Sea Control - Sea Control 169 - Larry Bond and Sebastian Bruns on Harpoon, Red Storm Rising, and Tom Clancy

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Links: 1. A Brief History of Naval Wargames2. Harpoon3. The Admiralty Trilogy4. Sea Control 156: Sink the Montana!5. Larry Bond on Goodreads6. Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University7. Principles of Underwater Sound by Robert Urick8. US Naval Strategy and National Security by Dr. Sebastian Bruns9. Kiel Seapower Series

Hey folks, it's Jared. Thanks for tuning in. A great, somewhat massive episode for you today with Larry Bond and Dr. Sebastian Bruins joining me to discuss Red Storm Rising, wargaming, and about 35 other topics. I also want to highlight SimSec's Project Trident. If you don't follow SimSec on Twitter, go do so now, or visit the website at simsec.org. If you're interested in shaping the future of international maritime security, this is your opportunity. Project Trident features seven broad topics, each presented by a partner organization in the form of a call for articles to address diverse perspectives on maritime security.

We want to hear your voice, international, disruptive, and seasoned, from academia, industry, government, and the military. Topics will include emerging technologies, infrastructure and trade, and even a fiction contest. You can find more information at simsec.org. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. This is the second in a series on the Navy and popular culture. First was Sea Control 156, Sink the Montana, with Claude Berube, an angry staff officer.

So please go back and listen to that when you get the chance. My guests today are legendary author and war game designer Larry Bond. We'll be discussing his game Harpoon, his World War III collaboration with Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising, the hunt for Red October, and the Navy and popular culture in the 1980s, as well as his current work. Also joining us is Germany's Dr. Jack Ryan, although I think for the purposes of this podcast, Sebastian, you're actually Bob Toland. So Dr. Sebastian Bruns joins us from the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy, Kiel University in Kiel, Germany. Larry, Sebastian, thank you both for agreeing to join us today. Love to be here. Thank you.

And Sebastian, I'm going to begin with you because we had your colleague from ISBK, Johannes Peters, on a bit ago discussing Defender 2020. Can you provide us with a little bit more of your background? Sure. I direct the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security, which is continental Europe's only maritime and naval themed think tank. My professional background is I have a PhD in political science on US naval strategy. I've spent some time living in the US and at one point I was actually in fact introduced to a TV producer as Germany's Jack Ryan and that kind of stuck with me. So I have a master's in North American studies which is sort of the lead

into popular culture if you would say so. I actually refer to you as Germany's Bob Toland which is the principal character in Red Storm Rising. He's a Naval Reserve intel officer, and I believe he just got back from an activation that was cut short by COVID-19. Is that correct? It's classified. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

It was much better. I was supposed to do reserve training. It lasted six and a half hours. I got a picture of me in camouflage in so I could prove I was there, But then it was cut short, so nothing to talk about, really. And are you actually an intel officer in your Navy life, if you will? No, I'm not, no. Actually, I will be on staff duty, which is probably going to be more in the strategic realm, strategy operations.

Well, that makes sense. So, Larry, I think your story actually begins with your time in the U.S. Navy. What made you decide to join the Navy? well it's uh the recession in 1975 strangely enough i uh was working as a computer programmer fresh out of college and they laid me off and i needed a job and i liked the fact that one could join the navy and they would teach you the skills that you needed and it looked interesting my my whole family's been military all the way back to the civil war so they were completely behind the idea and one uncle who had been a graduate lawyer in the air force said urged me to join the navy

because his time in the air force had been as an airman basic because you you sign up and then you take the tests so he was already committed and this way if i if i for some reason flunked out of the training i would be a civilian again and i i went for surface warfare and i was stationed on a destroyer in the Pacific, and I liked it a lot. I was always interested in, have been interested in war games ever since I was eight, and I looked at what the Navy was doing for training that we're doing a lot. Now, I won't say it's my own initiative, but in 1976, in the summer,

a magazine called Surface Warfare had a issue, And the cover of that issue was NAVTAG with some miniature modern naval ships on it. I went, oh, what is this? Well, it turns out, using war games for training. And I said to myself, gee, how can I obtain a copy? Well, it turned out the guy who wrote it was a staff officer on a ship just a few piers down at San Diego Naval Base from where we were birthed. So I walked down there,

went and saw, oh, now his name escapes me. Total brain cramp. Neil Byrne, 10th Commander. Neil Byrne. And he gave me a copy. I had to sign out for it because it was secret, no foreign. And I brought it back to the ship and showed it to the skipper. He said, bravo, Zulu. Yes, set up some games. and just a little insight into shipboard life if i hadn't had the skippers backing i never would have been able to run a game on that ship because there's just so much to do and so much other so many other demands on your time that if the skipper had said you will send your guys to this

training session it never would have happened and everybody thought it was very useful i was distressed because it was not easily playable the rules were terrible sorry neil and it was secret no form which meant i could not leave copies of it lying around for people to read the stats were were all classified so i couldn't make copies of ship portions to pass out to people to use for their games so i resolved to write a simpler set of game rules because and the other thing is neil was a war gamer he had written it using war game nomenclature uh dr sebastian are you a war gamer do you play play war games not as much as i would like to know okay but you but if you don't know the jargon you're totally at sea pardon the pun and so i wrote a game that

was used as few war game terms as possible and used completely unclassified information available from Janes and Combat Fleets and such sources. So we could leave copies of them lying around. Now, I was extremely fortunate at that time to know, I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is evidently one of the hotbeds of gaming in North America because I was good friends with Dave Arneson, creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

And Dave had started his own game company, Adventure Games, and I asked Dave if he would publish my game, and he said, sure. So they published it and it appeared in April of 1980. That was the first edition of Harpoon. But the whole idea of it being amazingly simple so naval officers can understand it and it being unclassified so that everybody wouldn't have to sign anything before they played the thing made it a great civilian game as well. And it did very well. It won awards.

So that's the genesis of Harpoon. Well, I want to ask you is like first, I think you violated several regulations just by telling Sebastian all the no foreign stuff. But we'll, we'll let it slide. Our listenership is not wide, wide enough where I think it's going to be a problem. But maybe I'll change now that we've had you on. And the fact that you were able to go to Jane's, because that was one of the questions I wrote down as you were speaking, is open source intelligence has evolved quite a bit. And back then, I think you were pretty much limited to Jane's as your open source intelligence. Is that accurate? Well, Jane's is a similar reference book. Actually, on our ship, we had a copy of Combat Fleets of the World by A.D. Baker III. And that, in my opinion, was far superior to Jane's.

