Abstract How war is anticipated has become a central problem of contemporary security governance. Across liberal democracies, simulated exercises, ranging from tabletop wargames to civil-military drills, are increasingly used to render uncertain futures actionable in the present. Drawing on ethnographic participation in two wartime simulation exercises in Taiwan—a state-led civil-military drill and a civilian–organized drill—this article examines how different modes of simulation shape the temporal and affective conditions under which war is imagined, inhabited, and performed. Situating these cases within critical scholarship on affect, anticipation, and security, the article argues that the political significance of simulated exercises lies less in their representational realism or future prediction than in their capacity to produce distinct temporal–affective subjectivities. The state-led exercises predominantly operate on a logic of preparedness, seeking to manage uncertainty by standardizing roles and procedures and mitigating adverse outcomes. In contrast, the civilian-led exercises mobilize a preemptive logic that treats uncertainty, disorientation, and embodied vulnerability not as failures but generative conditions of action and subject formation. Conceptualizing exercises as temporal-affective machines, the article shows how bodies, objects, infrastructures, emotions, and environments actively participate in shaping how war is sensed and lived in the present. In doing so, the study of simulated exercises opens new analytical space for understanding how security is constructed not only through policy, procedures, and institutions, but through the shaping of perception, temporality, and human-material relationships.
Wen Liu (Fri,) studied this question.