How did the 2024 University of Pennsylvania civil‑war tabletop exercise model escalation steps, and what safeguards did it recommend?
Executive summary
The October 2024 tabletop exercise run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) modeled a plausible escalation ladder that began with a high‑profile, unpopular federal law‑enforcement action in a major city and progressed through legal and operational attempts to federalize state forces into an armed federal–state confrontation; CERL’s public materials frame the exercise as yielding “key takeaways” about those escalation dynamics and the need to shore up institutions [1] [2] [3]. Public reporting describes the scenario’s trigger points and downstream risks in specific terms, but CERL’s published summaries do not release a full playbook of recommended procedural safeguards, so some recommended remedies must be inferred from CERL’s after‑action framing and established interagency best practices cited in the exercise literature [2] [3] [4].
1. How the exercise defined the initiating trigger and immediate political effects
The exercise foregrounded a single, catalytic move: a president orders a highly unpopular federal law‑enforcement operation in a major city—reporting cites Philadelphia in the simulation—and that act both provokes local outrage and raises questions about legal authority, immediately polarizing public opinion and increasing the risk that state officials will resist federal orders [1] [5] [6]. Multiple outlets emphasize that the scenario intentionally mirrored real‑world 2024 operations that prompted intense public backlash, because such operations create the political condition—delegitimization of federal action—that the tabletop treated as the primary escalation engine [7] [8].
2. How escalation from law‑enforcement action to federal military involvement was modeled
CERL’s exercise mapped the mechanics by which domestic law enforcement escalates into a militarized federal response: after the unpopular operation, the simulated president attempts to federalize the state National Guard and to reassign or place federal forces in local policing roles, an action that the exercise shows can trigger a jurisdictional collision with state authorities and produce confrontations on the ground [1] [2]. Public summaries recount that scenarios included the federal mobilization of National Guard units and even active‑duty forces to “reestablish law, order and public safety,” illustrating a sequential logic from enforcement operation to troop deployments and contested control of policing [2].
3. How the exercise modeled the dynamics of protest, violence, and armed conflict
Once jurisdictional and political lines hardened in the simulation, the exercise modeled iterative escalation: protests and local resistance to federal operations—amplified by politicized messaging and breakdowns in command relationships—could produce isolated violent clashes that, if mishandled, cascade into broader armed encounters between state and federal units or between armed civilians and federal forces [3] [6]. Media coverage distilled the exercise’s central warning: ICE‑style raids or other enforcement actions that lack local consent can become focal points for armed confrontation when backed by military assets, a dynamic CERL presented as a plausible pathway to sustained conflict [7] [8].
4. What CERL publicly recommended or emphasized as necessary safeguards
CERL’s public output positions the exercise as a warning and educational tool and emphasizes the need for institutional remedies—legal clarity, stronger civilian oversight, and planning to avoid federal–state command collisions—but the publicly available summaries and coverage provide only high‑level “key takeaways” rather than a detailed checklist of operational safeguards [2] [3]. Where CERL’s findings are silent on granular prescriptions, established interorganizational exercise doctrine (as practiced in U.S. tabletop formats) underscores familiar safeguards: pre‑defined legal rules for troop employment, robust civil‑military coordination, and procedures to preserve civilian control and minimize use‑of‑force escalations—principles consistent with interagency best practices highlighted in USIP guidance and reflected in CERL’s emphasis on preparing for “worst‑case” scenarios [4] [3].
5. Limits of the public record and competing interpretations
Reporting reproduces CERL’s scenario and warnings widely but also shows variation in emphasis—some outlets stress imminent civil‑war risk while CERL frames the exercises as preparatory and diagnostic—so public narrative can conflate simulation outcomes with prediction; crucially, CERL’s publicly posted summaries and the op‑eds citing them do not publish the full exercise transcripts or a detailed, enumerated set of recommended procedural safeguards, leaving analysts to triangulate from CERL’s takeaways and established interagency norms [1] [2] [3]. This gap means reporting can accurately describe the modeled escalation ladder (trigger → federalization attempt → jurisdictional clash → potential armed confrontation) but cannot definitively list every safeguard CERL proposed beyond its broad calls for legal clarity, coordination, and preparedness [2] [3].