Red Team Thinking for Law Enforcement Leaders
Bryce G . Hoffman
Today , law enforcement in the United States is at a crossroads . Police departments large and small face unprecedented challenges – not only from new criminal threats , but also from the communities they serve . Calls for police reform , or even to “ defund the police ” are growing louder every day . Responding effectively to these new challenges will require not only new ways of working , but also new ways of thinking . Nobody knows that better than America ’ s police chiefs . I know that because I started hearing from a lot of them last summer .
As racial justice protests erupted across the United States , I began receiving calls from police chiefs and sheriffs from across the nation . They called me because they had read my book , Red Teaming , which describes a powerful methodology developed by the U . S . military and intelligence agencies to help leaders and their organizations challenge their own assumptions , stress-test their strategies , understand how to better work with key stakeholders , and identify unseen threats and missed opportunities . They wanted to know if these tools and techniques could help them meet this challenge by rethinking policing . The answer is yes . In fact , this is precisely the sort of problem red teaming was created to help solve .
Red teaming was born out of the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001 , and the disastrous wars that followed them . These two events humbled the American military and intelligence agencies and forced them to seek out new ways of thinking . Drawing on the latest research in cognitive psychology and human decision making , the CIA and the U . S . Army began pulling together an array of applied critical thinking and groupthink mitigation
44 SUMMER . 2021 techniques and developing a systematic approach for applying these tools to complex problems . They also began assembling teams tasked with using this new methodology to evaluate strategies , improve plans , and support decision makers .
These red teams were soon offering alternative interpretations of intelligence in Washington and challenging existing strategies for combatting insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq . Their penetrating insights and sobering analyses began raising eyebrows – not just in the United States , but around the world . As reports generated by American red teams were shared with allied forces , other countries saw the value in this contrarian approach and were eager to emulate it . Soon , the British , Canadians , and Australians had established their own red teams .
When red teaming was allowed to work , the results were often stunning . The 2007 troop surge in Iraq that led to a dramatic reduction in violence in that war-torn country was one of the first products of red team thinking . Iraq ’ s subsequent descent into anarchy and the rise of the so-called “ Islamic State ” were the consequences of abandoning this new way of thinking and a return to a more traditional calculus
How I Became a Red Teamer I first heard about red teaming in 2014 , seven