A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies: The Hunt for Red October
The movie (and book) The Hunt for Red October is about a key question of strategy: What game is the other side playing?
A Soviet submarine captain named Ramius — played by Sean Connery — takes his new, undetectable submarine toward the U.S. coast. The entire U.S. military assumes he’s attacking. One CIA analyst — Jack Ryan, played by Alec Baldwin — thinks Ramius is defecting.
Same set of facts. Two completely different games. Which game is the other side playing?
If Ramius is attacking, the U.S. needs to sink the submarine. If he’s defecting, they need to help him. The wrong read means either letting an attack through or destroying an ally. Being wrong is catastrophic.
That’s game-type identification under uncertainty. And it’s one of the hardest things to get right — in intelligence and everywhere else.
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Ryan doesn’t have proof. He has a theory built from fragments.
He knows Ramius sent a letter to the Soviet admiral. But not what it says.
He knows Ramius is a skilled captain who doesn’t take unnecessary risks. But that fits both scenarios.
He knows the Soviets sent their entire fleet after Ramius. Which means he’s a traitor. Or that he’s been ordered to test the submarine’s capabilities.
Every piece of data supports two contradictory interpretations.
Ryan has to make a decision before the data is complete. That’s the reality of strategy. You almost never have enough information. You have to act on what you have. And be prepared to adjust if you’re wrong.
But first Ryan takes another step.
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Ryan does something some people skip: he asks what the other side’s Endgame looks like in each scenario.
If Ramius is attacking, what does his Endgame look like? It doesn’t hold up — a single submarine against the U.S. Navy is suicide, and Ramius isn’t suicidal.
If Ramius is defecting, what does his Endgame look like? A new life in the West for himself and his officers. That’s an Endgame a rational person would pursue.
Ryan reasons backward from each possible Endgame to test which one makes sense. He doesn’t guess. He doesn’t go with his gut. He works the frameworks.
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The movie also shows what happens when the people around you are locked into the wrong game type. The admirals and generals see a Soviet submarine approaching the US coast and see a zero-sum game. Us versus them, shoot or be shot.
Ryan sees a positive-sum possibility: Both the U.S. and Ramius could benefit from this defection.
Most of the tension in the movie isn’t Ryan versus Ramius. It’s Ryan versus his own side. It’s Ryan trying to get the admirals and generals to see they should be playing a different game.
That happens in the real world all the time. One side sees a zero-sum game when the other side wants a positive-sum game. Or worse, they believe it’s positive-sum when the other side is actually trying to destroy them.
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This is what game-type identification does. Before you decide what to do, you figure out what game you’re in. And just as important: what game the other side thinks they’re in.
Get that wrong and every move after it is wrong. Get it right and you see the opportunity before anyone else.
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The frameworks in this analysis:
Game-type identification — before you decide what to do, figure out what game you’re in. And what game the other side thinks they’re in. From A Spy’s Guide to Strategy
Endgame reasoning — reason backward from where you want to be. Test each scenario by asking what the Endgame looks like. From A Spy’s Guide to Strategy
-John Braddock