First of all, it's much cheaper. It still is cheaper than Jane's. I don't want to say anything is cheaper than Jane's. And I just felt the information was better displayed and more complete. I certainly bounced when I had access to Jane's. For instance, when we were near a library so I could go in and use the resources there, I would bounce the two against each other. And, you know, obviously as a researcher, one of the first things I learned was, you know, multi-source everything. because no one has all the information and nobody has all the right information.

And I discovered typos in Combat Athletes and typos in Janes and other errors that were like, what? And in one sense, my work with Harpoon has been about my personal understanding of naval warfare growing and broadening as the game progressed. The first edition of Harpoon ignored such matters as Radar Horizon. That didn't come in until the second edition. So, yeah, open source, and nowadays, of course, with open source being, you know, you grab a Russian web page and, you know, put it through Google Translate,

and you're reading a tremendous amount of stuff. It simply was unthinkable, unimaginable back in the day. i think sebastian brings up a good point too is that i think we would all like to be able to play these games more often but the difficulty is often finding somebody to play with you so sebastian what is it like in the office there i would imagine that jeremy stowe's and johannes would be uh willing partners but maybe you don't have as much time as you'd like for it well thank thank you for setting this up of course germans are all about work and no plays right so uh that's that's our prussian heritage um uh the thing is there's no the the war gaming culture is is not is not

nearly as big in germany as as it is in the u.s or in the anglo-saxon sphere i should say and i i'm among those people who really regret it you know we've we've got these games we've got a couple of games like you know tabletop games in the office but yeah i mean it's it's it's a time issue and as larry was saying you know you you sort of it's nothing you do on the side it's nothing like you hey you know you've got an hour you do it you really have to reserve a day or actually more than a day if you really want to get into it and since we've been uh so crazily successful with all the other stuff we're doing wink wink there's just so many side projects but But I'm hoping we can pick it.

I mean, this would actually be the quarantine and the social distancing would be ideal to try to pick it up. And even if it's done remotely on Zoom or Skype, we'll see. Well, I will agree and disagree with you, Sebastian, about the Prussian heritage, because everybody knows about the birth of wargaming with Kriegsspiel. And impressions, I think, managed to turn play into work, I think, or work into play or something like that. And I have to tell you a story. When we were having war games, exercises off the California coast, and blue versus orange, my blue destroyer squadron was looking for an orange destroyer squadron. And the way we resolved gunfire combat was with dice by an observer who was aboard our bridge. and you've never seen grown men cheer over die rolls as as the as the retired navy captain who

was the referee gets down on his knees and is rolling dice to see whether or not we hit the other side and i mean you you would you you had to go through all the drills you trained the guns out you locked your fire control radar on and then you would uh with your signal lamp go golf golf golf golf golf to indicate you were firing guns of course you could also fire mike mike mike to indicate you were firing missiles but the referee wouldn't let us do that because we weren't fitted with any but the war gaming that the the dedication of the enthusiasm that people bring to that is universal if you can tap into it i think i think you can really improve gaming and make it useful as a training tool in the military.

I gave a keynote speech on that a couple years ago at Connections because, I mean, I briefed, I had an air planning game on Israel attacking Iran, and I was talking to a group of very, very smart Marines, which is not a contradiction in terms. The Marines were all E-5s through O-3s at intelligence school, And the idea was we were using this for air staff planning, for threat analysis, everything. But they did not understand what a combat results table was. They did not understand.

And none of them would admit to ever having heard of Dungeons & Dragons, much less ever playing it. And I could not get them engaged until they found out that if they rolled the dice properly, they blew stuff up. once they figured out that if they got the right combination of dice things exploded then they were engaged it's all about the dice larry let me ask about the navy in the 70s because i've heard so many stories and out myself as a youngster here i was born in 1980 so i've only heard stories about the navy post vietnam and what the morale of the force was like at that point can you tell us a little bit what it was like to go from the 1975 Navy on into the 80s when sort of the fleet was being renewed and exploding in size and is getting a lot of attention? I'd be happy to talk about

that. Now, before I insult anybody's intelligence, did you serve in the, were you in the service at Algeria? I'm an active duty commander, so yes. Okay, so you're still active. Okay, great. And Sebastian, you were in the Kriegsbundeswehr, right? Actually, no, I was a conscience objector back when we still had the draft. This was in November 2000. I started my civil service on September 1st, 2001. And 10 days later, I thought, well, maybe this world isn't so peaceful after all. And I began being interested in the military, in the Navy.

And so I've come full circle in 20 years. I have to say, I joined the Navy in 1975 is when I enlisted, went through Osterkandade school, and I went to my first ship in 1976. I was aboard, and it was the peacetime Navy. That's the simplest two-word explanation of it. And there was an attitude of, well, you know, if the balloon goes up, it will be nuked, so why are we even training in damage control, for instance? I mean, we trained, we did our jobs, most sailors saw it as a job, and most sailors said, well, I'm going to take the skills I learned in the Navy and get out and use them somewhere in the civilian world as soon as I can.

And we had a fairly high turnover rate. The big change was, I believe, in 79 when Iran took the hostages. We actually had one fellow who had gone UA, unauthorized absence, AWOL, and he appeared on the brow a couple days after the Iran hostage takeover and said, when are we leaving? And we're all looking at him like, going, where are we? And he says, well, I want to go kick the Iranian's ass. And we said, no, no, you're going to go elsewhere. And they hauled him off to the brig. But I think that sea change carried over when Reagan was elected.

I don't know how much of an effect it had on Reagan being elected. And really, while Reagan was the national change in attitude, for the Navy, it was his selection of Secretary Lehman, who completely changed the Navy's culture almost overnight. I was the legal officer on my ship, collateral duty, and court marshals, all that type of stuff. One of the things we could do in the Navy was, I'm sorry, I'm trying to form this carefully because I want to get it right. We could flush bad actors out of the fleet, disciplinary cases, low performers, guys who obviously should never have joined the Navy in the first place. but obviously there was paperwork to be filled out and then you sent that paperwork to the Bureau of Personnel they processed it and sent it back

and the guy's out of the Navy, no problem there were a few restrictions, he could have been in the Navy less than six months he couldn't do this, and the important restriction was he could not be in a disciplinary status which meant either being processed for an offense or serving time for an offense while the paperwork was in process so you had to tell this bad actor

can you be a good boy while they process this paperwork never happened well layman came in and immediately changed first thing he did was change the name of the Navy Correctional Facilities back to break that was right there and then he said you got a bad actor

if he's been in the fleet more than six months you can flush him just tell us that you've done it and you could hear the screams of joy all over the squadron as we got rid of so many bad guys, immediately upped the Navy's pay. Everybody's pay was raised automatically by 11.5%. I remember that because it was a fairly impressive chunk of change for me.

