“The skipper’s backing was crucial, because trying to get [junior officers] freed up during in-port time to play a game. . . . The department heads were not very happy at first.”
—Larry Bond, interview with the author
Over the past 50-plus years, Navy officers and sailors have trained at sea with gaming, mostly tabletop board games. These tools have been valuable, and many commanding officers have seen them that way, but institutional support has been sporadic. For these games to earn a formal place in the training regimen for surface and submarine qualifications, an important question must be answered: What should the Navy attempt to accomplish through wargaming?
A RAND report describes two emphases for simulation-based training: physical fidelity—the physical and functional capabilities; and psychological fidelity—“the capabilities of the simulator or simulation to elicit the cognitive, behavioral, and affective responses relevant to behavior in actual task environments.”1 Naval War College Dean of Academics and former guided-missile destroyer commanding officer Doyle Hodges suggests focusing on “force disposition, coordination, and decision-making.”
Any solution that hopes to find a home on board the Navy’s ships will need, at a minimum, four things: senior-level support, space, time, and—should the Navy opt for electronic and digital options—compatibility with information technology and security.
Getting senior support. In October 1980, then–Chief of Naval Operations Thomas Hayward directed development of a “shipboard war game for tactical training.”2 Hayward’s memorandum contributed to the transition of Navtag (developed by surface warfare officer Neil Byrne) from an analog game played with miniature ships, paper, and pencils to a computerized program of record overseen by Naval Sea Systems Command. While involving the bureaucracy brought challenges, senior-level support meant those challenges were mostly overcome. In 2015, then–Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva aimed to accomplish something similar with an article about gaming in War on the Rocks.3
Going to sea . . . or not. Getting games into the hands of practitioners has proved challenging, however.
On board the most numerous ship type—Arleigh Burke–class destroyers—are just four spaces where a wargame might easily be conducted: the wardroom; the ship’s classroom; the combat information center; and the mess deck. The classrooms on the vessels on which I have served or visited have not been well-suited to gaming. They featured only a single projection screen and fixed rows of chairs whose arrangement could not be modified. The mess deck possesses more tables but the same lack of modularity. This leaves the wardroom and combat information center. Regardless of the space used, games need to be as compact as possible. A chart that folds neatly into a board-game-sized box is optimal.
Making time. Surface ships periodically conduct planning boards for training. Run by the executive officer, a planning meeting typically takes one or two hours. Attendees review administrative, training, and maintenance requirements to produce detailed short- and long-term training schedules, squeezing in as much training as the limited time available will allow.
An hour of events inside Larry Bond’s Harpoon 4.1 can take as much as nine hours to game.4 That is unsustainable, and it would never survive first contact with a good executive officer. In the author’s experience, only games that can be played in increments of three hours or less are likely to find regular slots on the ship’s schedule.
IT compatibility. Electronic games would appear to offer at least partial solutions, as space requirements can be minimized, and game play in some cases can be faster than with tabletop games. Two, Command: Modern Operations and Command: Professional Edition, are frequently suggested. These games are excellent in many ways, but they have significant drawbacks. First is complexity. Learning how to play—let alone facilitate a scenario—demands hours of preparation.
Second, and more important, playing the game on board a ship probably would require dedicated laptops. The security and administrative requirements involved with that could be insurmountable, even with considerable backing from senior leaders. As the defense program manager for Command’s manufacturer puts it: “Even with 4-star [saying] ‘do it,’ the IT community still seems to find reasons to say no.”5
Other Considerations
Ownership on board. Without a shipboard sponsor, gaming will languish. So, who should it be? Changes to the littoral combat ship program and pipeline in the mid-2010s led to a glut of Department Head School graduates. At the time, Captain (now Vice Admiral) Brad Cooper was the head surface warfare detailer (PERS-41). He suggested establishing a new department head position—plans and tactics officer (PTO). Around the same time, the surface navy stood up its warfare tactics instructor (WTI) program to create officers more specialized in antiair, antisurface, antisubmarine, and expeditionary warfare tactics. WTIs and PTOs would be the most logical stewards. Department Head School offers billet-specific training; a week’s focus on wargaming would be time well spent for PTOs, maybe even resulting in an additional qualification designator.
Don’t leave out enlisted sailors! One of my favorite experiences during my first tour on board the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) was participating in War Council. The wardroom and enlisted personnel with tactical responsibilities (operations specialists, Aegis and non-Aegis fire controllmen, gunner’s mates, etc.) were divided into groups and tasked with rewriting the captain’s battle orders. Each group addressed a specific warfare area. The best teachers in my group were two second-class petty officers responsible for the close-in weapon system and the SPY radar, respectively. Each provided valuable insights on how and why his system would respond in specific situations. Had we left these two sailors out of the planning process or ignored their inputs, the ship could easily have been placed at a disadvantage in a real-world scenario.
Possible Solutions
“Seatag purposely does not computerize nor classify the game since this would diminish the value of the game as a shipboard training aid.”
—Francis Devereux, master’s thesis,Naval Postgraduate School, 1982
I do not advocate for any particular game. While assigned to the German Armed Forces Staff College in Hamburg, Germany, I used the Naval War College’s War at Sea system extensively. I have written on the game’s use as a training tool, and, while I am an unabashed fan, the game would require significant modification even beyond that made for its use as part of the Advanced Division Office Course.6 It has a large footprint, with hundreds of dice and other bits and pieces that do not lend themselves to routine shipboard use. It would require considerable simplification to be made so.
Sebastian Bae, a gamer, prior-enlisted infantry Marine, and research analyst at CNA, created Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific. It also could be a great choice. [Editor’s note: The author was a beta tester of the game throughout its development.] The game is compact, tactically focused, and—most important for game play at sea—does not necessarily require an umpire. The game’s primary drawback, especially for newly commissioned officers, is its focus on joint elements. Even so, all the pieces are there to navalize the game to focus specifically on a fight at sea.
Nick Bradbeer’s Swarming Boats requires players to fight off a swarm of small craft, a mission the Navy trains for constantly. The game’s biggest advantage is the small footprint for the materials required and the game’s playing surface: a piece of plain white butcher paper of the type you would find in every combat information center. This lends itself to an in-depth debrief, because each decision point is captured and preserved by tracing the ship’s path.
Better, though, might be to use multiple games focused on different warfare areas. In any case, wargaming should be incorporated into what training is already occurring. No wargame will teach a junior officer how to patch a pipe, safely handle a firefighting hose, learn line-handling commands, or run through the variable action button sequence necessary to engage an inbound antiship cruise missile. But it could teach why those skills are necessary, how demand for them arises, and what decisions might have caused or averted those needs.
1. Susan G. Straus et al., Collective Simulation-Based Training in the U.S. Army (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2019).
2. Francis R. Goodwin, “The Navtag System and Its Modification to Include the SH-60B Helicopter,” master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 1984. The author attempted to procure a copy of the CNO’s memo via e-mail and FOIA request, but ongoing renovation work at Naval History and Heritage Command prevented success.
3. Robert Work and GEN Paul Selva, USAF (Ret.), “Revitalizing Wargaming Is Necessary to Be Prepared for Future Wars,” War on the Rocks, 8 December 2015.
4. Interview, LCDR Joseph Guida, USN, July 2023.
5. Email exchange with Jason Jones, Matrix Pro Sims Defense Program Manager, 6 July 2023.
6. Jared Samuelson, “Roll for Initiative: NATO’s Navies Need a Wargaming Series,” War on the Rocks, 12 August 2019.
