Inside SDSC's AI-Powered National Intelligence Community Exercise

Students in STST8017, a Special Topics course run by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) spent a week operating as representatives of Australia's National Intelligence Community, responding to a cascading national security crisis. The scenario centred on a major earthquake in the Northern Pacific, which triggered a misattributed cyber-attack and intelligence suggesting a political assassination plot on Australian soil.

The exercise is run by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), one of Australia's leading centres for the study of strategy, defence, and intelligence, based at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. Mastering Honeypots & Overcoats is offered as a Special Topic within SDSC's Master of Strategy and Defence and Master of Strategic and Defence Studies, giving students access to visiting specialists and emerging teaching areas not available in the standard curriculum. This year's iteration used Foresight, an AI-driven crisis simulation platform developed by Canberra-based technology company Capital Shield, to add a further layer of realism and analytical pressure to the exercise.

Each cohort held a different slice of the available intelligence, with no team holding the complete picture, reflecting the fragmented conditions faced by real intelligence agencies operating under time pressure. Foresight supplied the range of intelligence products used in genuine assessments, including signals intercepts, geospatial imagery, human intelligence reports, media reporting, and diplomatic cables. Teams coordinated with one another while interacting with AI agents built to behave according to their own goals and biases.

Professor John Blaxland, convener of the weeklong intensive, said the platform gave instructors a level of control not otherwise possible in a classroom setting. Instructors could inject too much or too little information into the exercise, or introduce deliberate gaps that complicate analytical judgements. Blaxland said this allowed the pressure to be dialled up so that students were forced to process intelligence, coordinate between agencies, and produce assessments under conditions that mirror the real thing.

The course is designed to prepare students for careers across government and industry, including Australia's security and intelligence agencies. It gives students direct experience of the judgement calls and coordination challenges those agencies face when responding to emergent domestic and international crises.

Tim Hobbs, CEO and Co-founder of Capital Shield, said the real test of an intelligence course is not whether students can describe how the intelligence cycle works. He said it is whether they can perform inside that cycle when information is incomplete, time is limited, and decision-makers require a clear enough picture to shape policy. Hobbs said this level of immersion was central to Foresight's design.

Foresight has its roots in the Coral Bell School's Hedley Bull Building, where the exercise took place. The platform was developed by a team that first encountered scenario-based learning in SDSC classrooms almost a decade ago, and is now used within government agencies, universities, and corporate organisations in Australia and overseas.

Prospective students interested in strategy, defence, or intelligence studies can learn more about the Master of Strategy and Defence and Master of Strategic and Defence Studies programmes here.