I was an ensign at that point. No, I think I just made Lieutenant JG. And the admirals were all amazed that retention improved because they'd been drinking their own Kool-Aid. The stuff they'd been selling us was, well, it's not, you know, the officers it's not it's it's leadership it's not the pay you've got to you've got to have proper leadership and that'll improve retention well guess what pay help too so a definite change in attitude a definite change in in in leadership at the top they improve the troops morale and

their performance it was it was really quite uh i don't want to use the word refreshing but energizing stimulating made us feel good about about prospects of course all of a sudden there's a threat russia invades afghanistan you know the world is not as nice as we thought it was in the 70s i'm sorry that was a very long answer feel free to edit that if you choose no absolutely not sorry sebastian i think did you have a question yeah if i could chip in there i think that that kind of sea change is also reflected in the the representation of the military in u.s popular culture you know in 1970s you've got it's either dark think deer hunter or fantastic, think it's the final countdown

where the Nimitz is traveling back in time. And then in the 1980s, the representation of the popular culture of the military is something like John Rambo, you know, Top Gun, these kind of movies, and I think that's palpable sea change in the spirit and in the mentality of the 1980s U.S. Navy, the maritime naval renaissance, if you will, versus the 1970s. I completely agree. I completely agree. So I'll tell both of you, feel free to explore the space.

We can put up plenty of tape. Long answers are encouraged. People are here to listen to the two of you, not to me. How about funny stories? Because when I was at Center for Naval Analysis, I met Commander Andy Dambligan. Now, he had been squadron commander of VFANU-1 when Final Countdown was being filmed. So he was on Nimitz and coordinated with the tech reps about where the cameras had to be on the F-14s. The best story he told me was about, if you remember a scene in the movie where two F-14s do a fast flyby on the Zeros.

Well, the Zeros were being flown by stunt pilots who were World War II veterans. Now, they amazingly experienced flyers. The 14s weren't supposed to get that close. The Ziks got caught in the jet wash. and which when they're not maneuvering they're trying to stay in the air if they've been any closer i don't know pieces might have come off of those airplanes and there's a recording of the radio circuit of course everybody was on a common circuit to coordinate the movements and the guys are just chewing out these young pup lieutenants with language that i don't know

even aviators had ever heard so that's my story about the final countdown i say i do love final countdown if for nothing else than just the shot of the flight deck and the incredible diversity of aircraft on the flight deck when you look at a u.s carrier today it's pretty uh i can't remember is it heterogeneous or homogenous it's like all the aircraft are the same homogenous yeah f-18s well if they could figure a way to put a radar dish on an f-18 i think uh we'd be in deep trouble yes uh so i'm going to transition now to red storm rising and we already talked a little bit about harpoon i i believe harpoon is what led you to your relationship with tom clancy absolutely you know talk about dumb luck heavy on the dumb uh tom bought a copy of the game

and used it as one of his many status sources when he was writing hunt for out october he reached out to me with some questions about naval terminology you know is it right hard rudder or hard right rudder that kind of thing and i read a draft of it and actually made some comments and for that reason he was very nice gave me a nice little blurb in the front of thank you for which i'm grateful and we you know in the course of working with that we became good friends he called me up on saturdays we chat for an hour or two about naval stuff in military Tom was a wannabe military guy he wanted to be in the military in the worst way

and it had coke bottle lenses on his eyes, I mean nobody would take him you know just his eyes were just too bad for anything even infantrymen so he was completely interested and very smart

and always fitting pieces together in ways that they weren't supposed to go no Tom that won't work because of this and so I was challenged to explain to him all this stuff But again, he was drawing on my wargaming expertise. Again, Harpoon, because it used knots and nautical miles and other units that were familiar to everybody, was very accessible to Tom, and he can show Harpoon in Hunt for Red October because in the chapter in the dogfight at the end, the Alpha Submarine fires a Type F torpedo at Red October.

Now, that was my designation for the most advanced form of Russian wire-guided torpedo. When I wrote the original version, I had no access to anything classified in Russian torpedo designations. So I just went from Type A, straight runner, all the way up to Type F, wire-guided. And those were the designations in the game, and so Tom used that in the book. I was working on another war game called Convoy, which looked at the issue of getting the convoys with Reforger across Europe if the balloon went up. And there was the whole question in the 80s about whether the Russians would try to send submarines down to attack the convoys. And I'm blathering on about SOSAs and the backfire raids and everything. Tom says, that would make a good book.

Really? You want to work on it with me? Best decision I ever made. Sure, Tom, that sounds like fun. what am i gonna do and and you know he was riding high with hunt for an october i mean he was you know you had you had president reagan holding up a copy of the book saying best yarn i ever read so talk about a book endorsement so i worked with tom on red storm and i was his apprentice basically i mean he he could crank out 10 15 pages a day for very prolific very good and i

I was basically researching, supporting different analyses, arguing with him about things he wanted to do in the book or problem solving. I mean, I got to watch Tom Clancy lay it out, build it brick by brick, fix it when it wasn't working right. I mean, is that a perfect apprenticeship for a writer or what? And then, of course, it blew the doors off of Daniel Steele on the New York Times bestseller list. We enjoyed that particularly. And it was just a tremendous success. But having Hunt for an October was a very valuable entree because when Tom Clancy showed up at Langley Air Force Base or we went up to Aberdeen to do research, we got red carpet treatment, which was a lot of fun.

It was a tremendous experience, and talk about falling into a tub of butter. Sebastian, do you remember the first time you read Red Storm Rising and what effect that book had on you? yeah yeah i do um i i read it in the in the mid 1990s and now it's important to know that one of the final battles of the of the book takes place in a in or near a small town in lowest what is today lowest exony and i was actually born and raised about 10 to 15 minutes south of alfeld in a small village called weinzen and i was so intimately familiar with the geography that the book blew me away it it just blew me away i was born in 1982 so even a bit younger and as a as a small child i remember uh you know the uh this was not necessarily the reforgers but

uh you know the kind of exercise that the that the brits would hold and you know as a kid you're fascinated by the by the helos and by the by the tanks uh you're a bit scared by by the uh by the jets that you know fly over but all in all i thought this was this was you know for for a little kid this was interesting it was only after the fall the wall came down in the mid 90s that as i was getting older you know entering my teenage years and sort of thinking about you know what's what what actually just happened and i picked up red storm rising among many other books and you know it's it's fascinating to read about you know world war three going down in your immediate neighborhood and you know we were just uh 30 miles 40 miles west of the inner german

border my dad used to have used to say sort of jokingly well you know we would just have been woken up one day and the russians would have been here no no no questions asked you know that's that's the kind of spirit that i grew up in it's like you know carpe diem if you will it remains one of the most fascinating books i've ever read you know no hands down yeah obviously the local connection i think would you know make it more pertinent to you what always captured my attention is a lot of books write to narrowly avoiding the conflict so there's the potential for conflict exists here and somehow the protagonist saves the day so that conflict never happens and Red Storm Rising was one of the first books I remember is like no it's uh it's happening

the war is on and we've laid it out for you in incredible detail and Larry we we talked about this a little bit before I started recording but and I'm going to take a minute and fanboy out a I've purchased at least 10 copies of Red Storm Rising over the course of my life. I refer to it as the $7.99 special. Anytime I'm getting on a plane, I don't normally bring a book with me. I hit the bookstore in the airport there and pick up one of those books. It's $7.99 U.S., $8.99 Canadian. I'm sure the price has gone up, but that's the one that's seared into my mind.

