A Christmas gift: Community Scenario Pack #50 now available

December 19, 2024 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Following the release of the new Build 1527 update for Command, which includes the new v509 databases, Brandon Johnson has now also updated the famous Community Scenario Pack (CSP), the Command community’s curated anthology of user-created scenarios. The new update, out just in time for the Christmas celebrations, contains 15 new scenarios:

* Assault on Al Tanf, 2024: Located in Syria on the Iraqi border and within miles of the Jordanian border, the U.S. garrison at al-Tanf has, since 2016, served as a launching point for counter-ISIS operations and training for Syrian opposition factions fighting the jihadist group. Iranian and Iran-backed forces are deployed in close proximity to the al-Tanf desert outpost, which sits on the strategically significant Baghdad-Damascus highway. U.S. forces in al-Tanf established a 55-km de-confliction zone, beyond which lie an array of forces described as either “pro-regime” or “Iran-backed” that have set up checkpoints in the area. Several incidents in recent months underscore al-Tanf’s potential as a flashpoint between U.S. and Iranian and/or Iran-backed forces.

* Caravan, 1982: Since the start of the Iraqi invasion, the northern Persian Gulf has been the site of an intense naval war between the Iranian and Iraqi navies. Most of the fighting has been centered around Iraqi attempts to stop the flow of vital material to the port of Bandar-e Emam Khomeyni. The Iranian navy and air force have devoted significant forces to protect the convoys. Slightly over a year ago, the Iraqi navy first deployed a new weapon in their battle against the convoys, the French Exocet anti-ship missile. A few hours ago, Unit 114 of the Directorate of Technical Equipment detected another Iranian convoy departing from Bushehr.

* Dead from EABOve, 2027: Approximately 2 hours ago, following an earlier announcement by PRC of a blockade of Taiwan, US initiated hostilities with China after interdicting a PLAN SAG attempting to transit the Bashi Channel out to the West Pacific.The Chinese have taken the first blow, now they are ready to return the favor. US bases in the Philippines, Palau and Guam will be in their crosshairs.
You will be required to hold off the numerically superior PLA forces and do so while being subjected to heavy bombardment from PLARF elements.
For your forces to survive, they will be required to disperse, and to refuel and rearm at austere locations. Capturing PRC bases in the South China Sea for follow on operations is also a nice option.
This is a complex 2-day scenario, happening just after the author’s other scenarios “Tighten the Straitjacket” and before “Penetrating the Blockade”.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – France Enters the Fray, 1957: This scenario assumes World War III began in late April of 1957. During most of April in 1957, the Soviets sortied a large number of ships and submarines, claiming they were conducting a series of military exercises.
In the early morning hours of April 25, the Soviets initiated a large and well-coordinated attack on NATO forces.
NATO forces already at sea have been organized into task groups and ordered to hunt down Soviet ships and submarines.  It is critical that NATO remain in control of the sea lanes.  As commander of a French task group centered around the cruiser De Grasse, your mission will be to secure the waters south and southeast of Sardinia.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – Poseidon’s Play, 1957: You are in command of the Greek submarine Poseidon.  She is actually an old American submarine, the Lapon, recently recommissioned and on loan to the Greek government.  However, as her captain, you are sure Poseidon loves her new country as much as she loves the country where she was born.
Today, she will have a chance to prove that love.  As the only Greek vessel in the southern waters of the Mediterranean, Poseidon has an opportunity to intercept a Soviet convoy on its way to the Egyptian city of Marsa Matruh.  The Egyptians appear to have allied with the Soviets, although they have not yet officially declared war.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – The Battle of Elefsina, 1957: In the early morning hours of April 25, 1957, you receive a flash priority message.  There is credible intelligence that a massive Soviet attack against NATO is about to begin.
As the commanding officer of the 114th Combat Wing of the Hellenic Air Force and its three squadrons of F-86E Sabres, your mission will be to help protect Greece from the Soviets and their allies.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 2 – Head ‘Em off at the Sunda Strait, 1957: It is the second day of the war. Shocking news has arrived from Europe.  The Soviet Union has launched massive attacks against European air bases and other military targets.  There are reports that the American carrier Forrestal and the British carrier Bulwark have both been sunk.
You are in command of a British naval squadron in the Far East.  Some elements of the Soviet navy have been operating in your area of responsibility.  It will be your task to destroy these ships and submarines.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 4 – Birmingham Goes Hunting, 1957: It is the fourth day of the war. Intelligence suggests the Soviets have sortied additional submarines and surface groups to threaten shipping in the Atlantic.  You have been placed in charge of one of the task forces assigned to deal with this threat.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 30 – South Dakota Says Goodbye, 1957: It is the end of the first month of the War of 1957. NATO has received reliable intelligence that a large surface group has left Soviet waters.  It appears to be designed to attack NATO shipping trying to cross the Atlantic.
Most NATO ships are already engaged in other theaters of the war.  No carriers and few submarines are available to intercept the battle group.
You are in command of a battle group of available vessels assembled to intercept and destroy the Soviet battle group.  It is a curious collection of ships for the late 1950s, being centered on two World War II-era battleships, South Dakota and California.  Both vessels had been reactivated shortly before hostilities erupted in Europe with the idea of using them as test platforms for new technologies.  However, once the Soviet attacks started, these plans were put on hold.

