Bryce G. Hoffman - Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

Sun Tzu

O n a cold, clear morning in March 2015, I eased my car past the hand-hewn stone walls and imposing iron gates of the old military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. When they used to talk about sending someone to break rocks at Leavenworth, they meant it. This was where the American military sent the baddest of its bad apples for more than a century. In 1875, the U.S. Army marched the first inmates out to what was still the frontier and forced them to build their prison around themselves, hewing it block by block from the native stone in a scene worthy of Kafka. Officially known as the United States Disciplinary Barracks, it served as the militarys maximum security prison until it was deemed unfit even for the worst offenders. The main building had been torn down in 2002and its inmates transferred to a modern, concrete penitentiary built at a more remote location on the base. I now found myself looking for a parking space on the fresh black asphalt that covered the area where the old cellblocks once stood. The rest of the original prison complex, from the walls and guard towers to the infirmary and workshops, still remained. Some of those buildings been converted into offices. Others, including a stone edifice that once housed the gallows, had been converted into classrooms. After a lengthy security check, I headed there, pressed my newly issued security pass to the electronic reader mounted next to the door of classroom 104, and tried to slip inside as discreetly as possible.

But it is hard to be discreet when you are the only civilian in a classroom full of soldiers.

There were a dozen other students, all wearing battle dress uniforms, and all of them turned in unison when I opened the door and eyed me suspiciously. Eleven were army majors, or soon to be promoted to that rank. One was an air force intelligence officer. Almost all of them had served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many wore the armys Combat Action Badge on their left breast, proof that they had been in the thick of it. Several sported paratroopers jump wings. Some were highly decorated. One had a green beret sitting on top of his notebook. The room was occupied by an enormous U-shaped table with seats arranged around the outside edge. A name card was placed in front of each seat. Mine said MR. HOFFMAN . All the others said MAJOR SO-AND-SO .

You must be important, said the officer to my left as I slipped into my seat.

I assure you, Im not, I said.

Then why are you dressed that way? he asked, eyeing my wool sport coat and slacks.

The only other person dressed that way was our instructor, Dr. Kevin Benson. He was a tall, lanky gentleman with a drooping white mustache that made him look like a frontier sheriff. But at least Benson was a retired colonel. And not just any retired colonel. He was, quite literally, the man who had written the invasion plan for Iraq. I felt like I was crashing a party I was not dressed for and had no business attending. But I was right where I needed to be if I was going to learn about red teaminga revolutionary way to stress-test strategies and navigate an uncertain future I had first learned about from a zombie movie.

I dont like zombie movies. I never have. But several friends whose opinions I respect had recommended the 2013 film World War Zand while I did not respect their opinions enough to actually go to the theater and see it, I did remember what they had said a few months later when I found myself laid up on the couch with a bad cold, scanning the list of new releases on Amazon Instant Video, looking for a way to kill the afternoon. World War Z was at the top of the list. It seemed suitably mindless, so I clicked on the Play button.

I couldnt tell you much about the moviemost of it was quickly lost in a decongestant hazebut one scene struck me like a shotgun blast to the face of an ambulatory corpse. Early on in the film, it emerges that only one nation, Israel, has managed to avoid the virally induced zombie apocalypse that has destroyed the rest of human civilization. Our hero, Brad Pitt, is sent to Jerusalem by what is left of the United States government to find out why. A senior Mossad officer meets Pitt at the airport and explains that his country decided to seal its borders after receiving reports of a fast-moving zombie plague in India. Other nations received the same hard-to-believe information but dismissed the reports as absurd. When Pitt asks why Israel decided to act upon them, the Mossad man credits the Tenth Man Doctrine, which he says Israel adopted in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.