People who currently have these jobs are generally too busy to spend all day wargaming through a simulated pandemic. You’d be lucky to sit them down long enough to play the board game Pandemic. What probably ends up happening is that this gets turned into a written report that some staffer has on hand to pull out and brief the key decision makers on. As the article points out, the learnings from these exercises sometimes get turned into actionable policy, e.g. Bush implementing continuity-of-government plans.

The most similar thing I know about personally is military contingency plans. My dad was a Marine Corps officer and, among other things, worked on contingency plans in the late 1960’s. There are standing contingency plans for almost every conceivable military operation the US might perform, ranging from amphibious landings on the fjords of Norway to capturing any given small Caribbean island. The plans don’t always get followed, though. My dad spent a lot of time developing a contingency plan to capture the island of Grenada, and he spent the rest of his life bitterly insisting that his plan was far better than how that operation actually turned out!

That's actually really cool. What was his plan like compared to the actual operation? Also, what kind of methodologies would one use to plan something like this?

He passed away some years ago so I'm just going off my recollections here.

His main complaint was that the actual operation used an unnecessarily large cross-service force (largely for political reasons; the Air Force and Army didn't want to miss out on the chance to get involved) when his plan required less than a division of Marines with accompanying air support.

The contingency plans themselves are highly classified, and none of the plans nor the associated maps and whatnot are allowed to leave a specifically secured facility, making this one of the few times in his military career that my dad couldn't just take home his paperwork at the end of the day. In the case of the Grenada plan, there was already an existing plan that is reevaluated and updated with new intelligence, doctrine, etc. on a periodic basis.

One detail of the plan my dad mentioned investigating was a standing tank (i.e. a large barrel for storing liquids) in the middle of a field on the island. The old plan entailed securing the tank and using it as temporary fuel storage, but my dad was suspicious. It turns out the tank was in the middle of a sugar cane field. It was a molasses tank. Probably not safe or feasible for fuel storage.

Even writing this out, I find this story a little hard to believe, but that's the level of detail the military, at least, puts into their contingency plans.

I think some of those plans may be for planning's sake (not a bad idea) and less of a case of "might actually need later".... others are somewhere in between.

We had a plan for war with the British empire. Once it was made public the Canadians got a bit upset as it was basically a detailed plan for preemptively invading them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red?wprov=sfla1

At the risk of making a political statement here (sorry dang!), the current administration in Washington seems to be highly resistant to outside advice.

It is safe to say that the current administration in Washington is incapable of making any intelligent decision based on facts. The current President is too much of an intellectual light weight; lacking the understanding and ability to grasp complex and nuanced issues he would have to have to handle a pan-epidemic. He also does not have the talent around him to help or make any decision that would be correct and wise during a pan-epidemic.

I'm not even sure ability is the issue when it comes to grasping things.

I think it is simply he chooses not to understand in favor of gut instinct and even what he last read / saw on TV.

Like you said I don't want to go down the rabbit hole, but I think there's a difference between trying an unable and simply choosing not to try understand a thing (for whatever reason that is).

> I'm not even sure ability is the issue when it comes to grasping things.

I am pretty sure it is lack of ability. Some of the reported interactions between him and other world leaders is pretty alarming. For example, Merkel of Germany had to tell him 11 times that he could not negotiate trade deals between the United States and Germany because Germany is part of the EU. (http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-trade-merkel-germany-eu...)

He uses his gut instinct all the time because that is all he has.

> lacking the understanding and ability to grasp complex and nuanced issues he would have to have to handle a pan-epidemic.

I mean, the guy can't even read.

I can't imagine the potentially catastrophically random decisions made by the current Trump administration when it would come to something as serious as a pandemic....