* Korean Campaign (Operation Dragon Fire), 2018: It is the Spring of 2018, and it appears that Kim Jong-un is finally going to make good on his constant threats to launch an attack into South Korea.

* Operation Ardent Shield, 2030: The world’s worst fear just materialised. Open conflict has erupted between the world’s two superpowers over the South China Sea.
Singapore, as a neutral country but finding many of its fundamental interests in line with upholding the principles of UNCLOS and with keeping the US presence strong in the Pacific, has decided that it will allow US military assets to continue to refuel and resupply in the country, and for limited US military operations to be conducted from the country so long as no direct strikes on Chinese mainland territories are staged from Singapore.

* Operation Sallyport, 2029: In mid-2029, China commenced an intervention under the pretense of restoring order in Papua New Guinea. For Australia and its allies, the stakes were high, as the stability of the South Pacific, regional security, and the influence of Western alliances in the Indo-Pacific hung in the balance. The ensuing operation would determine the future of Papua New Guinea and reshape the power dynamics of the region.

* Ouadi Doum, 1986: In response to Libyan aggression in Chad, President Mitterrand has deployed French forces to Africa.
France is determined to prevent Libya from destabilizing its former colonies, and is concerned about the ability of al-Gaddafi’s government to stage long-range bomber attacks out of the Ouadi Doum airfield.

* Sapphire, 1977: On June 27, 1977, the former French colony of Afars and Issas gained its independence as the country of Djibouti. At first, the FLCS (Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast), a guerrilla organization fighting against French colonial rule, celebrated this victory and was partially absorbed into the new country’s government.
But days after the declaration of independence, a splinter group formed calling for the integration of Djibouti into ‘Greater Somalia’. After gathering support, the group launched their insurgency against the Djibouti government and French forces stationed in the country.
Somali leader Siad Barre had primarily been focused on absorbing the Ogaden region controlled by Ethiopia, but started shifting his focus to the newly independent nation.
Somali forces that had been thought to have been preparing for an invasion of Ethiopia quickly deployed to the border with Djibouti. The French have started sending a large number of reinforcements to Djibouti, but due to the limited infrastructure and short time frame, this has been difficult.
The first units from metropolitan France arrived a short time ago, joining a number of units airlifted in from French territories in the Indian Ocean. French intelligence has assessed that there is a high likelihood that Somalia will launch an invasion in the coming days or hours, before most of the reinforcements can be brought in.

* Soviet Endgame – Seize Giebelstadt3, 1981: At the opening of the Third World War, the Soviet Union launched a continent-wide effort to sweep into NATO countries in a war of conquest.
This scenario focuses on one small aspect of the overall war. As a part of the effort to secure central Germany, the Soviet airborne forces, the VDV are tasked with taking the NATO airfield at Giebelstadt, just south of Würzburg.

The new community scenario pack is, as always, available for download at the Command Team site, and also on the Steam workshop.

The CSP now proudly counts 618 scenarios in its stable!

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Promises kept: Command-PE v2.4.1 and the new sim manual now available

December 11, 2024 · Posted in Command PE · Comment 

Last September, at the most recent (and most awesome) Command User Event held at Quantico, we showed off the then-imminent-to-release v2.4 major release to Command PE. We also stated that a “hotfix” update was scheduled for release by the end of the year, and that the much-anticipated CPE Simulation Manual would also be made available to current PE license holders in the same timeframe, even in early draft form.