And Red Storm Rising has made it into my book bag on more than one occasion. I'll buy it. I'll read it. I'll get most of the way through it on the flight and I'll land and leave it in the hotel library and then purchase another copy sometime later for the next flight or two or three flights later. One of the things that really captured my imagination, though, too, is once I got into the Navy and I was an anti-submarine warfare officer on a cruiser out in Hawaii, was the realism of the anti-submarine warfare scenes and some of the things that they would talk about in different geometries that the submarines would show. I was just fascinated by the level of detail, and I think that must have been your influence there. That was my second billet on board my destroyer was as an ASW officer. And as far as I'm concerned, it's about the most fun you can have as a junior officer aboard ship

because, well, there was one time when we picked up a sonar contact that was an honest-to-God unknown submarine. We were cruising in the waters off of California, just going from point A to point B, And I was serving an engineering watch, and all of a sudden, it's set condition 1AS, which is anti-submarine warfare. And I'm going, I didn't schedule any drills. So I'm up there, and sure enough, there's a boat paralleling our course of speed, but he's just forward of our baffles. He's missed the fact that that dead zone aft isn't covering him. And so he's just down there. Well, as soon as we turned toward him, he started maneuvering like a nuke.

But at that point, I'm on the sound-powered phones to the bridge. I have the con. The captain steps away. The XO steps away. The tactical action officer and CIC steps away. I'm running the boat. I've got the whole show. I got the weapons.

I got the boat. I am chasing this submarine. I am having the time of my life. And the big problem I had was my ASROC gunner's mate kept on, you know, saying, can I cable a bird? I said, not yet. Let's just hold off on that for the moment. You know, I don't know if we're going to shoot it at anybody here. And there was a lot more to the story, actually.

But the bottom line was it was probably we're almost certainly one of ours that happened to be going through the transit lane and just took the opportunity to work with us for a little bit. But that, you just can't have that much fun anywhere else. It was, luckily there were no other ships around where information, it was open ocean, I could just chase that guy all over the water. And that is, that is a tremendous amount of fun. And so, yes, I was ASW officer and tried to put some of that into the book. The way you make things sound realistic in a story, in my opinion, is by using just enough jargon so that the readers understand its jargon. but it's still understandable. And what that does, I believe, is it convinces the player, the readers,

I keep on mixing in players and readers in here, the person reading the book, that the characters know what they're doing and that they're expert and that they're very good at their jobs. The way you can show somebody is not an expert is by them misusing jargon and then getting called on it or something like that. But the jargon is a quality or a label that you can put on people to have them sound professional. Let the reader know that they know what they're talking about. And so the reader is sure they're getting good information.

Well, I think you got it exactly right, because I can still read the sequences with USS Reuben James, the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate chasing Russian submarines, and I will still start to sweat and get amped up like I'm in the fight with this ASW officer and the captain trying to secure the Marines' passage to Iceland. Were you involved at all with the design of the Red Storm Rising board game? Not directly. I mean, that was kind of a trip. Red Storm Rising was so successful that our agent received multiple proposals

from different game companies, including computer games, board games, and one of those moments where you may need a little oxygen. He rented a room at the Watergate Hotel, a suite, and we went up there and received, in turn, proposals from different leading game companies to produce the game. Now, I mean, so I'm meeting all these very, very well-known game designers. Chris Crawford, I remember, was a fascinating person to meet and talk with, and they wanted to do a Red Storm Rising computer game.

We ended up going with Microprose for their computer game and TSR for a board game. Now, both games are excellent. Doug Niles did the board game, and, of course, it was a, I want to say, it was a theater-level game, the Russian offensive across Europe, and used a lot of novel design techniques that were very well done. And then I had Microprose doing a computer game, which was a submarine game. That one we were heavily involved with. The guy who designed Civilization, the guy who did so many, he's a genius,

Sid Meier, Sid Meier came in and pitched this game to us. And it wasn't until, I mean, I could tell Sid was smart right off the bat. I didn't realize how smart he was. until we're working on developing the game, which was going to be a submarine simulation where you are on a submarine shooting at Russian ships or shooting at other Russian submarines. And we decided to focus on the whole low-fire analysis thing

where you had to identify the silent signature of the vessel that you were attacking and do other things to actually develop a fire control solution. And Sid wanted to learn about sonar. and so Chris Carlson, my good friend and partner at that point recommended we send him a copy of Yurik now Yurik is the physics of underwater sound and has many equations and very few pictures and Sid read it and understood it

and came back to us and said guys, if I understand this properly if you can send a sound beam deep enough it will go tremendous distances and chris and i are going yeah so sid had derived the deep sound channel just from reading yurik and at that point chris and i are just going we are in the presence of genius sid's a wonderful person to work with that was a great game and did very very well so yes that game i was no on the uh the the board game i was at doug now has presented that to us

as a finished product, and we went, wonderful. We received royalties in both, of course. Of course. Sebastian, did you get the opportunity to play either of those? Unfortunately, I did not. As I said earlier, the gaming culture, A, has sort of passed me. I had other hobbies, and B, nowadays it's just challenging to find the time to pick it up,

but I think that's just a terrible excuse on my behalf. well don't blame don't blame yourself because the only time i get to play harpoon is when i demo it at conventions actually my my wife has done more to improve my gaming time than anything else because she tripped over a game called zombicide which is a board game it's a tremendous amount of fun to play and so she wants to play zombicide and so we will break out a game of that every couple days well every couple weeks actually because it takes several days to play a game because they're they're long but i do game mainstream games in addition to the the the much more detailed harpoon stuff well so bastion let me ask you this have you ever uh thought about

