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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Command Showcase: Icebreakers released!

February 2, 2024 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Get it at MATRIX GAMES or STEAM

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Command Showcase: Operation Desert Falcon released!

October 10, 2023 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Get it at MATRIX GAMES or STEAM

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In the shadow of the Beast update: Community Scenario Pack #48 now available

September 16, 2023 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Following the groundbreaking release of the v1.06 update, bringing 64-bit finally to the mainstream version, it is now appropriate for a new release of the Community Scenario Pack (CSP).

Brandon Johnson (Kushan) has updated the pack to version #48, with 12 brand-new scenario and 9 updates to existing works. Additionally, the default WRA firing ranges for AAW weapons have been set to “50% of max range”, and all scenarios have been rebuilt to the v501 releases of the DB3000 and CWDB databases.

Let’s take a look at new additions:

Action in the Bay of Vlore, 1969: After 1960, Albania broke ties with the Soviet Union and allied with China. In 1968, Albania again snubbed the Soviet Union by withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union has decided to make a show of force by sailing ships into the Bay of Vlore and threatening to blockade ships attempting to enter or leave the Port of Vlore.

Dutch-Venezuelan Fishing Incident, 2025: Venezuelan fishing boats are violating Dutch fisheries. The Netherlands sends ships to address the issue. They have permission to fire on fishing boats that do not comply with their orders to stop and be boarded for inspection. Venezuela is unlikely to take kindly to this…

Jeannes Last Jaunt, 2009: It’s 2009 and a coup in Guinea has France trying to get their people out of an increasingly unstable situation. They’ve sent the aging helicopter cruiser Jeanne d’Arc and some supporting forces to get the job done. It shouldn’t be too difficult, right?

Kicking Down the Door, 2019: In August 2017, Donald Trump hinted at possible military action against Venezuela due to its crumbling democratic institutions. By December 2018, Russia’s Ambassador in Caracas claimed foreign powers were plotting to topple the Venezuelan government. The situation escalated in January 2019 when Juan Guaido, an opposition lawmaker, declared himself the “interim president” of Venezuela, contrary to the country’s constitution. While the U.S. and several nations supported Guaido, Maduro, the standing president, labeled this as a U.S. coup attempt. Countries like Russia, China, and Cuba stood by Maduro. Tensions further intensified when Venezuelan military forces loyal to Maduro blocked foreign aid on 23 February 2019. In response to this and Guaido’s appeal for international help, the U.S. took action on 24 February 2019.

Mediterranean Fury 7 – Under Pressure, 1994: You command the USS Nimitz CVBG, along with the newly arrived HMS Ark Royal. The two carriers have worked together in the Indian Ocean and will now move through the Med and into the Atlantic as a team. You have three major tasks: Neutralize the Black Sea Fleet; establish air superiority over Thrace and the Turkish Straits area, and significantly degrade the Bulgarian air force. USS Iowa and Kearsarge have a secondary task to complete. But you are under pressure to get it done quickly, with limited resources and with severe logistic constraints.

Operation Brass Drum – Second of Desert Storm, 1993: In the wake of a civil war that erupted in Tajikistan, Iran began supporting the Tajikistan opposition. However, their alleged involvement in a plane bombing that killed 176 people, half of whom were U.S. citizens, strained international relations. Despite Iran’s denial of involvement, a betrayed spy provided evidence against them. As a result, the Security Council displayed distrust towards Iran. In response, the Iranian President imposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Given the recent surge in terrorist activities and U.S. political involvement in the Persian Gulf, this act intensified tensions. The U.S. President responded by ensuring freedom of navigation through the strait and utilizing existing U.S. military presence in the region. Meanwhile, Iraq seemed to align with Iran’s stance, frequently violating restrictions set after the Gulf War. It appears the Middle East may be on the brink of another Desert Storm.

Operation Ghost Rider, 1985: A long-range strike from the UK on a simulated airfield 100 miles southwest of Goose Bay, Labrador by 10 F-111Es from the 20th Tactical Fighter Wing on October 18, 1985. This exercise was one of the proof-of-concept operations for Operation El Dorado Canyon, the April 1986 strike on Libya.

Operation Gray Advantage, 2023: The current Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 is sent to track a Russian task force making its way to the Denmark Strait. Right now, there are only three ships in the flotilla, so I’m assuming other assets get attached. Things are very tense as the scenario starts–it assumes the destruction of a US drone last month was followed by the shoot-down of a Russian Su-27 over Romania. Russia has sortied a task force and it is probably on its way to the Mediterranean. Russia also has something to prove with this mission. As you will see, things escalate…

Penetrating The Blockade, 2027: China has declared a de facto blockade of Taiwan. A week earlier, the 3rd MLR successfully interdicted some PLAN forces heading to waters off east Taiwan, however it is expected that a good number of PLAN navy sub surface assets leaked through, while other PLAN assets had already moved past the 1st Island Chain before the blockade was announced. The PLAN Shandong CSG is presumed to be somewhere in the Western Pacific. It is expected to be tasked with disrupting allied forces resupply efforts to Taiwan and Allied forces.

The 2023 North Korean Nuclear Attacks Part 1, 2023: Short scenario, all you really need to do is sit back and watch. You can probably play it in real time if you’re interested in observing a ballistic missile attack. (The story is based on The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, but updated to reflect 2023 politics)

The Old vs the New – The Madagascar Crisis, 2025: Following Madagascar’s tumultuous 2023 elections, the nation intensified its ties with China, culminating in numerous treaties in 2024 that bolstered economic and political relations. Concurrently, Madagascar escalated its territorial dispute with France over Indian Ocean islands. However, the new government faced internal dissent, further exacerbated by its inadequate response to cyclones in 2024, leading to widespread protests and a violent crackdown. In 2025, an attempted coup instigated clashes between loyalist and opposition forces. Amid this chaos, France and China bolstered their military presence, with confrontations between the two powers in the Indian Ocean escalating. The conflict saw alleged war crimes and the killing of French NGO workers by Madagascar’s air force. Consequently, France has opted for airstrikes against the Malagasy loyalists, aiming to bolster the opposition and reassert its waning influence in former colonies.

Tighten the Straitjacket, 2027: Scenario is focused on the 3rd MLR located on the Philippines, facing the Straits of Luzon. The scenario assumes China just announcing a blockade on Taiwan, with a PLAN SAG heading to Taiwan’s east coast to carry out a blockade of Hualien port. Your mission is to degrade/destroy the SAG.

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 587 scenarios in its stable!

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