As the year is now drawing to a close, we are happy to fulfill our promises:

* Command-PE v2.4.1 is now available for download to all current users of CPE. Intended originally as merely a hotfix release containing all the tweaks and fixes since the original 2.4 release, it has morphed into a substantial update in its own right.
Its biggest new features are the new “pin-cushion view” option for displaying aerospace units at their true altitudes (this got a lot of attention also at I/ITSEC last week), the tabular & machine-parsible “butchers bill” (list of losses & expenditures) and the option for repeatable-loop movement style on mining missions (ie. you can now define in advance the specific pattern to follow when laying mines, as well as related settings such as interval).
The new update also contains a whole slew of improvements and tweaks to the simulation engine, as well as the latest v509 release of the DB3000 and CWDB databases.

* The first version of the CPE Sim Manual that we deem share-worthy is now available. This document acts as the central point of reference for the overall design and internal simulation mechanics of CPE (and CMO) both for the Command dev team as well as professional customers (this is distinct and separate from the existing CPE & CMO user manuals, which deliberately focus on the user interface and gameplay options).
The sim manual is still in very early draft form, with numerous placeholders, unfilled or unfinished sections; even so, every single user who has glimpsed at it so far has found it extremely eye-opening, useful and illuminating. So we believe the same will hold true for any of our customers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how Command’s simulation engine works. The sim manual is not generally available for download, but can be provided to active CPE license holders upon request.

The CPE dev team is already hard at work, developing a new set of features (and especially a pair of big whammies) that will define the next milestone of CPE some time within 2025. Stay tuned!

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Command wins the 2024 TIGA award for “Educational, Serious or Simulation Game”

November 29, 2024 · Posted in Command, Command PE · Comment 

The complete winners list: https://tiga.org/awards/2024-winners

As a reminder, CMO previously won the 2019 Charles S. Roberts award for “Best Modern Era Computer Wargame”, and CMANO before it was “Wargame Of The Year 2013” and MS&T Magazine 2017 Finalist.

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Article on Command in the Wall Street Journal

October 27, 2024 · Posted in Command, Command PE · Comment 

Original link (paywall): https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/a-million-people-play-this-video-wargame-so-does-the-pentagon-e6388f50

Text reproduced below.

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.

Warfare is changing at a pace unseen in almost a century, as fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East shows. For military commanders, tackling that upheaval demands fast and constant adaptation.

Increasingly, that entails playing games.

Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.

Proponents of wargames include Tim Barrick, a retired Marine colonel who is now wargaming director at Marine Corps University. He drills students using board games and computers. In one online exercise, he pushed eight Marine majors repeatedly through the same Pacific military engagement, using a program called Command: Professional Edition.

This software is unusual because it didn’t originate with a defense contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit.

Over the two months that Barrick’s Marine majors played Command PE, as it’s known, their creativity grew.

“These are not simple problems,” said Barrick, who previously ran the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab’s wargaming division. “It’s not like we’re asking them to play checkers.”

The game has become a surprise hit, for users of all stripes. The Air Force recently approved Command PE to run on its secure networks. Britain’s Strategic Command just signed up to use it in training, education and analysis, calling it a tool “to test ideas.” And Taiwanese defense analysts tap Command PE to analyze responses to hostility from mainland China.

Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.

When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank.

“Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.

Former Air Force Air Mobility Command analyst Pete Szabo started using Command around 2017 to model military planes’ fuel consumption in battle scenarios.

“It’s been a very powerful tool for us,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Convincing his superiors to employ commercial, off-the-shelf gaming software, though, took some work, he recalled. “At first it was like, ‘Nooooo.’ ”

Some officers have long derided wargames as entertainment, navel-gazing or “bogsats,” short for “bunch of guys standing around talking.” But the simulations—especially digital ones—can hone decision-making, spatial awareness and maneuvering abilities, say advocates.

“There’s no doubt that skills in a game matter on the battlefield,” said Arnel David, a U.S. Army colonel who advises the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top general and helps lead an informal organization to promote wargaming of all sorts, called Fight Club International.

Wargaming, which first took its modern form in Prussia about 200 years ago, got a boost in the U.S. in 2015 when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work warned that the Pentagon’s wargaming skills had “atrophied.” The military services scrambled to up their game.

