Saudi Oil & Gas Drone-Swarm Tabletop Exercise Case Study

The challenge

Strategic crisis readiness against an emerging regional threat

Hostile drone activity has become a credible threat to critical energy infrastructure across the region. Working in partnership, Trend Saudi Trading and Cognitas Global set out to give representatives of the Saudi oil and gas industry a realistic setting in which to test how strategic and tactical command groups would respond to a deliberate attack on an offshore asset. The aim went beyond a communications drill. It was to explore risk classification, command escalation, resource allocation and commercial trade-offs, along with the long-term governance and stakeholder decisions that follow a major incident.

Meeting the requirement

Bespoke multi-session strategic tabletop exercise

Trend Saudi Trading and Cognitas Global jointly delivered a tailored tabletop exercise (TTX) to representatives of the oil and gas industry in Saudi Arabia on the view360global platform. Participants worked in cross-functional teams, each combining strategic (Gold) and tactical (Silver) perspectives. The scenario centred on a coordinated drone-swarm strike on a fictional offshore drilling rig with 104 personnel on board. It was structured across three progressive sessions:

Impact and immediate response: crisis classification, muster and well control, first notifications and the opening media position.
Peak crisis: fatality notification across a multinational workforce, escalation of a regional oil spill response, and misinformation alongside a leaked internal document.
Stabilisation and recovery: investor and market pressure, government security engagement, and resisting commercial pressure to resume operations too early.

The exercise featured authentic bilingual Arabic and English injects. These included a national mobile emergency alert, boat-filmed social media footage, competing holding statements, a government security assessment, a journalist’s press query with a leaked risk register, and a time-coded Daily Drilling Report.

Communications were treated as an output of strategic judgement rather than the main focus. Every decision participants made under pressure was tested for what it committed their organisation to say and do.

The value

By combining a regionally relevant scenario with structured decision capture, the exercise produced insights grounded in what participants actually did, not what they assumed they would do. The results gave the industry a clear, shared basis for strengthening its crisis readiness.

The tabletop exercise successfully:

Brought industry representatives together to test strategic and tactical command arrangements against a realistic, regionally relevant hostile-attack scenario.
Challenged participants to keep their position consistent from the first holding statement through to investor and regulator engagement.
Exercised the interfaces between contractors, operators, government agencies and regulators, including tiered spill response and market disclosure.
Strengthened approaches to multinational family liaison and fatality notification under media pressure.
Captured more than 100 time-stamped decisions on the view360global platform, enabling an evidence-based post-exercise report mapped against the exercise design and industry good practice.
Provided participants with a collective analysis and prioritised recommendations to strengthen crisis governance across their organisations, without assessing any individual team.