For a week in July, students in Mastering Honeypots and Overcoats, a Special Topic course run by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Australian National University, stopped studying Australia’s national intelligence community and started acting as it. The course closed with a full-day simulation on Foresight, in which a major earthquake in the northern Pacific set off a chain of crises: a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, blamed at first on the wrong group, and intelligence pointing to a plot to assassinate an Australian political figure.
01A test of performance, not knowledge
The course prepares students for careers across government and industry, many of them in Australia’s security and intelligence agencies. Its convener, Professor John Blaxland, wanted an exercise that tested what those agencies actually ask of people: judgement and coordination while a crisis is still unfolding.
Tim Hobbs, Capital Shield’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, puts it this way: “The real test of an intelligence course is not whether students can describe the intelligence cycle. It is whether they can perform inside it when the information is incomplete, the clock is running and a decision-maker needs a clear enough picture to act.”
02No team holds the whole picture
Students were split into syndicates, each standing in for part of the national security machinery: PM&C and the National Security Committee; Defence; DFAT and liaison; and Attorney-General’s and Home Affairs. Foresight gave each syndicate its own intelligence, from signals intercepts and satellite imagery to human intelligence reports, media reporting and diplomatic cables. No team held all of it.
That is deliberate. Real agencies work from fragments and against the clock, and an assessment is only as good as the coordination behind it. Between committee meetings the syndicates also had to deal with AI agents playing allied officials, ministers and journalists, each pursuing goals and biases of its own.
03Pressure the instructors control
Professor Blaxland said the platform gave instructors a level of control not otherwise possible in a classroom. They could inject too much information or too little, or leave deliberate gaps that complicate an analyst’s judgement. That let them turn the pressure up until students were processing intelligence, coordinating between agencies and producing assessments under conditions that mirror the real thing.
04Five days of crisis in one
The simulation compressed five days into one. Each notional day opened with a news broadcast and built to a committee meeting higher up the chain than the last, from an inter-departmental taskforce to the National Security Committee of Cabinet. One participant summed it up:
Far more engaging and realistic than other simulations I have participated in. It gave me more agency and felt strikingly similar to the workplace.
05Back where it started
The exercise ran in the Hedley Bull Building, home of ANU’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. It is where the team behind Foresight first encountered scenario-based learning, in SDSC classrooms almost a decade ago. Foresight is now used by government agencies, universities and companies in Australia and overseas.
The full account of the exercise, including the decisions students had to make, is in our case study, Honeypots and Overcoats.
This article is adapted from “Inside SDSC’s AI-Powered National Intelligence Community Exercise”, published by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.
