek to reshape facts, erode confidence, and compel neighbours to respond on Beijing’s timeline. The shared logic is not ideology. It is competitive advantage through managed instability.

This is where emotional reactions can obscure analysis. Observers may dislike these moves for principled reasons, but an analytic lens asks questions. What incentives does turbulence create? What resources does it force others to spend? Where does it generate seams between allies, inside bureaucracies, and between rhetoric and capability? In that sense, upsetting the international order is not just a moral claim but also a description of method: shifting the baseline so everyone else must adapt under uncertainty.

Strategic turbulence does not work on autopilot, and slogans and soundbites are not enough. It works best when connected to objectives, credible means, and system capacity. Otherwise, disruption becomes indistinguishable from incoherence — inviting external countermeasures and internal bureaucratic drag that erode advantage.

None of this demands cheering or despair, but it requires clarity about tradeoffs. Turbulence can cause competitors to waste effort on contingency planning rather than optimising for their preferred path. Turbulence, however, taxes the initiator too. It can spend alliance trust faster than it accrues advantage. It can also backfire if institutions cannot maintain coherence and if the fog created for opponents eventually becomes a self-blinding haze.

Henry Yep is a senior intelligence officer and a China specialist with nearly 20 years of experience at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the inerpreter.