Traditionally conducted using maps, grids and dice—essentially sophisticated cousins of familiar board games like Risk and Stratego—some wargames entail tabletop models that resemble electric-train sets or require an entire room.

Computer wargames still generally resemble complex maps more than first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty. But their speed and processing power allow operators to run and rerun scenarios at a tempo never before possible, and to generate scads of data for analysis.

In a project called Gamebreak for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2020, scientists at military contractor Northrop Grumman developed AI models to essentially play Command PE, processing more than 200 quadrillion options—or 2 followed by 17 zeros.

AI is increasingly helping users create scenarios, run games and sift through results for trends and surprises. French wargame maker MASA Group boasts that AI allows its Sword program to be run more easily than rivals’ systems.

Whether AI and advanced software actually improve wargaming and preparations for war is a question sparking battles of its own. Warfare is so complex—buffeted by factors ranging from equipment and strategy to politics, weather and corruption—that modeling all the inputs entails parsing an almost infinite number of variables. Quantifying unquantifiables such as military morale requires arbitrary decisions.

“If all your data for a simulation is garbage, it’s garbage out too,” said Anna Knack, who leads research on AI and security at Britain’s Alan Turing Institute, a government-funded research center.

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.© Kevin Ray J. Salvador/U.S. Marine Corps

Skeptics say digital wargaming, in an unintended twist, may actually reduce understanding of scenarios because software’s underlying algorithms aren’t accessible to users.

“It takes some of the human decision-making element away,” said Becca Wasser, who leads the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington.

Advocates say computerization expands enormously both the usefulness of wargames and their range of potential users, often complementing manual games.

“It’s a tool in a toolkit,” said David, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not all wargames involve combat. NATO, which in 2021 adopted warfighting guidelines that call for “audacious wargaming,” also runs crisis-management simulations. U.S. Transportation Command runs wargames involving shipments and logistics, its area of responsibility.

Wargames that focus on a specific field, such as logistics, are relatively straightforward to design, while modeling big conflicts is vexing.

To simulate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in a tabletop game played between teams of specialists in 2022, modelers hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington spent more than a year designing and preparing the project. Each of 22 iterations took a full day, between which the designers adapted the game to address new issues from each running.

It was a simple battle simulation that Navy Lt. Larry Bond wanted to create in 1980, after using the service’s complex training game, Navtag, onboard his destroyer.

Bond created Harpoon, published as a paper-and-dice game that drew a big following thanks to its extensive technical data on military systems. One fan was insurance-agent-turned-author Tom Clancy.

Clancy tapped Harpoon as a source for his first novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” and used it so extensively in writing his 1986 follow-up, “Red Storm Rising,” that he called himself and Bond “co-authors.”

A Million People Play This Video Wargame. So Does the Pentagon.© Elizabeth Frantz for WSJ

A home-computer version of Harpoon flourished and then faded early this century. Frustrated fan Dimitris Dranidis sought to replace it. The result, Command: Modern Operations, released in 2013, took off as users—many in the military—added and corrected its open-source database.

The database now includes tens of thousands of items, from bullets to bombers, covering almost every front-line piece of equipment used by all the world’s militaries since 1946. Users keep parameters like fuel capacity and operating range accurate.

After Work’s 2015 Pentagon memo sent the services scurrying to rediscover wargaming, an Air Force official stumbled on Harpoon and contacted Slitherine, which held the publishing rights. The McNeils introduced him to Command, which they were also publishing as a consumer game.

“It never even occurred to me that we’d work with militaries,” said Chief Executive Iain McNeil, whose father, J.D., had previously owned a scaffolding business.

The Air Force sent two retired generals to assess the company, seeking to better understand its operations and Command’s database. They invited the McNeils and Dranidis for meetings at the Pentagon, where the newbies shot selfies standing behind the briefing-room lectern.

Slitherine created a version of Command for military and intelligence-agency needs, Professional Edition, addressing their security requirements and allowing them to upload classified data without giving access to programmers or other users, Iain McNeil said.

In the military world, most acquisitions undergo more rigorous testing than consumer products for battle-readiness, but Command flips that paradigm thanks to its evolution. With roughly one million commercial users, Command “gets beat up by the community to a degree that the defense industry just can’t do,” said Barrick, the Marines instructor.

