Self-guided tabletop · Diplo Space

GPS Denial Over a Capital Region.

GPS goes unreliable across a metro area in the middle of a normal Tuesday. Pick a seat, take five injects (the scenario's timed developments), and make the calls. See what each one costs, drawn from real incidents. Fifteen minutes, no login, printable debrief.

Before you start · the shape of the problem

Every call comes due before its answer arrives.

The scenario clock runs six hours. Each bar is how long you actually have to decide; each marker is when the information that would settle it exists. Two of the five never arrive inside the exercise at all. That gap is what you are rehearsing.

01Time-quality flags, three substations

~2 h

Trust the clocks or not, before anyone can tell you why they slipped.

02“How long can we coast?”

days (procurement records)

The holdover answer lives in installation paperwork nobody has read. The call cannot wait for it.

03The public line

~1.4 h

Say something while the picture is incomplete, or let it leak framed by someone else.

04Who convenes, and who leads

days (attribution)

Coordination has to start before anyone can say what caused it, or it starts too late.

05It stops as abruptly as it began

recovery is uneven

Declaring “over” is its own decision; systems come back at different rates.

Time you have to decideWhen the answer existsAnswer arrives after the exercise ends

▣ COMMON OPERATING PICTURET−0:05FICTIONAL REGION · TRAINING USE · APP-6-STYLE SYMBOLOGY

friendly installationunknown entityop conditionline of bearing

Aviationnormal ops

Gridmonitoring nominal

Financeclocks in tolerance

Telecomsync nominal

Publicquiet

09:35 Routine watch. Nothing remarkable.

09:38 Coffee status: adequate.

Self-guided discussion exercise · ~15 minutes · no login

Pick your seat.

Five injects from the facilitated scenario, one real call at each. The map is your common operating picture. No score, no timer: just consequences, drawn from the public record.

All four seats share the same five injects: your lane, your hotwash (the immediate debrief), and your after-action report change with the chair. Worth one replay, not four.

Exercise objectives

Examine cross-sector information fusion and incident coordination in the first hours of an unattributed interference event.
Assess awareness of PNT holdover limits and the graceful-degradation decision when timing can't be trusted.
Discuss pre-attribution public communication: what officials say before anyone knows the cause.

Ground rules

This is an open, low-stress, no-fault environment. Disagreement with our consequence notes is expected. That's discussion.
Respond from your organization's actual current plans and capabilities, not the ones you wish existed.
Your choices are not precedent-setting and may not reflect your organization's final position.
There are no hidden materials and no trick options.
Identifying problems matters less than what you'd do about them. Problem-solving is the focus.

Assumptions & artificialities

The region and scenario are entirely fictitious; no real jurisdiction is depicted.
The scenario is plausible, and events occur as presented.
Assume other entities cooperate in good faith unless an inject says otherwise.
Platforms have their own fallbacks: aircraft revert to ground-based navigation aids, ships to self-contained inertial navigation, radar and visual bearings. Those are not your decisions here. Your seats face the part no fallback covers: whether the timing your systems depend on can still be trusted, and who says so.

▸ About this exercise: type, scope, and what it doesn’t do

Type: a self-guided, discussion-based exercise modeled on a facilitated tabletop. In strict HSEEP terms (HSEEP is the U.S. government’s standard for emergency-management exercises), a branching web exercise sits closer to a “game” than a tabletop. We say so because precision about exercise types is part of doing this credibly.

Scope: one scenario, one seat at a time, five injects, policy- and coordination-level decisions only, ~15 minutes. Your choices and notes stay on your device.

What it doesn’t do: evaluate your organization (no evaluators, no Exercise Evaluation Guides), exercise your actual plans, or replace group discussion: the parts of HSEEP practice that need a room. The facilitated version runs with a facilitator, evaluators, a proper hotwash, and a jointly written AAR/IP.

What it deliberately isn’t: there is no score, because discussion exercises are examined, never graded. That’s doctrine, not modesty. No countdown timer, because tabletops are low-stress by design; the scenario clock supplies the urgency. And no “how other players chose” statistics, because your choices are saved only in your own browser. Your comparison group is the documented public record each consequence cites, not a crowd.

Want that version, with your colleagues, your sector’s plans on the table, and a facilitator pushing back? See formats and pricing. Pilot sessions run 90 minutes, $5K–$20K, and you keep the after-action report.