IWP Students Complete the Spring 2025 Capstone Course

On 18 & 25 April 2025, fifteen soon-to-be departing graduate students enrolled in the IWP 799 Capstone Course engaged in what is becoming a rite of passage: the Capstone Crisis Simulation.

Set in the South China Sea in the “near future,” students roleplay key members of the National Security Council and the Cabinet and have to respond to a quick-breaking, pressure-cooker crisis in a region where they have some knowledge of the situation.   The simulation is held over two classes and puts the students in the first three hours of the crisis in near-real time.

Prior to the start of the exercise, students were given a stellar lecture on China’s activities in the South China Sea by Craig Singleton, Senior Director of the China Program for the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

“The South China Sea remains one of the most contested and consequential regions in the world — a flashpoint where legal ambiguity, military pressure, and strategic restraint collide daily,” stated Singleton. “The students’ simulation scenario was both timely and realistic, mirroring the very dilemmas national security officials face in real time: how to deter aggression without escalating, how to reassure allies without provoking China, and how to operate in the gray zone where decisions are rarely clear-cut. Exercises like this are vital preparation for the kind of high-stakes policy challenges many of these students will soon inherit.”

After Singleton’s presentation, Prof. Aaron Danis gave the students their role-play assignments and the specific scenario they had to contend with for the next three hours.  The simulation finishes with a “hotwash” where students discuss what they each learned. “Students are graded on how they think critically, communicate, share information, work as a team, and develop response strategies,” said Danis.

The exercise is part of the broader Capstone course, the objective of which is to integrate the tools the students have learned during their two years at IWP, and also help prepare them for their comprehensive written and oral exams.

“The course brings in other IWP faculty to review the key tools of statecraft – diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and intelligence – and makes the students employ and coordinate them in two mock NSC interagency meetings,” noted Danis.  “They have to produce two basic NSC documents relating to those meetings.  IWP is fortunate to have two professors, John Quattrocki and John Tsagronis, with extensive NSC experience to assist in this.”

The next Capstone course will run this Fall.