This is John Bachelor, a conversation with Cliff May, the president and founder of the Foundation for the Defense of democracies,

recently returned from Taiwan, where he participated in a tabletop game, war game about the possible scenarios of China, the People's

Republic of China attacks Taiwan. What is to be done? The object of the game is not to win or lose but to develop scenarios and to think

about them before they happen. Cliff outlines what those scenarios look like for the Taiwanese.

None of them are attractive.

All of them are possible.

When? No one knows.

Cliff May, Foundation for the Defense of democracies, on the threat to Taiwan, on a tabletop exercise,

and each of the exercises scenarios ends in extreme tragedy. Here's Cliff. They think it's a

real and serious threat. They don't know whether it's imminent. They don't know how it might be carried out. That was part of what we were there to do. We staged with them what sometimes called tabletop exercises or war games.

Essentially what it means is you look at contingencies. You have different groups playing the China,

playing shejing ping, his role, playing the chijing ping his role playing the role of the Taiwan government playing the role of the US.

You do you move a piece on the chessboard and you see what the reactions are and how it goes.

Admiral Mark Montgomery, who is a very important person at FDD and Craig Singleton, they both helped design the war game with someone from the military

war college, the Marine War College, Ben Jensen, very brilliant guy.

Let me try to summarize it really quick. You want to look not just at the most dangerous

scenarios, but also at the most likely scenario. So yes, you could have a cross-strait amphibious

invasion and missiles dropping dropping but you could also

have cyber warfare so suddenly nobody can get their money out of the bank so suddenly

you can't communicate between the government and the reservists so suddenly the financial

system collapses.

You could have some kind of interfering with shipping to and from Taiwan.

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