News & Events Decision Points

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Visiting Professor of History, Steven Simon

The breakfast burritos are tasty on Air Force One. Bill Clinton loves a good pun. And no matter how expert you are, you can be dead wrong. That’s the kind of insider knowledge Steven Simon shared last semester with students in his history class “National Security Decision Making.”

Simon himself helped make plenty of decisions on the National Security Council. In the Obama years, he was senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. Under Clinton, he was senior director for transnational threats.

These days, Simon is a visiting professor of history at Amherst. And in this course, his students role-played their own NSC meetings, working through an urgent situation, with Simon as the intense, been-there-done-that reality check. For each scenario, they alternated the big parts: chair of the joint chiefs of staff, director of homeland security, secretary of state and more.

In a classroom in Fayerweather hall one spring day, he cooked up this unnervingly plausible scenario. It had to do with Stinger missiles. On a routine patrol of the perimeter of Newark International Airport, an operational missile was found in the weeds. The FBI and TSA immediately searched other airport peripheries and found Stingers at O’Hare, LAX, Dulles and more. (Note: this actually happened at London’s Heathrow airport.)

In response, Simon told the class, the NSC has convened the Principals Committee. This was a small class—just five students—but they took the Stinger threat as seriously as method actors. Some even channeled D.C. fashion statements for the meeting, men wearing neckties, women strands of pearls.

“Let’s start with the intel briefing and decide where to go from there,” said Simon. The director of the National Security Agency, a.k.a. Mount Holyoke senior Arielle Tait, started things off, laying out ideas for who might have planted the missiles. It could be Jaysh al-Islam, a group of Islamist rebels involved in the Syrian Civil War, or white supremacists in Alabama who could be trying to frame outside terrorists. Or maybe it’s the Taliban, Iran, North Korea. They all have their reasons.

 “The Stinger is capable of firing within five miles, and so can be lethal against civilian airliners,” says Tait. “The mujahedeen dispensed Stingers to U.S. and NATO allies. The serial number can be traced to the CIA. But it could be one of those the CIA gave to Qataris in 2011.”

Should military forces move into the airports? Nate Silvea ’20, a.k.a. the secretary of defense, was reluctant: “We have to take into account what this redirecting of resources places on the U.S. military. It could reduce our ability in other theaters.”

Simon wondered if round-the-clock surveillance drones are an alternative. “But we need a plan that frames the surveillance in a way that short circuits liberals who flip out about privacy and civil liberties,” he suggested. He tells secretary of defense Silvea that, if drones are called in, he’ll have to work with the Office of Management and Budget for the funds.

Izabella Czejdo wondered if this is premature. She’s another Mount Holyoke student and here played the chair of the joint chiefs. “There’s something strange in that the missiles have to be operated by two people, yet we found them set up with no operators. Maybe they’re more a symbol of warning.”

The council continued to weigh theories and options, with Simon pushing them to see past faulty assumptions. Then he assigned homework: “I expect you all to put these recommendations together in a combined memo for the president.”

After class, I asked council members what it was like to role-play with someone who did this for real. Terrifying at first, they agreed, but later they warmed to the challenge. It helped that Simon created a friendly backdrop: the class was invited to the professor’s home several times to share pizza and watch films like the Cold War black comedy as Dr. Strangelove.

 Ralph Skinner ’20, the secretary of state that day, said this of Simon: “He’s so smart you don’t think he makes mistakes. But he told us about the meetings he was at after the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing. He jumped to the assumption it was a foreign actor like Hezbollah. I thought showing that vulnerability was really cool because we all make mistakes.”

Czejdo chimed in: “I’m wrong much more than I’m right in this class.” Everyone nodded in solidarity. And since each scenario is based on current, actual events, “we all feverishly read the news now,” she explained. “Because that could change our recommendations to the president.”