Command focuses on battles and engagements, not campaigns or wars. “It’s really useful if you want a very close look—almost through a soda straw,” said Wasser at CNAS, who sees it as an excellent tool for training and education.

Education was one of the top uses cited at a conference of Command military users in Rome hosted by the Italian Air Force last year, attended by civilian and uniformed defense professionals from the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan and beyond.

German Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Silier explained how Command offered a way to teach mission planning that mixed classroom theory and real-world experience.

In his seminars, a group of around 20 pilots would face an emergency, like defending a target from an incoming attack. They planned mission timelines and assessed factors such as flying time with a given fuel load. Their proposals were fed into Command, and the simulation played out on a big screen in the classroom.

“It’s a stadium-like atmosphere,” with students cheering when missiles hit the enemy, said Silier. “One student told me it’s more exciting than a Champions League football match.”

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Juanje Gómez at juanje.gomez@wsj.com

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No regrets: Command v1.07 now available

October 24, 2024 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Well, this certainly took a while.

Following the gargantuan releases of “Tiny”/”War Planner”/v1.05 and the more recent “Number of the beast”/v1.06, we had a lot of technical debt to own to and a lot of catching up to do. It was not unexpected that the rapid introduction of so many new groundbreaking features would bring about a bunch of new problems and issues, which needed to be addressed. There was simply too much baggage to keep hauling with us on the way forward.

The new major CMO release, version 1.07, is therefore very much a “service pack” (raise your hand if you recognize the term without googling it). The primary emphasis has been on identifying and fixing the various issues accumulated over the last couple of years, ideally in order of severity/priority. Performance, particularly on the simulation engine, has also been substantially improved. If you are a Command long-timer, you should notice (most if not all of) your past pain-points gone; and many scenarios whose scale/complexity previously placed them out of your hardware’s reach should now be perfectly playable. If you are a more recent player (welcome!), you get a nicer experience out of the box.

This is not to say the new release is bereft of new mechanics to explore and simulated toys to play with, though. A quick summary of the new additions:

* A new map mode of showing aerospace units at their true altitude (instead of only as ground-tracks on the planet surface), sometimes called “pin-cushion view” (disabled by default). This mode makes it easier to visualize the vertical placement of aerospace units, and can be particularly helpful when vertical positions play a crucial role in sensor & weapon interactions – think satellites, ballistic missiles and ABMs, even the altitude differences in air-to-air or surface-to-air engagements. Phil Gatcomb has already made a sneak-peek video for this, check it out.

* A new HTML-rendering backend, using Microsoft’s new WebView2 rendering engine. You should notice improved HTML rendering on the DB-viewer and other UI elements that use HTML sources. This also allows richer custom UI elements at the beginning of a scenario (e.g. to define custom options for the scenario, difficulty settings etc.)

* A new wrinkle on air-to-air refueling: Aircraft fuel on-load rate restrictions (requires v508+ DBs). When large tankers such as KC-135s or KC-46s refuel tactical aircraft, the bottleneck on fuel transfer is usually not the tanker’s offload capacity (which is huge; these booms are designed to fill-up B-52s and other monsters), but the intake rate of the receiver aircraft. This is now properly modelled.

* Indicators for aircraft contrails and ship/submarine wakes can now be displayed on the map, under a unit’s datablock. This makes it easier for the player to be more aware that his units may be visually detected at significantly longer ranges because of these factors. These indicators can be disabled on the “Map Settings” menu if they clutter the map unacceptably.
(Clarification: Contrails and wakes have been part of the simulation engine since Command’s original 2013 release. This change adds visual indicators for them.)

* Various “quality of life” improvements across the UI and particularly on the mission editor and various strike-planner windows.

* The latest releases of the DB3000 and CWDB databases, with the completion of a major year-long milestone: The China national review (see this overview for more details). The Command database is now arguably one of the most comprehensive open-source compilations of information on modern Chinese military platforms.

The full release notes are available HERE.

We want to thank both our internal beta testers who helped make this a solid release, as well as our public user community who contributed feedback on the public beta. You are part of this.

As always, there is no rest for the wicked and certainly not for the Command dev team. CPE v2.4, a big update to the Command-PE series has also been released this week, and CMO itself is already tweaked and improved for the next public update. Stay tuned as the dev team assembles and prepares some new amazing features for 2025 that will undoubtedly take the Command series to the next level in modern-era wargaming.

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