doing a staff ride at at alfeld for the battle of alfeld because that was one thing i always wanted to do when i was in germany and i never like one i would have had to convince my wife to come down there and do it with me it's like why are we traipsing around this german town that's kind of in the middle of nowhere it you know honestly it never occurred to me until now i think it's a it's a fab fabulous idea i i love it already i mean i i guess one had to one would have to get a tally of how many people actually you know how many people actually uh would be on these staff rides but you know it's it's it rides itself really and it's a fascinating idea and i can i can assure you there's good beer down there so uh you know if anything we will it will be a nice

staff right with a with a visit to a local brewery so uh oh please please sign me up i will i'll additionally you can even just go straight to the brewery no the uh i mean pick pick it in the fall when the leaves are out it's all uh my wife and i used to tour civil war battlefields in the fall and we always it was a lot of fun but a staff ride that's inspired that's inspired we should explore that totally we should totally explore that honestly i i think that's that you know that's another i've spent about three years of my life all all together in the u.s and i i i envy both the war gaming culture as well as the the the staff rides and you know that kind of hands-on practical the whole thing of military history not even just world wars but military history

military strategy is so is such such a such a uh niche uh topic in germany these days you know it's i wish we'd had that kind of staff right culture i you know i'd be the first first person to to kind of you know go through with them but you know that's i guess that's that's one of these things uh who actually has some ground experience to to conduct said staff right because the three naval guys yeah that's a hill there's another hill over there i i don't know i mean our terrain is flat it's it's it's it's conducive to war gaming but you know it's uh i would probably not know what i was looking at but it sounds does sound like a tremendous amount of fun so larry if i can ask you this what was the biggest challenge writing red storm right rising or what kept you

up at night i mean was it the terrain question as naval guys or sebastian it was the end game Tom and I spent a lot of time talking about how we can keep the United States and Russia from going to a nuclear exchange. I mean, that's the whole reason why the U.S. and Russia haven't gone to war is mutually assured destruction. And we did a lot of back and forth, different scenarios. And finally, we had to come up with something that was not deus ex machina. We had to come up with something that the readers would accept as a reasonable alternative to Russia launching an attack. During the course of our work, our study, learning, we came to the conclusion that, to the understanding, it wasn't any kind of unique conclusion, that so much of Russia's strategy was defensive,

That the whole purpose of the Warsaw Pact, the whole purpose of their naval strategy with the Bastion for the ballistic missile submarine was based around the idea that NATO was going to attack. Now, this is all before Able Archer 83 became known in the West. So I think we were on fairly safe ground. And so we both believed intuitively that if NATO pushed Russia too far, too hard, they would go to nukes. And we did not want that to be how the book ended, because that would be an end. And so we came up with the idea of the coup. And there was a big problem there, because Tom's going, well, how are the coup guys going to... And this was kind of a stopping point in that we were struggling with ways to have the coup get organized.

I mean, Russia, I mean, they've got all these different people. And finally, we remembered, I remembered, I will take credit for this, I remembered that one of the guys who was against using nuclear weapons, who thought it was simply a bad idea and we should not do it, was in the KGB. And so he gave a list, he got a list of all the guys whose loyalties were suspect and passed that to the conspirators. So these guys are safe. You can work with these guys because they'll, you know, they're on our side already. That was sort of the key to establishing in the reader's mind that the conspirators could successfully form a coup or execute the plan for a coup without being detected by the KGB, because the KGB was already in on the deal. That was the biggest storytelling challenge. Sebastian did you have a follow-up otherwise I have a couple go ahead okay yeah sorry um Larry first uh you touched on Able Archer 83 could you explain what that was oh I'm sorry no no I'd like I understand what it is but I'm sure there are some of our listeners who don't

know what you're referring to for the listeners Russia was deeply convinced and maybe as a result of their their their natural you know history of being invaded so many times that eventually NATO was going to attack them, and that our whole strategy was oriented around attacking and conquering Russia. And so one of the many measures that they instituted in the 80s was one called RAON, which I don't know. It's an acronym of a Russian word that I cannot pronounce and won't even try. But it was a hypersensitive program where they would look for indications

of a NATO attack being planned, staged, prepared. And they cast such a wide net and looked so hard that it was almost impossible for them to not find said indications, hints, etc. Now, NATO in 1983 held Able Archer. It was an exercise, and it was a command post exercise. A little bit larger than most, but not all that unusual. But a command post exercise takes the command staff and puts them in a realistic environment where they're receiving transmissions and orders as if the war is going on

and issuing orders as if the war is going on. And it's all about how the command staff is doing its job. Are they processing the orders properly? Are they receiving and understanding the intelligence reports that they receive? Now, this particular command staff exercise actually went down more than one level. It wasn't just division. It went up to higher headquarters. It went down to lower headquarters.

So they wanted to see how the whole thing fit together and whether everybody was working well together. And it was large enough, so it started tripping alarm bells in Russia. And they seriously thought that we were about to go to war and started preparing for war themselves. I actually have never read the book and just ordered it. It's sitting in my to-be-read file. And it's a fascinating account of how we almost went to war over nothing. Can I add to that? There's reason to believe that 1983 was probably the second hottest year of the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis

because a lot of context is also confrontational. This is the year of President Reagan, who has been in office by then two years, of the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars. There's the accidental downing of a Korean Airlines 747 jet over the Pacific with the loss of all lives by the Soviet Air Force. And it's a couple of years of leadership transitions in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev passed away and his two successors didn't stay long as well until Gorbachev came in.

It's the year of the Lebanon intervention of the Allied forces, of the attack on the barracks. So it's a very difficult year. There was a lot going on, you're right. Abel Archer caps it off in, I think, September, October. And additionally, if I recall correctly, the Soviet tactic or the Soviet doctrine, rather, is that large exercises turn into full-scale war. Whereas NATO's doctrine, NATO's approach was somewhat different. Exercises were exercises. If you were going to have a war, which NATO didn't obviously plan,

then you didn't stage an exercise to go into crisis mode or to go into attack mode. So it was a matter of not reading the other guy wrong or wanting to read the other guy wrong. And it was close, yeah. I guess the caveat for intelligence gathering is don't look for what you expect. If you look for what you expect, you'll probably find it. You know, you look for the unexpected, if you can do that. But Abel Archer was probably the peak. There were certainly other occasions where we came close.

So my second follow-up question there then is about how you depicted the Politburo and the inter-machinations of the Russian political apparatus, what were you deriving your insight from? Oh, boy. Well, that was – there's a story there because we didn't know – I mean, we, the West, did not know a lot about the Politburo at that time. It was still a fairly mysterious red box, I guess you'd say, not a black box. And Tom, again, the guy is brilliant.

