Honeypots and Overcoats

An earthquake of magnitude 7.9 in the northern Pacific sent a tsunami into Guam, the Philippines and northern Papua New Guinea. The worst of it fell around Vanimo, on a scale to rival 2004. The same morning brought unconfirmed reporting of an ISIL plot to assassinate an Australian political figure, and evidence that a domestic extremist group was planning a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. Over the days that followed the crises drew in the United States, China, Indonesia and New Zealand, each with interests of its own. The national intelligence community had to hold it all together.

Mastering Honeypots and Overcoats is a Special Topic in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre's master's programmes at the Australian National University. Its students are headed for careers in Australia's security and intelligence agencies, and its convener, Professor John Blaxland, wanted a test of performance, not knowledge: whether students could work inside the intelligence cycle when information is incomplete, time is short and decision-makers need a clear enough picture to act.

That called for more control over the flow of intelligence than a classroom allows. Instructors needed to be able to give too much or too little, leave deliberate gaps, and turn the pressure up as the day went on.

The simulation ran from 8:45 am to 4 pm on 10 July 2026 in the Hedley Bull Building, where the team behind Foresight first met scenario-based learning almost a decade earlier. It closed the course's week-long intensive and compressed five days of crisis into one. Students joined one of four syndicates: PM&C and the National Security Committee; Defence; DFAT and liaison; and Attorney-General's and Home Affairs. Each held about six roles, from the Chief of the Defence Force and the Director-General of Security to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and the chair of the parliamentary intelligence committee.

Each notional day opened with a news broadcast in Foresight. Each syndicate then received its own intelligence: signals intercepts, satellite imagery, human intelligence reports, media reporting and diplomatic cables. No team held the whole picture. Syndicates had 20 to 30 minutes to prepare before a committee meeting, each one higher up the chain than the last. Between meetings, they dealt with AI agents playing allied officials, ministers and journalists, each pursuing goals and biases of its own.

1. 01Inter-Departmental Emergency TaskforceDay 1 · chaired by DFAT
2. 02Australian Government Crisis and Recovery CommitteeDay 2 · chaired by the Secretary of Home Affairs
3. 03Secretaries Committee on National SecurityDay 3 · chaired by the Secretary of PM&C
4. 04National Security Committee of CabinetDay 4 · chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister
5. 05Heads of Intelligence Agencies MeetingDay 5 · chaired by the Director-General of National Intelligence

• Instructors could set the pressure.

  Professor Blaxland said Foresight gave instructors a level of control not otherwise possible in a classroom. They could give too much information or too little, or leave deliberate gaps, and so force students to process intelligence, coordinate between agencies and produce assessments under conditions that mirror the real thing.

• Coordination had to be earned.

  With each syndicate holding a different slice of the intelligence, no assessment was complete until the agencies had worked together, as in a real crisis.