And one of the things I learned working with him is don't be afraid to go and find the information. Go and find out, as Ricky Tiki Tabby says. And a book had recently been published, which we had both read, called Breaking with Moscow by Arkady Shevchenko. Shevchenko was the highest-ranking defector that had ever left the Soviet Union. I think he was assistant or deputy secretary general of the United Nations when he defected. And Tom said, let's go talk to him. I went, what? And Tom reached out to him through his, our agent, contacted his agent.

And he had an agent, obviously, because he published a book. And we set up a meeting at a Washington party. It was in Vienna, Virginia. And we drove over there. And very nice party. Shevchenko is there. and we sat down and talked with him about the Politburo. And, I mean, this is a tremendous guy.

This guy's worked with Dramico. He's worked with Khrushchev. He's all the big names. And I'm just kind of thrilled to be sitting in the same room with the guy. And my questions to him were all process-oriented. You know, what do they talk about? Is there an agenda? This and that and the other thing.

Tom, and this, again, is his genius. He asked, do they serve water or vodka? Okay. Is the meeting held in some ultra-modern Soviet-style 1950s, you know, room, or is it in one of the old palace rooms in the Kremlin, you know, with all the guilt from the Tsars? And verisimilitude, learning that word. I love that word.

What is the German word for verisimilitude, Sebastian? Because I should learn that one. I don't know. Realism. An air of realism. The atmosphere. And Tom looked to create the atmosphere that was in the room and how that fed into the poet's mood.

That was his genius. And it was just a fascinating evening. I mean, I almost didn't need the book after that because it was just, you know, talking with this guy was amazing. But that's how we got our information about the Politburo, straight from the source. I don't know if it did anything else, but it sure helped us. No, I think it made for a very interesting reading there. Sebastian, I would imagine, you know, we read it the first time for the action sequences, but now you're a political scientist professionally. Do you find it more interesting to read the book from that perspective now?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I can't claim that I have 10 copies like you do, Jared. But, you know, every time I pick it up, there's something new and there's some new angle that I just follow through. And, you know, it used to be the geographic proximity. Then it was the naval tactics and the naval doctrine. Then it was from a political science point of view, or even a historian's point of view, as you were saying, Larry, how does war develop? And, you know, what are the inner workings of the Politburo? So obviously, as a German, East Germany, where I've got lots of family who lived through that dictatorship as well, and their relations with the Soviet Union. And, you know, there's a lot of things playing into this that time and again, at least touch my family timeline, really, and in some parts, my personal biography. And I think that's why the book works so well. It's meticulously researched, and it's just one hell of a good read, pardon my French. And it's not fantasy. There's not one point, at least to my liking, where the book comes across as, oh, come on, this is just fantasy.

This is impossible. So it's really – that's why it's almost timeless and ageless. So, Larry, were there any disagreements in the creative process between you and Tom? Not in the sense of artistic temperament, but Tom and I would disagree about different elements of strategy and Iceland. He looked at a map and concluded that was a very strategic piece of real estate, which, of course, NATO agrees with, and said, if the Russians are going to send their submarines down into the Atlantic, they need to take Iceland. And I went, no, no, no, no, because they only have one airborne division. They have other things to do with that airborne division besides send it all the way out there.

They could use it in Europe. And I just talked about Russian doctrine being defensive, and I had all the standard arguments why this would not happen. And Tom said, no, it's got to happen. And so we played a game called the Great Keflavik Turkey Shoot. That's what we titled it after the game. And this was – we didn't even have any targets down for the Russians to hit. This was just can we get backfire regiment past the air defenses on Iceland.

Now, the air defenses were very well defined. They have some radar stations there. The standard defenses are one squadron of, at that time, F-4s, and would be reinforced in a mobilization by one squadron of F-15s. So that's what was on Iceland. And actually, that's very carefully defined. By treaty, you can't bring a .45 caliber pistol onto that island, at least this was back in the days of NATO, without negotiating it at the ministerial level. So we had a very good idea of what the defenses would be.

Now, the Russians have their backfire bomber. We had all its characteristics. And so we ran a very simple air defense exercise when the backfires came south. The backfire player had all the time he needed to plan his scenario. you know using altitude to conceal himself from from the radar station but at the same time they need some more fuel so we can't do that too much and standard patrols being launched and this is the other thing and it ended up being a bloodbath a single f4 got into the bomber stream on the way down and it shot down like four aircraft because the backfires are not all that hard a target to

hit and then two other follow-up aircraft arrived and did more damage but it was a tail chase so they suffered but out of a 27 bomber regiment i think they lost six or eight aircraft on the way down now they've still got the return trip and the defenses will be ready and waiting for them and they will suffer at least as many and probably more losses on the way back and any any russian player who looks at that and says okay we're suffering what 20 percent 15 percent at best attrition on a single on a single mission we can't sustain this over the entire war and so given that the story became more interesting because now the russians are outside their comfort zone and they have to figure out how to do something they wouldn't normally do i.e invade iceland with

their sole airborne division, how do they get it out of the island without triggering a massive NATO response of, you know, hundreds of, you know, certainly dozens of transport aircraft coming and landing, you know, taking off and heading for Iceland. And so that's, then we came up with Julius Fusik, who Tom discovered, was a row-row ship and could be adapted quite easily to an amphibious role. And so a civilian ship became how the Russians, you know, launched a surprise attack and invasion on Iceland. And by the way, I've heard rumors that Iceland renegotiated their reinforcement treaty after the book came out.

So, Larry, I can understand why, given its scope, Red Storm Rising was never made into a movie. But especially given sort of the 80s nostalgia wave that we've experienced in the last five years, It does seem like a really good candidate for maybe a three- to four-season-long prestige television series, be it on Netflix or someplace else. Have you ever been approached about that? From your mouth to God's ears, Jared, I have to tell you. We were approached when it was at its height. It was very popular, and my agent called me up and said, Lorimer wants to do it on HBO as a miniseries.

You know, and they want an option, which is agenting speak for they want the right to negotiate for a contract on your behalf. You know, you're giving them the right to go out and negotiate with other companies to put a deal together. We said, shoot, go for it. You know, Tom and I are doing cartwheels. and so Lorimar went to HBO and said we want to do Red Storm Rising as a mini series

and HBO said cool how much and Lorimar named a figure and HBO went and that was the end of it because back in those days before CGI you would have to feed the Russian army

this is really I mean it's a big book cast of thousands Now, our agent still has, in fact, Trident Media Group's office in California is bigger than the one in New York where the publishing houses are. And what I've learned about the movie business, and that's really still, I'm still an infant,

but you've got to have a champion. You've got to have somebody who sees it and has a vision and says, yes, I can make this into a killer series, whatever. And really, it's the same thing in the computer game industry. Somebody has to be your pitch man. Now, it can be you if you know the industry, and I do not know the industry, so I've been out there pitching it. I think there are two reasons why I think it's less attractive now

than it ever has been. One is that it is historical now. It would have to be set in either a historical time slot or have to somehow be, you know, seriously updated to represent a current day scenario. The second problem is, and this is something that I saw happen with all the military thrillers starting in the 90s, is that we've seen it all on TV now. Red Storm Rising and books like Red Storm Rising were immensely popular in the 80s. but as soon as Desert Storm took place and people were seeing laser guided bombs go through office windows and down the corridor

and turn left at the water cooler the whole what would it be like question went away and I really think that's one reason why Red Storm Rising works so well there had been techno thrillers before and actually the techno thriller genre goes all the way back to the late 1800s But recent editions like General Sir John Hackett's book in the early 80s,

World War III, and he did a sequel novel as well, were received well. And then Tom took it to the next level. Tom made it this great, epic story and answered the question, what would it be like? What would modern war really be like? Using all this highfalutin, fancy-dancy technology that we've managed to acquire but has never seen battle, the test of battle. And once you've seen laser-guided bombs go through roof vents, it's, okay, good stuff, works well.

And without that what-if factor, the curiosity factor, I think the sails are just done. I mean, black-clad ninja guys going with suppressed submachine guns, busting through doors, that's just a meme these days. It's nothing exotic or even particularly interesting unless, of course, there's a good story behind it. So if somebody comes up and wants to do Red Storm as a miniseries, I will do tech advisor and be a happy guy, but I'm not holding my breath. Please, I hope you're right. If anyone's listening to this, I work cheap. Yeah, I mean, in a post-Game of Thrones world, I think, one, maybe HBO has expanded their budgetary horizons.

Two, a lot of what drew people into Game of Thrones was that sort of political interplay, which is massive on the Russian side when you read Red Storm Rising. And there's even sort of the personal story of Toland's journey or Mike Edwards out on Iceland in that case, where I don't think it necessarily needs to be what you described as the techno thriller piece. And the modern warfare piece is like, no, it's human stories. And what's it like for this inexperienced Air Force weatherman to lead these, you know, trained Marines on Iceland in this difficult event and save the – That was – Sorry, go ahead. Was that weatherman on Iceland.

And because it was all about taking somebody out of their comfort zone and seeing how well they perform. you know giving them a challenge and them them doing well at it of course he gets the girl you know so that's that's tom's favorite part of the story i think yeah and so my mother was actually wanted to submit questions for this i was like ah i don't know i've kind of got an extensive list already but that is also her favorite part of this this is her favorite book as well uh she passed it on to me but the mike edwards storyline so you have a classic fish out war story you have a redemption story from tolan and then you have all the political interplay on the russian side i i feel like there's more than enough here for the miniseries and if you need a

pitch man i'm just down the road in san diego so i'll keep you in mind so i'll try to get i'll tell you that transition now to uh a little bit more modern themes here is that the rise of china is to put it bluntly pretty concerning if you're in the navy today as we look at the balance of forces but does that get the creative juices flowing for you as a game designer and author oh obviously we well we've i've already written a couple stories involving china shatter trident and some of the others and they were all exploring different scenarios there's no question that china is trying to become a major player, just as we've seen other nations try and rise up and become a world power.

The question is whether or not they can sustain it. The other question, of course, is if they decide to get pushy in the South China Sea or elsewhere, can we deal with them? I look at the U.S. strategic situation vis-à-vis China, And I say, in some ways, it's like World War II in Japan, or even when we were facing off with the Soviets, because a long stretch of water between the U.S. and where the action is, and facing a hostile shore. If China can build up this network of islands in the South China Sea and turn it into a defensive zone, that makes it harder for us to get at the Chinese mainland. Assuming we want to get at the Chinese mainland, which is in itself an issue. I mean, two world powers fighting each other, the real question becomes, what are they fighting about?

And we talked about that in the books. There were different reasons. I mean, I did the whole Red Dragon Rising series with Jim DeFelice, and it becomes too complex. And, of course, the nations are so interlinked and so interlinked with trade and other issues, which, of course, back in the early 1900s said, well, they can't go to war.

It's bad for business. That's what stopped us before. If the war gaming is good for analysis because you can, as I like to say, bang the rocks together and see what works and what doesn't work. For instance, the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles that everybody's so worried about. I'm worried about them, but not tremendously worried

because I don't think they've figured out how to target them effectively yet or they're still working on the means to target them. Just because you can fire a ballistic missile and get it into the same part of the world where an aircraft carrier is doesn't mean you can effectively target that aircraft carrier. The fact that they've never demonstrated or tested the DF-21, is it, in any kind of a scenario, to me indicates that it's still an aspirational capability, not a true one. If they could do it, I think they would put a dummy ship out there and obliviate it from 1,500 kilometers out just to show that they could. But that I would regard as definitive. I know the U.S. Navy's declared it to be operational. And I think the U.S. Navy is right to worry about it.

But there's a couple things that our war gaming has shown is that until you can figure out how to aim the thing, you don't know where to put it. And there's lags in targeting. There's lags in, of course, flight time. And now you have to get down into the weeds on this. You can't simply say the Chinese have this capability and treat it as a black box. When you get inside that box, you find out, well, for that thing to home in on an aircraft carrier at all, it has to slow down. And as soon as it slows, it becomes vulnerable. I won't say vulnerable, but we can engage it with BMD missiles off of ships.

Now, the Chinese, of course, not being fools, will launch other non-homing ballistic missiles along with the ones that are homing to saturate our defenses. And you go back and forth. And wargaming cannot predict an outcome, but it can let you study an outcome. It can let you look at different permutations of that outcome and various strategies and say,

this strategy doesn't even work. Don't even pay attention to that. This strategy, if they build on this, this would work. And they need satellite targeting. They need over-the-horizon targeting. Somehow that's better than, well, he's somewhere in an area the size of Fairfax County. That's not targeting. That's queuing.

And then you go from there to localize it and try and destroy it. The Chinese anti-ship missile threat is really still from cruise missiles and ship-launched anti-ship missiles, not from not from ballistic missiles and they've got a ton of those and there's nothing at all wrong with them and the fact that the u.s navy's working very hard to improve its cruise missile capability in the uh with uh long-range high-ship missile i believe it's the one that they're working in right now that's very telling also you know and this is this is pure speculation on my part but if i was the navy i'd be looking at ways to take down very small islands either with SEALs or with our own

ballistic missiles. Islands can't move. Those radar stations and those airfields on those Chinese spaces in the South China Sea that they've been building, they can't move, so they're perfectly vulnerable to our ballistic missiles if we wanted to get into that game. I don't know if we are or not. I mean, I think we have something of a reluctance to launch ballistic missiles towards another country. I don't know if the Chinese would see a flock of ballistic missiles

coming in their direction. No, they're not coming down to the mainland. They're coming towards the Dayu Islands or the Paracels or whatever. Let's hope their targeting is indiscriminate. We probably don't want to do that right off the bat. But, yeah, there's a lot of work we're doing. Our company, MLT Trilogy Games, we've got a book. about the Chinese Navy, done by a German artist named Manfred Meyer.

He was an artist for Viers and decided to concentrate on China. It's an excellent book, and he keeps it updated every quarter. So he's always sending us new drawings, which we drop in, and then we upload a new PDF to the website. So we're staying in the game as much as we can, Because this is where a lot of the changes and the interest is right now, of course. China's huge. Absolutely.

Sebastian, I think we're just about out of time here. Do you have any final thoughts or questions? If I can add, the one thing is you made me envious again of the kind of debates that are being held and debates and discussions being held in the U.S. China and the threat or the possibility of a of a major power war are really rarely discussed over here and even even in my professional circles if anything it's Russia but even that is always you know this this country is is is just very we just don't do military thinking and military strategy anymore and even the war game communities you know I mean my my one my one criticism of the war game communities the professionals in Germany is that it's mostly confined to the military

The Führungsakademie does some of these things, but you'll be lucky if they play the Battle of the Bulge or Stalingrad or something like that. I've never seen a contemporary game. That is, of course, I don't have privileges to venture out into the classified discussions of games that they have. So hopefully that will change at some point. Of course, I won't be able to talk about it then.

But my frustration is that we don't have this kind of debate on a more broader level and i think you know both redstone rising as as well as ghost fleet for instance books can really go a long way if they're really well well crafted to broaden that debate beyond the military policy folks that always you know everyone is already catholic so you know the idea obviously and this is where popular culture comes in is we have to we have to move it beyond the classroom i mean if you don't have in the classroom it's it'll be a challenge because then there's nothing nothing for you to to move outside of the classroom right but but that's my my parting thought is or wish is that we in germany get get more serious about the kinds

of debates that we we have perhaps yeah jump on that train too larry let me uh ask you my final question then that's uh whose work do you read and admire were you uh i saw you nodding what seemed to be vigorously as soon as sebastian mentioned ghost fleet oh well ghost ghost fleet was fun i've met the author and he said you know it's it's you know i met him up at the naval war college and ghost fleet is a lot of fun i i can't i will not comment on the factual part of the story because i i there are some parts of it that are stretch the truth but he wrote a good yarn and people enjoy reading it and really i mean my whole purpose is to deprive people of a good night's sleep i i i really want them to become so involved in the story that they forget that

they're lying in bed and that they're the character and and and that really is what i look for in a good story myself when i'm reading if he can do that and i hope he goes on and does does a lot more not to mention the fact that it's simply generating positive positive vibes for the navy in general. I sort of put Ghost Fleet in with the same bucket as Battleship, if you've seen that movie, which is a fun movie. I really

enjoy it. I can sit down and watch that movie anytime you want. Now, I enjoy Liam Neeson. He has a lot of fun with it. And some of the other characters are a lot of fun. But again, popcorn. Sebastian, I'm surprised that

you're having problems hooking up with the german game community because we've talked i've talked to other german gamers who are very very enthusiastic i know there's a very active community in france so europe in general there's the guys should be out there somewhere i hope you find them and hook up and have some good games it's interesting the the the genre i feel is changing having been to origins lately although obviously not this year, it's been delayed until October, there are fewer pure war games based on historical battles or hypothetical battles using real-world forces.

There are many more games like Zombicide, Dragon Castle. There's one called Cave Quest. And these are large box, very well-designed, high-quality components, and they have nothing at all to do with classic warfare although you're still playing a game and you know conflict with forces and this type of thing

so some of them might even be useful for training purposes I know that Maxwell Air Force College Maxwell Air Force Base, the Air Force War College at Maxwell some years they have their students play

games like Risk just to get them used to the idea that, you know, there are other levels besides figuring out what kind of fuse a Mark 82 bomb is supposed to have. Right. Yeah. Well, I'd like to thank my guests, author and game designer Larry Bond and naval strategist Sebastian Bruns.

We'll have links up to Larry's work included in the show notes. Larry, what else are you working on right now? Well, right now, Amity Trilogy Group is full throttle on the fifth edition of Harpoon, which we plan to come out with in the next couple months, that is going to be not only a new set of rules, which is the first set of rules in 20 years. I can't believe it's been that long.

But also the first two of the Navy's supplements, which is a new series covering modern naval systems, and there will be a two-volume set on the U.S. Navy and a two-volume set on the Russian Navy, kind of a gimme for the first two issues or first two releases and then a player's handbook and we're going to have a free jump start quick start that that can be downloaded as a pdf that lets you see how the game works and what the uh what the uh different rules are and how they compare with earlier editions so if you're interested in gaming and uh sebastian i can email you a copy of the

Galley, if you'd like, so you can see what's going on. Anyways, Abbotty Trilogy Group covers all four areas, but we've finally got the fourth one, Modern Times, included. I mean, we've been doing World War II, World War I, and even

pre-Dreadnought era. So we've now got everything from 1890 up to the current day as a naval war game. That's been going. So I can't say I'm starting any new books, new novels right now, because the publishing has just been sucking up every every moment of my time now that's understandable

sebastian you've mentioned the incredible quantity of projects in progress over at ispk can you tell us so one where can we find you online and two what do you what are you all working next i know covet has sort of thrown a wrench into a number of your plans there sure yeah so uh all these events which we had planned such as the keel international sea power symposium that we host every year for keel week obviously postponed i'm personally putting the finishing touches on a book called conceptualizing maritime and naval strategy brings together 16 authors and discussing how countries in europe in the u.s north america i should say and in asia have conceptualized navy and maritime strategy over the years and decades it's a a fast drift an honorary uh collection of volumes

a volume of collected essays, I should say, for Peter Swartz of the Center for Naval Analysis, well known in these circles. And once that's done, we'll see. I mean, again, Carpe Diem, I suppose. And you can find, keep tabs on what this German does on Twitter at naval underscore gazing, naval obviously with two A's. Or you can follow the QLC Power Series, which is broader and includes the work of my colleagues at ISPK, and on Twitter

it's at SeapowerSeries or www.qseapowerseries.com Thanks. Wonderful. Thanks, Sebastian. We'll be on the lookout for those. And as a reminder for listeners, you can listen to the first episode of the Navy and Popular Culture Series, Sea Control 156

on the SimSec website, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts. Thanks again to Larry and Sebastian for our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.